This is the fourth blog on my Clore Fellowship/Wellcome Trust sponsored study visit to the USA. See the others here.
Janet Zweig
I spoke with artist Janet Zweig about her practice and her participation in the Public Artist in Residence (PAIR) programme, starting in 2019 in partnership with the then Mayor’s Office for Sustainability (MOS). Janet brings humour, fantasy and language to public artworks. In the past she has created a stand which gives a Seattle park a different name from the history of fantasy literature every day. One of her most spectacular works is an entire lounge in Austin airport, set on a 6 degree angle, intersecting with the rest of the airport, and including a departure board and ticket desk offering flights to fantasy lands. She spoke through her planned installation with the Mayor’s Office, for the PAIR programme: ‘Move The Needle’ (see image below). For the purposes of my research into the role of art in science and policy, particularly interesting elements of her residency, for me, included:
Janet spent a lot of time physically present at a desk in the MOS space interviewing MOS staff. The space she created was really special - it included books, plants, artefacts, so that people effectively left their day-to-day office space environment. She would ask people questions such as ‘how did you end up here…? What did you study…?' Feedback was that staff enjoyed the interviews, and she had repeat customers at her desk.
This research phase was very important in determining the planned output of the residency. E.g. a theme which came out was the use of mechanical metaphors in the office - e.g. which lever to pull - and this led to the concept for the installation.
Janet used the placement as a basis for securing extra resources to achieve something beyond the initial scope/ambition of the project.
She also provided useful information about things like the application process, contracts, funding etc.
Janet provided a really interesting piece of advice to me in the context of organising a programme for artists working in climate policy - don’t limit this just to people who may identify themselves as purely ‘climate artists’, as this may artificially narrow the field in terms of perspectives, approaches and skills. (She also generously gave advice to me as a practising artist: spend approx one full day per week making applications for funding for the kind of project I want to make with various rosters/funders, including US based ones. The hit ratio will be about 1:30 - it gets better over time…).
Move the Needle proposal drawing, courtesy of Janet Zweig (see here)
Kate Gouin
Kate provided a highly complementary perspective on the PAIR programme, as she was then Chief of Staff in what was called the Mayor’s Office for Sustainability at the time (the office has since grown to include a resilience portfolio).
Kate and the then director of the office, Mark Chambers (now working in the Biden Administration), saw that benefits of collaborating with an artist could include:
Connecting to people, especially new audiences
Exploring our work in new and interesting ways
Helping bring meaning to some of the technical, detailed work.
Building on what Janet had described, the process of the PAIR programme was particularly rich and beneficial for the Office and its staff. The team came to value the actions that Janet took as an artist in her research: how she attended meetings, asked questions, talked about her practice, organised discussion workshops, brought in prompts and books to adorn her desk space, created a nature library, pitched ideas and ran brainstorm sessions on these ideas. This ultimately led to a significant change in the culture of the office. People began to release themselves. The team was (necessarily) technical and precise, and Janet’s interventions and ideas helped people see the multi-dimensionality of the environmental challenge, and start to step into foreign, uncomfortable areas of knowledge.
The impact of the placement on the culture of the office seems profound. Kate described that ‘you could hear people talk differently’ - explain their work in different ways, think of it in a human-centred way to complement the need to focus on important technical/engineering questions. Janet had a beautiful way of bringing out the impact of climate change on people, not just greenhouse gas emissions; she asked ‘why?’; she inquired as to the meaning of acronyms; she sought to see hope in an otherwise difficult space, where there is plenty of (justified) doom and gloom. The image or metaphor that comes to my mind is Janet creating a confessional booth, or playing the role of the court jester (present in all the decision-making centres of power in previous eras).
Kate describe a few pieces of infrastructure which helped the placement go well:
Leadership and support from the top of the office, including Kate and Mark Chambers.
Collaboration with the Department for Cultural Affairs (who run the PAIR programme), both on funding but also on artistic, conceptual and technical support, e.g. in recruitment and contracting/legal - the latter was very important as it covered things which a more environmental/infrastructure team may be unfamiliar with, for example intellectual property rights for artists.
A genuinely open and honest conversation with shortlisted applicants, where Kate described that ‘they were interviewing us as much as we were interviewing them’.
Similar to feedback from Melanie Crean, some of the barriers came when the research/artwork went up against procurement challenges - public procurement processes and timeframes typically work on a longer timeframe than might fit with the requirements of the placement.
Kate has kindly offered to link us up with Mark Chambers and some of the DCLA staff.
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I am the Wellcome Trust sponsored Clore 16 Fellow. In 2022 as part of this Fellowship I travelled to New York, Santa Fe and Los Angeles. I met an artist in New York thinking about criminal justice by using shape, an artist pushing the boundaries of interspecies collaboration, and the artist-led entertainment space innovating how audiences engage with evidence. Read about them and others here.