The current situation is as much a result of board-staff tension as lack of funding, and may be traced back at least as far as June 1, when managing director Steve Tremble threw in the towel. CoCA's board of directors chose not to replace him, instead assuming Katie Kurtz might take over some of his duties. Predictably, Kurtz felt overburdened. "I was put in a position I wasn't qualified for, and the board did nothing to closely oversee that," she maintains.
To make matters worse, CoCA's financial situation had taken a downturn. An August 1 article in the Seattle P-I reported that the organization was $30,000 in debt, with less than $1,000 in the bank, noting, "The constant crisis of CoCA's finances is sapping the organization's ability to remain fresh and vital." Since then, CoCA has seen in-fighting between board and staff (and even amongst the board itself) intensify, resulting not only in Kurtz's resignation, but resignations from six members of the board of directors in the past three months alone.
Such strife is nothing new for CoCA. The organization has made a habit of becoming entangled in all manner of clichéd nonprofit pratfalls: Directors have walked; boards have erupted; the organization has gone homeless and penniless for months. "CoCA has always been out of sync with its board. Except, of course, at the very beginning, when all there was was a board," notes former director Susie Purves, who left the organization under duress in 1997. "CoCA has been in some kind of trouble perennially, right from the start."
In fact, it has even had a trial run for the very situation it now faces. Purves notes that when she took over the organization in 1994, CoCA had no staff, no space, no money, and only five board members. "CoCA has been in worse straits than it is now," she says. Her predecessor Larry Reid, director of the organization from 1986 through 1992, seconds the opinion, noting, "CoCA has always had its share of ups and downs, some of them pretty damning. But you know, as these types of organizations go, this is not unusual."
Ironically, the case may be made that CoCA's artistic vitality all but mandated a chaotic administration. CoCA has never cast itself as a model nonprofit--the model being fundamentally antithetical to the mission of a vital, edgy contemporary arts center. As Reid notes, "When CoCA started... there was no arts programming to speak of, let alone contemporary, experimental arts programming." Purves adds that CoCA was founded by an energetic group of artists largely on the strength of a late '70s National Endowment of the Arts initiative to establish a new model for artist-driven spaces.
CoCA has thus, from day one, been long on programming vision and short on institutional development--and this vision has driven its vitality. "CoCA has always done best when it's the platform for a strong programming personality," comments Purves. "It works when somebody comes in and says, 'This is how I plan to do this. If I'm producing the art and I'm producing the programs, then this is how it's going to run.'"
Throughout the years, a fair number of people have used CoCA as a stage for their curatorial visions, with undeniably impressive results. With such pioneering shows as Reid's 1994 Cult Rapture--which traced ideological obsession and millennial fervor through so-called "cult" art--and Purves and Brad Thompson's 1996 Nirvana: Capitalism and the Consumed Image, which analyzed the nature of memory and media manipulation in the specific time and space of Seattle, CoCA dominated the local contemporary arts scene throughout most of the '90s. Further back, the organization counted such high points as a Volunteer Park concert with Laurie Anderson, and an early exhibition of Survival Research Laboratories machines among its many successes. Only a fool would deny CoCA its legacy. "If we had relied only on the Seattle Art Museum and the Henry Art Gallery to provide our art over the last 20 years, the cultural climate here would be completely different," insists Reid. "People would even dress differently."
And yet there is no sense in preserving an organization based only on its legacy. It is much harder to look forward. The question needs to be posed with great clarity: What are we preserving by preserving CoCA?
On one hand, it is obvious what we are not preserving: We are not preserving staff. We are not preserving a valuable space (CoCA's proposed new space--a basement at 11th and Pike--is, in fact, less appealing than their current hovel). We are not preserving a particularly amicable or even competent board (not one of the board members I talked with could give me even a ballpark number of CoCA's annual budget--a bad sign). The organization has no money, no collection, and minimal assets.
Some might argue that what infrastructure exists is worth preserving. To some extent, they would be right: It is not the easiest thing in the world to form a nonprofit, to assemble a database of members, to get a bulk mail permit. But it's not all that hard, either. Nonprofit organizations are founded every week; some grow to become Seattle Repertory Theatre, and others vanish without a trace. But the technical hurdles of creating the systems that govern these organizations are certainly incidental at best to the pursuit of a unique artistic vision. If the energy is there, it is only a matter of a couple of years before such basic infrastructures are firmly in place.
Perhaps the case may be made for preserving a great programming entity, but even this has recently been drawn into question. The organization's strongest programming now lies quite a few years behind it. The recently completed New Prometheans International Fire Art Festival, while leagues ahead of its tepid 1997 predecessor, still came off as more flash than substance, and the current exhibit, Emotional Rescue (curated by Linda Ferris and previously shown at Bumbershoot), is not really a CoCA exhibit at all.
More troubling still is the board's insistence on using a programming committee to develop new programs--a system that has proven to be at odds with the ideal of a select few strong, professional curators using the organization as a platform for the benevolent dictatorship of their vision. "The process is now crazy!" notes Reid, who went through the committee to bring forth the recent acclaimed Destroy All Monsters show. "It's like going through a high school dance committee or something: It's an exercise in compromise."
Further complicating CoCA's claims on programmatic ascendancy is the fact that the world around CoCA has profoundly altered. The once pristine landscape of contemporary arts programming has become crowded with enthusiasts. In the University District, the Henry has emerged as the more substantial--if more conservative--contemporary arts center of Seattle, while Consolidated Works appears almost self-consciously poised to steal some of CoCA's limelight. Meanwhile, energetic artists' collectives--Project 416, ArtSpace, SOIL, Fuzzy Engine--come and go with fruitful abandon. In short, CoCA's uniqueness has been greatly diluted to the point where its programs must actively compete with those around it. With no single, charismatic programming vision instated in the organization, it is all but certain the programs themselves will weaken and dissipate.
By preserving CoCA, then, we are not preserving anything more concrete than an idea backed by a congregation of goodwill. Yet, in the minds of those most closely attached to the organization, there is no other possibility.
Currently, CoCA's board sees two options open to them: First, they may re-form the organization, raising the requisite capital and hiring a new administrative staff. Second, they could cut back on expenses by going without a space or a paid staff, essentially becoming a roving programming entity. According to board president Shawn Ferris, the former option is currently the one in favor amongst the board. In fact, they have even gone so far as to hire a consultant to advise them. "In August, we enlisted the professional help of a developmental consultant for nonprofits," says Ferris. "That was a major step for CoCA, to get a professional on board." Among the recommendations offered by the consultant are to develop a strategic plan, to raise $100K by the first quarter of 2001, and to launch a capital campaign to purchase a building.
There are two problems with this course of action: First, there is the question of how much $100K will purchase. At CoCA, the answer is, not much. A similar amount in the hands of an emerging group would doubtless be stretched further. Second, and more importantly, we must question the very fundamental wisdom in institutionalizing an organization that has shown itself to be chronically against institutionalization, both technically and aesthetically. Institutionalizing CoCA by buying it a building seems almost doomed to failure, not in the direct, obvious sense--Seattle has proven itself almost idiotically able to fund hollow monuments to "the arts"--but rather in the more abstract, moral sense of a failure of right intention. Examples of organizations growing in size only to lose touch with their artistic intentions are numerous: On the Boards' egregious firing (later reversed) last year of artistic director Mark Murphy is only the most recent example.
The second option available to the board--to scale back and act as a programming entity--is no more feasible than the first. To run the organization as a volunteer effort would require a Herculean feat of passion, and while such passion is common in the world of start-up nonprofits, it is questionable how effective such passion would be in a 20-year-old body. To pit such passion against an already opinionated, already bickering board seems foolhardy at best.
Nonprofits are by nature archaic beasts, designed as an afterthought by a culture that suspects public art may not be a vital ingredient in the national capitalist identity. The problem has been gruesomely aggravated in the past 20 years. Increasingly embattled in the public funding sphere, nonprofits have become ever more bound to the capricious tastes of private capital (which itself is inextricably bound to the narcissistic urges of the wealthy) in a developing structure that typically rewards predictability and civic obsequiousness over the random, anarchic cultural gesture.
As an organization predicated on the random, anarchic cultural gesture, CoCA has one last round in its cannon, and that is to dissolve. I am well aware that this opinion is the unpopular one, but I honestly believe it has merit. If we preserve CoCA, it will only be by the tremendous application of capital and volunteer hours. And while such triage may resuscitate the laboring institution, it will either be as a temporary success or the first step down the dead end of Institutionalization.
Seattle has too often presumed a sort of holy mandate upon the sacred form of the institution. In a classic inversion, patrons and administrators cling to the fallacy that the institution enables the artist and not the other way around; so like a coterie of well-intentioned but ultimately selfish relatives at the deathbed of a loved one, they struggle to keep alive a moribund form, not pausing to consider the inevitable mortality of all living systems.
André Malraux once said, "Art is a reaction against the demands of fate." The optimistic among us might recognize in that statement the sublime inevitability of artistic visions realized in time. Indeed, we might even recognize that institutions are only the repositories of visions, while artists are the creators of them. And in a good, open-hearted city, artists will find a way, regardless--and, indeed, often in spite of--the institutions that may exist.
Should CoCA vanish, it will not take its legacy with it. Its legacy is already here, in the civic space. Indeed, CoCA's death may actually liberate its legacy, and inspire new and energetic young groups to grapple with their vision of contemporary art; to engage funders and patrons to take risks on new, untried ideas; and to engineer a new and unique dialogue in a language we cannot yet know. Such is the sweetness of the living city: that it has the power to nurture, independently of the individuals who make it up, and that death never takes away without giving back.
