Michael Clegg and Martin Guttmann

Synopsis by Mark Nelson

Michael Clegg and Martin Guttmann have been a collaborative artist team since 1980. For this presentation Clegg was unable to attend. Guttmann began by giving an overview of problems associated with the execution of public art in Europe. His concerns: How does the artist secure funding for public art without glorifying the state and adding to its power? How does the artist deal with issues of representation in the communities in which they are operating in, given the artist is often an outsider?

Guttmann then proceeded with the core of his presentation by showing slides of their project in Graz, Austria, titled "The Open Public Library." He described the project as a portrait of the community–a way of presenting the community to itself as to stimulate the social imagination via a temporary set-up designed to elicit change in the social environment. They installed large weather-tight bookcases in three areas of the city that represented the different social strata of the population (near a post office, a train track, and at the end of a highway). They established direct contact with the community by going door to door collecting books to fill the bookcases. Once the collection of books was completed, the public was encouraged to take a limited number of books for a few days, then return them. Meanwhile, for three months a group of local sociology students gathered opinions and ideas from the community regarding the project. They also did photographic documentation of the bookcases' sites and displayed the images in a museum. The artists' expectation was that this would encourage an interaction between the museum work and the bookcases' sites. However, Guttmann acknowledged the range of success varied: Museum patrons were more likely to visit the bookcases than users of the open libraries were to visit the museum. For the artists, this interaction of the community (whether positive or negative) revealed the social environment as the portrait of the community, thus defined by the direct involvement with the library and the museum.

Guttmann finished the lecture talking briefly about "The Open Public Library" they did in Hamburg, Germany. There, the project was well received throughout the community and the artists initiated more thorough follow-up by gathering information and bringing it back to the community to learn more about the potential aspects of the project. He also stated that three years after the Graz project, they went back to interview people and found that the artwork was fondly remembered.

Analysis by Toshihiro Komatsu
(with Beth Peckman)

Martin Guttmann began his one-man presentation of "Open Public Library" with a brief review of previous collaborations with Michael Clegg. This was accompanied by a short discussion of their abiding interest in creating portraits of a community. Guttmann and Clegg’s particular interest is the notion of human representation in the field of social forces. It comes as no surprise therefore that "Open Public Library" resembles a psycho-social research project.

Michael Clegg and Martin Guttmann designed and constructed a series of weatherproof bookshelves to be temporarily inserted along footpaths and fields of a particular community. They canvassed surrounding residences for book donations to stock these unlocked Public Libraries and kept track of usage, wear and tear, and content of donations. In conjunction with the outdoor installations, "Open Public Library" existed as an evolving exhibition in a nearby museum consisting of site documentation and participatory information. Here one could access a brief description of the project, details of library usage, photos and directions encouraging excursions to individual sites. At each library installation directions were posted promoting visits to the corresponding museum exhibition.

Martin Guttmann determined the success of "Open Public Library," as well its identity as a work of art, by its ability to elicit specific behaviors from its audience. For him, the ultimate indicator of success for this piece was its ability to initiate interaction between two communities. While museum patrons regularly ventured out in pursuit of library installations, the library patrons showed little to no interest in the museum exhibition. On this basis, Guttmann conceded that a work of art was only halfway produced. This is no arbitrary signifier: in essence, Guttmann and Clegg are recognizing the project as art to the extent the participants, the public, recognize the work as art.

Guttmann and Clegg would differentiate their audience participation from that associated with performance art. They would distinguish participation in their social experiment as self-motivated, less influenced by group momentum, and certainly not event specific. The collection of raw data unsullied by expressed intent provides them the material for their unselfconscious, unmitigated portrait.

Martin Guttmann and Michael Clegg conceived "Open Public Library" as a portrait of social response. The physical vestiges of this public arts project existed to facilitate and measure social interaction and communal exchange. It was the behaviors themselves, the statistical portrait of interactions and mapped responses, which comprised this work of art. This reflects a shift away from object oriented public art and focus on the artist as provider, either of an object or an experience. Even in the transformation of bare bookshelves into public libraries, Guttmann and Clegg define artist and the role of art as a facilitator. What remains open for debate is acceptance of Guttmann and Clegg’s parameters for defining art. Assuming that their project fulfilled all of their requirements for achieving art status it may remain in the eyes of others a nonsequitur.

Martin Guttmann responds:

I would like to make a few remarks of a more general nature to complement the material covered in my presentation. These remarks will address some of the issues related to the identity of The Open Library project as a work of art which were raised by the commentators.

"The Open Library" project was conceived as a social sculpture. That means that basic "building blocks" from which the project was constructed were not material objects but actual functioning institutions. First, there was Grazer Kunstverein, an art space which sponsored the project. Then there was the city government which had to be consulted in order to obtain the various permits necessary for the realization of the project. The Sociology Department from the nearby university was an additional factor. (We got in touch with the Sociology Department in order to find students who were interested in following the project.) Finally, there was "The Open Library" itself, a tentative and temporary institution which operated in three small communities. The idea of "The Open Library" was to create a multifaceted social theater which will make tangible the nature of the various participating institutions and their relations to one another. It was designed as a focal point and a background around which a portrait of the local communities was to be constructed.

This general methodology, of revealing the nature of the social environment through the creation of a focal point, is the basis of a new understanding of public art. The idea is not to see works of public art as "homeless art objects" which could have been situated within a museum or a gallery. But neither is public art a way of liberating art completely from the constraints of its identity as art. The point is to thematize all the operating social factors and institutions, including those related to art, and dramatize their modus operandi. The conception of public art which I would like to advocate is to look at public projects as the creation of the "test particles" which reveal, through their specific trajetories, the nature of the field of social forces in which they operate.

As a consequence of the general methodology of the social sculpture, the relation between the work and the art context is twofold. On the one hand, as long as a project is sponsored by an art institution it has already some identity as an art object. On the other hand, in order for it to be experienced as art by the members of the local community where it is located, a more specific relation to the art context needs to be developed. For the members of the local community, the project will be art if its relation to the art context will cease to be merely a factor in the background but a connection to an art institution will be developed. If it is not developed, the project does not stop being art. It simply registers the lack of social cohesion which makes it possible for different communities to experience the project in entirely different ways. The art community, situated on one side of this epistemic fault line, will certainly experience the project as art. The community which is alienated from the art institutions will develop its own particular relation to projects like "The Open Library."