FELT

I do it with this push and pull.
--launching spring 2007--

Introduction

We started in the summer of 2003. We realize now that what we really wanted was to get advice: we had just graduated from college and were trying to figure out how to live—how to get the range of things we were interested in into the activities of a day. And while we were at it we wanted to make a living.

At the time, we thought we were asking questions about art. We thought that this project was about how political art clarified certain very old questions about things like the relationship between form and content. We did know that the questions were naive, and we also knew that they were important to us, for the same reason that people have been studying them for thousands of years.

We thought that if we asked artists about how they concretely approached their projects (i.e., What materials did they choose? What equipment did they use? What were their questions? How did they evaluate the success of their work?) we might come to some larger understanding about how art works: what it does, how it does it, and how what it does can be manipulated. We were really interested in the feeling people feel when they're moved by a work of art, and we wanted to know how that feeling of being moved could be transformed into an impulse for action.

We started out with research. We asked for recommendations. We spent a lot of time on the internet. We googled things like "art politics nyc." When we started out, we had a hard time finding artists who fit. Then the re-election campaigns started; then the RNC happened in New York City; then it was all downhill (uphill?) from there. It wasn't so much that artists were suddenly interested in political work, but that artists who were already doing work around those issues suddenly became a lot more visible.

We met a lot of artists. Many of them knew one another; others came from completely different worlds. We collected a lot of information about the kinds of work people have been making over the last several years in response to political concerns. We learned a lot about concrete issues that artists approach as they make choices, both in individual projects and in their careers. And, along the way, we did answer a few of those questions we started with.

Ultimately, what came out of this giant investigation had nothing really to do with us. It's not about finding the answer to a big philosophical question (or five, or a hundred). What we have for you are a lot of small insights—often very small—and a lot of loose ends.