Thinking about it again …

After thinking about the phone conversation and the process in developing a project we felt that we might have made some incomplete statements in an earlier email where we said:

– We might start by giving an idea, but only continue, if this idea grows through the input of others. Otherwise it’s the wrong idea and we have to come up with something new.

This is misleading and would have needed some more clarification to put it in the right context. First, we are not yet at the stage where we think that any of the projects we listed following this statement are elaborated or worth pursuing( nevertheless it was fun to hear someone else mix and develop different scenarios.) They are merely structural elements to provide a transparency of thoughts. – At the same time  it made us aware of a process we want to avoid and which isn’t applicable to our artistic practice. The process we experienced as standard practice of many public art/community commissions:

– Invitation to the artist for a specific site/community

– Artist proposes idea

– Commissioning institution proposes artistic changes in order to be able to fund, facilitate, maintain, protect it, etc.

– Negotiations between commissioning institution and artists discuss the changes until both parties can agree on what’s doable and what’s not. By the time they approach the community many things have already been decided based on previous agreements. Now both sides have to integrate another voice into the dialog (community).

– The artwork which was conceived during this meeting process gets realized.

– Receiving community says thank you and awaits the next token of appreciation.

This might read harsh and exaggerated, but we feel that it is important to emphasize what we don’t want to happen. Some of these steps we have already successfully avoided and we want to make sure we will avoid the other ones too. We consider all of the ideas we have proposed so far as exercises in imagining possibilities. Like a piano player who has to keep practicing his finger work, as conceptual artists we have to keep practicing imagining ideas. For us it’s very seldom necessary to share these early “sketches” with outsiders. It’s mostly our internal studio practice to keep telling each other ideas for a certain place. Now we made the process public and came up with a preliminary list of possible events for a place and a community in Pittsburgh. But the list should  only be used as an indicator and to start a conversation, which has already happened, so this works.

We want to keep the development of this project open and accessible. But have we found the right form to present these ideas as sketches yet? An old graphic designer once told us: “you get what you see”, meaning, if it’s a quick pencil drawing on a napkin everybody knows that this is a sketch. If you do this same sketch on the computer and print it out does this rendering look more like a final version? Maybe this blog can serve as something more in flux and immediate than a weekly email or phone conversation. Comments welcome!