In What We Made, Tom Finkelpearl examines the activist, participatory, coauthored aesthetic experiences being created in contemporary art. He suggests social cooperation as a meaningful way to think about this work and provides a framework for understanding its emergence and acceptance. In a series of fifteen conversations, artists comment on their experiences working cooperatively, joined at times by colleagues from related fields, including social policy, architecture, art history, urban planning, and new media. Issues discussed include the experiences of working in public and of working with museums and libraries, opportunities for social change, the lines between education and art, spirituality, collaborative opportunities made available by new media, and the elusive criteria for evaluating cooperative art. Finkelpearl engages the art historians Grant Kester and Claire Bishop in conversation on the challenges of writing critically about this work and the aesthetic status of the dialogical encounter. He also interviews the often overlooked co-creators of cooperative art, "expert participants" who have worked with artists. In his conclusion, Finkelpearl argues that pragmatism offers a useful critical platform for understanding the experiential nature of social cooperation, and he brings pragmatism to bear in a discussion of Houston's Project Row Houses.
Interviewees. Naomi Beckwith, Claire Bishop, Tania Bruguera, Brett Cook, Teddy Cruz, Jay Dykeman, Wendy Ewald, Sondra Farganis, Harrell Fletcher, David Henry, Gregg Horowitz, Grant Kester, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Pedro Lasch, Rick Lowe, Daniel Martinez, Lee Mingwei, Jonah Peretti, Ernesto Pujol, Evan Roth, Ethan Seltzer, and Mark Stern
Industry Reviews
"What We Made is a dialogic thick description of cooperative art practices from the point of view of practitioners and many insightful interlocutors. It will be an extremely valuable resource for artists, art historians, and museum professionals." - Rebecca Zorach, author of The Passionate Triangle "In between histories, current art practices, and theories lies the conundrum: how to describe relational and public art and the many intentions of those involved. Tom Finkelpearl gives us perspectives from artists' on-the-ground experiences and a welcome revisiting of Dewey, contextualized by a sweeping introduction that alone is worth the price of the book." - Suzanne Lacy, author of Leaving Art: Writings on Performance, Politics, and Publics, 1974-2007 "In between histories, current art practices, and theories lies the conundrum: how to describe relational and public art and the many intentions of those involved? Tom Finkelpearl gives us perspectives from artists' on-the-ground experiences and a welcome revisiting of Dewey, contextualized by a sweeping introduction that alone is worth the price of the book." - Suzanne Lacy, author of Leaving Art: Writings on Performance, Politics, and Publics, 1974-2007 "This work attempts to unpack contemporary artistic practices along new aesthetic criteria: sociopolitical, transnational, spiritual, and, in particular with regard to the Internet, given its notions of networked collaboration and new definitions of authorship. These conversations by key practitioners and thinkers are a snapshot of thinking around the emergence of social and collaborative art, which seeks to improve society and address social issues... Finkelpearl ably situates collaborative and participatory art within the chronology of American art history. This book will be at home in university libraries and can function well as a course text in the field of public-art studies.".--Toro Castano, Library Journal, February 25th 2013 "The book is a really rich and nuanced entry into the conversation about artwork that brings artists and communities together, specifically within a visual arts framework. Aligning well with the political commitments of the projects [Finkelpearl]'s shepherded in Queens, the book does not have a single authorial voice. Instead, it's comprised of edited transcripts of interviews and conversations with over 20 artists, curators, academics, and otherwise [...] What What We Made does, perhaps better than anything I've read so far about this particular kind of art, is utterly refrain from arriving at singular summaries or judgments. Instead, the conversations foreground the nuanced and complex social relations tied up in any artwork, but particularly collaborative artwork that draws on communities operating largely outside of the arts marketplace. And the projects Finkelpearl has chosen to discuss and feature by and large demonstrate real possibilities for genuine exchange across networks and communities." - Hyperallergic
