RE: Work Re: Work

The Install Art Collective at the Library & Gallery in Cambridge

June 18 to July 25, 1998

In the winter of 1997 Lisa Fedak proposed to me the idea that the Install Art Collective might undertake a project of installations, interventions and performances at the Library & Gallery that specifically engaged the library, the gallery as well as the building's common foyer. It was impossible to say no. 

I had worked with the Install Art Collective as a catalogue essayist for their first exhibition, Niche, in the spring of 1995. Niche was a series of 24 installations, performances and interventions throughout downtown Guelph. At that time the Install Art Collective consisted of a core group of artists living in the city of Guelph with the addition of invited artists from outside the city. My earliest memory of the group was of a meeting at the Clinton tavern in Toronto. At least ten tables placed end to end were surrounded by twenty-six artists all talking at once, across tables, over people's heads, and behind each other's backs. The volume of all of the simultaneous conversations was so great that Lisa Fedak, the meeting's chair, couldn't be heard to call the meeting to order. It was left to Corinne Carlson, who while rising, focused her eyes in the distance and emitted a sound, similar to the high pitch of vibrating glass, strong enough and clear enough to gather everyone's attention. I remembered the enthusiasm of that meeting – the "Hey-guys-let's-put-on-a-show" energy of the group. How to say no to getting that energy back in 1998? 

My interest in seeing this new project through was of course more than just the fun and excitement of chaos. Like the artists in the group, I too am sometimes frustrated by the limitations of the public gallery space, climate controlled and self contained, existing for connoisseurs and iconoclasts, but dismissed by the larger society as irrelevant or overly precious, elitist or just downright incomprehensible. Getting out into the public's space and catching people's attention the way commercial publicity seeks out its audience is alluring. For a curator it is, in the end, just another way of drawing attention to the activities of the art gallery and to the possibilities of what art can contribute to public life. In this rests a fundamental belief that at some level, the sublimities of art can be experienced by everyone. 

But Install Art was so formless, so chaotic . . . How would the group deal with a library – an institution defined by its mandate for collecting, classifying and ordering? Moreover, as curator, there was virtually no road map that I could consult in dealing with a collective. Public galleries don't normally do that sort of thing. No one in Guelph had invited the Install Art Collective to undertake Niche in 1995 – they just did it. From where I stand today, it makes all of the difference in the world that there was no curator in Guelph, no one to mediate between the city and the artists. In hindsight, the role of curator seems all the more problematic. So what was my role? What could my role be? Was I going to make this Install Art project better, or worse? 

There was another thing too. There are significant cultural differences between being "in the street" and being "in the library." Interventionist art has an agit-prop history. Being "in the street" is symbolic of a social malaise experienced by the artist – shut out of the academy, as it were, alienated from the institutions of public discourse, finding common cause with the disenfranchised and challenging the existing iconography of authority. Authority is "inside." It resides in public buildings and private wealth. Being "inside" means to be connected to power, to acquiesce in its practise and to share in its rewards. Protest and challenge reside "outside." This could, as our gallery director reminded me on a more than one occasion, cause the library real problems. But I was completely sold by the original Install Art statement from 1995: "Our intention is to create connections between artists and communities – whether that be other artists or the community at large . . ." I didn't see this group taking aim at community institutions. 

My inclination was to find workable models for our relationship. First, I considered it a touring exhibition, meaning that it was not an "in-house production." The Install Art Collective decided who its members were and who would exhibit; each individual member would decide alone what they would exhibit. This effectively absolved me of the necessity of making curatorial decisions. I imagined the Library & Gallery as a small city, like Guelph. Its departments – Information Services, Circulation, Fiction and Children's Services, and the Gallery – were semi-autonomous states. The artists would direct their proposed installations to the managers of the various departments. This would retain the character of the 1995 installations which were independently negotiated between the artists and small business people, property owners and city authorities. Moreover, this was a solution aimed at preventing a flood of proposals arriving at my desk, many of which I would have no power to authorize, while at the same time preventing a flood of proposals arriving at the office of the chief librarian. 

So, it seemed like a plan. It first had to be approved by the gallery director and the management committee of the library. The gallery director, Mary Misner, was nervous about the lack of curatorial control. I assured her that the model that the group had developed in Guelph for negotiating space would adapt itself very well to the departmental system of the library. It was a convincing argument that said, "Let the librarians decide what they can tolerate, and what they can't." 

I then took the proposal to the chief librarian, Greg Hayton. After struggling a bit to explain the concept of "interventionism" to him, I received his full support. I was invited to make a presentation to the management committee where I outlined my idea of the library as a city in miniature, in which artist's proposals would be made to the various department heads. I wanted to make the managers of the various departments comfortable with the role into which they were being thrust. They were in effect becoming programmers and curators of the public spaces they managed. 

When in doubt, managers, unlike owners of business and property owners, are inclined to look up the ladder to the next level of authority. They are trained to work as a team, and they chart carefully the political map of authority, its principalities and semi-autonomous republics. Sitting at the management table, the eyes of all of the various department heads of the library were on me. As I spoke about the history of Install Art, the Niche exhibition and how I envisaged it would play out in the Library & Gallery I sensed a light, buoyant mood in the room. Everyone was glad to go for the ride, and if it went wrong, I, at the head of the table, spouting off god-knows-what to them, would be the one to buy it. "Sounds great Gord. Keep us posted," went the general response. The show was a go. 

Perhaps in my zeal to sell the concept to the management, I had also unwittingly sold myself. Perhaps I believed too much in my own rhetoric, my own clever analogies and the tidy organizational structure that I had conceived and negotiated. The exhibition of course would be nothing like that. I attended meetings of the group to represent the interests of the Cambridge Galleries and to answer any questions the artists might have in dealing with the library. Inevitably I felt the pull of debates and issues which were outside the role I had defined for myself. I was attracted to the debate over the theme and title of the exhibition, and stopped myself when I felt that I had offered more than I should – hardly an easy thing to do for someone full of opinions like me. But I felt this strange pull, and it wasn't just me, straining at my self-imposed leash either. To act like a curator was to impose myself and my vision; to pull back was to invite unmediated conflict. It was as though the Install Art Collective formed a whirlwind of energy, its centre a vortex for those attempting to organize a unified front. At various times any number of us felt sucked into this vacuum, floating in space, gasping for air, waiting for Corinne's siren song. 

The creative process is chaotic by its very nature. It doesn't follow predictable paths, and doesn't conform to conventional assumptions. After the exhibition, I spoke with Install Art Collective member Ian Cauthery about the Work Re: Work experience, about why exhibiting institutions "don't do that sort of thing." I said to Ian that as a curator you must be ready to "embrace the chaos" that is Install Art. Reflecting on this later, I realized that while this chaos is a weakness of the Install Art Collective, it is also its greatest strength. The Install Art Collective organized itself to riff on the theme of work in a public library and art gallery. When so many individuals are given a virtual free reign, ideas are generated, images rendered and situations created, that I, as an individual curator, never could have imagined. The power of a collaborative exhibition such as Work Re: Work is that it is so much more than the vision of one person. 

What was great about Work Re: Work? It was its scope. It involved new media and old, monumental scale and miniature, interactive and static. It was everywhere in the Library & Gallery – in the face of more than a few people – yet it was also discreet. Life went on. Books and videos were checked out, magazines were read, homework was done. People felt the ripples, or they ignored them. And little epiphanies took place. 

Gordon Hatt, 1998