creating cultural commons

Rick Prelinger is best known as the founder of the Prelinger Archives, a collection of thousands of ad-
vertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films available for public use, a portion of which are accessible online for free viewing, downloading, and remixing. A writer, filmmaker, and longtime advocate for the public domain, Prelinger was invited by artist collectiveFuturefarmers to give a talk on the commons for the core participants of A People Without a Voice Cannot Be Heard, “a temporary, free school using the ‘voice’ as a theme to guide workshops and public events that explore methods to amplify, coordinate and channel our individual and collective voice.” He spoke at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis as part of its Open Field experiment in creative co-creation in a public space.

During Prelinger’s visit, Sarah Schultz and Sarah Peters posed these questions about the relationship between commons and museums, and the complications of institutional forays into social practice. This is reprinted from the new book Open Field: Conversations on the Commons, an absorbing collection from many authors exploring issues of the arts, the commons, public space and community co-creation.

What can the model of a commons offer an art institution?

Open Field offers us an unusual opportunity — to throw light on, and perhaps even to resolve for a time — the contentious and vexing relationship between what we think of as “art” and what we call “craft,” “social practice,” “maker culture” and yes, “political activity.”

As civic actors, artists have been notoriously unsuccessful at causing social change on a macro level. While we’ve collectively helped to construct one of the most culturally exciting periods in recent history, we’ve had no success halting militarism, reversing accelerating economic inequalities, or grafting our values and ideas onto a working political framework. I believe we’ve experienced these chronic failures traumatically, and we’ve adapted by reconfiguring our senses of ourselves and our work to focus on smaller, more autonomous, and more achievable outcomes.

Open Field could certainly evolve into a bona fide commons, or at least as much of a commons as can exist within current society, but an authentic commons is not a temporary affair. Building a place where tools, ideas, and projects are shared and money wields no power is a profoundly urgent and exciting experiment, but its success would require that we redefine what we do as artists. We’d have to move beyond a demonstrative mindset and into a productive mode, and to build a more permanent presence geared to supplying goods and services, tangible and intangible, that society doesn’t currently provide. We might have to chip away at the “visiting artist” paradigm as well, because residency, longevity, and accountability are greater enablers of community. Finally, it might make sense to try to redefine privilege as an outgrowth of participation in the community, rather than individual reputation, and find new ways to distribute agency, control, and attribution.

I’m not arguing for an end to art or for self-effacement on the part of artists. Rather, I imagine the commons as a space where art practice can find new meaning as it addresses deeply intractable and unsolved dilemmas. Not a single year’s crop, but a field with many harvests.

Is the word “commons” a useful term? Is this concept effective for creating real change?

As the term “commons” works its way into everyday speech, it runs the risk of being appropriated to describe arrangements and schemes that have little to do with collective ownership (non-ownership!) or shared resources. If the word goes the way of “organic” and “sustainable,” we’ll have an issue unless we work hard to let our practice lead our language, rather than the opposite.

How do you make the commons essential rather than a choice? How do you virally build sharing into something so that it can’t be taken away?

Building sharing, interdependence, and non-ownership into a good, a practice, or a place is a most difficult problem. Schemes such as the General Public License (GPL) and the Creative Commons (CC) license make it possible to irrevocably build sharing into the core of an intangible good such as software or digital content, but few working schemes exist for tangible goods. As artist Amy Balkin points out: in her piece This is the Public Domain, our current legal regime requires that all real property have a distinct owner. We might be able to stretch intangible licensing models into the tangible world, but doing so on a voluntary basis falls far short of permanently viralizing non-owned status.

http://onthecommons.org/magazine/what-can-artists-do-create-social-change