SPACE: Inova Gallery, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee
SHOW: Indexical Frontiers, featuring Adelheid Mers: Organogram Mapping Project at the Peck School of the Arts
DATES: March 28 – May 11, 2008
REVIEWER: Jessica Lee Cochran

All images courtesy of Inova Gallery

In correlation with its preparations to hire a new dean, the Peck School of the Arts invited Chicago-based artist Adelheid Mers  to engage in an almost-year long mapping project. Months of interviews with the school’s departmental stakeholders, open sessions, surveys and other forms of research culminated in a map of the school, currently on view in a group show at the school’s Inova Gallery.

Diagrams, or “organograms,” are a significant part of Mers’s practice. Although they vary in sophistication and depth from project to project, each offers what Mers calls a “temporary bird’s eye view” of the institution. For example, a past organogram at the Rockford Art Museum mapped out the museum’s structures and activities, placing particular emphasis on the institution’s unusually active board and education programs.

In a similar fashion, the Peck School of the Arts organogram makes visible the school’s relations; positions; activities; spaces; temporalities; and most importantly, subjectivities. Visually, the map is systematic and organized, yet its organic and colorful visual renderings communicate an artistic, and even playful kind of authority. Mers describes such projects, for which she occupies the roles of artist, instructor, administrator and curator, as an exercise in New Institutionalism that works on the “flipside of activism.” As Jacques Ranciere points out, “Politics and art, like forms of knowledge, construct ‘fictions;’ that is to  say, the material rearrangement of signs and images, and the relationships between what is seen and what is said, between what is done and what can be done.”

Working politically, from the ground up, Mers opens up a space in order to construct such ‘fictions’ that in turn deconstruct, amplify and connect. Rather than using her cultural and symbolic capital to obliquely critique the school, she works within a feminist pedagogical framework that mobilizes an assessment of information, flattens out hierarchies and redist-ributes competences. As she moves fluidly within her roles in order to interview and relate to students, instructors, volunteers and other members of the school community, Mers helps part-icipants to question the ways they move within their chosen roles, and re-imagine their expectations and positions. Import-antly, her project allows for all levels of participation and makes no claims for the community’s identity. That, as we know, is always out of reach.

Contemporary art has a long history of service-oriented practices. Institutional Critique artist Andrea Fraser, well known for her “prospectus model” and an infamous provider of artistic services, understood site specificity “as a kind of boundary of critical intervention: the limit of its possible efficacy.” Fraser worked within institutions to make visible problematic power structures and hierarchies, by way of performative and curatorial projects, but her definition of site specificity is useful when considering Mers’s practice. Though Mers’s sustained intervention lacks overt criticality, it performs criticality, working under the radar to link seemingly disparate relationships and amplify points of intersection. In doing this, Mers hopes to provide a platform for the community to re-imagine its own discursive identity.

By producing an organogram, Mers reaches her “boundary  of intervention,” and leaves a tool for moving forward once  she’s gone. Some may dismiss artistic services (those that are performed in solidarity with the institution) as being overly complicit with the establishment. But Mers’s mapping project succeeds for its capacity to make visible and important the layered and dynamic habits, relationships and activities of  a productive cultural community.