MARKET provides indoor market stalls for a range of people and practices that are not often included in traditional marketplace settings. Table space is provided to people and groups that have demonstrated a commitment to the Lower East Side. Participants are included regardless of the economic intention or viability of their practice (the usual criteria for participation in a market). We have asked groups and individuals to participate that do not have a public office or cannot afford rental property, neighborhood spaces that do rent real estate but could use a boost in visibility or a change of audience, individuals that operate outside of typical capitalist economies, local experts, organizations that have heavily documented culture from the neighborhood, seasonal vendors and single-person enterprises, and others who add to the eclectic and dynamic energy of the area.

MARKET borrows the infrastructure provided by Creative Time’s rental of the Essex Street Market for the exhibition Living As Form. Each participant in MARKET is given one of six six-foot long stands to use for an entire eight-hour day, throughout the duration of the exhibition. Each participant will be able to use MARKET for one or more days, according to availability. Our design of the brightly colored stands is modeled after lemonade stands, produce stalls, and flea market style table-top presentations. Each vendor’s table is the same size and provided free of charge. Any money made by those who sell things is kept entirely by the individual, group or business.

The Old Essex Street Market buildings were built in the 1930s under the administration of Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. While one of the market buildings on Essex Street remains active as an actual marketplace, the Old Market building that is hosting Living as Form is managed by the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC). NYCEDC rents the raw building space for film shoots, events, and other temporary functions.

MARKET temporarily restores the Old Essex Street Market building at the southeast corner of Delancey and Essex Streets to its original function as a marketplace and publicly shared space. MARKET is free to use and non-competitive and particularly diverse in its offerings.

This publication functions in part as a directory to the people and organizations and their missions that can be consulted long after the exhibition ends. It is a snapshot of active organizations and people working on the Lower East Side in the Fall of 2011.

MARKET champions the values of decency, compassion, working on a small scale, empowerment, and non-exploitative relationships with other people. Among the concerns we wish to highlight are creativity and self-representation, human relationships to the built and natural environment, social and spatial justice, and ethical economic practices. MARKET is, in part, a response to the ongoing national and global economic and social crisis and its devastating impacts on the economy, ecology, and on vulnerable populations.

INSPIRATION

A project that has particularly inspired us over the years is Ask Me! – an event series organized by the now dormant Chicago-based group Chicago County Fair. The group’s members during this project were Laurie Jo Reynolds, Scott McFarland, Kyle Harris and Robin Cline.

Each Ask Me! event consisted of a large room filled with separate booths whose design was inspired by the character Lucy van Pelt’s “Psychiatric Advice” booth that appeared in the comic Peanuts. At each Ask Me! event, numerous self-proclaimed experts on a variety of subjects would appear in person to provide information and conversation for attendees. In a 2003 article by Cara Jepsen in the Chicago Reader, Laurie Jo Reynolds explained,

Every one of us is an expert in some way and is curious in some way … But it takes some kind of interface to fulfill those needs. It seems like such a radical act to talk to a stranger. There’s no place to have a conversation like that. That’s why we love booths – they make that act possible in a lot of different contexts.

In addition to providing a sign at each booth indicating each person’s area of expertise, there were lists of sample questions to help break the ice.

A member of our group was able to see Ask Me! at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2003, as well as a later version of the event at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry. The Cultural Center event included sixteen booths with an astounding range of topics. There were experts on Iraq, a supermax prison (represented by family members of men who were incarcerated at the Tamms Correctional Center in Illinois), and the Stone Mountain Confederate monument. The member of our group that attended stayed for over two hours. However, he had such intense conversations that he was only able to consult four experts. Among those were a speech pathologist who conducted an informal voice analysis accompanied by anatomical diagrams, a six-year-old Yu-Gi-Oh! and Power Rangers expert (whose attention also drifted to dinosaurs), and an expert on televised rock and soul music performances aired before the age of MTV and YouTube (who sifted through stacks of VHS tapes to fulfill requests). One minute you could be learning about quantum physics, and the the next, you could be watching Sly and the Family Stone on the Ed Sullivan Show.

A number of elements made Ask Me! an extraordinary experience. For one, it was free to attend. One could easily spend an entire day learning in one on one or small group situations from an enthusiastic and knowledgeable person that would happily indulge your most naive questions. The people at each booth were friendly, patient, and generous. The range of participants, who represented a broad racial, ethnic, and generational spectrum was uncommonly diverse for an artist-organized event. It appeared that Chicago County Fair didn’t just ask their friends to participate. They asked the parents of their friends, or their own parents, or their friends’ children. The organizational structure, with its system of booths and the participants’ use of props, photos, diagrams and other learning aids created many points of access. The project begged the question: why can’t more exhibitions and events be this interesting?!

Ask Me! recognized that everyone has some area of specialized knowledge that they could share informally if they were given a creative framework to do so. The art of the project was sited in the creative organizing structure, which was certainly unlike any information fair that we have ever been to. While static informational displays can be great, objects, images and facts become so much more compelling when they are animated by the live presence of an individual that can illuminate unnoticed details, or answer follow up questions about information that lies below the surface.

ORGANIZING PROJECTS WITH MANY PARTICIPANTS

MARKET expands an approach to exhibition and project organizing that Temporary Services has been employing since the group began in Chicago in 1998. It has been common in our practice to make projects where we devise a creative structure that then provides a platform or opportunity for others to participate and enrich the larger endeavor with their collective concerns.

Most often we do this by taking a preexisting infrastructure and opening it up to others who likely would not have been invited, and sometimes do not normally participate in art exhibitions or art projects. To find participants, we follow our own interests, engage our preexisting social networks, and enlist the help of others in a community who may share our values or have a deep commitment and investment in these practices and histories. We follow up on suggestions and aim to create a diverse and compelling array of participation, often with clashing ideas and aesthetic concerns. At times the other participants already know and feel a kinship with one another. Others meet for the first time through their participation in our project.

We have spent many hours at book and information fairs. Who you sit next to can make or break the experience. Most often, it is rewarding to have an extended period of time to talk with fellow “tablers.” We have designed the stalls of MARKET so that they sit in a semi-circular fashion that projects outwards. It puts the people behind the booths closer to one another. It is our hope that this will make it easier for many conversations to happen across practices, concerns, and initiatives.

The creation of a newspaper or booklet gives the participants a free space to present their work and ideas in a format that will outlast the event or exhibit it was created for, using a medium that can reach many additional readers that did not attend the project.

CREATED OR BORROWED INFRASTRUCTURE

With MARKET, we designed an enveloping structure (six market stalls) for groups and individuals to present their work. Previous projects have borrowed existing infrastructure with less original construction or modification.

In January, 2010, Gallery 400 at University of Illinois at Chicago invited Temporary Services to present our project ART WORK: A National Conversation About Art, Labor, and Economics. ART WORK is a newspaper with a national selection of over fifty contributing writers and artists that focused on how artists, art students, and arts professionals are coping with the miserable economic climate we are living through and how we can build different, more ethical arts infrastructures for the future. Exhibitions and distributions of the free newspaper were usually accompanied by additional discussions, lectures and events.

For the exhibition at Gallery 400, we organized a two day event titled FAIR that presented the work of twenty-four different local makers and self-publishers. Borrowing an empty lecture room at University of Illinois at Chicago and a large number of tables and chairs from throughout the building, we staged a two day information, social, and sales event, complimented by a string of short presentations by many of the artists and groups that were tabling their wares. Because we already had a space to use through the ART WORK exhibition, and because everything we needed to organize FAIR was already available on site (gallery staff, tables, chairs, and the gallery’s PR network for getting the word out), there were few additional organizing costs and the two day event came together quite easily. We did not charge the participants anything to take part in FAIR and they were allowed to keep all of the money that they made. In addition to giving publishers and artists a space to circulate their materials (which many bookstores will not sell), FAIR gave people a space to talk about what they do. It gave young practitioners an opportunity to work on their public speaking skills; some of the short lectures were the first time participants had spoken about their work to a public audience.

Temporary Services maintains a publishing imprint and webstore, Half Letter Press, and we participated in FAIR as well. We could have organized a book selling event for only ourselves, but this surely would not have drawn nearly as many people or been as effective at creating an event that other publishers could cross-promote and attract their audiences to.

It is our hope that others will organize events like FAIR in the future when they have temporary access to free exhibition space and resources that could be commandeered for events that help a larger community. A rotating series of events like this would be a great boon for other small business operators who do not have their own retail spaces and cannot always afford to participate in larger, pay to play, commercial situations. They cannot always afford to sell their work through other distributors who take 40-50% of their proceeds when they acquire their items at wholesale. Events like FAIR also connect publishers and producers to their audience – an all too rare experience in the art world.

PREVIOUS PROJECTS THAT CREATE PLATFORMS FROM NEW OR EXISTING INFRASTRUCTURE

It has been an ongoing theme of Temporary Services’ work to create projects that function as an opportunity to initiate relationships with people we do not know, as well as to build on preexisting relationships. Often when institutions invite our group to have an exhibition, we will include these projects with multiple participants. This creates exhibition opportunities for people who might never have been invited to work with the institution that invited us. Bringing others into exhibitions makes these venues more inclusive and less able to control every detail of what happens. Authorship is complicated as well, because these participants do not join Temporary Services when they take part in our projects. They retain their own authorship and crediting within the structure we create for them to participate, which sometimes turns what would have been a “solo exhibition” into a show that now has twenty or more people on board.

One of the many advantages of including others in invitations is that each invitee has their own audiences who may not overlap with those who care about what we do. Additionally, when we are not working in a familiar city, we can invite participants who are far more sensitive to local issues than we are, and we learn a great deal through our interactions with local participants.

Another obvious benefit is that by reaching out to creative people outside the group, we can work together to create a more layered and complex project with multiple – sometimes contradictory – points of view, thematic concerns, presentation styles, and aesthetics.

One recent example of this is our project Designated Drivers that we launched in 2011 during an exhibition titled Social Mobility at the Mary & Leigh Block Museum of Art on the campus of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

For Designated Drivers, we invited an international selection of twenty people and groups to each fill one four-gigabyte USB flash drive with material of their choosing. These drives were then presented in the exhibition space, attached to wall-mounted retractable laundry lines. Visitors could load their own drives or laptops (or use a host computer and CDrs or DVDrs) with any of the material they would like from each of the flash drives.

The drives include images, films, audio, programs, and many publications worth of writing and graphic design. File types include: MP3, JPEG, PNG, AIFF, TIFF, PSD, DOC, PPT, MPEG, PDF, AVI, GIF, and more. There is a mountain of material – often at higher resolution than is commonly seen on a personal website, and in many cases material that is not duplicated online at all. Some participants used this opportunity to present a few recent projects with great depth, while others have chosen to survey their entire creative output over more than a decade.

ANTICIPATION

We’ve written this essay to provide some background into MARKET, to discuss a project by another group that continues to inspire us, and to describe some precedents from our own work. But it is still August and MARKET hasn’t happened yet. It’s over a month away. We can plot and scheme, review past efforts and seek advice from locals on the ground on the Lower East Side, but ultimately the project is an experiment that will take place in the future. Will great conversations happen at a series of booths embedded in the middle of a dense exhibition? Will people shy away from human interaction in favor of looking silently at photos and didactic materials? Will the invitees that sell things make any money? Will the activist groups gain participants to help them with their struggles? Will new relationships form between the participants after they stand alongside each other for eight hours a day? Who will attend the exhibition and what will they take from it?

We would like to hear about your experiences of MARKET. Would you be willing to take a minute to write us about your encounters with the project and its participants? We’d love to hear from you. Contact: servers@temporaryservices.org

Thursday, September 22 (6-8 PM)

— Allied Productions, Inc.
— Bluestockings
— Half Letter Press / Temporary Services
— Lower East Side History Project
— Alan Moore
— Damon Rich

Friday, September 23 (7-9 PM)

— ABC No Rio
— Allied Productions, Inc.
— Bluestockings
— Half Letter Press / Temporary Services
— Save The Essex Street Market
— Gregory Sholette

Saturday, September 24 (10 AM – 10 PM)

— ABC No Rio
— Alan Moore
— Bluestockings
— Half Letter Press / Temporary Services
— Save The Essex Street Market
— Gregory Sholette

Sunday, September 25 (12-8 PM)

— ABC No Rio
— Jim’s Pepper Roaster
— Alan Moore
— Picture The Homeless
— Save The Essex Street Market
— Gregory Sholette

Thursday, September 29 (12-8 PM)

— Howl Festival
— Lower East Side History Project
— Time’s Up!
— TBA
— TBA
— TBA

Friday, September 30 (12-8 PM)

— Downtown Community Television Center
— GOLES (Good Old Lower East Side)
— More Gardens
— Picture The Homeless
— Reverend Jen’s Lower East Side Troll Museum
— Time’s Up!

Saturday, October 1 (12-8 PM)

— Bowery Boogie
— Picture The Homeless
— Reverend Jen’s Lower East Side Troll Museum
— Street Vendor Project
— Thin Air Video Poetry DVD Archives
— Tzadik / Chippy Design

Sunday, October 2 (12-8 PM)

— Bullet Space
— Cake Shop
— The Lower Eastside Girls Club
— Reverend Jen’s Lower East Side Troll Museum
— Thin Air Video Poetry DVD Archives
— Anton van Dalen

Thursday, October 6 (12-8 PM)

— Alphabet City Acupuncture
— GOLES (Good Old Lower East Side)
— Lower East Side History Project
— Lower East Side Peoples’ Federal Credit Union
— Rev Billy & the Church of Earthalujah! (4-8 PM Only)
— TBA

Friday, October 7 (12-8 PM)

— Allied Productions, Inc.
— Dias y Flores Community Garden
— Downtown Community Television Center
— Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani / Buscada
— Lower East Side Peoples’ Federal Credit Union
— Millenium Film Workshop

Saturday, October 8 (12-8 PM)

— Allied Productions, Inc.
— Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani / Buscada
— Fly
— Lower East Side Print Shop
— Street Vendor Project
— Tzadik / Chippy Design

Sunday, October 9 (12-8 PM)

— Yevgeniy Fiks
— Fly
— Lower East Side Print Shop
— Millenium Film Workshop
— Skin By Kyra
— World War 3 Illustrated

Thursday, October 13 (12-8 PM)

— Alphabet City Acupuncture
— Local Spokes
— The Lower East Side Squatter-Homesteader Archive Project
— TBA
— TBA
— TBA

Friday, October 14 (12-8 PM)

— The Artists Alliance / Alianza de Artistas INC. / Cuchifritos Gallery
— Downtown Community Television Center
— Living Theatre
— Lower East Side Ecology Center
— The Lower East Side Squatter-Homesteader Archive Project
— TBA

Saturday, October 15 (12-8 PM)

— The Artists Alliance / Alianza de Artistas INC. / Cuchifritos Gallery
— Hester Street Collaborative & the Waterfront on Wheels
— Living Theatre
— Lower East Side Ecology Center
— Time’s Up!
— Tzadik

Sunday, October 16 (12-8 PM)

— The Artists Alliance / Alianza de Artistas INC. / Cuchifritos Gallery
— Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani / Buscada
— Dias y Flores Community Garden
— Living Theatre
— Lower East Side Ecology Center
— Place Matters

Here is the newspaper we made for MARKET. Click on the image above to view the entire paper in your browser. If you would like to download the paper, click on the links below. Paper copies are free to visitors to Living As Form.

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