All across America, it is as though we’ve been roused in the night by sirens, the sound of shattering glass, and the roar of flames; as though we’ve found ourselves wrapped in bathrobes, standing on our lawns as a housefire rages down the street. We approach people we’ve seen over fences and through car windows.

Our national narrative holds many more flattering examples of what defines us as a people. Over the past seven years, for example, we’ve billed ourselves as bearers of Democracy to the rest of the globe. Then, earlier this month, Congress passed a $700 billion bail out package against the undeniable will of their constituents. At moments like this, it’s hard even for the most optimistic Americans to stick to the script and ignore the fact that “the voice of the people” rarely gets the last word around here. Our relationships both to those who represent us and to the financial system the ultimately frames our lives have become so abstracted that recent events are a shock to many. But if we take the time to look back the evidence is clear; what we’ve come to call the American Way of Life is more closely tied to Wall Street than it is to Pennsylvania Avenue.

Matt Keegan / Photo by Meghan McInnis

Economics has always played a central role in shaping democratic values in America—where individual equality is predicated as much on material conditions as political freedom. Back in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to America as magistrate for the court of Versailles, to witness egalitarian democracy in action. Ostensibly, de Tocqueville was studying the prison system, but he ultimately produced a text that reached much further. Democracy in America has since become required reading for anyone interested in understanding how America understands itself.

De Tocqueville noted that in the burgeoning democracy of the Unites States, the rise of market capitalism had become the defining characteristic for American social values. Unlike European aristocracies, where a well-established class structure determined the limit on one’s wealth and social standing from birth, the American concept of equality was based on the ability of every person to better themselves through hard work and moneymaking. While Americans typically pride ourselves on this “pull yourself up by your boot straps” mentality, de Tocqueville rightfully warned
that equating money with equality would motivate “crass individualism” and the accumulation of wealth based on selfish desire. Furthermore, he cautioned that excessive pursuit of personal wealth would result in despotism, ensuring material prosperity at the expense of personal liberty.

Trevor Paglen / Meghan McInnis

De Tocqueville’s tome was one of the primary influences (and the namesake) for the most recent Creative Time project by curator Nato Thompson. Previous to Creative Time, Nato was the curator for Mass MOCA, where he organized socially relevant exhibitions such as The Interventionists; Art in the Social Sphere. Nato’s newest project, Democracy in America; The National Campaign has traveled the country over the past year in a multi-platform, multi-city extravaganza of  art and politics. Scheduled to coincide with this crucial election year, Creative Time’s national campaign involved commissions in Austin, TX; Denver, CO and Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN; as well as mobile projects around New York City.

A series of “town hall” style talks also brought together artists and activists in five different cities— Chicago, LA, New York, Baltimore and New Orleans— to discuss their work at the intersection of art, politics and social life. The town hall talks were co-organized by Daniel Tucker, editor of the biannual publication AREA Chicago. The edited transcripts of these discussions have been published in book form and are available on Creative Time’s website in their entirety. In September, the project culminated in the Convergence Center—a weeklong exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, where more than 40 artists undertook installations, speeches, and participatory projects.
Taken altogether, Creative Time’s yearlong endeavor is an unprecedented look at how contemporary cultural producers articulate a distinctively American democratic tradition through a mixture of art and politics.

InCUBATE was among the forty artists and groups invited to participate in the Convergence Center.

InCUBATE is a Chicago-based research institute composed of four art administrators. Abigail Satinsky, Ben Schaafsma, Roman Petruniak, and Bryce Dwyer united around a shared interest in developing new models for presenting and funding cultural production. For two years now, InCUBATE has undertaken a number of projects, such as operating a storefront that houses a residency program, organizing traveling exhibitions, selling homebrewed beer and kombucha, facilitating the exchange of mail art, and administering the Sunday Soup Granting Program. Robin Hewlett is an artist/organizer who has collaborated with InCUBATE on several past projects. For Democracy in America, we (InCUBATE and Robin Hewlett) joined forces to create a special installation of Sunday Soup at the Convergence Center.

Sunday Soup started over a year ago as a weekly meal, hosted at InCUBATE’s storefront space. Guest chefs cook simple soups using local ingredients. Soup is sold for $5 per bowl. At the end of each month, the soup income is given as a grant to support a creative project. Visitors who purchase soup also earn a spot on the grant selection committee. All of the grant proposals are emailed to Sunday Soup patrons, and a popular vote determines the grant recipient.

Sharon Hayes / Photo by Meghan McInnis

We also invited Sara Black and John Preus to collaborate on Sunday Soup at the Convergence Center. Sara and John are members of the collective Material Exchange, whose practice re-directs materials from the waste-streams of cultural institutions and puts them back into circulation by altering their practical and conceptual use value. Over the course of three days, our team designed and constructed a café space using cast-off materials found at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and the Park Avenue Armory, as well as materials scavenged from the streets of New York City. The completed café included a cashier counter, food preparation and service counters, dining tables and a small library. For one week, we ran a full-services soup café in this space, generating not only revenue for our granting fund, but a myriad of conversations and relationships.

The Sunday Soup Café was a microcosm within the larger framework of the Convergence Center, but both projects follow an “exhibition as forum” model that can be traced back to Democracy: a project by Group Material—another of curator Nato Thompson’s major inspirations. Working in the 1980’s, Group Material was instrumental in introducing non-art concerns into the dialogue of institutionalized art spaces through their expanded exhibition formats. In particular, their Democracy project in 1989 brought together artists and activists working to address what they identified as four significant issues in the crisis of democracy: education, electoral politics, cultural participation, and AIDS Through town hall meetings, roundtables, a rotating exhibition, and a publication, the project enacted an alternative public sphere, both physical and theoretical, to debate the merits and limitations of democracy as a practice. Group Material believed the institutional setting (the project was hosted by the Dia Art Foundation) lent visibility and legitimacy to their evolving and dialogical cultural activism. This pivotal experiment remains influential for many contemporary exhibitions that hope to create meeting grounds for discourse on art and politics. It strikes us as particularly relevant presently—with the attention of the public peaked by the financial crisis and so many Americans ready to interrogate the logic of our governing systems.

Needless to say, the social and political backdrop surrounding Creative Time’s Democracy in America in 2008 is drastically different than the circumstances Group Material’s Democracy responded to in 1989. In their introduction to the project, Group Material wrote, “We see ourselves as the outspoken relative at the annual reunion who can be counted on to bring up the one subject no one wants to talk about.” Here they are referring to politics and the essential role that it plays as a mediator of culture. Thanks in large part to the content and process-based practices of collectives like Group Material, the realm of politics has been blown wide open for artists working in 2008. At InCUBATE, however, we still identify strongly with this comment. While political issues are fair game, and in fact fashionable, we find that money is still left off the list of subjects suitable for polite dinner conversation.

This is where Sunday Soup differs from many of the relational, food-based projects to which it is often compared—we are not merely trying to be convivial. We’ve created a model that is explicitly functional as a way of generating independent funding for cultural producers, and implicitly critical as a way of generating conversation about the availability and distribution of resources within the mainstream arts establishment. Competition for funding both private and public is fierce, and this reality forces artists and organizations to base their programming on available funding streams. In an environment where governmental support for experimental art practice is minimal at best, and private support is dictated by the values and priorities of granting foundations, innovative and potentially controversial work is compromised in order to fit within categories deemed “fundable” (for example; educational arts programming, narrowly define “community-based” programming, art/science collaborations, etc.). Furthermore, many granting foundations require 501c3 status in order to disperse funds, or fail to offer individual artist grants all together—favoring organizations tied into the Non-Profit Industrial Complex.

Allison Smith / Photo by Meghan McInnis

In contrast, Sunday Soup is a model of arts funding that is transparent and participatory. Community participation in the grant funding and selection process is key. Applying for a grant is intentionally simple and un-bureaucratic in order to encourage broad participation. This enables InCUBATE to stimulate and support experimental, critical and imaginative practices that may not be eligible for formal funding. The questions InCUBATE is asking through the framework of the Sunday Soup Grant Program are meant to be pointed and challenging, but we are also concerned that this inquiry extend beyond the rhetorical basis for our program model. We want conversations about money and its fraught relationship to the politics of art to be shared and expanded over soup. We want to actively examine the ways in which we are implicated and accountable within the economies
of culture.

This is the point at which we have to be honestly reflective and self-critical. Did Sunday Soup at the Convergence Center go far enough toward framing a conversation around money and opening up this line of inquiry? Did we provide enough entry points and springboards for discussion? Have we been transparent enough about our own precarious monetary situation? How do we negotiate our relationship to institutions and foundations while presenting a project like Sunday Soup in the context of a Creative Time exhibition? And what about our relationship to political and economic realms far larger and more complex even than the art world?

Economies unfold on different scales. One of the most pressing tasks for anyone interested in civic participation and working towards social change is figuring out where to position the self, and on what scale? Like much of the work we’re most passionate about, Sunday Soup is rooted in the local— built over the course of the past year in Chicago. However, being in New York City just a few miles from Wall Street while all financial hell was breaking loose set our participation in the global economy into sharp relief. Given this heightened awareness of the simultaneous link and disconnect between different scales, it was disconcerting to realize just how cozy the confines of our Soup Café could become.

Rachel Mason / Magdalena Jitrik / Photos by Meghan McInnis

Despite our greatest intentions to talk pointedly about economics, it was incredibly hard to maintain a sense of connection to the chaos unfolding on Wall Street. Like Americans across the country, we find that the practical imperatives of getting through the day threaten to eclipse our grasp of the bigger picture. At the Armory we had soup to make; black bean, lentil, potato and leek, split pea, ginger carrot, tomato basil, three sisters stew, watermelon gazpacho, curried squash and minestrone—just to name a few. And there was an ever-growing to-do list to keep the café running: buy more onions, refill the water pitcher, update the chalkboard menu, coordinate with tomorrow’s guest chef. The list went on…

Critical Art Ensemble and Institute

America may have woken up to a fire-in-the-night on Wall Street, but we have to go back into the house at some point, get dressed and get ready for work. With the larger economy in turmoil outside the door, we found ourselves hunkering down in the Amory in order to keep our miniature economy functional, and contemplating economies of scale. These questions followed us home from the Convergence Center: “How do we bridge scales? How do we operate locally, within our own network and simultaneously puncture its borders?”

For now, we have no clear answers but continue to  create a forum for this kind of discussion. Upon returning to Chicago, we opened our doors to 28 people on Sunday October 5th, for the second installment of InCUBATE’s new Sunday Soup Brunch. We’ve revamped Sunday Soup, which is now open to the public with an expanded menu and takes place once a month—on the first Sunday from 12-2 pm—at our storefront. Through these family-style meals we continue to expand the network of friends and collaborators involved in our process of questioning, discussing, experimenting and generating new questions.

In Democracy in America, de Tocqueville suggested that the safeguard against excessive individualism is association—the coming together of people for a common purpose, which allows them to exercise their freedom by taking a part in politics. Sunday Soup, while specifically raising money, also serves as a way to build a network of support that reaches beyond purely monetary assistance. Guest chefs prepare soup, present their work and engage visitors in conversation. In this way, Sunday Soup becomes an open platform to discuss ongoing projects with new audiences, meet new collaborators, and share ways of working.

As de Tocqueville wrote in closing his analysis of American democracy, “The nations of our day cannot prevent conditions of equality from spreading in their midst. But it depends upon themselves whether equality is to lead to servitude or freedom, knowledge or barbarism, prosperity or wretchedness.” Our national narrative touts equality of opportunity based on hard work and achievement, but consistently fails to hold true, and the income gap widens.  Even while the richest 1% of the United States population controls roughly 40% of our country’s wealth, many prefer to hold onto the myth rather than break the taboo and talk about the underlying mechanics of our economy. As the bottom falls out on Wall Street, it becomes increasingly evident that our collective silence is leading toward servitude, barbarism and wretchedness – at least, as far as de Tocqueville’s breakdown is concerned.

Perhaps we should have seen this crisis coming from miles away. But having come this far, we hope it’s not too late to reconsider and redirect. An earnest start might be reaching over the fence, rolling down the car window; realizing that it’s time to get to know our neighbors. While there is a danger in becoming myopic, in the most optimistic sense we imagine Sunday Soup as a much-needed and necessarily local gathering space to begin talking about the kinds of alternative economies we want to create, both on the macro- and micro-scale.

Please join us for Sunday Soup Brunch on the first Sunday of every month at 2129 N. Rockwell Street, where  this conversation is to be continued …

Organizers:
InCUBATE: www.incubate-chicago.org
Robin Hewlett: www.robinhewlett.com
Material Exchange: www.material-exchange.org

Sunday Soup chefs at Democracy in America:
Gina Badger: www.ginabadger.com
Forays (Geraldine Juarez and Adam Bobbette): www.forays.org
Carolyn Lambert & The Ohio River Lifeboat Project:
www.ohioriverlifeboatproject.org
Andi Sutton & the National Bitter Melon Council: www.bittermelon.org
Paige Saez & Anselm Hook: www.paigesaez.org
Carissa Carman & Nat Bletter: www.carissacarman.net
Anne Elizabeth Moore: www.anneelizabethmoore.com
Sal Randolph: www.salrandolph.com
Food Not Bombs NYC: www.abcnorio.org/affiliated/fnb.html
Siobhan Rigg: www.sarigg.net
Fereshteh Toosi with Matthew Michel & ‘78 Records: Erie Canal to Love
Canal 1978-2008: www.fereshteh.net

by Robin Hewlett and Abigail Satinsky