Viewing page 41 of 42

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

it has a staff who are very good at fund-raising and publicity and who believe in protecting the artist from all administrative or custodial chores. Queen of alternative arts organizations in the United States, far from offering an alternative to the corporate art world, the Heiss empire functions as part of it.

In Los Angeles a similarly functioning alternative arts organization flourishes, the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art (LAICA, at 2020 South Robertson Boulevard) established in the fall of 1974.  Bob Smith, its present director, began operations in response to the demise of one of the two institutions in Los Angeles which exhibited local contemporary art, the Pasadena Art Museum, now the Norton Simon Museum. The other such institution, the Los Angeles County Museum, has subsequently also abandoned its former commitment in this direction.

Today LAICA maintains an establishment profile. In its own words, taken from a recent publicity brochure, 'Its innovative exhibition policy, JOURNAL [its publication] and artist's service programmes are now accepted methods of providing exposure and validation for high-level contemporary art.' As a showcase to 'validate' 'quality' art - keywords around LAICA - it has all the necessary components and more, including two receptionists.

LAICA gets its funds from its membership (regular members, $25.00, students $15.00) but the majority comes from federal, state, city, corporate, foundation and community sources. It has a board of trustees, a committee, a director and officers for its administrative, exhibition and publication departments, and it employs about ten artists who work in the Art in Public Places Project. Its internal organization chart looks like that of any museum or art institution.

In April 1978 LAICA hosted a three-day conference for 'Alternative Visual Arts Organizations' around the country. Radical and minority artists were outraged, Black, Mexican-American and feminist communities were largely excluded from the event. Considerable acrimony against LAICA continues, principally on the grounds that although it receives various kinds of public moneys in order to serve all the various arts communities in Los Angeles, it mainly serves the interests of the white male middle-class artists.10

LAICA and all the enterprises described so far are more accurately termed alternate than alternative spaces. And the primary beneficiary of these alternate spaces is the corporate art world. There is no doubt that the arts organizations I have mentioned do contribute much to what is considered the most funky representational, formal and conceptual art in the United States today. But, as a quick glance through any catalogue will show, the intent and form of art seen in 'alternative' arts organizations differs only by degrees, if at all, from art shown in regular art institutions and commercial galleries.11 How can this be explained? The best art and ideas which these new arts organizations produce are siphoned off into the commercial gallery circuit within months. New York's alternate spaces are a major boost to that city's maintenance of its still largely hegemonic position in the U.S. art market.

By way of exception to the above, there are a few groups interested less in exploring new solutions to the endemic capitalist problems of production and distribution, than in attempting to integrate social practice with art-making. These groups have other concerns; for example how to put non-artists in touch with their creativity, and how to work in collective association rather than individual isolation. Arts organizations struggling with these problems more readily justify the term alternative spaces.

An isolated example in New York of truly alternative art was seen in March-April 1978 at the Metropolitan Museum, which lent a wall opposite one of its coat-checking facilities 12 to a women's group of an inherently ephemeral - and socially peripheral - nature. The work consisted of photographs by white and black women, representatives of the big city lumpen-proletariat: the 'bag ladies' of New York. These are homeless women without any form of income, even welfare cheques, who wander around New York with their worldly goods in shopping bags. Some of them find their way to a

[[image]]

[[image]]
The opening of the Bag Lady exhibition, Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1978: Artist Anne Marie Rousseau and Channel 5 T.V. talking to a woman from the shelter

City-run shelter care centre, formerly an animal shelter. Up to 47 women at one time are able to stay in the shelter, and do so anywhere between a few days and a few months. The photographs in the exhibition were taken in a workshop funded, at the time, by the New York Metropolitan Museum's so-called First Fruits Programme. The museum, coming suddenly to a full realization of what they had supported for nine months, cut off funds immediately after the exhibition closed.

The idea for organizing the workshop came from artist and photographer Anne Marie Rousseau, who used to work at the shelter care centre as a recreation aide, until New York City's budget crisis. Anne Marie instructed the women in the use of cameras, one instant camera, and one borrowed 35-mm

66