PROBLEMS AND PROVOCATIONS
Fathomers opens the archive on Grand Arts
The Propeller Group, process detail, The AK-47 vs. the M16, 2015. Fragments of AK-47 and M16 projectiles encased in ballistic gelatin.
Last fall, Grand Arts closed its doors after 20 years of producing exceptional and far-reaching projects by Alice Aycock, Patricia Cronin, Alfredo Jaar, Stanya Kahn, William Pope.L, Sissel Tolaas, Glenn Kaino and many, many others. More than a gallery or fabrication studio, Grand Arts was an interdisciplinary melting pot: a place where artists mingled with expansive thinkers from other fields – rocket scientists and cartographers, smell researchers and gunsmiths – to create wildly imaginative, dynamic work. And while Grand Arts itself is now gone, its legacy as an innovative, risk-taking institution lives on.
We are delighted to announce the publication of Problems and Provocations: Grand Arts 1995-2015, chronicling 30 of the most complicated and challenging projects Grand Arts ever produced.
In opening the archive on Grand Arts’ endeavors – the Propeller Group’s mid-air collision of bullets fired from an AK-47 and an M16; Tavares Strachan’s cosmonaut training in Russia; Rosemarie Fiore’s appropriation of a full-scale carnival ride as a drawing tool – Problems and Provocations is designed to capture Grand Arts’ energetic spirit of dreaming things into being. All of the project dossiers were created in consultation with the artists, who share unvarnished recollections, details about the fate of works produced at Grand Arts, and thoughts about directions their practices subsequently took.
John Salvest, installation process view, IOU/USA, 2011. Shipping containers, 59 1/2 x 120 x 40 ft. (image: E.G. Schempf)
Essays by Pablo Helguera, Iain Kerr, Gean Moreno, Emily Roysdon, Rob Walker, and research studio RHEI consider the models, practices, and ethics of art institutions; a “devil’s dictionary” appendix, edited by Timothy “Speed” Levitch, parses art-making states of mind. Additionally, micro-texts drawn from a private colloquium engage questions of risk, magic and what comes after, with artists like Mel Chin, Michael Jones McKean, and Annie Lapin in conversation with thinkers from other fields, including poet Anne Boyer and de-extinction scholar Andrew Torrance.
Sissel Tolaas, research documentation, SmellScape KCK/KCMO (2007-2012), 2011. (photo: Megan Mantia)
Now Grand Arts’ spirit has been conveyed to a new organization: Fathomers. In January 2016, Grand Arts alumni Stacy Switzer, Lacey Wozny, Eric Dobbins and Annie Fischer relocated to Los Angeles to extend Margaret Silva’s vision of radical support, in a global city ripe for complex entanglements in the vicinity of art. The essays in Problems and Provocations had tremendous influence in shaping Fathomers’ considerations of Grand Arts’ next life. The project documentation and artist contributions serve to remind us why we fathomed that next life at all.
Thumbnail Photo: Fathomers