YESTERDAY, we discussed one way for contemporary visual artists to survive in a boomtown era of rising rents and stagnant incomes--work for advertisers.
But not everybody's suited for painting corporate-friendly images onto five-foot-tall fiberglass coffee mugs. And a few commercial commissions don't by themselves solve the problem of alterna-art's place in urban society.
Ex-Stranger theater critic Matt Richter claims to have a potential answer: Consolidate.
Consolidated Works, the new exhibition/performance space Richter and Meg Shiffler just opened in Seattle, is, on one level, an attempt to make alterna-art into a series of Big Events (big enough to get big newspaper coverage and attract big donations). It ain't no little hole-in-the-wall gallery space; it's a 30,000-square-foot ex-warehouse, arranged like a movie multiplex into three big rooms (film and live-stage theaters surrounding a visual-art exhibition area).
Not only will the three areas feed audiences to one another, but their programming will be coordinated under overarching themes (the first, showing thru the end of November, is "Artificial Life").
While the existing Center on Contemporary Art also arranges one or two "theme" shows per exhibition season, it mainly mounts or imports single-artist (or single-group-of-artists) installations. Good for aesthetic unity, but not as good for marketing as CW's big-event concepts. COCA regularly schedules music and discussion events as adjuncts to its visual-art presentations, but CW's more ambitious scheme is to give equal emphasis to visuals, performance, and film/video.
One thing CW is doing that COCA originally did is to start out by building the organization (and the fundraising) before settling into a permanent space. CW's current ex-warehouse building is rented cheaply from Paul Allen, who will raze the building early next year (shortly before he razes the Kingdome). CW plans to keep mounting huge shows in temporary quarters at soon-to-be condo or office sites, while soliciting business-community support for a building it would eventually own.
By being big enough from Day One to compete with other bigtime organizations for software-millionaires' dough, CW hopes to stem the recent arts-funding trends that have seen hundreds of millions going to fancy new buildings for the big prestigious institutions (next in line for a new palace: the Seattle Opera), while second-tier outfits like COCA stagnate and DIY-level outfits (fringe theaters, alterna-galleries, studio spaces) are threatened by the lack of affordable spaces.
But you can easily see the limitations built into the concept.
For one thing, works that don't easily fit into one of CW's scheduled big-theme concepts, that's too idiosyncratic or too astray from what other artists are currently up to, might not get in there. And any big institution runs the risk of over-institutionalization, letting artistic decisions become subsurvient to bureaucratic or fundraising considerations. And it doesn't solve the space problems faced by established-but-smaller organizations.
But for now, let's welcome the Consolidated Works concept. If it works, it just might be copyable elsewhere, igniting new levels of public interest in alternate visions.
IN OTHER NEWS: So much for Seattle's supposed "civility"....
TOMORROW: The music everybody but me likes.
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