Domains, Publics and Access:About
How this all started
This collection of forms of access for all audiences in the domains of art, science, culture, economics, politics and technology sprung from an invitation from Aisel Wicab to the person now writing this story. Being aware of my renowned obsession with the subject, Aisel invited me to set out an archiving project. The idea centered around building an archive dedicated to contemporary art that could be browsed online, since fostering these kinds of artistic practices is the mission of Fundación Alumnos 47, especially those based on education. The problem was, online access is not easy to achieve without a sizeable budget to allow for respecting current intelectual property agreements and a great amount of time alloted to negotiate each and every piece. In order to have an archive dedicated to a group of works of art, either their acquisition or reproduction and distribution rights have to be negotiated or, failing this, focus on those of public (albeit not so contemporary) domain. Another idea had to do with facilitating text consultation. If the archive were to be dedicated to reference books, catalogs are nothing, if not the most similar to open access, allowing for consultation and use of art publications. I take this oportunity to throw around a suggestion for open access to the dusty, forgotten catalogues of historical exhibitions in museums around the world. That would’ve been a great project: a suggestive image of the past displayed onscreen.
It is true some art publications are trying out new, open licenses such as Creative Commons. It is also true a significant segment of contemporary art is available online. But, it is also true we speak of a reduced number of texts and practices in both cases. To overcome the access fence, everything pointed to devoting oneself to the public domain and designing a project closely related to the digital humanities. In short, coming up with a solution to the proposal on the terms, timeline and budget laid out might not have been impossible, but the questions that kept arising guided the proposal elsewhere, without my noticing it. In the search for possible projects, every question led to the same problem over and over again, that of access.
From and art history perspective, the problem with access is not new. Art’s access to all areas of life is the burdensome inheritance of the first vanguards that artists and researchers have been struggling with ever since. Perhaps the matter of life’s access to art is a more current one. Regardless of whether it’s about politics, fashion, economics, food, insect sexuality, climate change, war, molecular physics, hunger or the service industry, today’s art is present, standing out in exhibitions, performances, residencies, biennials… linking artistic production with topical issues. Along this line, the old rule for blending art into life seems to have been reversed. Now, it’s become about blending life into art, as if art were the BBC. The result: framing the access problem in relation to contemporary art implied asking not about access to art, but access to everything else.
Following these concerns, the research for Domains, publics and access arose in january 2015. A collaboration between Fundación Alumnos47 and the Arts and Humanities Department at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana - Lerma
Paz Sastre
Mexico City, August 8th, 2016.
