Applying for an art grant is the opposite of artistic: With its
forms and procedures and judgments, and despite all good intentions, it
is completely deadening. And grants go to the few, not the many. If we
relied on grants alone to inspire art, we would be surely an almost
entirely art-free society. This is the baffling wrong redressed by
something called Arbitrary Art Grants. This summer alone, Arbitrary Art
Grants have generated 94 sculptures, 150 works of graphic design, 34
dances, and one short story written by 200 writers. Eighty new
performance artists and sixty first-time art dealers have appeared on
Seattle streets because of the Arbitrary Art Grants.
Here’s how they work: A call goes out online for, say, the Arbitrary
Art Grant in Dance, or Sculpture, or some such: “Dance like you’re
being shot at” or “build a sculpture inside a grocery cart created from
only the store inventory” are the only rules. Applicants then post
videos of their bodies flailing from fictional gun-downings to YouTube
or send photographs of their kaleidoscopic arrangements of produce to a
website. For the writing grant, a story about the adventures of a
ping-pong ball was written like a blog, with some 200 comments building
on each other for the duration of a single workday, from 9:00 a.m. to
5:00 p.m. (on August 7).
Then the “judges”—meaning a Seattle guy named Greg Lundgren,
who thought up the Arbitrary Art Grants, plus a couple of friends he
enlists for fun—get together and think up a clever way to pick a
winner. Like: Ping-pong balls with names written on them are tossed
downriver, and whichever one reaches the finish line first wins. Or:
The winner of the Arbitrary Art Grant in Performance Art—which
called for performers protesting performance art on the street outside
On the Boards, where the New Works Festival was opening—was
chosen because his face passed through the viewfinder of a preset gun
scope at the right moment. Lundgren hands the winners $500 cash, in
small bills, from his own bank account.
What matters is not the winners—it’s the hot, swirling planet
of art that gets generated. Of course some of it is shit, but there’s
always something worth seeing, too. This colossal creative mass will be
shoved into an exhibition of videos, photographs, two-dimensional art,
sculptures, a book, and performance props at Bumbershoot this year.
Plus, three new competitions will happen during the three days of
the festival, one per day. Fabric, a seamstress, and hair and makeup
stylists will be available to anyone who wants to enter the
fashion-design competition. For the Arbitrary Art Grant in Photography,
you take a photograph, any photograph, inside the gates of Bumbershoot,
titled Why I Came to Bumbershoot. In the architecture contest,
you’ll get a single sheet of card stock, plus tape, scissors, and glue,
with which to build a work of architecture that you can then set on a
faux landscape of green rolling hills made of felt. As in every round
of Arbitrary Art Grants, the arbitrarily selected winner on each day
gets 500 bucks.
“It’s not about showing the best artists in the world,” says
Lundgren, who conducted his first round of Arbitrary Art Grants back in
2000. “It’s about how to inspire people who are not normally involved
in the making of art.”
Not all grants should be arbitrary: That’s a given. But the
Arbitrary Art Grants take the usual public-service rhetoric of (public)
arts funding and do it one better—motivating people not just to
sit in an audience but to actually make things. Given the
precipitous 20th-century slide away from production and into
consumption in the arts, this is a tiny revolutionary blowback that
looks like nothing more than fun.
