Le'Andra LeSeur for ArtPrize 2018. Image: ArtPrize. 

by Tessa Paneth-Pollak

RESPONSE > GRAND RAPIDS MICHIGAN

ArtPrize is a bit like the TJ Maxx of the art world: it’s hit or miss, and you have to work to sift the good from the bad. To its credit, the 10th annual ArtPrize event dispatches art all over the city of Grand Rapids: venues can be as small as the inside of a PO Box, as in the clever set of miniature installations by the artists of the Intergalactic Arts Federation, or as large as the Grand Rapids Art Museum. To its detriment, as any urban or commercial space, from the wall of a restaurant to the more established venues like SiTE: Lab, can become an ArtPrize venue for a mere fee of $50, the loss of focus around the event’s edges dilutes its significance.

Toggling between the ArtPrize app and Google Maps on my phone, I attempt to strategize before we set out. It quickly becomes my mission to plot a path for us through the city that avoids, based on the small thumbnail images provided, installations involving American flags, bald eagles, or Jesus. I realize the brewery we’re eating lunch in is an ArtPrize venue. The anodyne close-ups of lakewater hanging over each booth, it turns out, are an ArtPrize entry. There is a large metal dragon at the entrance of the brewery. Is this an ArtPrize work too, we wonder, or the mascot of the brewery? As we exit, we consult the app about this matter.

Lora Roberston's installation "By Her Own Hand" at Fountain Street Church for ArtPrize, 2018. Image: ArtPrize.

There is no way to see the entire thing in one day, but a day is what we have allotted, and we are traveling with a toddler. So we unfortunately miss what are supposed to have been some of the most compelling entries: Detroit artist Tyree Guyton’s Heidelbergology; 2 + 2 = 8 and the other installations at SiTE: Lab. One venue that stands out from the rest is the Fountain Street Church, a sprawling neo-Gothic structure that is an architectural attraction in its own right. The building houses an array of social justice oriented works. Though ArtPrize is the brainchild of Rick DeVos—a member, like the better-known Betsy, of the prominent conservative Michigan family enriched by the Amway fortune—one finds artworks at Fountain Street Church addressing social justice issues dear to the left: racism and police brutality, immigrant rights, mass incarceration, sexism and misogyny. Climbing the stairs to the upper tier of the dimly lit sanctuary, one can experience Lora Robertson’s film installation By Her Own Hand, in which two films exploring women’s undervalued labor in the life cycle pierce the darkness and several layers of gauzy fabric suspended from the ceiling, floating hauntingly in this sacred space flanked by colorful stained glass.

At the Grand Rapids African American Museum and Archives, Aedan Gardill’s portraits honor four African-American woman innovators from Michigan, depicted with the tools of their trade and alongside copies of their patents for inventions from hair products to thermostat heating. That these obscure figures, rescued from the archive, hang opposite a glisteningly uncritical and oversize painting of the head of Oprah Winfrey bedecked in butterflies and titled Phenomenal Woman indicates something about the poles that ArtPrize almost compulsively pulls together.

In “Avant-garde and Kitsch,” Clement Greenberg writes: “A poem by  [T.S.] Eliot  and a poem by Eddie Guest—what perspective of culture is large enough to enable us to situate them in an enlightening relation to each other?” This is the crux of ArtPrize: it tries to be large enough to contain both the high and low. As ArtPrize allows avant-garde and kitsch to comingle, I am forced to confront my own biases: not typically inclined to speak of “quality” or “kitsch,” I nevertheless must own my disdain for bald eagles in Art and my own acculturation—despite growing up in Michigan--by an East Coast art world. Nevertheless, given the abundance of bald eagles and other Americana, I can’t help but think that, while ArtPrize seems to celebrate the idea that anyone can be an artist, the event is not working for those most marginalized by art institutions.

Installation view of The String Project by Chelsea Nix & Mariano Cortez. Image: ArtPrize.

As a whole, the event is unapologetically uncurated. This is what makes shopping the appropriate metaphor: as ArtPrize eschews making the kinds of calls and commitments that would risk alienating some sector of its audience, there is something for everyone. Two-tier marketing triumphs over critical decision-making. By the end of the event, selections are made and two sets of prizes go out: the “public vote” and the “juried winners.” This year, the public chose a Benettonesque photography series aligning with ArtPrize’s posture of nondiscrimination and elision of difference: The String Project puts forth a sunny vision of humanity’s shared connection across borders. By contrast, the jury—staffed with East Coast art world types—selected the work of Le’Andra LeSeur of Jersey City, which foregrounds difference and deals with embodied experiences of ostracization involved in being black, queer, and feminine. The popular vote and the electoral college, and ne’er the twain shall meet. Isn’t this America now?

ArtPrize is frequently celebrated for its monthlong activation of the city through art. But our most successful public art projects don’t just overtake the city; they seize urban space with a purpose. At its best, public art joins and galvanizes communities to forge new groupings, new shared values, and a sense of ownership of otherwise mundane civic space. ArtPrize’s refusal to make distinctions feels like a cop-out that affirms everyone and challenges no one (besides thumbing its nose at the overly-educated art critic). Ultimately, the event’s seizure of the city seems more like a victory for commercial real estate than for art. Indeed, ArtPrize feels like research and development for Richard Florida’s premise, what Nato Thompson has deemed “boosterism”: to what extent can spaces owned and controlled by a conservative real estate class benevolently tolerate ‘bohemian’ culture and still profit? The streets of the city built by Amway cleaning product profits shimmer as if recently sanitized.

Installations by Tyree Guyton (image 1), Augustine Boyce Cummings (image 2), and Kyd Kane (image 3) at SITE:LAB for ArtPrize 2018.
Images 1-2: Emily Gilbert. Image 3: Kyd Kane

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tessa Paneth-Pollak is a historian of modern and contemporary art and Director of the LookOut! Gallery at Michigan State University’s Residential College in Arts & Humanities (RCAH).

www.tessapanethpollak.com

RESPONSE
A feature of project reviews experienced in person. Response will provide artists with much needed critical response to their work. Response is opinion-based but is not an op-ed.