A Reminder

Earlier this week, one of my professors, Nick Tobier, passed me a great article from the Winter Issue of Art Journal about the Portland State University (PSU) Social Practices program. The article is essentially a transcription of a conversation between Harrell Fletcher and the first group of grad students in the Social Practices program at PSU. This is one of the places I considered applying for graduate school, since I've created many pieces that could be called "social practice" or "relational aesthetics," but I had a few reservations about attending such a new program:

1. I would be treated more like a test subject than a student
2. I don't think of myself as someone who is only interested in social practice

To make a long story short, I didn't apply to PSU, or the similarly-minded program at California College of Art, opting instead for a different experience.

Here, at University of Michigan, grad students are given the freedom to work in virtually any imaginable way, but the funny thing is, my imagination has been out of commission since arriving here in August. Until just recently, I had forgotten the reasons I was even in art school. I feel as if I've had temporary amnesia for the last six months and as my memory is slowly returning so is my desire to work in a socially-oriented format.

Right now I am working on a plan for a show that would distribute a call for submissions using viral media and will eventually be curated democratically, rather than a taste-making curator. I have been reading and thinking a lot about the nature of power and power structures so my hope here is to plan a show that would undermine conventional systems of power and suggest new ways of distributing ideas.

I also have another, more involved project in the plannings stages, but I'm not quite ready to spill the beans on that one yet.

The article reverberated with me and was a timely reminder of what brought me to this point in my artistic career. I have spent too much time wrapped up in my head since arriving in Ann Arbor and now it is time for some action.