This interview is part of 5 Questions About Critical Art In Chicago, an online publication presented by AREA Chicago – a magazine and event series dedicated to documenting, researching and networking political and cultural work in Chicago. Full transcripts of all the responses to all five questions are available at www.5questions.areachicago.org.

5 Questions is also part of a larger research project called “Town Hall Talks”, co-curated by Daniel Tucker and Nato Thompson, and sponsored by Creative Time – a public art organization in NYC. Town Hall conversations were held in Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans, and New York City in March 2008. Selected organizers, artists, and activists across a broad spectrum of cultural communities discussed five questions pertaining to strategic local and national activist concerns.

For the Chicago talks, twenty artists and organizers from across the city were brought together to respond to five questions. In response to this question here, we hear from Aay Preston-Myint, Amanda Gutierrez, Laurie Jo Reynolds, Jon Pounds, Rebecca Zorach, Salome Chasnoff, Sarah Black (Material Exchange), Mary Patten, and Laurie Palmer. This interview took place in March 2008 at Experimental Station, and some responses were sent in later via email.

The Question: “Describe a local cultural event that productively expanded the social networks that your practice operates in. That is to say that the event produced a new sense of community that had political potential.”

Laurie Palmer: When the Tamms Poetry Committee did an event at Hyde Park Arts Center in December 2007, Laurie Jo Reynolds showed her Space Ghost video at the same time as a number of poems written by prisoners were read. There was a very diverse audience, including relatives of prisoners, former prisoners, artists, activists, and poets. It was one of these circumstances when you realize the false divisions that you carry around, such as thinking that artwork has to be either explicitly political or experimental and aesthetic— and therefore politically ineffective. This event made it abundantly clear that often those divisions are false, that you can make work that’s really powerful (which this video is) and it can do a number of things at once. It can touch a lot of people with different relationships to art. It can carry an enormous impact in terms of galvanizing people’s understandings and actions. The event was particularly powerful because there was such a wide range of backgrounds represented. The organizers’ ability to draw that audience together and connect us was a huge part of what made the event so powerful.

Mary Patten: I would like to talk about the “AIDS Actions for Healthcare”, organized in Chicago in April 1990, in which cultural/artistic elements played a big role in realizing political potential. I’ll also touch on some questions that have been circulating recently about success, failure, how to measure effectiveness, and approaching the limits that define how we look at these things. The AIDS Actions occurred at the height of the international coalition ACT UP [AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power] and the AIDS movement nationally. ACT UP had not yet broken because of racism, sexism, internal differences, the incessant death toll, and burnout. The April 1990 demonstrations were organized by many groups – a collection of differences aimed at one thing, which was securing national healthcare. There was a twenty-four-hour vigil at Cook County Hospital; rallies, caucus meetings, and affinity group planning; and an all-day march with civil disobedience actions targeting insurance companies, the American Medical Association, the city of Chicago, and Cook County. At the time, there were fifteen empty beds in the AIDS ward at Cook County Hospital because County officials claimed they did not have enough money to install a separate bathroom for women. This was a moment when women with HIV/AIDS—people like Jeannie Pejko, Novella Dudley, and Ida Greathouse—were taking huge risks by coming out publicly. The culmination of the protests was an action organized by the Women’s Caucus. We semi-secretly dragged fifteen mattresses through the alleys of downtown Chicago to block a major intersection in front of city hall. There were incredible layers of protection for this action. As dozens of women dressed in hospital gowns sat down on the mattresses, creating a makeshift AIDS ward and political theater in the street, we were surrounded by the People of Color Caucus. Our posters and chants proclaimed: “Women are dying! Fifteen beds!” Because mattresses are heavy, it was difficult for the police to move us quickly, so the arrests took awhile. We effectively blocked traffic and got a lot of press.

Within a matter of days, the AIDS ward at Cook County Hospital was opened to women. This was one of those remarkable instances where we actually succeeded in achieving one of our demands. On the other hand, this came at a price: many people were brutalized and hurt. So there was both exuberance at an actual victory and pain and shock at the brutality of the arrests. It was not on a scale of what many poor people and people of color have to endure on a routine basis in this country at the hands of the police, but there was still a chilling effect. It’s amazing to realize how enormous an effort was required to realize one example of a basic democratic right such as access to healthcare, a right that should be guaranteed for all citizens.

Sara Black: A few events that have brought a number of practitioners together in a critical way that I would include are Pathogeographies Project, the Pedagogical Factory/How We Learn events at Hyde Park Art Center, and the latest “What We Know of Our Past, What We Demand of Our Future” conference at Mess Hall. Those were pretty important experiences. And of course, numerous events here at the Experimental Station. I would like to add that, for me, a lot of the visibly political activities organized around these events and spaces were less exemplary of the thing that is Chicago than the conversations, discussions, gatherings, dinners that have happened peripherally to the artwork or political activities. It’s in this peripheral activity that I see evidence of a culture being produced: a culture that is enacting what I think of as a true democracy with responsibility, empathy, and creativity at the heart of it, where the values suggest that everyone finds the greatest freedom when everyone acts to maximize the freedom of others, where we are only as free as our most disenfranchised person. That’s something that I have found in this community here that is really exciting and stellar and particular to this group of people in Chicago.

Salome Chasnoff: Beyondmedia started working around the issues of the incarceration of women and its impact on families in the mid-90’s. We did a series of tapes with formerly incarcerated women in the middle to late 90’s. One that was released in 2001 was screened all over [the country]. Out of that grew this installation that we created with seventeen different community groups. We also worked with a number of students at Columbia College and the School of the Art Institute. The project was called 30 Days of Art and Education on Women’s Incarceration. First of all, the process of making it was extremely collaborative and really created all these networks and relationships that hadn’t existed before. The project toured five sites in thirty days in Chicago, very diverse sites: a gallery, a church, a university, and so on. The installation was multimedia; it represented women’s stories on video and audio, interviews with their children, written works, and in a later form there was art by women who were incarcerated. Women in prison from around the country sent us arts and crafts that we sold at the exhibition and then sent the money back to them or deposited it in their accounts. After the first year, the installation continued to tour as Voices in Time, Lives in Limbo. Each location had a live performance by formerly incarcerated women and a town hall discussion on the issues with the audience. We also often had a panel with different activists, scholars, and former prisoners; many times one person was in all three of those roles. [The panels] looked at different issues surrounding the prison industrial complex and how it affects women. At each event, not only did the relationships grow and multiply, but so did the documents: the documented evidence, the stories, the videos, the art objects all multiplied. Finally, we started putting them on this website [www.womenandprison.org]. That’s the idea of it—it just continues to grow.

Rebecca Zorach: When we [Feel Tank] corresponded by e-mail as a group about this question, we cited a lot of the things that have already been mentioned, so I won’t go over them. One of the things that emerged for me is the fact that there wasn’t necessarily a sense of a community being formed in that moment, but rather a set of partial moments where a connection was made or a network at an individual level was advanced. This is an ongoing creation of community that can’t be situated in one particular moment, but rather is something that happens over time, over a number of different encounters and different relationships. The other thing I would add is that coming from the point of view of Feel Tank, I think sometimes community is forged through a negative identification or bad feelings as much as through a positive experience; for instance, through resistance or protest or the negative feeling of existing within a bad institution that you want to change. It’s not always just a matter of going to a great art event where people feel community, but actually experiencing something bad that you want to change.

Jon Pounds: Within the politics of the local, one of the things that I hear in Chicago is that we’ve continued to see this real dissolution of the distance between artists and the audience, between the artists and the public. All of us are describing various ways in which the work is generated out of open-ended explorations. In some cases, the audience becomes a part of the performance, and that’s a welcome piece of it. That’s a really positive thing. One of the things that I would say we probably believe collectively is that everybody is more creative than they’re asked to be in the course of their ordinary lives. And that we as artists, to use that honorific term, have some responsibility not only to make our work and our life meaningful for ourselves and to make a living, but also to help other people to create the context in which they can experience their own creativity, to understand and impart why they are part of a larger creative community and not a larger divided community.

Laurie Jo Reynolds: There are a lot of ex-offenders and family members who are afraid of retaliation in terms of talking [in public]. Also, of course, the prisoners themselves are afraid of retaliation. There’s this interesting aspect of trying to foreground the testimony of people, sometimes without names and sometimes with names, who can talk at which events. That’s been an interesting conflict for us.

The other thing I was going to say, which is more to the point of the question, is the type of social events that were crucial to us were these letter-writing sessions [to prisoners in TAMMS]. We would get together and have potlucks inspired by Mess Hall; we would call them “Potluck Down”—they always combine words, you know (like Brunch-Luck meals). It was a lock down and a potluck, where you had to finish writing all the letters but you could be in a room with food. We would even have brunch lock downs. These things fulfilled social needs for us; they were social events. They were also the way to connect socially with prisoners who had no social contact and were in total isolation. We really did that because we thought that it was the only thing we could do for prisoners in isolation. In doing that really small act, we actually started to change the preconception in all of our minds that obviously that’s not all you can do for someone [in prison]. That never could have been eliminated, it never could have developed without the process of getting to know each other, of writing back and forth, through this systematic letter writing monthly, even weekly.

Amanda Gutierrez: I think that working and living in Pilsen has allowed me to expand my networks beyond just art or just social activism. For me, having contact with the work of art spaces such as Polvo, The Flower Shop and the Plaines Project has been really rich—not only because I’ve shown my work there, but also because they’ve allowed me an important experience of social practices within art networks. When I was developing the piece “En Memoria,” several core questions were formed based on my experience here: What or who represents the “community?” Is that community divided based on cultural and class divisions? Is it really possible to stress cultural and class differences in order to overcome them, and create some kind of interrelation? Is that a utopian ideal?

On the other hand, I see that two of the places I mentioned are already closed, after exhaustive efforts to work within and for the “community,” leaving more questions about the relationships between the people who collaborate in these projects and the participants left behind (most of them teens, kids and community artists). I believe that there was a legitimate reason behind their existence: expanding cultural alternatives as a political tactic. But I’m not sure how aware, conscious, or critical the users or participants were during the process, and I wonder about the practical and ideological results of this as a political tactic.

Aay Preston-Myint: Last year, the Chances organizers decided to use surplus funds and donations in order to create a float for the Pride Parade. Rather than stage an intervention or feeder march, we decided to participate in the parade in order to gain more direct access to paradegoers, as well as to repoliticize an identity-based event that has, over time, become co-opted by commercial sponsorship, and promotes and exploits material and consumerist tendencies in the [gay] mainstream.

With the help of many of our Chances DJs, performers, and attendees, we constructed a witchcraft-inspired float asking spectators to “Summon a New Queer Reality,” continuing the tradition of the “witches” that came before us – twenty-seven queers and allies selected for their contributions to culture, activism, and justice. Images of these historic and contemporary figures were distributed to spectators in the form of paper masks, with biographical information and quotes on the back. The event made connections with paradegoers who were surprised to see some of their unsung heroes represented at the parade, or maybe did not expect to see political and educational information relevant to their identity. We also fostered connections with other organizations that heard of the project. The masks have recently been on display at Mess Hall as part of the What We Know of Our Past/What We Demand of Our Future lecture series, accompanied by a presentation on the float project. Outside of Chicago, they are currently being used as an educational tool for queer youth at the LGBT Resource Center in New York, and we are also in the working with Justseeds (Portland) on the possibility of distributing a silkcreened edition of the masks.

by Town Hall Talks