Temporary Services is a collective of artist-activists committed to providing accessible art to the public. They produce exhibitions, publications, events, and projects as a way to explore the social context and potential of art and its viewers. They are best known for The Library Project (2001), where they clandestinely added over a hundred new books designed by artists to the Harold Washington Library Center in Chicago.

Nato Thompson: I would like to begin with a discussion of your formation. Your origin story, if you will. I know that Brett and Marc went to graduate school at the University of Chicago in the late 90’s but that is about all I know. How did you start? More importantly, what were the largest influences on your practice as you began?

Temporary Services: Brett & Marc did indeed graduate from the University of Chicago’s MFA program. Brett was a year behind Marc, and while they knew each other during that time, they both claim that they were uninterested in each other’s work. It took a couple of years after school for their ideas about how art could be presented in public spaces, and outside of commercial galleries, to develop to the point where collaboration felt necessary. They first worked together when Brett organized Dispensing With Formalities, a public project where a variety of artists and groups used newspaper dispensers to distribute publications and art all over Chicago and other cities. Around this time, Brett also moved into a storefront at 2890 N. Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago that he ran as a project space called Temporary Services. Marc’s work with artist Matti Allison was in the first exhibition, along with a retrospective of Axe Street Arena, a super important political art space that existed down the street in the 80′s.

The limits of one person running a project space and the excitement of finding like-minded people in part led Brett, Marc, Kevin Kaempf, Lora Lode, and Lillian Yvonne Martinez to form the first Temporary Services group. Kevin, Lora, and Lillian had all contributed in some way to Dispensing with Formalities, and the Temporary Services space – including showing work in exhibitions there. After about six months, Lillian left the group to work on other endeavors. Nance Klehm, now well known for her urban homesteading, city foraging walks, and visionary ecological work, was asked to be a part of the group in 2000, after already working on several projects with TS. She left sometime in 2001. Kevin left sometime in 2001, Lora left sometime in 2002. Kevin and Lora continue their collaboration with their great work as the group People Powered. Salem “officially” became part of Temporary Services sometime in 2001. As with the rest of the members past and present, she had been around since the beginning helping on the sidelines and collaborating in less formal ways. Brett and Salem met when they worked together at a day job around 1996. They were roommates during the time that Temporary Services was transitioning from being solely a venue for projects into becoming a collaborative group. One thing that has always been consistent for Temporary Services since the beginning is the reliance on group work – even when it was just a storefront space that Brett lived in and showed other people’s projects in, many hands and minds helped shape and create each exhibition and event. We all had a need to make the collaboration visible and accounted for. That aspect of our work has amplified greatly in the subsequent years.

There were many things that influenced our decisions and the work we were embarking on together. We remain closely connected to important Chicago histories of socially engaged practice that includes Dan Peterman and the Experimental Station, Haha and their incredible, long-term project FLOOD, and the late artist Michael Piazza, whom people should really know about both in Chicago and outside the city. Groups outside Chicago include Group Material, Act Up, and Ant Farm, as well as the Danish groups N55 and Superflex who were friends and conversations with them inspired many of our own.

Equally important to us was our experience of music, of all kinds, together at live shows. The Ex, and how they organized both their music and their daily lives deeply impacted us and is one of the most important influences on our group. Punk Rock, anti-authoritarian, and DIY culture really shaped a lot of what we do. Of course there are political influences like The Weather Underground, the glorious long history of anarchist thought and action in Chicago dating from Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, up through anti-corporate-globalization organizing.

NT: I love that you include bands as important aesthetic influences and consider how bands work as collaborators. But I want to dig into the seeds of this social based practice, as its lineage is not well known. We are all familiar with the term ‘relational aesthetics’ – I can already see your eyes rolling around, as you probably hate that term. It is almost like the word hipster. Nobody wants to be a part of it. Nonetheless, there were projects that were more political and social (like Superflex, Dan Peterman and N55) in the European art community of the 90’s that had more teeth. They were more political. I am interested in how you tie the work you do as Temporary Services to this complicated historic narrative of social based practice that has both political potential as well as some tendencies that are utterly conservative.

TS: We do not use the term “relational aesthetics.” We think this phrase reflects a lazy analysis and ignorance of the history of political and socially engaged practice. Socially-engaged and politically-engaged practice seek other modes of presentation and work to bypass the amnesia of market-dominated discourse. The very act of naming a diverse, broad way of working, collapsing it down, is a market-lead activity that makes no sense. There is no guarantee that any language artists use to describe their work will be all-purpose and comprehensible to all audiences. However, because we make such a strong effort to engage diverse audiences that may not be up to the minute on whatever theoretical gobbledy-gook is in fashion in the art world, we try to talk about our work in terms that hopefully will not alienate people that discover our projects outside of art spaces and exhibitions. Sometimes it takes a variety of terms or examples or descriptions to connect with people.

Construction Site, our collaboration with the group Biggest Fags Ever (hosted by the Outpost for Contemporary Art in an empty lot in Los Angeles), has been described as an example of “relational aesthetics.” If we had announced to the extremely diverse and eclectic range of visitors to the site that this project was an example of Relational Aesthetics, the various building activities and social events that were happening on the site (which may have seemed strange and unexpected to begin with) would have become completely opaque, and perhaps quite alienating to many who experienced the project. In other words, our core audience doesn’t give a crap and would be put off if they had to start telling people “Temporary Services does something called Relational Aesthetics.” One can imagine the phrase used as seduction between imbeciles (“Hey honey, come up to my apartment and participate in some Relational Aethetics.”) but not much more.

While creating Construction Site, we had to constantly try new ways of talking about what we were doing, as people were constantly asking us what the hell was going on. Not all explanatory approaches worked the same for each person or group of people that visited, but “relational aesthetics” would have been an absolutely useless way of talking about this project. A more coherent explanation might have been to say that we were trying to create a social experience that passersby could participate in and add to. We literally had hundreds of conversations and we prefer to engage people with a language that they use as well. Some people would be more comfortable hearing just about opening up vacant land to citizen use. Others have a more political take on the situation and how land is speculated on in cities like Los Angeles. Still more people would want to talk about public art. There were many who just came to hang out and try and figure out what was going on because it didn’t look or feel like anything else in the city.

Aesthetic experience is never centralized, uniform for all people, and cannot be reduced to a single term or set of ideas. It is dispersed and distributed among people who have a different stake in what something might be saying or mean, in varied backgrounds, origins, ideas about the world and so on. The term “relational aesthetics” is just a useless categorization that takes power away from diverse kinds of work. This kind of reduction through art terminology is an attempt to reduce a deep, interconnected, history to political ways of working and making art into a chewable tablet for the commercial/academic systems to spit out at their patrons and students (or student/patrons). The people who continue to use meaningless terms effectively do the effacing by enacting the erasure of complexity and robustness that people who work like us come from.

We trace the history of these ways of working back a long way, past the 1960s, past the Situationists, to people like Emile Zola who used his literature to advocate for disenfranchised people and question the corrupt, brutal society he lived in, Dziga Vertov, and others. It is a cliché to claim the Situationists as an inspiration, but many people start there. Their work had an impact on us. What doesn’t often get reported is that they wanted to destroy the commodity form in art and society in general. They were communists, socialists, anarchists and, in general, beautifully difficult non-conformists. Most people who claim their work today as an inspiration leave this out and this leaves room for dangerous terminology to creep in.

Temporary Services gathers inspiration and bile from many places as we are three separate people working together. We have been influenced by, among other things, the anti-globalization movement. Two of us were very active in making work that went into the volatile situations of street battles and mass protests against corporate globalization and the various meetings of the de facto world oligarchs: WTO, IMF, World Bank, WEF, G8, G20, and so on. We wanted to interject a sophisticated visual cultural approach as well as a playfulness into the often stagnant aesthetics of proper Political Art which usually functions as propaganda and not in more interesting ways. Many of our peers work and worked in parallel ways both in the U.S, South America, and Europe: Institute for Applied Autnomy, RTmark, Yes Men, Taller Popular de Serigrafía, The Pink Bloque, Reclaim the Streets, Copenhagen Free University, Superflex, Oliver Ressler, You Are Here, Indymedia, and on and on. This history follows an earlier one of artists organizing to fight museums at the same time they were fighting the Vietnam War.

We also pull from the deep wells of people who blended and blurred their activism, aesthetics, and every day lives: Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (alternately known as “The Family” and “The Motherfuckers” and “Black Mask”), the Guerilla Girls, Solvognen, The Living Theatre, Palle Nielsen, Gran Fury, PAD/D, the Art Workers Coalition, the Guerrilla Art Action Group, TTA Løgstør, the Atelier Populare in France that made the well known May ’68 posters, The Mad Housers, The Ministry of the Housing Crisis, WHW, The Pinky Show, The Zapatistas, and more. This history is under-represented because it isn’t the dominant commercial narrative, which people mistakenly understand as a natural occurrence (Darwinian in some respect) rather than something class and market-based (an ideological construction).

We propose some questions to ask to help in evaluating when something is socially engaged or just merely “relational aesthetics” or commodified social experience:

1) Does the work empower more people than just the authors of the work?
2) Does the work foster egalitarian relationships, access to resources, a shift in thinking, or surpluses for a larger group of people?
3) Does the work abate competition, abusive power and class structures, or other barriers typically found in gallery or museum settings?
4) Does the work seek broader audiences than just those educated about and familiar with contemporary art?
5) Does the work trigger a collective imagination that can dream other possible worlds while with eyes wide open understands the current one?

This list is nowhere near complete (is hardly a serious beginning), but it gives a sense of a direction this thinking could be taken in.

NT: Empowerment seems to be a central concern in the points you bring up. Fighting alienation and encouraging subjective growth seems to be one of the central concerns that Paulo Freire had in his Pedagogy of the Oppressed as well as Felix Guattari with his concept of transversality. But I share your suspicion of theoretical terms as well. I mean you don’t need famous theoreticians to articulate an antipathy for alienating cultural production. That is a simple ethos of punk rock. For that matter, it is the goal of many activists and educators. But what interests me is how power operates within a variety of cultural fields and how what one person might find alienating another might not.

I often believe that much of contemporary political art idealizes an audience who comes to the table open for radical ideas. I must admit that the Prisoners’ Inventions project that we put together at MASS MoCA managed to reach out across a broad audience, but at the same time, some of your work can be a bit more arty and obscure. Surely this work has a different approach to audience.

I guess what I am asking is: besides the art world vs. general public categories, how else do you think about the vast range of people who engage with your work (or do not). How strategic are you in considering the points by which people interact. Who is your audience? Is it ok to alienate some people (is it an inevitable result of reaching some other people more effectively)? How specific are you when you consider levels of power in the work that you do?

TS: We consistently have experiences where people tell us that one of our projects confounded their expectations and we find this exciting. One thing that is critical for us is to follow our interests and desires, which often takes us outside the constraints of art proper, and gives us a great deal of freedom to look into whatever we feel like regardless of what may be fashionable. We always move back and forth sometimes pursuing things that not very many artists care about. Sometimes our concerns make sense situated in an art context or they receive a focus there that is different from when it is removed from this space. We enjoy many different understandings and lives of our work and see and feel the power in embracing complexity and aesthetic experience that is distributed amongst many types of people, places, and social situations. This gives us a freedom to make a project like Prisoners’ Inventions, but it also means we can do something more “arty.” For us there are not boundaries between things in such a clear way. Additionally, unlike many artists, we wear our mistakes and missteps out in the open and our arty-ness and politics intertwine in ways that often surprise us. Even projects we think aren’t so good are displayed on our web site for all to see. We are constantly pushing ourselves, and others, to go places where we haven’t before with art and creativity.

We constantly seek different audiences out. Some may be bigger than others. The audience for Prisoners’ Inventions has been global. Millions of people from many different countries have seen it in various forms and have been moved by it. Then there are the Temporary Conversations booklets. Each one may tap into a more discrete group of people who are concerned about the person being interviewed and her work. Our booklets (85 and counting) circulate well beyond our control and design, with downloads of PDFs vastly eclipsing original print runs. This is important to how we work – getting our ideas out in the world, turning them free for others to take on and use as they will. We have already taken responsibility for them by putting them down in the first place. We are taking our place in the great continuity of ideas and the collectivity of exchange on a much bigger level than ourselves. One show, whether seen by a large diverse group, or by a more concentrated, defined group, does not define our entire continuum of work.

Empowerment is important, from ourselves to people we work with and those impacted by what we do. Breaking down abusive power structures is something we actively work on in all aspects of our lives. Each of us must always negotiate abusive power and work hard that we don’t make it ourselves with whatever opportunities or resources we are privileged to have. This extends to the variety of people that we count as our audience. We think it’s a mistake to limit your conception of who the audience for a work or project will be. In our experience, our time has been better spent in learning how to engage wider groups of people by finding aspects of our work and projects that both appeal and intrigue them, and making connections based on those threads. Using this methodology rather than making work for a vast, unnamed “general public” or for people with a specific arrangement of skills or privileges makes us open to new conversations and perspectives — a seemingly simple result that many artists seem to forget about in their quest to appear as “experts” on the subjects that they create projects about. We have been able to collaborate on various projects alongside people from a variety of backgrounds, and this is the direct result of us being committed to talk about and experience our work with people regardless of their background/perspective/way of life.

Additionally, we all have multiple side projects that address issues and subjects that Temporary Services can’t. The three of us are individually concerned with a range of other issues that don’t always have to show up in exhibitions. Nonetheless, this is all a part of the continuum of how Temporary Services works to integrate art and activism within our daily lives.

NT: You have produced over 80 booklets at this point and their content ranges from booklets to accompany projects such as Prisoners Inventions or Free For All, to interviews with obscure musicians like The Dicks and Kawabata Makoto, to alternative histories such as the Guerrilla Art Action Group. How do you see the booklets as part of your practice?

TS: Some aspects of the booklets and books have changed over time. Other factors have remained constant. It has always been important to us to write about our ideas, or the work of others we include in projects, and to be generous with information about what we do and why. We like openness, accountability and sharing information. When we first started organizing exhibitions and projects it was in a tiny storefront space. Wall space was at a premium and it would have been wasteful, and aesthetically ugly, to use a wall for a large text panel. Putting text in a small photocopied free booklet made it portable. People could read the booklets on the bus ride home, refer back to them when writing about the work, or just enjoy them as a free keepsake from something they saw. There is very little journalistic attention for art in Chicago and good accurate critical writing is usually the exception, if you are fortunate enough to have your work written about at all. Making our own booklets – even if they were only four or eight pages – was a way of ensuring that something was written that accurately reflected our concerns. It also gave us accountability for our ideas and served as a challenge to others to engage us.

At first the booklets were more like exhibition guides. We have also used them to document our work as we go, to function as their own creative element within a larger project or exhibition, and, increasingly, to exist as coherent printed works independent of a larger exhibit or project. Prisoners’ Inventions was conceived as a publishing project first and only later as an exhibition. The Temporary Conversations interview series booklets are sometimes made to compliment an exhibition – such at the booklets with Tim Kerr and The Dicks that were created around a project at test-site in Austin, Texas – but they can also stand on their own. The interview booklets have been a great opportunity for us to learn from others. We can initiate conversations with people that inspire us but who we might not know how to work with otherwise. We generally find the most interest in people who slog away on the margins. The histories of some of these folks are sometimes hard to access. Our curiosity about what Jean Toche might be up to and our thirst for more information about what it was like to be in Guerrilla Art Action Group motivated us to contact him. His ongoing friendship has been an absolute delight and he took such a great interest in making the booklet that it really became a collaboration, and not just us acting like journalists or researchers.

We appreciate the autonomous spirit of self-publishing. We all enjoy writing. Some of us have a ‘zine-making background that we can’t get out of our blood. We like the opportunity to share our free or inexpensive publications with thousands of people -– either in print form or as PDFs that many people download from our website. At this point we have made 84 publications which must total several thousand pages of content. If we set out to make something so massive at the beginning, or at any other point in our history, it would have been far too daunting to even consider. It has been a more natural and organic process to record our ideas and interests a little bit at a time as we go – steadily and consistently – in as few or as many pages as we can afford or feel are necessary.

Over the years many writers have used our booklets as a resource to describe what we do. People share them with others and spread our ideas and information far beyond the audiences we could reach on our own. A lot of people who teach use our booklets too, which is particularly gratifying.

We can’t emphasize enough how important it is to take control over the discourse around your work and to publish at every opportunity. It is important to not sit around and wait for someone else to do this. We tell this to younger artists all the time and to our peers. We got this fever from many different places. One inspiration was an earlier incarnation of the Danish group N55 (the version that was still a collective of all of its founding members). They published booklets for everything they did. They actively engaged in fierce, lively debate and really cared about ideas, ethics, aesthetics, etc. Their publications were “proof” somehow of their intense commitment to their work.

NT: I find your thoughts on DIY publishing extremely important and interesting. Increasingly I feel that real power in art under neoliberal capitalism comes from the ability to assert the terms by which your work can be gauged. When you insist on providing a context and a platform from which to discuss what is going on, you can arrest the dialogue from the market-friendly infrastructures that perpetuate an inane idea of what cultural production can do. How important is it for you to produce infrastructures for you and your collaborators work? I know that you founded with some other artists a space called Mess Hall. How does that fit with your work?

TS: Creating our own infrastructures as a group and with others has been extremely important. Sometimes the infrastructures we are offered, inherit or borrow from others (for an exhibit, an event, or a publication) work quite well within what we wish to do at a particular place or for a certain set of ideas. But to just work within a framework, or platform or context that someone else creates is never going to be entirely satisfying for a group like ours. After all, creating your own contexts, or discourses, or infrastructures is as much of a creative opportunity as anything else that might go into being an artist.

Distribution for self-published materials by artists and other creative people remains far too limited. We created the publishing imprint and internet store, Half Letter Press (www.halfletterpress.com), out of an urge to address this need. We still work with others who will distribute our work to people we may never find with our own efforts, but we felt that our own infrastructure was necessary to address the gaps we perceive in current distribution channels. Half Letter Press is a constant work in progress. We continually are figuring out how to make Half Letter Press more effective, creative and profitable. We feel that the better we can be at circulating our own work and the work of others, the more money we can spend to support other people’s creative publications by purchasing them up front at wholesale and distributing them.

Mess Hall is an experimental cultural center in the Rogers Park neighborhood in Chicago. We came up with the name and co-founded it with five others in 2003 after a generous landlord offered Temporary Services a small storefront space for free in exchange for us creating regular free cultural events. Though the three of us are no longer immediately involved in the day-to-day work of running Mess Hall, the group and space have evolved as new members (called keyholders) have been invited on. The current keyholders continue in the spirit that the space was founded with – while also introducing new ideas that are specific to the new people and audiences running the space. Over the years Mess Hall has hosted literally hundreds of events, which include free lectures, exhibits, workshops, skill sharing, brunchlucks (potluck brunches), public and private meetings, and a host of projects that are harder to categorize. It excites us to no end to have been part of the creation of an infrastructure that can continue with vitality, even as we no longer program what happens there.

NT: Who are the other groups across the United States and world you work with? It does seem absolutely wild that as vast as this network is, the relative visibility of this work on a public level remains so limited. Do you have thoughts of working with this group of people to increase its impact or do you prefer the current condition?

TS: We’re often “paired” or “collected” into group exhibitions with the same artists and groups, but our collaborators, friends, allies, and co-conspirators come from all fields. They are artists and non-artists alike. We’re unsure about the zest for and usefulness of grouping artists and others under artificial umbrellas. That said, we do feel solidarity with the work of numerous artists, activists, writers, and groups. There are many that we feel genuinely excited to be compared to and shuffled into a larger network with. We do enjoy a certain familiarity with many others and have the same needs and desires as a lot of our peers and mentors. We’re not sure if this makes a network, or a movement, but it sure is a condition.

Our latest project is Art Work: A National Conversation About Art, Labor, and Economics. All of the above said, Art Work includes the work of a variety of people, mostly “working in these ways,” who feel the need to interrogate or investigate the current ways in which art, artists, and artistic endeavors are financially supported. Art Work exists as a newspaper (which is being distributed for free in all fifty U.S. states, Puerto Rico, and within indigenous communities), and as a website (http://www.artandwork.us). Both the paper and the site include contributions by many amazing people reflecting on art, economy, labor, and more. A good beginning to a list of others that work in the ways in which we work can be found by researching our contributors on Art Work.

No one seems to prefer the current condition, whether you’re referring to the conditions experienced in the various worlds of art production and performance, or simply the way the world is at the moment. We strive to champion others, and we try to be a group that is anti-competition. We feel that we are always working with our allies – and the great majority of the projects that Temporary Services creates are done with the help, support, input, and direct collaboration with people who are not in Temporary Services. We are up front about that, and continue to find new ways to include other people in whatever fortune or opportunity we find for ourselves.

NT: So, lets imagine that Temporary Services was handed the keys to a big endowed museum the size of the MCA Chicago. In fact, lets just say you get to be director of the MCA Chicago. What would you do to rectify the problems of a commodity driven art world?

TS: This is a trick question. No one in their right mind would want to be the director of the MCA Chicago.

More seriously, while this is an interesting fantasy, we are not going to be handed the keys to a big endowed museum any time ever, nor would we have the patience or inclination to work within that kind of extremely bureaucratic situation. Getting rid of the the dense, corporate, hierarchical power structure of such an institution in order to make them more livable places to work in would also be an efficient way to lose that big endowment. As a sign at an Art Worker’s Coalition demonstration once said: “Art Workers Don’t Kiss Ass,” and one of the primary lubricants that keeps big art institutions in business is world class ass kissing skills. We don’t have ‘em.

Plus we don’t want to aid and abet the corporate whitewashing that organizations like the MCA must do to keep their doors open. They take money from Boeing, a particularly nasty company that is profiteering from the two ridiculous wars that the U.S. is still engaged in and the President doesn’t have the decency and humanity to end. In the past, it was Altria (formerly known as R.J. Reynolds) equally as disgusting but in different fields. They really need to build a grassroots support structure to replace the corporate funding and reliance on their collectors, but they are unable to do that based on the fact that they were founded by an upper class that wants to instill its privilege and power through the presentation of art to the public, while being subsidized by such great things as taxes foregone, tax write offs for donations of art work, getting greater profit out of the work in their collections by boosting their value through exhibition at museum, and on and on. It is a sick, exclusive culture that needs to be opened up.

Part of the problem of the commodity driven art world is institutions like the MCA, but an equally guilty party are all the universities and their BFA/MFA degree programs which teach the vast majority of students that this is where their work should go. The problems are systemic and we are quite content in trying to build up other things as a way to address this. This doesn’t mean we won’t go into places with problems like this, and it can be very useful to our ends in opening these places up, but it is not where we rest. We like to keep moving between different levels of visibility, cultural production, and ways of working.

NT: I suspect I share [with] you folks a real frustration at the myopic terms by which art is interrogated in contemporary culture. Your work embraces such a robust sense of what is possible and complicates the narratives of art that seem to permeate a commodity driven infrastructure such as that of New York City. I would like to hear your concerns about cultural production in the United States as well as models that you think are successful.

TS: Frustration abounds. We can barely keep from screaming when someone uses the term “relational aesthetics.” The dearth of thoughtful discourse and analysis among practicing artists is too often palpable. Most artists’ and art professionals’ heads are so thoroughly up the ass of the commercial system that they can’t even see their own potential. Their art and creativity gets put in the direction of and service of making money, becoming famous, decorating existing corporate power, pleasing people at the top of the class structure in this country … really empty bullshit. It is constantly amazing how much artists hand over just to participate in this nonsense. The immense hordes of artists in Brooklyn aching for Chelsea legitimation is pathetic. Just think if all that energy could be turned in other directions, set free from the need to be validated by a system that chews up the majority of people to propel a few to financial well being and powerful positions – shaping art and culture for the rest of us, the dark matter. But myths and symbols continue to be more powerful than reason. For us, despite a small number of really great artists and organizations, New York is where you catch a flight overseas to places where people have unplugged from this, or an inbound flight to Chicago, the capital of the kind of work we do. We have been fortunate to work directly with great New York City spaces like Printed Matter, Apex, Proteus Gowanus, EFA, 16 Beaver, Bluestockings, and the Center for Book Arts, but few others have demonstrated any interest in what we do.

The real power of art to tell us something important about ourselves and the world, to transform us and give us new possibility, is disemboweled by an array of forces anathema and external to the generative beauty of human creativity. These forces are a consortium of corporate interest, commercial galleries and their museum outlet malls, universities and art media. The university is the training ground for conformity and fealty to utterly stupid ways of going about making art; a self-propelled and self-legitimating system of cyclical inanity and return. The universities need to be emptied of all the tenured faculty. The infrastructure is still useful and could be put to more liberatory fantastic ends. But it isn’t. So everyone must go and start over.

One thing we constantly bring up is how uncreative the collective output of artists is when considered against the rest of society and who is really changing our existence and understanding of ourselves. Artists are seen as, are portrayed in movies and TV shows as, the pinnacle of creativity, as liberated individuals unbounded by the constraints others must endure. Nothing could be further from the truth. Maybe at one point in human development artists performed a vital visionary function, but today most just repeat forms and ideas that get us nowhere. The real human creativity, the really raw transformative creativity is being done by people in other fields and other situations.

We would like to see artists’ and others’ creativity liberated and set free to show us new things. But this won’t happen under capitalism, under the commodification of every thing we can possibly do. However, there are various struggles and initiatives that give us hope. Is that what you want us to reflect on?

But first, we have questions for you… New York’s commerce-centered and fame-driven ethos has had an impact on you. We have seen some shifts in your work. Could you tell us how you have had to adapt from your days at Mass Moca? What constraints has Creative Time put on you and what has it offered to you that you didn’t have before?

NT: Ahhh the tables have turned back on me. Truly a reflexive process. Fair enough. Well, I don’t actually feel that New York City has been too problematic in terms of the political work like you say. I agree that this city would benefit from a more hands-on critical approach and not simply the Whitney school contemporary art-sympathetic games. There are a lot of reasons for this. I am of the opinion that the commercial market actually produces a massive model that many people cannot help but copy for lack of models. But anyway, about me for a second. I have actually felt better about being able to work in the public realm. Democracy in America, Paul Chan in New Orleans and the Jeremy Deller road trip on the war in Iraq, were all flagrantly political projects that I feel really good about. Working on public based practice in cities across America has provided a truly amazing way of working that I am extremely inspired by. I think the chance to work in a public arena outside the public perception that a project is, or isn’t, art, has been very powerful. There are pressures to exhibit artists with name recognition at times, but this really isn’t all that different from MASS MoCA. I’m curious what you mean by “New York’s commerce-centered and fame-driven ethos has had an impact on you?’ It’s hard to not be offended by this, but I suppose it is reasonable enough to be suspicious of all curators working in New York City. What impact would you say that is? I think the best political work I have done so far has happened at Creative Time. Well, the Interventionists at MASS MoCA was a great project but also fortunate in its timing really. I don’t want this to get too personal but at the same time, I understand the importance of us both interrogating each other and putting our cards on the table. I have always felt that most curators don’t use their platforms enough for the purpose of expanding the dialogue around contemporary art and cultural production.

TS: This question wasn’t meant as an attack, but was intended to just push the conversation into a place that isn’t totally comfortable. We have known you since before the Department of Space and Land Reclamation days in Chicago, a watershed event for many many people, us included. We have all gone through a lot of changes together, some major changes together, and it wasn’t all roses, there were some guns too. And this could be a space to reflect on those transformations.

You invited us to be in our first museum show, your first big curated show at Mass MoCA titled “Fantastic!” It was a big deal for us to be in a museum at that time. We had long conversations about whether or not this was good for our work or appropriate for the particular project we exhibited. Ultimately we agreed and the exhibition ended up exposing our work to over 100,000 people in person and millions of people world wide, much greater than had we continued to only work in more underground, guerrilla and ephemeral ways and the same thirty or so people came to things we would do. We have had to develop a more complicated approach to thinking about the distribution of our work, keeping a foot in the underground, the institutions, and in between.

New York doesn’t have as strong a dialogical, socially-engaged climate and community as Chicago. There are pockets of great people there, but there is not the same critical mass as in Chicago, nor the same way of doing things. There are different concerns in Chicago and the art market isn’t a dominant factor. You mention the Whitney program, but it isn’t dialogical; it is the university top-down critical theory-driven idea of criticality (which doesn’t confront power and the powerful) and how that can be integrated into the contemporary art marketplace. People are taught to replicate the dominant “counter” discourse, which for a handful of people gives them a jumping off point, but for many more is about getting access to jobs and exhibition opportunities. Critical challenges to powerful structures and discourse can come from within institutional frames, but is more likely to come from self-organized, decentralized, idiosyncratic positions that push things in ways because they are less encumbered by a variety of factors. You are trying to challenge this situation by leveraging your position and history at CT, but we are curious to hear your take on it. It was all of these things that we are interested in getting you to reflect on. You have clearly been impacted by your time in Chicago. Those of us who continue to be very active there can see this in what you do at CT.

Also, you are one of the very few people in the US, who is highly visible, and is so strongly supporting practices that don’t fully participate in either the commercial discourse or the psuedo-critical discourse of postmodernist-critical-theory. You have embraced more active/activist/anarchist practices that seek to confront and dismantle abusive power rather than feel content “critiquing” it.

NT: I don’t disagree with you about NYC. I think your complaints about this city reflect a certain frustration I have with European’s complaints about the United States. Many folks on the left will complain that capitalism destroys culture and privatizes production (and its people), but simultaneously they move from this macro-political analysis to blaming the people who live in these conditions. Yes, at the heart of capitalism people are faced with a difficult situation and have limited models to work from. However, this provides a great need for leadership from those folks who don’t live under such precarious conditions. That means you Chicago. I suppose I always want folks to move away from resentment and toward leadership. People always have a chip on their shoulder about NYC, just like folks abroad have a chip on their shoulder about the United States, but the fact is, the conditions of capital produce people. For those who have access and a sense of alternative models, I really think they should show them generously. I think that onus is on you folks.
I know you used to organize shows but maybe you could do that again. It might provide a tangible model for people to learn from.

TS: We don’t have a chip on our shoulder about NY. We like the city a lot and many artists and organizations working there. What we have a problem with is how nearly totally the commercial market dominates all aspects of artistic production and discourse there and throughout the country creating giant blind spots and barriers to other possibilities. This is one narrative of how art should function in the world. It is not one we accept.

We continue to devote a lot of time and space to highlighting work and examples by other artists and creative people, but these efforts don’t always take the form of exhibitions like the ones we used to do in our old spaces in Chicago. Lately we are more likely to shine a spotlight on others by interviewing them for the Temporary Conversations booklets or the book Group Work, or inviting them to write for something like the couple guest texts in our book Public Phenomena, or the many contributors to our new newspaper Art Work which mainly focuses on the ideas and histories of others.

Outside of Temporary Services we also do a lot to prop up work we care about from the present and past. Salem is an endless promoter of other people and their projects using her public relations skills, performing and organizing events, and working with others to run sporadic free stores (freestorechicago.wordpress.com) all over Chicago. Brett works with Bonnie Fortune in Let’s Re-Make (http://letsremake.info/) whose project The Library of Radiant Optimism for Let’s Re-Make the World (www.letsremake.info) promotes a number of printed resources and organized a gathering of socially engaged artists from the U.S. and Denmark at Mess Hall. They also work with a larger group of people called the Midwest Radical Culture Corridor that seeks to create new narratives about the Midwest as well as activate and interconnect people working along parallel trajectories in energy and food production, radical ecology, art and more. Marc started Public Collectors in 2007 which encourages private individuals to make their collections of all sorts of cultural materials accessible and hosts a number of free digital resources online (http://www.publiccollectors.org/). He recently opened the Public Collectors Study Center in his basement to hosts exhibitions.

The desire to promote the work of others has never left us; it has just taken some new forms. We absolutely agree with you that those with access and knowledge need to share. We continue to try to do our part. It’s in our blood.