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"My enthusiasm for collaborative experimentation is at the heart of everything Machine Project does. The word experimental is used in lots of ways in relationship to art. Usually it signals a specific aesthetic, maybe a new or innovative style. It’s shorthand for non-mainstream work. In scientific practice, an experiment tests a principle or supposition, or tries to discover something unknown. By its very design, an experiment involves risk and uncertainty.
An arts organization, then, can act as a research lab. Although genuinely new ideas in culture are often poorly received, every event has the potential to offer insight into an artist’s work or about the world at large. Consider the art you make as the trace or record of your thinking rather than something that you have to produce. One project will lead to other projects, and an unexpected lesson inevitably emerges. It’s a way of embedding practice in the continuum rather than extracting one moment to stand as the apex. Then you can keep being an artist for a very long time. Otherwise you make yourself into a factory, and then you might as well get a job.
It’s also true, though, that sometimes things just go really, really wrong, and you can’t think your way out of feeling like a big fat failure. In this case, I’ve found it helpful to practice selective amnesia in the aftermath.
Game face is super important for organizing anything. You must not look like you are unhappy about anything while it’s happening, especially don’t complain, because that demoralizes everybody. You have to understand that your subjective experience of something may be different than someone else’s anyway. People experience things in other ways.
Gentle transparency about your opinions can be really good in the lead up to a project. If an artist I’m working with is going in a direction I’m not sure about, I will say something. “Look, if I was doing this I might not do it this way. If you are spraying the audience with pig blood and you don’t tell them, they might not like it. Maybe they wore nice clothes because they were excited for you that it was your opening.” But, in the end, they’re the artist and I’m supporting them. In the end, any aesthetic decision is going to be up to the artist once the discussing is over.
My attitude is you have to be generous to the audience. That doesn’t mean that everything has to be fun and entertaining or not boring. Something can be generous to the audience and also be very challenging. It can be emotionally challenging. It can be politically challenging. It can be boring. It can be difficult. I’m down with all of that, but it has to be with the attitude that work is made in the spirit of supporting the audience’s best and highest experience of something. If an artist I work with has a generous attitude to an audience, I’ll support them in the production of a terrible piece, if that’s what they want to do."
excerpt from Machine Project THE PLATINUM COLLECTION
By MARK ALLEN, CHARLOTTE COTTON and RACHEL SELIGMAN
"My enthusiasm for collaborative experimentation is at the heart of everything Machine Project does. The word experimental is used in lots of ways in relationship to art. Usually it signals a specific aesthetic, maybe a new or innovative style. It’s shorthand for non-mainstream work. In scientific practice, an experiment tests a principle or supposition, or tries to discover something unknown. By its very design, an experiment involves risk and uncertainty.
An arts organization, then, can act as a research lab. Although genuinely new ideas in culture are often poorly received, every event has the potential to offer insight into an artist’s work or about the world at large. Consider the art you make as the trace or record of your thinking rather than something that you have to produce. One project will lead to other projects, and an unexpected lesson inevitably emerges. It’s a way of embedding practice in the continuum rather than extracting one moment to stand as the apex. Then you can keep being an artist for a very long time. Otherwise you make yourself into a factory, and then you might as well get a job.
It’s also true, though, that sometimes things just go really, really wrong, and you can’t think your way out of feeling like a big fat failure. In this case, I’ve found it helpful to practice selective amnesia in the aftermath.
Game face is super important for organizing anything. You must not look like you are unhappy about anything while it’s happening, especially don’t complain, because that demoralizes everybody. You have to understand that your subjective experience of something may be different than someone else’s anyway. People experience things in other ways.
Gentle transparency about your opinions can be really good in the lead up to a project. If an artist I’m working with is going in a direction I’m not sure about, I will say something. “Look, if I was doing this I might not do it this way. If you are spraying the audience with pig blood and you don’t tell them, they might not like it. Maybe they wore nice clothes because they were excited for you that it was your opening.” But, in the end, they’re the artist and I’m supporting them. In the end, any aesthetic decision is going to be up to the artist once the discussing is over.
My attitude is you have to be generous to the audience. That doesn’t mean that everything has to be fun and entertaining or not boring. Something can be generous to the audience and also be very challenging. It can be emotionally challenging. It can be politically challenging. It can be boring. It can be difficult. I’m down with all of that, but it has to be with the attitude that work is made in the spirit of supporting the audience’s best and highest experience of something. If an artist I work with has a generous attitude to an audience, I’ll support them in the production of a terrible piece, if that’s what they want to do."
excerpt from Machine Project THE PLATINUM COLLECTION
By MARK ALLEN, CHARLOTTE COTTON and RACHEL SELIGMAN
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