Mosaic Meeting, January 25, 2018. Guest Artist/Activist Chloë Bass.
Artist Chloë Bass wants to teach us how to live better together. Drawing on The Book of Everyday Instruction, her recent multiform project studying one-on- one social interaction, Chloë presented a series of artworks about the nature and implications of spending time together, followed by a participatory conversation about the fundamental intimacy of living in a metropolis like NYC, questioning how we experience intimacy (one-to- one relationships) in school, home, and New York City. What are the politics of everyday life, and how can we recognize the labor of living together to shape our political choices at a local or national level? Chloë Bass works in performance, situation, publication, conversation, and installation. She is also an HCCS Alum, who graduated from HCES in 1996, HCHS in 2002, and is still within the CUNY system as an Assistant Professor of Art at Queens College.
Bass presented herself to the audience of Hunter parents and 4 th graders as an “Artist and Public Practitioner.” She explained to the attending students that she came to talk about her art and how we can live better through art and human interaction. Her featured project, “The Department of Local Affairs (2014),” was a commissioned interactive installation conducted and presented in both Bed-Stuy and Omaha, Nebraska. Her goal was to try to make people feel special in (and about) their normal lives, the way people feel when they travel elsewhere, or when they host visitors.
In Nebraska, Bass conducted research by taking photos and talking to the people who live there. She set up an “office” as part of her art installation in the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art. Her goal was to give Omaha locals a chance to talk about what it was like to be in that place at a particular place and time. She collected info through maps, pamphlets, reviews, interviews, etc., hiring a team of local teenage researchers from the area. Bass shared that she could not have done this without the teens, who were mentally flexible and socially free enough to participate by reaching out to Omaha residents and persuading them to share their thoughts candidly. She collected very personal information, i.e., “a review of my front porch,” or “advice about my neighborhood.” She was not seeking data about places where you spend or make money. Bass set herself the rule that she couldn’t interact or investigate personally; she had to collect all information from the local participants. Following field research, there was a 6-month presentation at the Art Institute, and she produced a guidebook that summarized her researchers’ contributions and reflects the city from the point of view of the locals.
In Brooklyn, the project differed in that she set up the “office” research centers in laundromats around the area. The helpers were mostly adults, and the responses were of a more casual nature, whereas in Omaha in the art gallery, the presentation was more formal, and the resulting responses were also more formal.
For her visit to Mosaic, she engaged the 4 th graders present to do the “Hunter College Elementary School Department of Local Affairs” and ask each other: What is most important to each of you on a day-to- day basis about being here that you feel everyone should know? What would be the most important information we could share with each other about this place? Some of the results of the animated student discussion are shared below:
The most important things about this school are:
- The library is tranquil.
- The lunchroom, because of all the discussions that happen where you find out what goes on. – Teachers find a way to put in creativity and fun while we’re learning.
- NDI (Natl Dance Institute) and field trips.
- We have options at recess.
- Everyone has a good sense of humor.
- We have specials rather than just academic classes.
- Knowing the expectations of your teachers for your behavior.
- The arches are magical, and you get sent back in time!
- Gym class, because we play basketball and get to run around.
- Our classroom, because we get to do so much fun stuff there.
- The courtyard, because we get to run around.
- In the Hunter community, parents lend a hand, we are all cafeteria monitors, so all members participate and work together.
- Technology program is available which makes all classes more fun. Videos in classes, digital hands-on work on the computer and active board.
She left the students with two questions:
- How can we live better together?
- What do we need?
Q&A session:
- Why not let the tourists speak? She didn’t want them because they didn’t know the place as local people would.
- How did the audience for your project interact? Some of the audience were also people who shared their information. The project helped people to realize that this art project couldn’t happen without their own participation.
- Is there a difference in the audience when participating collectively versus participating by viewing the final project? On average, no one is as enthusiastic as people under the age of 12. But level of focused intense quiet sharing is equally strong everywhere.
- A parent appreciated how Bass takes the concept of gratitude and converts it into an active element of art, by asking what we appreciate and value as an element of her active artwork. Bass responded that she is concerned by the concept of empathy: empathy is disturbing and exhausting for people. We should not be expecting people to respond to art or to act in politics in the world via empathy, because it’s too hard. We should be asking ourselves what we should be doing, and how we should be behaving, and what we value, as part of our art and politics and everyday lives.
- She wants to go to law school, because she sees law as a collection of texts subject to interpretation, just as art is. Response from lawyer parent: law has its limits. It sets rules, but can’t exist without the compassion and empathy that comes from art.
- What artists inspire her? Adrienne Piper is a contemporary artist and printmaker, who established a philosophy institute in Berlin. She has made a beautiful career out of alienating people. Bass admires her rigor and beauty and wants to apply it to her own work. Vito Acconci has created “the grossest” performance art, but she admires his concepts of scale and sense of space and structure.
- How do you think about incorporating structure into your work and working with kids? Most of Bass’s work involves setting up rules for herself and then trying to work within those rules. That then allows her work to feel like her creative exercise has enough boundaries or rules so she and other people can know how to participate, while leaving it open-ended enough that people could know how they would want to participate creatively.
Bass currently has a show at Washington and Lee University in Virginia. She describes the school as a very conservative institution, but totally open to the project while remaining very conservative in viewpoint. (On average the students she met at W&L were not as conservative as the institution itself.)
It will be presented in April here in NYC at the Knockdown Center, on the Brooklyn/Queens border. Most of her work from the last few years will be presented there. It will be kid-friendly- ish, in that some of the topics will need to be explained by parents, but children will not see anything that would be disturbing to a child.
Constructive empathy is at the center of Bass’s work. We know that people perform better when they are “working” than when doing something just on their own, so her goal is to construct settings and situations where people will bring their best and most focused selves to bear, and “work” at something that elicits empathy from them.
For more information, visit her website is: http://chloebass.com.