The Social Sculptor

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Lynn (far right) reading at paradigm race contest
Photo courtesy of SPACES

This fall, Christopher Lynn celebrated his first anniversary as the director of SPACES, one of the oldest artist-run, alternative art spaces in the United States. The Plum Academy: An Institute for Situated Practices (September 11 to October 23), a “school-as-exhibition” designed to challenge educational institutions and pedagogies, launched the first full year of programming under Lynn’s leadership. And Lynn wiped the slate clean. Out went the art objects and the invisible-hand-behind-the-curtain curator, and in came a six-week Happening that teemed with ideas and “facilitators” who offered plenty of opportunities for social-practice art – art whose primary medium is person-to-person interaction. The point was the process, not the object. And the process, hopefully, resulted in new ways of seeing and thinking. The Plum Academy wasn’t prefabricated for the viewer’s passive perusal, nor could it be easily scrutinized by the art-critic’s eye. It became only what each viewer was willing to make of it. 

A week after The Plum Academy’s commencement ceremony – during which a very fit Lynn rode a stationary exercise bicycle for 25 minutes while reading aloud a rather dense excerpt from art critic Rosalind Krauss’ “Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths” – I spoke with the 34-year-old Lynn about the strategic vision behind The Plum Academy and his first year of programming at SPACES. Lynn, who earned an MFA in painting from the Ohio State University, occasionally draws and makes video-based art. The Utah native was director of the Gallery of Contemporary Art at the University of Colorado before joining SPACES in August 2008.

EL: The Plum Academy was a way to introduce participatory art – relational aesthetics, social practice, collaborative art, or whatever you want to call it – to SPACES’ audience.  

CL: The idea of Plum Academy was that you’re not looking at the individual portions – as some have done – but as a project as a whole. So nobody’s really going to the have the ultimate view of The Plum Academy, because nobody went to everything. I wasn’t able to go to everything. But the idea was you participate when you can. We provided materials both online and in the galleries for people to read, to listen to, to contextualize things and to talk about education as a whole and, particularly because we’re an art institution, how that disseminates down into the arts-how art is taught or not taught. We wanted to engage people in the same sort of dialogue. Not necessarily tell them what to think, but to teach them different ways to think. And that was the whole point of it. 

EL: In a recent PD article, you told Steven Litt that you wanted The Plum Academy to be an “intellectual palate cleanser.”  What did you mean by that?

CL: It’s not only intellectual but in some respects [an] aesthetic [palate cleanser]. There are those who might look at SPACES and assume a very particular type of aesthetic, a particular type of art that happens here. What The Plum Academy was intended to do is if we remove the objects, we therefore remove the assumed aesthetics. We’re not dealing with painting, photography and sculpture – at least not directly. Instead, we’re focusing on ideas and concepts, which have a different type of aesthetic that I don’t think SPACES has taken head on.

EL: Can you describe the perceived SPACES aesthetic? 

CL: It’s hard to say. In 1990s, SPACES was pushing installation art. Installation art was hitting its peak in the 1990s, and because of the way people were working with it, it started to take on specific aesthetic. And I’m not saying that that’s bad, but I think if SPACES wants to remain experimental, we need to be continually changing, and not changing because the other stuff is bad, but changing because we need to continue to explore and experiment, and to see where that takes us and where that takes the art. 

EL: What is your strategic plan for SPACES?

CL: My basic idea is to keep SPACES true to its roots. It was started in 1978 by a group of artists who were dissatisfied with the opportunities to show the type of work they were doing. The kind of strange, cutting-edge work they were doing had no home. Commercial galleries were not interested in it, in the late ‘70s, and the museums were definitely not interested in it, especially ones as conservative as Cleveland’s were at the time. But that environment has changed. Commercial galleries are much more permissive about the types of art they show. The Cleveland Museum of Art now has a full-time curator of contemporary art. The general system is now more permissive, and so the idea is: Who is doing interesting, quality, progressive work but still does not have a home, a place in the current system, because they’re doing that kind of work?

EL: What’s in SPACES’ future?

CL: The next few exhibitions build upon on one another. [Temporary Services, a three-man Chicago-based collective, is producing] a newspaper that tackles how economic issues effect art and art production, and how artists get paid, and that theorizes different models outside the commercial gallery and nonprofit sectors that can help fund artists. I think it’s going to be a piece that people end up pointing to in the future. (Find out more about “Art Work: A National Conversation on Art, Labor and Economics,” here.) 

After that, we invited Steve Lam, associate dean of the Cooper Union School of Art, also a curator at PS122, to curate a show. And he invited artist Sarah Ross, from Illinois, to help him conceive this exhibition. It’s tentatively called From Crash to Crash. They’re going to address how economic difficulties and economic crashes are utilized by those in power to reestablish their power and to make a lot of money. Or push legislation through that would have been difficult otherwise. Or rezone areas of cities in ways they can leverage to their benefit. So we talk about how the public is educated – or intentionally miseducated – and move onto the economic system in the arts, and then economic system in general. 

EL: How do SWAP And SPACELAb fit into this new vision?

CL: This year, SPACELab is still showing eight [artists], but there has been talk of trimming that down to four.  SWAP will mostly be sticking to four, unless funding continues to tank in 2010 worse than we’re anticipating. But we’ve changed those programs to serve the community better. SPACELab has refocused on northeast Ohio instead of anywhere, and we’ve introduced workshops that our artists participate in to get them thinking a little differently, so therefore they can act a little differently. The idea is that we select artists based on a stated willingness to experiment and evidence within their work that they can. It’s one thing to say I want to experiment but then many artists just fall back on familiar practices. We’re trying to encourage more production of experimental work within the area. 

EL: People expect galleries filled with objects. What will you show them?

CL: It depends on the artist. But even though we won’t have as many SWAP exhibitions, we’ll still have SPACELab exhibitions and the main exhibition going on, and so we can expand those and give the artists a bit more elbow room, if they want it.

EL: Which also might explain why traditional art criticism is problematic.

CL: Right. People tend to value information more when they feel like they’ve discovered it, instead of having it foisted upon them. That’s what we try to do with the artists, and that’s what we try to do with the audience. And I’m still trying to strike a good balance with the audience thing. I have this moral aversion to didactic text. It drives me nuts.