Center for Afrofuturist Studies artist-in-residence Justin Allen reads at Public Space One. Image Courtesy of Public Space One and Rachel Kauff.
Center for Afrofuturist Studies artist-in-residence Justin Allen reads at Public Space One. Image Courtesy of Public Space One and Rachel Kauff.
by Rachel Kauff
APRIL 9TH, 2018
REGION > IOWA CITY, IOWA
In her 2000 Portland Arts & Lecture Series address in 2000, the late novelist Ursula K. LeGuin remarked, “it is really unwise to encourage New York and those places in their illusions of centrality and delusions of grandeur… Now with the net and all that, geography means less than ever. Therefore, locality, being placed, and the local community, may be even more important.” Three years after relocating to Iowa City from New York State, I realized my allegiance had flipped when I mentioned PS1 to a friend on the phone, forgetting that to everyone else, the shorthand denotes the hip MOMA satellite. “No, Public Space One, not PS1 MOMA,” I corrected.
It is tempting to try to defend the small, Midwesterness of Iowa City by promoting what it has that New York doesn’t.The fact is, when I am walking into town to see the latest project at PS1, the only place in Iowa City where one can exhibit art, rent time on a letterpress, hold break dancing practice, watch the live screening of the Creative Time Summit, or just about anything else one can imagine, it possesses its own kind of centrality. With a gallery, press co-op, performance space, zine library, artist residency, and community kitchen, Public Space One is a fully equipped, if scrappy laboratory where people are invited to experiment with the question, “how can we describe our ideal community in the fullest breadth”? And, “what does the future look like?” Inquiries of which LeGuin would surely approve.
A college town, Iowa City is a transient community, with people arriving and leaving with the cycle of the academic calendar. A year after graduating with my MFA from the University of Iowa, I continue to feel as if I’ve overstayed my visa, but my attachment to Public Space One has only grown, my feelings toward this microbiome in a constant flux of exuberance for its radical inclusion of activities, and at times, exasperation when its public orientation seems to result in a dilution of focus. While in school, I enjoyed the wealth of resources and exhibition opportunities that came with being a student, a kind of exclusive access that I now see as contributing to the unwieldy nature of PS1’s purview. With the art museum largely out of commission as a result of the 2008 flood, and the art department’s insular public disposition, Public Space One is not only an alternative space, but in Iowa City, it is the alternative space for cultural production.
When I am frustrated by the absence of critical response to activity in our arts community, I remind myself of what it would mean to take on the role of critic. A pure critical view requires some distance from the subject, a luxury only afforded to those in a large enough place to take that step backwards, assured that their relationship to the subject is not hopelessly entangled in relationships that would constitute a conflict of interest. And besides, to invite a fully articulated art-world hierarchy into this space is to miss the point. When the collective effort to hold space for many voices is defined by entanglement, the critic must take counsel from the Tao: You must love the people enough to let yourself be corrupted by them. In other words, relevant insight draws power not from critical rectitude, but love of people.
Public Space One’s ability to support such a range of activity does not come out of a wealth of monetary resources or a flashy facility. In fact, as with many other kinds of vital community activities, events take place in a space akin to a church basement, a sublevel that once housed a soup kitchen, with a 1980s-infused palette of cafeteria linoleum distinguishing the floor. Each year, hundreds of artists donate work, including some who have since moved away, for an auction that raises a large portion of the year’s budget. PS1’s executive director, John Engelbrecht, cleverly dubbed this year’s annual fundraiser Dear Future, a strangely tender epithet for the national zeitgeist, as well as an earnest plea for sustaining creative life.
Mid-November 2016, as the election results rolled in, it became clear that the future, however it is defined, would be entirely contingent on our ability to imagine it as otherwise. At the University the gears of the institution continued to grind. We shed some tears in the hallways between teaching and attending classes, but essentially carried on as usual. But at PS1, events were postponed for an emergency meeting to discuss the impact of the election on the community.
by Rachel Kauff
APRIL 9TH, 2018
REGION > IOWA CITY, IOWA
In her 2000 Portland Arts & Lecture Series address in 2000, the late novelist Ursula K. LeGuin remarked, “it is really unwise to encourage New York and those places in their illusions of centrality and delusions of grandeur… Now with the net and all that, geography means less than ever. Therefore, locality, being placed, and the local community, may be even more important.” Three years after relocating to Iowa City from New York State, I realized my allegiance had flipped when I mentioned PS1 to a friend on the phone, forgetting that to everyone else, the shorthand denotes the hip MOMA satellite. “No, Public Space One, not PS1 MOMA,” I corrected.
It is tempting to try to defend the small, Midwesterness of Iowa City by promoting what it has that New York doesn’t.The fact is, when I am walking into town to see the latest project at PS1, the only place in Iowa City where one can exhibit art, rent time on a letterpress, hold break dancing practice, watch the live screening of the Creative Time Summit, or just about anything else one can imagine, it possesses its own kind of centrality. With a gallery, press co-op, performance space, zine library, artist residency, and community kitchen, Public Space One is a fully equipped, if scrappy laboratory where people are invited to experiment with the question, “how can we describe our ideal community in the fullest breadth”? And, “what does the future look like?” Inquiries of which LeGuin would surely approve.
A college town, Iowa City is a transient community, with people arriving and leaving with the cycle of the academic calendar. A year after graduating with my MFA from the University of Iowa, I continue to feel as if I’ve overstayed my visa, but my attachment to Public Space One has only grown, my feelings toward this microbiome in a constant flux of exuberance for its radical inclusion of activities, and at times, exasperation when its public orientation seems to result in a dilution of focus. While in school, I enjoyed the wealth of resources and exhibition opportunities that came with being a student, a kind of exclusive access that I now see as contributing to the unwieldy nature of PS1’s purview. With the art museum largely out of commission as a result of the 2008 flood, and the art department’s insular public disposition, Public Space One is not only an alternative space, but in Iowa City, it is the alternative space for cultural production.
When I am frustrated by the absence of critical response to activity in our arts community, I remind myself of what it would mean to take on the role of critic. A pure critical view requires some distance from the subject, a luxury only afforded to those in a large enough place to take that step backwards, assured that their relationship to the subject is not hopelessly entangled in relationships that would constitute a conflict of interest. And besides, to invite a fully articulated art-world hierarchy into this space is to miss the point. When the collective effort to hold space for many voices is defined by entanglement, the critic must take counsel from the Tao: You must love the people enough to let yourself be corrupted by them. In other words, relevant insight draws power not from critical rectitude, but love of people.
Public Space One’s ability to support such a range of activity does not come out of a wealth of monetary resources or a flashy facility. In fact, as with many other kinds of vital community activities, events take place in a space akin to a church basement, a sublevel that once housed a soup kitchen, with a 1980s-infused palette of cafeteria linoleum distinguishing the floor. Each year, hundreds of artists donate work, including some who have since moved away, for an auction that raises a large portion of the year’s budget. PS1’s executive director, John Engelbrecht, cleverly dubbed this year’s annual fundraiser Dear Future, a strangely tender epithet for the national zeitgeist, as well as an earnest plea for sustaining creative life.
Mid-November 2016, as the election results rolled in, it became clear that the future, however it is defined, would be entirely contingent on our ability to imagine it as otherwise. At the University the gears of the institution continued to grind. We shed some tears in the hallways between teaching and attending classes, but essentially carried on as usual. But at PS1, events were postponed for an emergency meeting to discuss the impact of the election on the community.
Near Future emergency art action pop up space on Market Street, Iowa City. Image Courtesy of Public Space One and Rachel Kauff.
Out of this initial concern for space, voice, and action developed Near Future, an emergency art and action space curated by Engelbrecht, board member Hannah Givler, and program director Kalmia Strong. On the day of the Inauguration and the weeks following, Near Future was a visible storefront presence of collective resistance, which was heartening, despite the feeling of meagerness in any gesture of resistance in the face of such political enormity. Here was a place for artists and others to gather, share words of encouragement, propose activities, and organize dissent.
In a 300-square foot space, artworks accumulated on the walls, a printed resource library of zines and books on loan assembled, protest posters were printed, a benefit auction was held for Planned Parenthood, punk shows channeled rage and donations, people wrote poison pen valentines for politicians, and a symposium held on capital and cultural production included not one but two full community meals. Givler’s Near News, an invented artist-run news agency, covered the flurry of activity with charming awkwardness, the reporters on screen nearly consumed by the intensity of the green screen behind them.
Hannah Givler films the Near News with a special report by Sayuri Sasaki Hemann. Image Courtesy of Public Space One and Rachel Kauff.
If the broader activities of PS1 hold the space for futurity, the Center for Afro-futurist Studies (CAS) is engineering it, foraging ahead to concretize the wildly vibrant and powerful future of the imagination held by CAS artists. A project hosted by PS1 and founded by the poet Anaïs Duplan, for the last two years CAS has brought artists working around race, technology, and the diaspora to Iowa City for short-term residencies that include workshops, lectures, public forums, and exhibitions. A standout from the last year was a reading by artist-in-residence Justin Allen, whose lecture included an introduction to the culture of Hatnaha. The country is entirely of Allen’s invention, an African nation that, not unlike Wakanda of The Black Panther, was never colonized. With a complete vocabulary and grammatical structure, Allen impressed audiences in a demonstration of his spoken fluency in Hatnahan.
Inclination toward the speculative in recent times could be described in correlation to the acceleration in global pressures of calamity. Once dismissed as a vehicle of escapism, artists are returning to speculative realism, science fiction, and Utopian narratives as tools for countering oppressive systems with their own alternatives. At PS1, these activities have bent toward questions of how to balance the radical inclusivity of its mission with focused attention on projects that move larger dialogues forward. How is inclusivity balanced with curatorial leadership? Making space for the speculative requires wading through practical constraints, conflicting ideas, and the reality of the present.
Despite some recent small gestures towards increasing arts funding on the national level, (Congress approved a $2 million increase for the National Endowment for the Arts last March), small arts communities have been affected by the fallout of the 2016 election. These impacts, such as the Iowa GOP’s gutting state’s entire cultural trust in 2017, have a large impact on the vibrancy and quality of life for places “between the coasts.” Although funding is a real issue, Public Space One continues to demonstrate that in a community arts culture, creating new ways into the future is possible not just despite the lack of attention and capital, but in part because it operates largely outside the influence of big capital and institutions. This alternative kind of centrality, one free of “delusions of grandeur” is defined by vision of all of its members; a bottom-up approach that in this land of former prairie, might be rightly described as grassroots. It is for this reason that, even as I consider moving on from Iowa City, I hold PS1 in the dearest future of my heart, ever grateful for its model of community and its continued existence on the map, offering space for all who need it.
ABOUT PUBLIC SPACE ONE
Public Space One is an artist-run, nonprofit arts organization that aims to:
• provide an independent, innovative, diverse, and inclusive space for making and presenting art
• provide cultural educational opportunities, and
• advocate for the importance of art in everyday life for any and everyone.
120 N Dubuque Street
Iowa City, Iowa
52245
ABOUT RACHEL KAUFF
Rachel Kauff is a visual artist and writer working in sculpture and print media around ideas of American history, craft, and ecological emergency. She received her MFA in printmaking and sculpture from the University of Iowa, and is based in Iowa City, at least for the time being.
ABOUT PUBLIC SPACE ONE
Public Space One is an artist-run, nonprofit arts organization that aims to:
• provide an independent, innovative, diverse, and inclusive space for making and presenting art
• provide cultural educational opportunities, and
• advocate for the importance of art in everyday life for any and everyone.
120 N Dubuque Street
Iowa City, Iowa
52245
ABOUT RACHEL KAUFF
Rachel Kauff is a visual artist and writer working in sculpture and print media around ideas of American history, craft, and ecological emergency. She received her MFA in printmaking and sculpture from the University of Iowa, and is based in Iowa City, at least for the time being.
REGION
A comprehensive feature on any state, area, or city that lacks mainstream coverage. Region considers the various factors that influence a particular art scene or art-making community, and how it sustains itself. Region also includes profiles of individuals influencing the area (be they curators, writers, artists, professors, etc.), and is always written by people familiar with the topography of the region’s art community. It can include interviews, op-eds, or dialogue in man other forms. Region aims to demystify specific art scenes for interested artists, educators, dealers, curators, advocates, and everything in-between.