The Brooklyn Rail

The contemporary artist is often assumed to be a nomad who “travels widely with a backpack carrying meanings and messages,” writes Irmeli Kokko, one of the authors of Bringing Worlds Together: A Rethinking Residencies Reader. Featuring eleven essays and three transcripts (two of which originated at a Rethinking Residencies Symposium), the book examines residencies as networked entities uniquely positioned to address the evolving needs of artists and communities. As the first anthology on artist residencies to be published in the US, Bringing Worlds Together joins the fray of ongoing conversations interrogating institutions like museums and art schools. Its tone, however, is optimistic: as the book’s editors—Kari Conte, founder of the Rethinking Residencies working group, and Susan Hapgood, director of the International Studio & Curatorial Program—assert in their jointly penned introduction, “The more arts residencies there are in the world, the better, as far as we are concerned.”

One of the most intriguing contributions is the essay “A Brief History of Artist Residencies,” by Kokko, former director of the Helsinki International Artist Programme. Kokko argues that the contemporary artist residency has its roots in the Industrial Revolution, which pushed European artists into rural areas of France, central Germany, and the Netherlands, as well as in the 1880s, when US artists flocked to Taos and Santa Fe, having “discovered the nature and landscapes of New Mexico.” She suggests that these rural artist colonies are the reason why contemporary artist residencies are linked to notions of exile, emancipation, and ecology and are often expected to offer “new sensory experiences of nature.”

Today, equally or more important than sensory experiences of nature are eco-remediation efforts, which are central to residencies like the Finnish Mustarinda House, according to chairperson Robin Everett, in a transcript titled “New Models for Communing: Residency Programming and Strategies.” Mustarinda House, nestled within a two-thousand-year-old forest, actively encourages residents to integrate renewable energies, such as wind power, geothermal heating, and bioethanol, into their practices. While this awareness and responsibility is vital in the face of mounting anthropogenic climate change—and although Rethinking Residencies identifies “ecological responsibility” as the “most pressing” issue for artist residencies today—the conversation, this transcript shows, is still inchoate.

Panelists acknowledge, for instance, that the act of gathering artists from different continents together necessarily conflicts with the imperative to reduce the carbon footprint of travel. But they admit, in the words of Sally Mizrachi, director of Lugar a Dudas in Colombia, “I don’t have advice.” One concrete course of action is described: for those going to Finland, Mustarinda House subsidizes non-air travel with “slow travel grants.” However, I would argue, protracted travel schedules necessarily privilege artists who have time to spare from work and caregiving responsibilities, making slow travel grants an imperfect and temporary solution.

Like a conference program, Bringing Worlds Together is lightweight, unfussy, and well-disposed to annotation. Many of its essays invite further speculation. This is the case with Nova Benway’s thought-provoking piece, “The Political Struggle that Genuine Care Requires.” Here, Benway, director of Triangle Arts Association, looks at residencies through the lens of medical ethics, a field that is itself undergoing reevaluation and revision. The traditional credo of “Do no harm,” for instance, is expanding to account for systemic problems, such as healthcare access, housing costs, and food insecurity, which may be harming patients before they even enter a doctor’s office. “The analogy suggests that residencies practicing radical generosity and care for artists without positioning this care within a real-world context undermines the mission they hope to fulfill,” Benway argues.

As one reads on, the scope and complexity of the structural problems outlined in the book start to feel daunting and unwieldy. One of the last chapters, however, obliquely addresses some of these persistent problems. It is a refreshing conversation between environmental artist Dylan Gauthier and the feminist and ecologically-minded conceptual artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, about her forty-some-year stint as the Artist-in-Residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation.

Beginning in the 1970s, Ukeles was given a “storage room,” as she recalls, to work from, in the department’s Lower Manhattan office building. In her quasi-official role, she was both a field researcher, meeting and talking to service workers across the city, and an unsalaried, ungovernable gadfly, knee-deep in the trenches of bureaucracy. From this simultaneously anomic and enmeshed position, Ukeles conceived of notable works like Flow City (1983–1995). Seeking to highlight some of New York’s urban ecology, she created a visitor center in a marine waste transfer facility on the Hudson River at West 59th Street, where members of the public could witness thousands of tons of waste being dumped onto barges each day. Works like Flow City show us, to this day, that ecological emergencies exist not just in faraway incinerators, and certainly not just in thousand-year-old forests, but in metropolitan centers. They’re lurking, in other words, in plain sight.

It is perhaps more operative, the interview implies, to think of artist residencies as strategic occupations rather than as travel destinations or even networks of care. It seems the blueprints for rethinking residencies are hiding in plain sight, and the way forward is etched in the past—in institutional memories and the work of artists who have long survived within and without these structures. Meanwhile, their stewards continue to deliberate, stumble, learn, and grow.