"We want to be in control of our lives. Whether we are jungle fighters, craftsmen, company men, gamesmen, we want to be in control. And when the government erodes that control, we are not comfortable."
- Barbara Jordan
"When you come back with no arms or legs, then you can say war is fun"
- The Dicks ("I Hope You Get Drafted")
For testsite 08.5, Temporary Services will investigate two aspects of the state's cultural and political history that embody its radical independence: the development of Punk music in Austin during the early 1980s, and the speeches of Barbara Jordan, the great, late United States representative from Texas. This will be Temporary Services' first exhibition in the Lone Star State.
As part of their ongoing series of publications entitled Temporary Conversations, Temporary Services will publish two new booklets drawn from interviews, memories, and artifacts contributed by Punkers. One will celebrate the band The Dicks and a separate booklet will extensively interview Austin-based musician and artist Tim Kerr, who has played guitar for many bands including the Big Boys and Poison 13.
Temporary Services will also apply these dual interests to a new series of banners. Fabricated from discarded plastic bags, these recycled textiles are part of the group's ongoing investigation into new uses for plastic bags: Personal Plastic. Quotes drawn from politician Barbara Jordan and Punk lyrics are featured on a series of banners hanging in locations both inside and outside the residence housing testsite's exhibition space.
Temporary Services' testsite 08.5 is motivated by their interest in focusing on people and histories that have not been given as much attention as they should, as well as that of coupling their exhibitions with self-published booklets. Towards this purpose, a new poster will appear around Austin and DOMY Books will host a release event for the new Temporary Conversations booklets at their store. Also, an extensive array of past publications by Temporary Services spanning ten years will be installed in the galleries at Test Site.
As is always their way, with their project for testsite 08.5, Temporary Services casts the artist as activist and brings tangible social purpose to the practice of making and exhibiting art. All of the aspects of Temporary Services' activity in Austin, including working with pre-used plastic, tie into the get-it-done spirit that both the musicians they are focusing on and Ms. Jordan seem/ed to have. Making something useful (hope, groundbreaking legislation, groundbreaking lyrics and harnessing youth culture, intervening in public to shed light) out of something useless (despair, racism, plastic) is a common theme.
Temporary Services is Brett Bloom and Marc Fischer. We are based in Ft. Wayne (IN) and Chicago. Salem Collo-Julin worked with us from 2001-2014. We have existed, with several changes in membership and structure, since 1998. We produce exhibitions, events, projects, and publications. The distinction between art practice and other creative human endeavors is irrelevant to us.
The best way of testing our ideas has been to do them without waiting for permission or invitation. We invent infrastructure or borrow it when necessary. We were not taught this in school. We try different approaches, inspired by others equally frustrated by the systems they inherited, who created their own methods for getting work into the public.
Temporary Services started as an experimental exhibition space in a working class neighborhood of Chicago. Our name directly reflects the desire to provide art as a service to others. It is a way for us to pay attention to the social context in which art is produced and received. Having “Temporary Services” displayed on our window helped us to blend in with the cheap restaurants, dollar stores, currency exchanges, and temporary employment agencies on our street. We were not immediately recognizable as an art space. This was partly to stave off the stereotypical role we might have played in the gentrification of our neighborhood. We weren’t interested in making art for sale. Within the boundaries of “what sells” artists often carve out tiny aesthetic niches to protect, peddle, and repeat indefinitely, rather than opening themselves up to new possibilities.
Experiencing art in the places we inhabit on a daily basis remains a critical concern for us. It helps us move art from a privileged experience to one more directly related to how we live our lives. A variety of people should decide how art is seen and interpreted, rather than continuing to strictly rely on those in power. We move in and out of officially sanctioned spaces for art, keeping one foot in the underground the other in the institution. Staying too long in one or the other isn’t healthy. We are interested in art that takes engaging and empowering forms. We collaborate amongst ourselves and with others, even though this may destabilize how people understand our work.
-Courtesy of temporaryservices.org
Harper Montgomery teaches courses on modern and contemporary Latin American art exploring issues of post-colonialism, nineteenth-century techniques of image-making, modernism, conceptualism, and art and politics through a global lens. Specializing in the art and visual cultures of Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, and the Latino U.S., she focuses her research on criticism, magazines, prints and printed ephemera, histories of collecting and display, transnational networks, and relationships between cosmopolitan and indigenous art.
She has written essays for exhibition catalogues published by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, El Museo del Barrio, the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, and Hunter College. Her research has appeared in The Art Bulletin, Art Journal, Modernism/Modernity, and the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, and her reviews can be found in caa.reviews, Art Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, and ArtNexus. Montgomery was a curator in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the North American curator of the Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan, and has organized exhibitions of Francis Alÿs, Felipe Dulzaides, the collective Temporary Services, Conceptual Art, and nineteenth-century traveler artists’ landscapes of Latin America from the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros. She co-edited Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic with James Elkins (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013) and is the author of The Mobility of Modernism: Art and Criticism in 1920s Latin America (University of Texas Press, 2017). Montgomery received her PhD from the University of Chicago and her research has been supported by the Rockefeller and Mellon Foundations and two PSC-CUNY research grants. Her current work includes research on the politicized body during the 1960s and 70s and on modes of copying and appropriation in contemporary art.
-Courtesy of Hunter Department of Art and Art History
