176 177

MELISSAMILLER

The Possible @ BAM/PFA: Artistic Production and Museum Programming in the Experience Society

178 179

In the spring of 2014 I enrolled in an elective in the

graduate Fine Arts department at California College of the Arts

titled “Making the Museum.” The course, nominally focused on

museum-based practices of art, particularly institutional critique,

promised the unique opportunity to participate in an exhibition

at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAM/

PFA) called The Possible. Over a span of ten weeks, the class

convened at the museum to discuss texts and to develop projects.

The BAM/PFA press release describes The Possible

as “an experimental exhibition that reconceives the museum as

a site for creative convergence.”1 Guest curator and Oakland-

based artist David Wilson invited over one hundred artists to

participate in The Possible as well as a group of area facilitators to

oversee each of the studio spaces. During the exhibition, several

of the museum’s galleries, including the largest ground-level

gallery (gallery B), were converted into studio spaces. Guest

artists were invited to lead workshops, to work in new and

familiar mediums, and to collaboratively produce and learn. A

textile studio was fitted with looms for weaving and natural dye

processes, including a custom-designed indigo vat with locally

sourced indigo pigment. A publication studio contained copy

machines for DIY zine production, Risographs for fast artist

multiples, bookbinding tools, and materials for relief printing.

A ceramic studio was filled with clay, tools, and glazes, while

kilns were set up on the balcony outside. The centerpiece of

gallery B was Fritz Haeg’s Domestic Integrities (2012–ongoing),

a crocheted rug made of donated textiles from the locations it

visits that grows as it travels (fig. 1). Upstairs in gallery two was a

multisensory library comprising texts collected by participating

artists as well as print and sound archives and research from

natural perfumists. Gallery three contained a custom-designed

display structure to exhibit finished works selected from the

workspaces. On the next landing, a recording studio was set up.

Lastly, gallery four housed the audiovisual and performance

collective The Something.2 The exhibition was extended into the

garden surrounding the museum with the inclusion of a “physical

activities studio” and outdoor showers designed by artist Drew

Bennett.3

Despite the diversity of media, practices, and

participatory events on offer within the loose boundaries of the

show, my classmates and I, students in CCA’s Master of Fine

Arts Studio Practice and Social Practice programs, experienced

only the slightest connection with the tools and materials laid

1

“The Possible,” UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, accessed October 21, 2014, http://bampfa.berkeley.edu/exhibition/possible.

2

“Making the Museum” was co-taught by Shaun O’Dell and Maria Porges. O’Dell’s status as a member of The Something enabled the class to access the exhibition.

3

The Possible’s structure is reflective of Wilson’s Ribbons project, a practice in which he repeatedly visits locations, primarily in Northern California, and organizes gatherings based on these trips. After in-depth exploration and contemplation of the landscape, including watercolor and drawn studies created en plein air, Wilson organizes an event at the location, inviting guests by distributing hand-drawn maps and printed materials. According to his website, Ribbons “draw[s] together a wide net of artists, performers, filmmakers, chefs, and artisans, into situation-based collaborative relationships.” This interdisciplinary grouping of makers and crafters, combined with the events’ often off-the-grid settings, provides Ribbons events with a utopian and collective feel, somewhat nostalgically referring to Cali-fornia’s commune movement of the 1960s.

FIGURE 1.

Participants add to Fritz Haeg’s Domestic Integrities (2012–ongoing) during The Possible. (“March 6, 2014,” submitted to The Possible Process anonymously, http://process.the-possible.org/post/78758525246.)

180 181

out.4 Admittedly, some members of the group work in mostly

dematerialized forms, although other members conceptualize

their practices through the lineage of craft. Nonetheless, this

disconnect suggests that The Possible’s studios diverged from

notions of contemporary art as conceptualized and reinforced

in institutions of higher education like CCA. What proved to

be most frustrating about The Possible was not the handicraft

aesthetic, but the apparent lack of conceptual rigor; neither

statements nor claims—political, historical, or otherwise—

emerged along with the work produced throughout the studios.

The anti-object, process-focused ethos of the organizer and

involved practitioners resulted in a steady flow of tests and

experiments but never any conclusions. The historically resonant

themes of “utopia” and “collective” were implied by the show’s

collaborative structure and title—The Possible—though never

stated directly in exhibition materials or by the organizers in

interviews. In particular, the show suggested ties to movements

in California’s past, namely the communal experiments of

the 1960s, in which reigned a decentered, anything-goes

atmosphere.5 Beyond the regional precedents of Bay Area

counterculture, the show also drew on broader experiments of

the early twentieth century, particularly the Soviet avant-garde

and the Bauhaus, whether consciously or not.6

The Possible’s location within BAM/PFA, which is an

extension of the University of California system and is one of the

nation’s largest university art museums, compromised its ability

to embody the politics associated with the historical collectivities

it seemed to reenact. The total aestheticization of the studios

contributed to the sense that a commodified image of community

had replaced the political potential of collaboration. The lack of

fine-tuning and neglect of historical and political precedent were

not the only problems I identified during my participation in the

exhibition; they were just the criticisms easiest to articulate.

Amorphous both in structure and content, The

Possible provided little to push back against conceptually. This

lack of specificity stems in part from the show’s designation

as “experimental.” BAM/PFA Director Lawrence Rinder has

spoken of it as a means to discover the possibilities of museum

programming. Although The Possible sounds optimistic, the

title also suggests that the show could potentially fail. This

potential failure stems from the process of experimentation itself.

What possible forms BAM/PFA’s programming may take in the

future is yet to be determined, but in all probability, not every

4

Further, our relationship to The Possible was affected by our status as students, as opposed to participating artists. In addition to having to pay tuition fees, we also felt relegated to a category of lower-ranked participants by Wilson and other artists on occasion. Combined with the fact that the course took a critical stance toward the institution and, by extension, the exhibition, these factors contributed to my searching appraisal of the show, as it did for my peers.

5

For an impressive account of this aspect of California’s past, see Iain Boal et al., eds., West of Eden: Communes and Utopia in Northern California, Original edition (Oakland: PM Press, 2012).

6

Though outside the scope of my study, Hal Foster’s work on the reoccurrence of contin-gent, utopian, and readymade models in art bears mention. See Hal Foster, “Who’s Afraid of the Neo-Avant-Garde?” in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996), 1–33.

test conducted as part of The Possible will reappear in future

exhibitions at BAM/PFA. Instead, only parts of the experiment

will be implemented into ongoing programming. Thus, the name

resonates with the speculative nature of the project and the goal

as outlined by Rinder. The name also highlights the function of

the exhibition itself: to see what is possible for contemporary art

museum curation and to question the limits of experiential and

participatory programming.7

This essay attempts to answer questions that

emerged from my direct participation in The Possible, through

a materialist analysis of the objects produced during the

exhibition, as well as a consideration of systems of display

deployed there. This project, then, examines how contemporary

conditions of artistic production and dissemination, reflecting

the conditions of a wider consumer culture in our “experience

society,” nevertheless emerged amid the so-called radical opening

of the museum to play, improvisation, and visitor participation.8

Employing art historian and curator Dorothea von Hantelmann’s

conception of the experience society, I reflect broadly on the

conditions of advanced market societies, which allow experience,

once held as the site of emancipatory agency, to become one more

commodity. I then propose The Possible as a case study of such

tendencies and question the labor systems established by the

structure of the show. Inasmuch as The Possible forecasts the type

of programming BAM/PFA will be implementing in the future,

it has implications not only for San Francisco Bay Area artists

and curators, but also for local museum visitors. Exhibitions like

The Possible require audience participation and are often used to

satisfy education and engagement requirements, presenting art in

a hands-on, pedagogical frame.9

An examination into how museums are currently

internally and publically conceived informs my research. Much

has been written critiquing the traditional museum model

as complicit in the production of capitalist subjectivity, but I

question whether new museum programming leaves behind

the values associated with older exhibition models.10 In the

current moment museums are re-imagining themselves as

participatory, experiential, and egalitarian.11 These changes have

been interpreted as an expansion of the museum’s educational

responsibility and as an opening of the institution to a wider

public. Drawing on the work of von Hantelmann, I maintain that

The Possible was reflective of changes in wider consumer culture,

or the experience society, in which objects have been replaced

7

In an interview, Wilson noted that many of the things that happened in the museum during The Possible might not have been allowed if the museum had not been scheduled to close shortly after The Possible ended. The Possi-ble was not the final exhibition before the closure of BAM/PFA’s Bancroft building, but the imminent closure, he suggests, seemed to expand the “possibilities” of the exhibition and contribute to its spirit. Specifically, concerns about the use of dyes, glazes, and inks inside the museum were less of an issue because the space would house just one more exhibition after The Possible closed.

8

Dorothea von Hantelmann, “The Experiential Turn,” in On Performativity, ed. Elizabeth Carpenter, vol. 1 of Living Collections Cata-logue (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2014), http://www.walkerart.org/collections/publi-cations/performativity/experiential-turn.

9

The participatory and experimental nature of The Possible is symptomatic of the continued infantilization of the perceived museum audience; art museums are targeting both the young and the young at heart more and more in their programming.

10

See Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London; New York: Routledge, 1995).

11

See Robert Atkins, The Art of Participation: 1950–Now (San Francisco: Thames & Hudson, 2008).

182 183

by experiences as the most valuable commodities.12 While at

first glance The Possible may have seemed to represent a revival

of 1960s political energy, in its collective, neo-hippie aesthetic,

this essay endeavors to demonstrate how the exhibition in fact

perpetuated a set of values tied to Western capitalist societies.

During The Possible, BAM/PFA’s gallery 3 was

dedicated to a display unit built by artist Alexander Kori

Girard (fig. 2), which throughout the course of the exhibition

slowly accumulated objects being produced in the galleries

above and below. The inclusion of a gallery dedicated to

traditional conventions of museum display in a show dedicated

to experiential and process-based art practices raises several

questions about the status of the objects displayed there. If

creative value was found in artistic production during The

Possible, what function do the objects that come from these

processes serve? Are they artworks? Or are they simply artifacts

from a process that should be considered the real work of art?

The status of the art object has been in question

since the late 1960s when Minimalism, Conceptualism, and

other movements gave rise to artistic practices that had become

deskilled.13 The stainless steel cubes of minimalist artists, for

example, required machine fabrication skills more familiar to the

assembly line than to art making. Many minimalist artists hired

fabricators to make their work. Since that era, contemporary

artists have become increasingly focused on conceptual practices

that either do not require fine art training or valorize blank

reproduction or purposefully low production values.

The deskilling of art goes hand-in-hand with the

decreased importance of the art object. Without the specialized

set of artistic skills and training that had been associated with

art since the Renaissance, the physical art object lost some of the

value previously made implicit through its link to the masterful

artist’s hand. Conceptual artists of the late 1960s and 1970s

utilized dematerialized art practices and the devaluation of the

object in part as a stance against capitalism and the art market.

The value that could be found in artistic practices shifted from

the art object as a commodity to the creative value located

in the process of production, the circumstance of the work’s

conception, or the context of its display, especially in practices

associated with institutional critique.14 But it eventually became

apparent that even dematerialized practices that did not result

in traditional art objects could still become commodified and

12

Von Hantelmann, “The Experiential Turn.”

13

See also Ian Burn, “The ’Sixties: Crisis and Aftermath (or the Memoirs of an Ex-Con-ceptual Artist),” in Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, eds. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000), 392–408. It can be argued that Dada represented a similar instance of deskilled artistic production that questioned the status of the art object, but Dada’s relevance was renewed during the 1950s and 1960s and began to impact mainstream artistic practices then.

14

Ibid.

FIGURE 2.

The pedestal built for The Possible by Alexander Kori Girard. (Photo: Terri Loewenthal, “The Possible,” http://blog.terriloewenthal.com/tag/the-possible.)

184 185

FIGURE 3.

David Wilson adds to the pedestal in gallery three. (Photo: @jay, “#thepossible,” http://instagram.com/p/oErSF3v217/.)

subsumed into the ever-changing landscape of the art market and

advanced capitalism.15

The changing status of the art object and the

deskilling of artistic labor mirror shifts in wider consumer

culture over the same period. Following German sociologist

Gerhard Schulze, who proposes that the shift toward experiential

art forms corresponds to economic transformations in Western

societies in his book Die Erlebnisgesellschaft (The Experience

Society), von Hantelmann suggests that the object, both in art

and wider consumer culture, has lost some of the significance

it once had in bourgeois societies.16 In bourgeois societies a

person’s selection of material objects or products is not driven by

necessity and does not prioritize purpose or utility. Instead, when

it comes to purchasing goods, our primary selection criteria have

become increasingly aesthetic. According to von Hantelmann, in

the “post-bourgeois” society or the experience society, aesthetic

choices and selections are no longer tied to objects themselves.17

The experience society is defined by the fact that the object has

been replaced by experience and the lifestyles specific objects

connote as the most valuable commodity. In art this could

be evidenced in the fact that the aesthetic nature of art is no

longer tied to its objectness, but increasingly is derived from its

experiential quality.18

The shift away from utilitarian objects to

increasingly aestheticized products and experiences in the

market has swayed our goods and services economy toward a

heavy emphasis on services. Furthermore, this trend toward

services in the wider market has been paralleled by artistic

practice. Over the past twenty-five years more and more artists

have been commissioned to perform, lead public programs,

or facilitate participatory projects, in addition to displaying

documentation of projects, such as videos, maps, or diagrams,

in place of a central one-off object. It has become increasingly

understood that successful businesses not only create desirable

products but also create experiences around their products or

sell experience itself.19 Artists are increasingly pressured to use

similar methods to stay relevant and desirable in the art world.

In addition, value, in both art and the broader culture, is not just

created by producing an experience around objects. Instead, the

act of production now has the potential to become an experience

in itself.

In her essay “On the Socio-Economic Role of the

Art Exhibition,” von Hantelmann argues that the traditional

15

See Andrea Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique,” Artforum 44 (September 2005): 278–83.

16

In addition to Gerhard Schulze, The Experi-ence Society (London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2008), see B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy, Updated Edition (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011).

17

Von Hantelmann, “The Experiential Turn.”

18

Ibid.

19

William Deresiewicz, “The Death of the Artist—and the Birth of the Creative Entrepreneur,” The Atlantic, December 28, 2014, http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/01/the-death-of-the-artist-and-the-birth-of-the-creative-entrepre-neur/383497/.

186 187

exhibition format itself is tied to a set of values that are

fundamental to Western market societies. These values include

the production and circulation of objects as products, the

focus on a linear notion of time as related to progress, and the

prioritization of the individual.20

In the experience society, as the experience of the

viewer becomes the actual object of the exhibition, one can

argue audiences continue to perform this ritual in participatory

and collaborative exhibition models. While von Hantelmann’s

critiques are specifically leveraged against the nineteenth- and

early twentieth-century model of the museum exhibition, still

in use by institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art,

her concluding thoughts of the essay suggest that as long as

the structure of the art exhibition performs the values listed

above, the museum will remain a site to ritually perform

capitalist subjectivity.21 But she leaves the reader with lingering

questions: What will this ritual look like in our rapidly changing

experience societies? How will shifts in artistic production and

in the wider consumer culture affect museum exhibitions and

programming? The Possible provides us with a case study for

answering these important questions as it reflects both shifts in

artistic practice and the exhibition format itself. Because The

Possible was presented as a revolutionary exhibition in its content

and structure, the focus on collaboration and participation may

have disguised the perpetuation of these values. I argue that the

new exhibition models employed in The Possible merely repackage

these values, including the production and circulation of the

object, a need for progress or growth, and the prioritization of

the individual, in ways that mirror changes in wider consumer

culture.

The Possible’s embodiment of the major capitalist

values outlined by von Hantelmann can all be located within

gallery three and the custom-designed pedestal, built to display

finished works from the exhibition. Every Wednesday, Wilson

and a team of preparators would select objects from all the

studios to display on the pedestal as emblematic of the work

being done in the exhibition (fig. 3). As gallery three began to

accumulate objects, an eclectic mix of works were juxtaposed

and a leveling between the pieces took place. Although the

works were not chronologically labeled, the process of amassing

the collection embodied the need for progress or growth. For

participants or repeated visitors, the pedestal became the place

to visualize the progress of the exhibition, although no real

20

Dorothea von Hantelmann, “On the Socio-Economic Role of the Art Exhibition,” in Cornerstones, eds. Juan A. Gaitán, Nicolaus Schafhausen, and Monika Szewczyk (Rotter-dam: Witte de With Publishers, 2011), 266–77.

21

Von Hantelmann, “On the Socio-Economic Role of the Art Exhibition,” 277.

production goal was ever established. In an interview, Wilson

indicated that he had a real interest in seeing the results of

the work being done in the studios and hoped that the more

traditional opportunity to show work within the museum would

encourage artists to leave their pieces at BAM/PFA for the

duration of the exhibition.22 The alternative, he said, would have

been a summer camp model where participants would work in

the studios and take their creations home with them at the end

of the day. But Wilson needed a way to measure the success of

the exhibition. In addition, the inclusion of the pedestal arguably

acted as a reward or incentive system to keep artists in process

and working, a central draw for audiences of the show.

In gallery 3 it is easy to see how The Possible valued

the production and circulation of objects, despite the focus on

production and process staged in the studios. For the most part

the objects displayed on the pedestal exist purely for the reason

that they could be made—as experiments—and not necessarily

because an artist was compelled to create them out of a larger

conceptual practice. In our experience society, where experience

has replaced the object as the most demanded commodity,

the growing collection of artifacts displayed in gallery 3 also

reiterated the extent to which the staging of production and

process replaced objects in the rest of the exhibition. In this

sense, The Possible embodied the first capitalist value outlined by

von Hantelmann in two ways: literally through the production

and circulation of objects, and more abstractly by turning

production and process into an object for consumption itself.

But the collection of works displayed on the pedestal

also brings up a set of questions around the idea of authorship—

and by extension labor—that complicate The Possible’s seemingly

engaging and collaborative structure. The author of each piece

displayed on the pedestal would be unknown to a viewer unless

they witnessed its construction. In a few cases, familiarity

with an artist may provide a clue into the maker, although no

information about the practice of the artists being displayed or

the artists themselves was provided, as would be typical for a

museum display’s educational purpose. This could be seen as a

totally democratic system, with no hierarchy being established

among objects by reputable artists and the work produced by

visiting children. Yet the works that ended up on the pedestal

were selected from hundreds, if not thousands, of objects that

were produced in the galleries. The ostensibly random selections

are still reflective of Wilson’s personal taste, despite his attempt

22

David Wilson, interview by the author, Oakland, California, July 16, 2014.

188 189

to produce a sample of the work being created in the show.

Moreover, because no identifying information was provided as

to the maker of objects displayed on the pedestal, everything

created during The Possible was ultimately presented to the public

as “authored” by Wilson.

Although Wilson’s title during The Possible was

“guest curator,” Wilson is an artist who considers his practice

to include facilitating collaboration between other creative

individuals. The distinction between curating and facilitating

may seem trivial. Yet, in the case of The Possible, despite his title

of “curator,” Wilson also performed his normal role as facilitator,

perhaps preventing the participating (read: exhibiting) artists

from being recognized as the artists of the show. It is not

common that the curator of an exhibition is also the publically

recognized artist responsible for the work in the show.23 The

structure staged by The Possible has precedents, especially in

the Bay Area where these seemingly collaborative and collective

projects have particular popularity in part because of our unique

and continued regional nostalgia for the 1960s. For example,

Stephanie Syjuco’s Shadowshop at the San Francisco Museum

of Modern Art, in which Syjuco created a gift shop to sell artist

multiples and unique objects created by a group of local artists,

created similar relationships between a “head” artist and a set of

participating artists.24 The artists were able to keep the proceeds

from the sale of their works, but the project was marketed

as Syjuco’s, raising similar questions brought to light by The

Possible about the relationship between an authorial genius and a

producing collective.

The structure employed by both The Possible and

Shadowshop is directly tied to “crowdsourcing,” a concept that

came out of Silicon Valley’s once imagined-to-be-democratic

Web 2.0, but which has since been instrumentalized by global

capitalism.25 When websites like Facebook and YouTube

appeared in the early 2000s, they offered users “free” platforms

to generate material and to form communities. But it is now

understood that uploaded content and user activity is turned

into data that these websites sell to marketing and advertising

companies. In this system of exchange, users are not customers;

they are both the producers and the product for sale.26 Notably,

the term crowdsourcing was actually coined as a play on the word

“outsourcing,” which describes companies’ practice of moving

their labor to other, generally cheaper markets.27 The Possible,

then, should be considered not collaborative but crowdsourced.

23

See Fraser, “From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique.” In practices of institutional critique, the artist-organized curatorial project is more common.

24

“SFMOMA | Shadowshop,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, accessed March 19, 2015, http://www.sfmoma.org/exhib_events/events/series/1337. In exhibitions like The Possible and Shadowshop, participating artists are aware of their positioning within the projects to varying degrees. Some artists even take their complicated authorial status as the departure point for the creation of the works they produce for the project.

25

Ted Purves and Shane Aslan Selzer, eds., What We Want Is Free: Critical Exchanges in Recent Art, second edition (New York: SUNY Press, 2014). 14.

26

Ibid., 15.

27

Ibid., 17.

FIGURE 4.

Wall text for The Possible. (Photo: Terri Loewenthal, “The Possible,” http://blog.terriloewenthal.com/tag/the-possible.)

190 191

FIGURE 5.

Participating artists listed in The Possible’s wall text. (Photo: Terri Loewenthal, “The Possible,” http://blog.terriloewenthal.com/tag/the-possible.)

In addition to the exhibition’s labor, the catalogue, as well as

an online blog created to collect documentation of The Possible,

employed crowdsourcing techniques.28 They, like the wider

exhibition itself, relied on the free labor of the participants in

order to forego the cost of printing an exhibition catalogue or

hiring a documenting photographer. Exhibitions that rely on

crowdsourcing as the labor structure do so because the labor

is cheaper; the host institutions offer opportunity or exposure

instead of monetary compensation in exchange for the work.

In the case of The Possible this system of labor distribution was

disguised by a utopian and collective ethos and aesthetic that

overlay the entire exhibition.

In addition to ensuring, perhaps unconsciously, that

the work produced in the exhibition would look like his own

work, Wilson also reinforced the hierarchy of creativity through

his decision to handwrite all wall text and labels directly onto

the wall in Sharpie pen. The images of The Possible’s wall text

(figs. 4, 5) illustrate the style of all of the didactic materials

produced to support the show.29 Wilson’s handwriting imbues the

exhibition with a relaxed, egalitarian feel. The choice to write

every participant’s name in a constellation of node-like circles

avoids the traditional hierarchical structure associated with lists,

instead visually suggesting a network or community. By foregoing

printed and mounted text or cut vinyl, the institutionalized

feel given to most wall text also disappears. Secondly, Wilson’s

imperfect handwriting extends the exhibition’s do-it-yourself

ethos, whose roots are found in the punk scene’s rejection

of mass production and culture. There is even an element of

occupation inherent to the action of writing directly on the

walls. The handwriting can be viewed in relation to graffiti,

suggesting that the artists have taken over the museum rather

than have been invited and approved by the institution. In many

ways the use of Wilson’s handwriting helps to accomplish the

utopian and revolutionary spirit that Rinder hoped to create

through The Possible. But Wilson has said that while Ribbons

events use public space, their goal is not to claim public space.30

The prolonged inhabiting of a contested area has never been the

point of Wilson’s work. Far from performing a set of politics,

the handwritten text is purely aesthetic and contributes to the

shadowing of all participating artists under Wilson’s ultimate

authorship.

By writing an artist’s name on the wall, Wilson

gives credit to the participating artists for their contributions to

28

A Tumblr page (http://www.the-possible.org), which allowed participants to upload photos directly to the site, was set up as an archive of The Possible. Images uploaded to social media platforms with the hashtag #ThePos-sible also became linked to the site.

29

Figure 4 shows the curatorial statement, while figure 5 focuses on the names of the artists who were initially invited to participate in the show. Not all of the artists whose names are on the wall actually participated in the show in the end. Some noted that the studios established for The Possible were not conducive to their own practices. It is also unclear as to whether the wall accumulated more names as regular participants became involved with the studios.

30

Wilson, interview by the author, Oakland, California.

192 193

the show. But visually, a viewer first and foremost sees “Wilson”

signaled by his scrawl. This is especially true for viewers familiar

with Wilson’s previous works that use handwritten invitations

and hand-drawn maps to direct participants to the sites of

Ribbons gatherings. By labeling Wilson as a guest curator, a

false sense of autonomy is imparted to the area facilitators and

participating artists, when in reality Wilson was unable to

forego the organizing role he normally occupies during Ribbons

gatherings. In this sense The Possible could be interpreted not as a

group exhibition but simply as an extended Ribbons gathering, in

which case Wilson is both the curator and the artist on display.

In this complicated hierarchy, what roles do the area

facilitators, the group of artists selected to essentially run the

studios, play in The Possible? Area facilitator of the publication

studio, Luca Antonucci, provided the museum’s workshop with

his personal printing equipment and supplies. The BAM/PFA may

have provided space for artists to congregate, but the fact that

Antonucci had to donate his own equipment, as did other area

facilitators, creates considerable liability for already precarious

professional artists. According to Antonucci, much of his time

was spent repairing and troubleshooting machines receiving

heavy use throughout the exhibition.31 Antonucci was told he

would be sharing his knowledge of book arts and printing with

other artists, but instead he ended up performing the role of

the shop tech. In an interview, he noted that instead of helping

artists see what was “possible” with the medium, as the title

of the exhibition suggested, artists generally only contacted

him when there was a problem with a machine, setting up a

strained relationship from the beginning of his interactions with

frustrated artists.32

Most of the area facilitators were given a $2,000

stipend to set up their areas of the museum, which Antonucci

says he “blew through in labor in the first two weeks” of the

four-month exhibition.33 While Antonucci continued to operate

his commercial business, Colpa Press, from inside the museum,

much of the work Antonucci did for The Possible, including

reprinting thousands of prints from the four-month exhibition to

be included in the collection of prints sold as the catalogue, was

unpaid. Antonucci noted that printing The Possible’s catalogue

is the only project at that scale that he has not been paid for.

But when it comes to critiquing the labor structure inherent to

The Possible, it is not just a question of whether artists were paid

enough.

31

Luca Antonucci, interview by the author, San Francisco, January 21, 2015.

32

Ibid.

33

Ibid.

There are many theories for determining the value of

labor in the art world and for proper methods of compensation. On

the one hand, there is a camp dedicated to wage compensation, and

its major proponents include the collective Working Artists and the

Greater Economy, W.A.G.E., as well as artist Andrea Fraser, who has

written about artists that perform or facilitate projects as providing a

service, suggesting that they should be paid as would be typical in a

goods and services market.34 Proponents of this model, however, do

not escape the capitalist system and assign value to artists’ work based

on the market system. Others have hope of setting up alternative

economies for their work to circulate within. Another group might

suggest there is value in exposure and opportunity, although this

group also sits firmly within the capitalist model. The idea that one

show leads to another in the art world has for a long time been argued

as a form of compensation in its own right. But Wilson’s artistic

governance over The Possible prevents most of the area facilitators and

participating artists from even being able to leverage the exhibition in

this way. Additionally, because The Possible was open to anyone and

everyone, the inclusion of the exhibition on an artist’s CV has little

significance. Participants of The Possible became more like interns

or volunteers who executed choreographed performance pieces, for

example, rather than exhibiting artists.

So, while The Possible was presented as a collaborative

and collective experiment, mimicking back-to-the-land and

communal experiments of the Bay Area’s utopian past, the

exhibition’s structure actually embodied a set of capitalist values

while simultaneously exploiting labor in the same way that other

sectors of the capitalist market do. The aestheticization of political

representations associated with historical social movements is not

the same as reviving and embodying a set of politics. Admittedly, the

ability to embody a set of countercultural politics within a cultural

institution like the museum becomes extremely hard to negotiate.

Because the museum and traditional exhibition models grew out

of the cultural conditions of Western market societies, negating

those values through traditional structures becomes extremely

challenging. I encourage productive skepticism and continued

questioning from curators and artists as well as the general

public about what is actually being taught or staged in museums.

Contemporary artists must be mindful of the ways their work

operates within the larger scheme. It is not enough to present a set of

politics; we must struggle to find ways to embody them. Whether it

is possible to do so within an institution like the museum is still yet

to be determined.

34

“Mission,” W.A.G.E., accessed January 19, 2015, http://www.wageforwork.com/about/2/mission; Andrea Fraser, “How to Provide an Artistic Service: An Introduction” (The Depot, Vienna, 1994), http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/fraser1.pdf.