Non-Participation

June 27 – August 8, 2014
The Luminary Center for the Arts
2701 Cherokee, St. Louis, MO

Non-Participation is an in-progress collection of letters written by artists and others in which they refuse to take part in cultural events for various political and ethical reasons.

The first public presentation of the ongoing project will take place at the Luminary Center for the Arts in St. Louis, from June 27 – August 8, 2014. The exhibition follows a residency at the Luminary during the last two weeks of June.

I am still actively taking submissions of letters, which may be sent tolauren@laurenvhs.com.

The call for submissions follows.

More info at laurenvhs.com

Call for Submissions

Non-Participation is an on-going collection of letters written by artists, writers, musicians, curators, and other cultural producers, in which they decline opportunities to participate in cultural events, such as exhibitions and performances, for various political and ethical reasons. These statements serve as evidence that the artist may act with agency, and is not beholden to the terms of an institution. They also pose a positive alternative to a ubiquitous pressure to perform, and state cases for the legitimacy of art-work as a real and remunerable form of labor. At the core of the project is the notion that what we say “no” to is perhaps more important than what we agree to.

Examples of such letters include: The artist collective YAMS’ withdrawal from the 2014 Whitney Biennial on grounds that the Museum perpetuates racism within the institutional art world; the withdrawal of John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Catherine Opie and Ed Ruscha from the board of trustees of LA MoCA in response to the leadership of Jeffrey Deitch and the exit of curator Paul Schimmel; Artist Michael Rakowitz’s refusal of an invitation to create a commissioned work for the Spertus in Chicago, after they had pre-maturely closed a show on contemporary and historic interpretations of mapping the Israel Palestine region; and a heavily annotated and criticized request received by the artist activist group Working Artists for the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.) for their participation in a major exhibit for which no artist fees or support of any kind was offered by the organizer.

I am now collecting your letters of non-participation, which will be compiled as a publication and online archive, with additional exhibitions and events to be announced.

Please send copies of your letters via email to lauren@laurenvhs.com.

With your submission, please indicate whether or not you wish to remain anonymous. All names and contact information can be omitted or made public.

Each letter will be accompanied by a factual account of the incident and/or any other relevant information that could illuminate the situation, as you see fit.
There is currently no deadline for submissions.

Thank you in advance.

Lauren van Haaften-Schick

The Luminary Center for the Arts

Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc destroyed on March 16, 1989.
© Jennifer Kotter. Courtesy Jennifer Kotter.

Canceled:

Alternative Manifestations

& Productive Failures

Freedman Gallery, Albright College

October 10–November 17, 2013

Lecture by Guest Curator Lauren van Haaften-Schick & Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento
Thursday, October 10, 4pm, Klein Hall
Opening reception: Thursday, October 10, 5–7pm

The Freedman Gallery
Center for the Arts
Albright College
Reading, PA

www.albright.edu/freedman

Guest curated by Lauren van Haaften-Schick

Canceled: Alternative Manifestations & Productive Failures considers a selection of historic and contemporary canceled exhibitions, and the secondary projects that artists and curators created in response to, or in place of, these foreclosed efforts. Initially presented at the Center for Book Arts in New York, Canceled highlights the book form and printed matter as a crucial means of disseminating artworks, documentation and information on a wide scale, potentially in ways that are more historically accessible than the intended exhibition would have been.

The materials in Canceled also include correspondence, photographs, video, and web presences that serve to document the process and politics of a cancellation, stand as an alternative manifestation of an exhibit, act as a critique of prohibitive forces, and may be an admission and exposition of an ultimately productive failure. In some cases, alternate venues and curators take a direct hand in ensuring other outlets for controversial artworks. At other times, artists will choose to opt out, subverting accepted institutional power structures. By utilizing non-traditional means of dissemination and exhibition, these artists and curators have found alternative routes through which the politics surrounding the presentation and creation of art become at least as relevant as the work itself.

A catalogue has been produced in conjunction with the exhibition.

Exhibitions and artists’ projects:
– Seth Siegelaub, publications, 1968
– Manifesta 6, 2006
– Wallace Berman, Ferus Gallery, 1957
– Hans Haacke, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1971
– Guerrilla Girls, Do women have to be naked to get into the Met. Museum?, Billboard for the Public Art Fund, 1989
– Jill Magid, Article 12, commission for the AIVD, 2004–2008; Becoming Tarden, confiscated from Authority to Remove, Tate Modern, 2009
– David Wojnarowicz, A Fire in My Belly, censored from the Smithsonian Institution, 2010
– Illegal America, Exit Art, 1982
– Richard Serra, Tilted Arc, 1981–1989
– Christoph Büchel, Training Ground for Democracy, Mass MoCA, 2006
– Patrick Cariou, Yes Rasta, Celle Gallery; Richard Prince, Canal Zone, Gagosian Gallery, 2008
– Takis, removal of sculpture from the Museum of Modern Art, 1968; The Art Workers Coalition, 1969
– Temporary Services, Why the Exhibit Was Canceled, 2001
– Brendan Fowler, BARR tour, 2008
– Bas Jan Ader, In Search of the Miraculous, 1975

And others.

Associated publications, artworks, and documentation:
Bas Jan Ader, Greg Allen, the Art Workers Coalition, Wallace Berman, Christoph Büchel, Martha Buskirk, Patrick Cariou, Shu Lea Cheang, Dexter Sinister, Exit Art, Brendan Fowler, the Guerrilla Girls, Hans Haacke, David Horvitz, Douglas Huebler, Jonathan D. Katz, Jill Magid, P.P.O.W., Primary Information, Richard Prince, Seth Siegelaub, Richard Serra, Temporary Services, Lawrence Weiner, Werkplaats Typografie, Marion van Wijk and Dalstar, Amy Wilson, David Wojnarowicz, and many others.

Canceled: Alternative Manifestations and Productive Failures

Freedman Gallery, Center For the Arts
Albright College, Reading, PA
October 10–November 17, 2013

The Oresman Gallery
Smith College, Northampton, MA
February 2014

Lauren van Haaften-Schick is a curator, artist and writer from New York. Her current interests concern the economic and legal factors that influence the conceptual and material manifestations of art. She is currently developing Non-Participation, a collection of artists’ letters of refusal, to be published by Half Letter Press. Presentations in 2013 include the CAA Conference in New York, the Art Law Program, and the NY Art Book Fair. She was the founding director of Gallery TK in Northampton, MA, and AHN|VHS gallery and bookstore in Philadelphia. www.laurenvhs.com

To learn more about the exhibition, please visit www.albright.edu/freedman.

The Freedman Gallery is located in the Center for the Arts at Albright College on 13th and Bern Streets, Reading. For more information or disabled assistance, please call 610 921 7715.

Exhibitions and programs in the visual arts at Albright College and The Freedman Gallery are generously supported by The Silverweed Foundation in honor of Doris C. Freedman, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and its partner, the Berks Arts Council, and the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development.

Albright is a nationally ranked, private college with a rigorous liberal arts curriculum with an interdisciplinary focus. The College’s hallmarks are connecting fields of learning, collaborative teaching and learning, and a flexible curriculum that allows students to create an individualized education. Albright College enrolls more than 1,650 undergraduates in traditional programs, 800 adult students in accelerated degree programs and 100 students in the master’s program in education.

Canceled: Alternative Manifestations and Productive Failures
curated by Lauren van Haaften-Schick

Archive of the exhibition included in:

The End(s) of the Library: David Horvitz
How Can a Digital be Gift?
11/08/12 – 12/21/12
Opening: November 8, 6:00-8:00pm

Goethe-Institut New York
72 Spring Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY

theendsofthelibrary.com

The End(s) of the Library is a series of artist commissions taking place at the Goethe-Institut New York library from October 2012-June 2013 organized by Jenny Jaskey. For the first of these projects, David Horvitz will address the role of digital rights management (DRM) within the library’s infrastructure. Working with a group of artists and independent publishers, Horvitz will attempt to make a generous donation of artist books to the Goethe-Institut library in digital format. His gift will be contingent upon these materials being available to library users for an unlimited timeframe and without restriction for edition size. Both of these aspects of e-books – their length of use and number of copies – are currently limited within the e-book system, in which each book is understood as a singular object. Horvitz’ project, entitled How Can a Digital be Gift?, will explore the challenges of the digital format to the library’s circulation model, emphasizing the important role played by third-party distributors who provide the online platforms necessary for sharing digital content. With these platforms, libraries no longer own the books in their collections, but rather subscribe to them as rented data.

To carryout his project, Horvitz will be in residence at the Goethe-Institut New York, integrating his collecting and digitization work into the library’s everyday existence. He will maintain an active blog documenting various aspects of his project, and will embark upon an extended conversation with the Goethe-Institut library staff and their information providers. In celebration of the artist books donated to the Goethe-Institut, Horvitz will host a special event and book launch for BFFA3AE by digital publisher Badlands Unlimited, the Los Angeles-based music group Lucky Dragons, and Andrew Beccone of the Reanimation Library on Monday, November 26, 2012 beginning at 7 p.m.

David Horvitz (b. 1983, Los Angeles) is a New York-based artist whose work shifts seamlessly between the Internet and the printed page. His participatory practice, which often involves close collaborations with other artists, as well as a web-based audience, considers strategies of information circulation and the impermanence of digital artifacts. Horvitz work has been included in exhibitions at The Kitchen, New York; Art Metropole, Vancouver; Or Gallery, Vancouver; and New Museum, New York, among others.

The End(s) of the Library is a series of commissioned installations, lectures, performances, and workshops that consider the state of the library with Julieta Aranda, Fia Backström & R. Lyon, David Horvitz, Christian Philipp Müller, and The Serving Library taking place at the Goethe- Institut New York Library from November 8, 2012 – June 21, 2013. Organized by Jenny Jaskey, the contributors will address how previous library configurations have given way to new forms and revised values in the digital age, emphasizing the fact that the library is neither a monolithic system nor an abandoned utopia, but an ever-contested site demanding new readings of its organizational frameworks: an institution whose ends are without end.

The program is free and open to the public. For a full schedule of exhibitions and events, please visit theendsofthelibrary.com. For general information call (212) 439-8700 or visit the Goethe-Institut New York online at www.goethe.de/newyork.

I am seeking submissions for a new project, Non-Participation.

Non-participation

The project, Non-Participation, will be a collection of letters by artists, curators, and other cultural producers, written to decline their participation in events, or with organizations and institutions which they either find suspect or whose actions run counter to their stated missions. These statements are in effect protests against common hypocrisies among cultural organizations, and pose a positive alternative to an equally ubiquitous pressure to perform. At the heart of the project is the notion that what we say “no” to is perhaps more important than what we agree to.

Historic instances and examples include: Adrian Piper’s letter announcing her withdrawal from the show Reconsidering the Object of Art: 1965-1975 at LA MoCA, stating her opposition to Phillip Morris’ funding of the museum and requesting that her criticizing statement be publicly shown; A letter from Jo Baer to a Whitney Museum curator canceling an upcoming exhibition on the grounds that her work was not being taken seriously because she is a woman artist; Marcel Broodthaers open letter to Joseph Beuys questioning the relationship between artists and exhibiting institutions; and, just recently, critic Dave Hickey‘s public announcement of his “quitting” the art world.

I am now collecting your letters of non-participation, which will be compiled as a publication, with other activities surrounding the project to be determined.

Please send copies of your letters via email to lauren@laurenvhs.com.

With your submission, please indicate whether or not you wish to remain anonymous. All names and contact information can be omitted or made public, depending on your preference.
Also, feel free to include any other details or background information which could illuminate the situation, as you see fit.

The deadline for submissions is December 31.

In terms of my own work, this project is a natural extension of my last exhibition, “Canceled: Alternative Manifestations & Productive Failures.”
The idea for “Non-Participation” came up many times over the course of the exhibition, and now I would like to see it come into being. 

Please feel free to pass this along to anyone else you think may be interested.

And of course, let me know if you have any questions, thoughts or suggestions.

Thank you in advance!

All my best,

Lauren