Tom Finkelpearl

What We Made presents a series of fifteen conversations in which contemporary artists who create activist, participatory work discuss the cooperative process. Colleagues from fields including architecture, art history, urban planning, and new media join the conversations.

Conversations on Art and Social Cooperation

What We Made

Kellie Jones

David Hammons

Steve Cannon

Essays by Steve Cannon, Tom Finkelpearl, and Kellie Jones Photographs by Dawoud Bey and Bruce Talamon Rousing the Rubble celebrates two decades of work by artist David Hammons, who has risen to prominence while at the same time consciously ducking the attention of critics, galleries, and museums, preferring to "do things in the street." A recipient of both a MacArthur Foundation "genius" award and a Prix de Rome, Hammons places himself as an artist between Arte Povera and Marcel Duchamp. He makes his art from refuse and the detritus of African-American life: chicken wings, Thunderbird and Night Train bottles, clippings from dreadlocks, basketball hoops. Hammons's deeply felt political views on race and cultural stereotypes give his witty and elegant sculptures, installations, and body prints an integrity that promises to keep the focus on his art rather than on his career. Illustrated with nearly 100 photographs (both black and white and color), Rousing the Rubble covers the full range of Hammons's art and his methods of creating it. Steve Cannon's rap poem takes the reader on a freewheeling bicycle ride from Harlem to the Lower East Side in New York and is joyously infused with the same energies and inspirations as Hammons' work. Tom Finkelpearl discusses the power of the dirty, used objects Hammons prefers and how they relate to the clean" art exhibited in conventional gallery settings. And Kellie Jones examines how Hammons's art evolved from Los Angeles in the 1960s to New York and Rome in the present day.

Rousing the Rubble

Valerie Smith

In an increasingly globalized cultural landscape, artists are often asked to represent their "home" country. But what if identifying home is a complex matter? The Queens Museum of Art organized the exhibition Generation 1.5 with this sort of ambiguity of origin in mind. With a title taking its name from the Korean-American phrase describing people who moved to a new country between the ages of 12 and 18, Generation 1.5 featured eight artists who made this transition--Ellen Harvey, Pablo Helguera, Emily Jacir, Lee Mingwei, Shirin Neshat, Seher Shah, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Nari Ward. This volume examines Generation 1.5 and the featured artists through interviews and essays that address cultural representation, cosmopolitanism, personal expression, alienation, the pain of transition, immigration, exile, and the complexity and limitations of identity politics. With essays and interviews by Man Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai, Pulitzer Prize finalist Suketu Mehta plus noted sociologists, artists, writers and curators.

Generation 1.5

Examining the changing attitudes toward the city as the site for public art.

Dialogues in Public Art

Roxanne Blanchard

Charles Brannon Tomlins

Patricia Phillips

Institute for Contemporary Art (New York, N.Y.). P.S. 1 Museum

Waterworks : Roxanne Blanchard ... [et Al.]

The Drowned World

In What We Made, Tom Finkelpearl examines the activist, participatory, coauthored aesthetic experiences being created in contemporary art. He suggests social cooperation as a meaningful way to think about this work and provides a framework for understanding its emergence and acceptance. In a series of fifteen conversations, artists comment on their experiences working cooperatively, joined at times by colleagues from related fields, including social policy, architecture, art history, urban planning, and new media. Issues discussed include the experiences of working in public and of working with museums and libraries, opportunities for social change, the lines between education and art, spirituality, collaborative opportunities made available by new media, and the elusive criteria for evaluating cooperative art. Finkelpearl engages the art historians Grant Kester and Claire Bishop in conversation on the challenges of writing critically about this work and the aesthetic status of the dialogical encounter. He also interviews the often overlooked co-creators of cooperative art, "expert participants" who have worked with artists. In his conclusion, Finkelpearl argues that pragmatism offers a useful critical platform for understanding the experiential nature of social cooperation, and he brings pragmatism to bear in a discussion of Houston's Project Row Houses. Interviewees. Naomi Beckwith, Claire Bishop, Tania Bruguera, Brett Cook, Teddy Cruz, Jay Dykeman, Wendy Ewald, Sondra Farganis, Harrell Fletcher, David Henry, Gregg Horowitz, Grant Kester, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Pedro Lasch, Rick Lowe, Daniel Martinez, Lee Mingwei, Jonah Peretti, Ernesto Pujol, Evan Roth, Ethan Seltzer, and Mark Stern

Tom Finkelpearl

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