What possibilities for political transformation can be opened up through imagination, fantasy, and art? Can the left create instrumental change or is the game rigged? This week artist and writer Jacob Wren considers these questions, as well as ideas about the artist as political activist and the balance between egoism and conciliation in collaborative projects.
“Sometimes I think that the secret ingredient in art is art. Another thing that has come to the forefront of my mind over the years is how little room for art there is in art; how much of the structural and institutional ways of thinking in and around art keep out what I think of as art. For me art has to be something where you don’t know everything about it when you start. What I’m trying to do when I make work […] is discover something that I’m not entirely able to articulate.” – Jacob Wren
Wren, Jacob, Polyamorous Love Song, Toronto: Book Thug, 2014.
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What possibilities for political transformation can be opened up through imagination, fantasy, and art? Can the left create instrumental change or is the game rigged? This week artist and writer Jacob Wren considers these questions, as well as ideas about the artist as political activist and the balance between egoism and conciliation in collaborative projects.
“Sometimes I think that the secret ingredient in art is art. Another thing that has come to the forefront of my mind over the years is how little room for art there is in art; how much of the structural and institutional ways of thinking in and around art keep out what I think of as art. For me art has to be something where you don’t know everything about it when you start. What I’m trying to do when I make work […] is discover something that I’m not entirely able to articulate.” – Jacob Wren
Wren, Jacob, Polyamorous Love Song, Toronto: Book Thug, 2014.
Art in Public: Guelph at Twilight with Mark Clintberg (The Secret Ingredient – 10/12/14)
The Secret Ingredient
56 minutes 31 seconds
10 years ago
Art in Public: Guelph at Twilight with Mark Clintberg (The Secret Ingredient – 10/12/14)
What are the risks in cracking open binaries? Is community engagement akin to using a copper wedge tool, simultaneously changing the pryer, the pryee, and what is being used to pry? Delve into boundaries, thresholds, doorways, and outskirts with Montreal-based artist, curator, art historian, and critic Mark Clintberg as he encounters Guelph’s post-industrial terrain with a flâneur-type strategy to urban space. His tailored workshop with the Boarding House Arts Incubator Residents, Public Scenes at Twilight: Shadow Economies, explores the city at a time of transition and ambiguous onset, of change in atmosphere, and shifting uses of space in the search for forgotten sites and anti-monuments. Consider the importance of embodied engagement with the place of art, consciously avoiding “parachute” curation, and sitting down to tea as the ultimate way to get to know ya.
“There is no one ingredient, there has to be two: risk and hope. Without risk or challenge, there is nothing worthwhile in it. And potentially that risk can turn into disappointment that the project didn’t go as I wanted it to. I’ve been thinking a lot about disappointment and looking at it as a positive value. If you have disappointment, then it means that you are striving for something that is even better. Hope is important too, for what the next project will be. I need to be able to be able to imagine my way into a second, third, or fourth work. I want to see each work as a window into the next work, the opening tool into the next work.” - Mark Clintberg
The Secret Ingredient
What possibilities for political transformation can be opened up through imagination, fantasy, and art? Can the left create instrumental change or is the game rigged? This week artist and writer Jacob Wren considers these questions, as well as ideas about the artist as political activist and the balance between egoism and conciliation in collaborative projects.
“Sometimes I think that the secret ingredient in art is art. Another thing that has come to the forefront of my mind over the years is how little room for art there is in art; how much of the structural and institutional ways of thinking in and around art keep out what I think of as art. For me art has to be something where you don’t know everything about it when you start. What I’m trying to do when I make work […] is discover something that I’m not entirely able to articulate.” – Jacob Wren
Wren, Jacob, Polyamorous Love Song, Toronto: Book Thug, 2014.
