Arts in Action Working Group

Next Meeting: Wednesday, April 9th, 7pm at Eyebeam. 540 W. 21st Street, (between 10th and 11th Avenues).

The Where We Are Now Arts in Action Working Group:

In this election year a wave of creative energy will sweep the country. It will be characterized by an explosion of brilliant and colorful projects that will bring focus, aim and meaning to politics for people across the nation. As people come together to work toward different and common goals it will be an occasion for new communities, infrastructures and networks to be invented.

This familiar and perhaps idealistic narrative is one that the Arts In Action Working Group is dedicated to realizing. However where this narrative typically plays out in only one of every four years and ends with the act of voting at the ballot box, we aim to expand on the story.

The Arts in Action Working Group is a platform intended to facilitate the production of projects driven by individuals and groups. We are the space where, for example, the activist, artist or group can explain his or her project to a larger community, and the curator can hear about possible projects to organize into a catalogue or show. We are the place where people power comes together and where resources are shared. The Arts in Action Working is the place to go if you have an idea of what the voting could/should look like.

One of the most powerful transformations that occurred in the last century was that art was freed as a discipline from itself. After Duchamp, it is absurd to imagine art as necessarily determined by any particular material, discipline or location. Like politics, art can be, or perhaps is, present in everything and requires only a slight shift in perspective to be revealed. But where a urinal is art and everything is political, the act of voting, of exercising one’s right to affect politics, is contained to only the most limited range of expression.

The Arts in Action Working Group is dedicated to facilitating projects that actively engage the act of voting. We relate to the act of voting as something that happens, not only once in every four years, but as something that could happen more often (perhaps all the time). Voting, as we understand it, can take the form of, but isn’t necessarily limited to, the act of casting a ballot. It is an act that does not represent the end of an electoral narrative but instead is imagined as the beginning.

Projects:

• A distributed city-wide day of action in the early summer, and another in mid-Fall, to take place in galleries, lecture halls, and in the streets.
• Regular meetings for artists, activists, writers, curators to promote projects and plug in.

TO GET INVOLVED:
Please send a blank email to wherewearenow-artaction-subscribe@googlegroups.com to join the Arts in Action listserv.