A B.A.D SOCIAL CLUB - Organizing, Curating, and Installing

A B.A.D Social Club: the result of more than two months of intense planning, organizing, and preparing so that all 18 of the fine arts exchange students at Willem de Kooning could put on a group exhibition. It began with Sean, an Irish exchange student and studio friend, emailing a bunch of galleries and organizations looking for a cheap or free space for students to show work, and he heard back from a place called Stichting B.a.d, a non-profit arts organization in the south of Rotterdam. B.a.d used to be a squat, and now artists live and work there cheaply and occasionally there are art events and exhibitions in their main hall. Sean and a Finnish girl Maria were leaving the studio one day a few months ago to go look at the space and I tagged along to see what it would be like. We talked to Kamiel, who runs B.a.d and who gave us a lot of helpful information about when, where and how we could show work, giving an approximate exhibition date and some expectations for another meeting. We spent the rest of the day exploring the surrounding neighborhood called Charlois, and many other arts organizations and galleries found there. It seemed we had somewhat unintentionally become the three organizers of this foggy idea of an exhibition, but we decided that we were all on board as a team,  and agreed to be as deliberate and clear as possible about planning everything and organizing the other 15 people in our fine arts exchange group. We went to a cafe and sat for hours taking notes on everything that had to be done logistically, worked through ideas for themes, trying to find a central thread to tie all the works together, and planned how we would present our ideas to the group the next week. By the end of the night we were exhausted but excited and hopeful with the idea of independently putting on an exhibition in Rotterdam, particularly such a large one. Our biggest concerns from the start were to make the show accessible and to keep it aware of its location in the south of Rotterdam, as a marginalized neighborhood that has been red-taped by the government and city planners and where many minority communities live. We were also intent on not putting on a typical student exhibition with 18 unrelated works in a white cube with our names on a piece of paper- we all find this incredibly boring and we had no interest in continuing in the usual fashion.

We spent the next month or two meeting with our group of 18 and as a group of organizers every week or so. Some more people volunteered for responsibilities- Jen was treasurer and in charge of fundraising, a mediator between us and Hogeschool Rotterdam who was giving us funding, Otto agreed to make the poster and flyers, and Beatrice joined me in curating the exhibition. "Curating" was a word I had only briefly used in quotations during our first little meeting of three when I agreed to be in charge of figuring out a central theme for the exhibition and do whatever writing work that had to be done. Of course I should have known better that by agreeing to that, curating was exactly what I was doing, especially as Beatrice and I made the exhibition itself more and more into its own concept: a kind of campy, kitsch, playful environment modeled after a combined social club, childrens' birthday party, and community center that we would eventually dub a B.A.D Social Club.

Curating: Fumbling and Experimenting

The original goal we had set as a group of organizers was for me and Beatrice to come up with three themes or commonalities amongst the exhibition group, around which we would organize a shedule of events during our three day long exhibition. In order to do this we decided to talk individually with each member of the group, asking them one very open question: What do you give? Originally we were going to ask each person about their artistic practice, but we changed the question to make it more general and less art-specific, so that in theory we could ask the question to any person. I talked to almost everyone, and when I did I told them the question, I let them know I was recording their voice, and told them I would not speak but only listen, and they could speak to me for however long they wanted about whatever came to mind. This question and format were a bit broad and uncomfortable for some, so most people spoke about what they make and think about artistically, but I assured everyone that it was ok to stumble and ramble and say "um" and that this was what made the exercise so incredibly interesting. I modeled it after active listening, something I'd practiced before in other communities, and I loved being able to hear each person speak without interruption and listen to where their brain took them. The recordings ended up being fascinating and highly personal artifacts, a work of art in themselves as unique statements made by artists in the moment, and they seemed to hold so much more truth and life than any careful, calculated written artist statement.

Beatrice and I had wanted to use the recordings to compile everyone's thoughts and organize them into whatever themes we found most prevalent, a way to extract a content for exhibition from the group rather than impose it top-down. After much mental struggling and discussion we came up with two common themes: action and reaction as an artistic process. We observed that some of us make work as a reaction to what we see in the world, processing it through drawings or paintings or video, and some of us make work as an action meant to have an impact in the world, in the form of images, zines, performances and sculptures. We presented this dichotomy to the exhibition group and told everyone which group we thought each person tended towards, stressing that everyone can choose and there was also room for changing the themes or adding to them. People seemed to like the idea enough, though we had not been able to interview everyone and sometimes the language barrier made explaining difficult. We decided to go forward with this theme for the exhibition and then had a few weeks break from planning due to the Verbeke trip, Easter and spring break.

Once we came back however, much of the group seemed a lot more confused and divided on the theme and what was expected of them. We met with our group critique teacher Juan, who had heard bits and pieces about the exhibition from students, and he pushed us to be more specific about the theme, what we were asking from the artists, and what the show would be "about". I stressed the fact that we still had not planned any of the events, which would be an integral part of the content of the exhibition, and the group of organizers decided to meet again to rethink our ideas. Sean, Maria, Beatrice and I talked for hours, joined by Otto and Philip, deciding to take everything back to the beginning, scrap "Action vs. Reaction", and brainstorming ways to make a show engaging, accessible, playful and interesting for all kinds of people while still being able to incorporate all the artworks in a way that made sense. Somehow, in a very roundabout way that I find hard to remember, we reached the idea of making the exhibition into a fictional social club. Lots of couches, a shared meal, music and dancing, discussions and games, kitschy colorful decorations, and creating a space where the work could be exhibited in a playful way, almost decoratively, so that no particular commonalities had to be drawn between any of them and they could be installed as one with the hangout space. We named it a B.A.D Social Club after Stichting B.a.d. and to play on the idea of the building originally being a public bath- a meeting place for the local community. By the end of the meeting we were again exhausted but even more excited about our renewed idea.

This new idea was more difficult to explain to the group as it was dependent on the specific social phenomenon of community clubs that are familiar to some and not others, and having a socially-engaged, non-traditional exhibition was out of the comfort zone of some students coming from a more traditional, white cube education at home. We were careful to get personal feedback from each member of the group, finding that everyone was on board, some people more comfortable than others but everyone excited about doing something new and different. We then had one month to make and distribute posters and flyers, publicize the exhibition online, organize food and drink, apply for funding from Hogeschool Rotterdam and Willem de Kooning, plan where and how to install the works, and most importantly come up with a schedule of events for the weekend. As soon as I came back from my trip to Berlin I was hard at work helping with all of these things and working closely with Beatrice and Sean to make sure all the artwork was being made on time, everyone had everything they needed to install, and everyone was on the same page for what would actually happen during the exhibition. We planned Friday night as our opening party and shared meal, Saturday as a day to discuss city planning, go on Otto's art walk out in the neighborhood and use a bowl full of questions to start other discussions in the living room area, and Sunday would be a big, informal and public group critique. We had also asked Otto to make a zine in place of the usual sheet of paper with names, titles of works and artist statements- instead the zine would have a simple, sometimes humorous drawing of each work with the artist's name and a question posed by the artist to the viewer. People could walk around trying to match each drawing in the zine to the works they see and answering the questions if they chose, adding an interactive and playful element to the exhibition. In the end the zines weren't published in time and Otto decided he didn't want them shown, but I thought it was a brilliant idea anyway.

Our very pretty and color-coded exhibition layout plan

Installation

Before the week of the show I was nervous that I would spend that week pulling my hair out, that some people wouldn't turn work in on time or the space wouldn't be big enough or no one would show up to help- I should never have worried. I was working with the best group I could have wished for, all the work was finished on time to be installed (except poor Otto going crazy trying to finish his work and the zines), everyone showed up on Thursday morning to move furniture, clean and install, Tea and Clare had more than enough help cooking, and everything was finished on Friday with time to spare. The space looked better than I could have imagined, it was the perfect amount of work for the size of the hall and outside garden, and we were able to borrow some really great retro furniture from B.a.d. to make the space really cozy. Once we were finished it looked like a proper living room, and even the residents of B.a.d. were happy with how inviting it looked.

Timelapse Video of Installation

The Living Room

Sean installing his sculpture, which was christened Otto.

Decor gals

We left sketchbooks around to draw in

Jess doing some inviting sidewalk chalk drawings

The Question Bowl, by Maggie and Beatrice

Tea Andreoletti, Bologna, Italy

Tea Andreoletti

Mair Cook, Falmouth, England, pre-performance

Jessica Young, London, England

A sign with instructions for Otto's neighborhood art walk, with maps on flyers below

Francesco Dipierro, Milan, Italy

Francesco Dipierro

Milos Stevic, Linz, Austria / Serbia

Milos Stevic

Maria Kokkonen, Turku, Finland

Marina Garner, Calgary, Canada

Alex Hamlin, Sydney, Australia

Serden Salman, Turkey

Clare Lowden, Bristol, England

Jen Nguyen, New York, USA

Otto Stoneman, Bristol, England / Galway, Ireland

Philip Weiss-Tornes, Sydney, Australia / Norway

Sean Grimes, Dublin, Ireland

Berkay Yahya, Turkey

Nateish Wilman, Calgary, Canada

One of the things weighing on my mind pre-installation was what I was going to do with my own work. I had spent almost all semester spinning raw wool and knitting it into pieces approximately one foot square, and attaching a small piece to a mug like a cozy similar to the large rug piece Tea Cozy I had made my second year. I felt like I had very little to show for a lot of work, understandable due to the time-intensive nature of crafting, and so I had to drop ideas I'd had like wrapping trees in knitting, covering the treehouse in the garden, or covering several chairs. Instead I took one light blue wooden chair from B.a.d. and covered as much of it as I could with the dark brown knitting, dotted with bits of hay and smelling strongly like farm and lanolin and very oily to the touch. I found a rickety wooden side table and a retro-looking lamp and placed them within the living room arrangement with the wooly chair at the table. On the table next to the lamp was the mug with a woolen cozy, in addition to two small books I had made during the semester. One was called "A House For Love", a palm-sized book with watercolor drawings paired with short bits of repetitive text opposite, and the other was called "A Little Book of Fun & Games & Radical Intentions", a notebook with a compilation of games, activities and exercises I had learned at camp and in other communities with helpful explanations and illustrations. I had never formally critiqued either the knitting or the books, and so I really had no idea what exactly I had made until I put it all together in the context of the exhibition, and I had not originally meant to put the books with the knitting until I made a gut decision while installing. When finished installing I still did not know what exactly I had done or why I had done it, but I left it, giving it up to the exhibition and the people interacting with it to find out its meaning in context.

Inside "A House For Love"