Artists Are Essential Workers/Art Is An Essential Service for the occasion of a special reading at The Fireplace Project by Warren Neidich

My first act was to transport a 76 x 126 inch solar powered electronic highway bulletin board (used by municipalities for messaging passerbys) from its normal resting place alongside freeways and roads to the Guild Hall Museum parking lot where its size and context produced an uncanny presence. Situating an artwork in a parking space reestablished a trend I had already initiated in my now infamous Drive-By-Art exhibition in which formerly unused quasi-public spaces were annexed for cultural provocation. The artwork then circulated throughout South Fork travelling to the Leiber Museum as part of the exhibition, Garden of Friends, to finally rest at The Fireplace Project. At each site, the work reacted to a specific set of contingencies embodied by the sense of place it occupied. At Guild Hall, as I mentioned, it colonized an alternative space beyond the hermetically sealed white cube normally used to display artworks. At the Leiber Collection, it joined a group of friends already exhibiting there, many of whom I had met through the Drive-By-Art project. In its final presentation at The Fireplace Project situated alongside Spring Fireplace Road directed towards oncoming traffic, it finally made it to a situation where it’s dual identity as both artwork and highway apparatus was allowed to express itself. Here it fulfills its historic purpose by engaging the simulated history and nostalgia of the Springs, most notably the Pollock-Krasner House just down the road, as the birthplace of Abstract Expression. However, Andy Warhol lived in Montauk, as did Peter Beard. Dennis Oppenheim raised hell here and, of course, we can’t forget the late, great Keith Sonnier, or the contemporary artists who call this their home; Eric Fischl, April Gornik, Mary Heilmann, and all the artists in this show.

In this rarefied cultural context the message board becomes a readymade platform with which to enunciate messages both troubling and significant. Can one say that “artists are essential workers” and “art is an essential service” especially during this global pandemic? Essential worker and essential service are terms usually reserved for the brave medical personnel on the front lines of the therapeutic panopticon established to battle disease at the medical frontier. At odds with this role, the artist’s position in society is as an outlier, bad boy/girl, anarchist, and recently entrepreneur. This pathos haunts deep pockets and makes the spectator uneasy. No doubt this also has something to with the recent denigration of the artist and artwork as a place of power and importance at the hands of the neoliberal art market, where cultural meaning and value have been subsumed by market value.

I am a romantic and this very romantic notion of an artist reaches back to the beginning of Modernism (and Romanticism before that). Artworks maintained an aura and provoked in the spectator a sense of wonder, soothed the aching soul and challenged crystallized dogma through its radical and enigmatic presentation. That is the rub from which this work establishes its pithy phraseology and creates a platform for the resuscitation of a bygone artistic purpose. I want to find new breaths and rhythms in the respirations of new forms of enunciation that my poetic verse launches in this moment of nihilism. For me, art is life and without it life is not worth living; a fortress against the agony of this interminable bungling of the Covid pandemic at the hands of an unruly narcissism and neoliberal fanatic federalism.

My piece is about asking a question. Can we imagine the healed human body without the healed human spirit? Is it enough? What will the post-pandemic art world and art system look like? Maybe it’s time to renegotiate the status of art as a commodity fetish, its primary raison d’etre, and rather understand the role of the artist and his or her production as a means with which to heal and generate social justice. With half of museums on the edge of bankruptcy and an equal number of galleries on the edge of collapse, the artist as a producer of alternative states of consciousness and solidarity is more crucial than ever.