Originally published: May 3, 2011
By: Eva Saviano
NEW YORK – The MoMa, the Met, the basement of a neighborhood bar? The Museum of Arts and Design, or MAD, strikes a new pose with its newest idea for funding New York City artists. Committed to discovering and fostering new and underfunded art forms, MAD established the FUN Fellowship. The Fellowship is MAD’s effort to financially and logistically support artists whose medium is nightlife, and was created and given to the first round of recipients in March 2011. The staff of MAD hopes it will give NYC scenesters a new reason to party arty.
“The FUN Fellowship is a new program we have here at MAD where we are looking to support artists who work in the social practice of nightlife,” Jake Yuzna, FUN Fellowship curator and Director of Public Programs at MAD, said.
Social practice is an art form that skips traditional, physical mediums of paint or sculpture and communicates directly from artist to audience.
“Social practice is basically artists whose work is the actual bringing together of social constructs,” Yuzna said, “It could be community gardening, or town hall meetings, or they could do protest work. It is really about not necessarily making a physical thing, but making a situation, having an effect on a society at a social level.”
But, elevating clubbing to the level of high art is difficult for some to understand.
“We even got people responding after they got the press release with, ‘Is this a joke?’ But no, it isn’t. This is serious,” said Yuzna. “Yeah, nightlife is fun and debauched and crazy, but there is also a real art to it and real work and a real intelligence."
Earl Dax, a curator and producer and recipient of the FUN Fellowship, produces a live art event in New York City, the name of which is too racy to print here, but has been nicknamed by The New York Times as “The Party That Dare Not Speak It’s Name.”
“It’s been described as a mini-festival of queer performance…DJs, visual artists, burlesque, vaudeville performers,” Dax said of the show that once included a controversial gay skinhead from central New Jersey. “I try to deliberately program the evening so there are performers from a variety of different scenes and interests. With an eclectic list of performers you get this interesting crowd where people who
wouldn’t necessarily be in the same space at the same time are sharing the space and their art.”
Dax will take his party on a mini-tour along the East Coast, traveling to Pittsburgh, Boston and Philadelphia to party, collect local performance artists and bring them to New York City for a capstone party sometime in the fall. The fellowship helps pay for that travel.
“It is a modest award,” Dax said, “But very appreciated.”
New York City artists in residence who want to make their living doing their craft, but don’t want to starve, often seek alternative funding. In 2011, the New York Foundation for the Arts, or NYFA, awarded 115 fellowships, each included a $7000 financial award for unrestricted use, according to the NYFA’s Website. In March 2011, the 3rd Ward, privately owned gallery and work space in Brooklyn, hosted an
open call for artists competing for a 3-month live/work residency, a $5,000 cash grant, access to resources and a solo exhibit.
But many awarding organizations are rigid about accepted art forms and requirements for award. The Artists’ Fellowship, a fund established in 1859 to assist artists and their families in times of need, will not accept applications for aid from performance artists, commercial artists, commercial photographers, filmmakers, crafts persons or hobbyists. So, where does nightlife fit in?
“MAD has a great history of supporting and fighting for unrecognized artistic practices,” Yuzna said, “It began as the Museum of Craft, back in the day when what we now know as craft art wasn’t really accepted in institutional arts communities. We wanted to push that and continue to find new art forms that are under-supported.”
But, Yuzna says, nightlife as a social practice has largely been ignored by institutions, in part because it is so hard to define.
“It is just fashion? No. It is just performance art? No. Is it just nightlife? No,” Yuzna said, “In the cultural dialogue, we are still catching up to finding new words to talk about it.”
The FUN fellows showcase the varied art forms that are the social practice of nightlife. An organization called JUDY produces queer-themed performances and will use the fellowship funds to work toward its own non-profit status, hoping to create an artist-run venue in New York City.
Artists Cameron Cooper and Zach Cole received the fellowship to pursue Gag! The Free Store. The project will be a pop-up store at the MAD during Fashion Week this September, said Yuzna. The event tent will have DJs, bands and walk-offs as well as a store of one-of-a-kind samples and rare tchotchkes which people can come in and take, as long as they leave an item of equal value. Cooper and Cole will log every
item that comes in or goes out.
Lauren Devine and Patrik Sandberg’s work titled Snack the Planet will recreate
the same-named cafe from cult-classic 90s film Hackers, where digital and physical interaction will blur.
Upcoming shows include a April 29, performance of The Party That Dare Not Speak Its Name as a part of the Queer Zagreb Festival in Croatia.