Art for Artists
A conversation with David Petersen and John Marks of Art Of This
“When I got out of graduate school, I didn’t want to talk to collectors and gallerists; I wanted to work with artists,” says David Petersen, the Artistic Director of Art Of This (AOT). It comes as no surprise, then, that AOT was conceived as a space run by artists for artists. “Our audience consists of 99% artists,” says Petersen—and to him and John Marks, the Executive Director, that is a good thing. At AOT, artists do not show their work to catch the eye of a collector but to engage others who are equally passionate about making art.
“I don’t know if you’re familiar with the Hardland/Heartland collective,” says Petersen (I am not), “but they had an MAEP show in the fall of 2008 and it was good. But then, in February 2009, they did a show at Art Of This and it was like a rocket had gone off, conceptually and emotionally—I mean, they lived there, created a full environment and really engaged with the audience.” Those are the kinds of shows that stand out, as Marks and Petersen reflect on the history of AOT.
It is an ambivalent moment to look back on the five years this artist-run space has been around. Originally located on Bloomington and 32nd Street, AOT moved to its current storefront location on Nicollet Avenue in South Minneapolis in 2007. At the end of August 2010, after Open Summer, an intense residency program, AOT will move out for good. Both Marks and Petersen emphasize that AOT—“the brand, for lack of a better word,” says Petersen—will remain a permanent presence in the Twin Cities’ arts community. They plan to expand their web presence, exhibit in temporary spaces or work with existing galleries, utilize street-level studios of artists committed to AOT, or show in defunct commercial spaces. “Do you remember the show at Shinders?” Petersen asks. I do, I tell him.
Marks and Petersen see AOT in the future as functioning as a kind of umbrella organization, running a fiscal sponsorship program as a non-profit, while organizing focused events and shows that continue their interdisciplinary scope of offerings. “In the first year,” Marks remembers, “we did a lot of photography, painting, sculpture, and installation.” In the second year, AOT moved from the relative anonymity of the artists’ studios into the street-level space on Nicollet, responding to the perceived need in the community for a space open to showing interdisciplinary and multi-media work.
“The art community was so compartmentalized then,” says Marks, “and we wanted to create this all-inclusive space that would just crash through all of these walls and boundaries and truly offer a broad spectrum of art.” Petersen adds, “We wanted to push boundaries, but we also wanted rigorous work—and not just lip service to rigor.”
Whether a one-nighter or a month-long show, the artist audience ensures that kind of rigor: Highly critical, attentive, and eager to engage. Showing art that is predictable may be well-received elsewhere, but what AOT prizes most is the unpredictable: How artists expand their practice, step out of their respective comfort zones, and push into new creative territory.
Petersen and Marks showed their own work at AOT, most recently in a show entitled Opposing Thumbs, on view in February 2010. Negotiating how “to work together but not necessarily cooperate” could serve as a metaphor for running the space, suggests Marks, who, unlike Petersen, is self-taught and comes with a background that includes punk music and audio engineering. “I had this sculptural element and John needed speakers for his sound installation… we ended up burying the speakers under the floor boards and alternating the four-minute audio loop with four minutes of silence, so you’d have a chance to see my video without connecting my visuals to his sound,” Petersen remembers. Their exchange leaves no doubt about their intense commitment to their practice and to fostering an environment where, as they describe it, “new things can happen.”
New things are currently happening at Art Of This: Open Summer, a loose residency program, has been bringing artists to AOT for events as diverse as spiritual discussions and yoga by Grace MN, Julia Kouneski’s participatory sound mapping project, and a mock graduate seminar organized by Emily Atchison (i.e., the seminar, “Topics in Contemporary Art and Design,” freely borrows from a syllabus designed for a Liberal Arts seminar in the Minneapolis College of Art and Design’s Master’s in Fine Arts program). Petersen and Marks’s goal is to make the space as active as possible and invite artists to use the gallery space—as well as the blog of AOT—as an extension of their practice. “Here’s the key to the space, here’s how you log into the blog,” is how Petersen and Marks describe their hands-off approach.
“For the time you participate in the residence, you are of Art Of This,” Marks sums up their approach.
Despite their laconic farewell to the impending move—“we’ve put in our time,” says Petersen; “we’ve made our contribution,” echoes Marks—when they talk about the Open Summer, the energy, intensity, and sheer force of will that has kept them going for five years is hard to miss. We wish them the best for their future efforts and hope they will continue—in whatever way, shape, and form—to push artists towards those edges where new things do indeed happen.
Images:
Opposing Thumbs. Work by John Marks and David Petersen at Art of This.
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