So this fun little jaunt happened a little over a decade ago when I was still in art school. It involves primarily myself and a good buddy I went to school with who we'll call Dan.
Dan and I were both art majors and each year the art department had a student show. The show was open to any current art major at the school and each artist was liked limited to 5 submissions each.
Dan and I were curious if we could figure out a way to get more than 5 submissions each and came up with the solution of a collaborative artists group.
At the time, there were no artists groups on the campus and we asked several of our professors what the best way to start one was and if that was something that would be encouraged. Historically, artists groups were an important part of up and coming artists as a way to get more exposure and push forward new ideas. The professors we talked to were ecstatic that we were looking to start something like this.
We came up with an idea and wrote out the "rules" for inclusion into our group and what we wanted to accomplish.
We initially called our artist group "The HOPE Recipients" (which we eventually changed and I'll note that later in the story) with the idea that even accomplished artists are capable of making bad art. We wanted to showcase artists' fledgling work. Work that should not have seen the light of day. We made the group open to anyone that met certain requirements (all of which Dan and I did meet).
The requirements were as follows: Each artist must be on the HOPE scholarship (I'm not sure if this scholarship is still a thing or not). Each artist must be in the honors program. Each artist must be on the Dean's List. Each artist must have a minimum GPA of 3.5. Each artist must be in at least 5 different national and/or international honors society (one of which was required to be Golden Key.
With the requirements that we used, while open to anyone, it basically made it so that only Dan and I were "eligible" to be in the group.
Every piece of art that we made under the group name was a collaborative effort. Nothing was produced by one artist solely. The art that we made for the group was an effort to show that while we might look good on paper, sometimes it's still just really bad art. Think 3 year old refrigerator art or the first watercolor or first sculpture an artist makes. Everyone starts somewhere and usually those first few pieces are bad.
So now that we had our artists group conceived and had several pieces ready to go we approached the gallery director and presented our ideas. We asked her if group submissions were allowed and if the artist group could have 5 submissions as a separate entity from our individual submissions. She was excited to hear that we had headed up an artist group and thought it was a great idea. She approved the group's 5 submission slots on top of our own.
Fast forward a few weeks to a handful of days before the galley opening was going to happen. Submissions to the show were going on and the gallery director approached Dan and I. She said that we couldn't have an extra 5 submissions for the group and that the submissions would come out of our own 5. This is not what she said to us originally and we got pretty pissed. We were absolutely up front with the fact that we wanted 5 submissions for the group over our own and she had originally told us that was ok. We decided to pull all of the group's submissions from the show.
About the same time that we were told we can't have the extra 5 submissions we found out that one of the other professors (we'll call her Dr. N) at the university was submitting her student's work without their knowledge. This was not cool and actually hurt the students because part of the art program there was learning the submission process to shows.
Dan and I were constantly talking to a few professors who were on our side and they helped us with suggestions on how to proceed. They didn't want to be directly associated with what we were planning but were extremely helpful in guidance.
This is when we changed the name of the artists group to "The HOPE Recipients: We're Still Smarter than You". We typed up a paper that explained what had happened with our submissions and brought to light that Dr. N was submitting students work for them without knowledge or consent. We made a lot of copies and held on to them until the gallery opening.
Dan and I decided to host our own guerrilla art show in the hallway next to the lobby of the gallery on opening night during the opening. We rallied several other students to help us move our pieces in and set them up. We informed the school newspaper that they might want to be there during the opening. We also got a few photographer buddies there as well to document the event.
So maybe 20 minutes into the opening all of us rushed some tables into the hallway and got the pieces set up. We had little plaquards with the title of each piece and a description of the piece. Some of the pieces we put in this guerrilla show were extremely offensive, by the way. We set out a bunch of our "manifestos" on the tables and started passing them out to everyone that walked by.
Once the papers started circulating there was quite a buzz about our show. Lots of people were going to our tables and taking pictures and talking with us. However, the gallery director was pissed. Like really pissed. She started cussing us out in the hallway. Fortunately the school newspaper showed up with video cameras and got all of that on tape and they did an interview with us a little later.
We were 100% prepared to be asked (or forced) to remove our pieces from the hallway. That didn't happen, but if it had Dan and I had shirts made up with big bold letters saying "CENSORED" on them that we wore underneath our regular shirts.
After all this happened the school ended up changing how submissions to any future shows were handled. Every piece now had to be submitted in person by the artist. No proxy submissions were allowed anymore.
The professors that had backed us up (in ghost mode) thought that everything we did was great. They had the biggest shit eating grins the whole night and congratulated us later after everything was over. They were proud to see some of their students doing things that were causing ripples in the system. That felt great!
The professors that didn't approve of any of this seemed to tread lightly around Dan and I for a while after this happened.
All in all, Dan and I had a great time doing this and it was talked about for a couple of years after it happened. The videos and pictures from the event were lost years later due to a hard drive failure but I would frequently look through the albums with a fond remembrance while I still had them.
Submitted October 02, 2017 at 07:16AM by BlakAcid http://ift.tt/2hFMaW3 ProRevenge
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