Bryce in Ernest

8/2/2019 Bryce in Ernest

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is an initiative of commonthread.it which focuses

on the research of contemporary curators and art-thinkers.authors will be invited to reason backwards around

a specic project they have done, declaring which books

have inuenced it, in the form of a bibliography.

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Born 1977, based in Beograd, Serbia. Art historian, critic

and curator based in Belgrade (Serbia). Member of IKT International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art.

BA in Art History at the University of Belgrade, Faculty of

Humanities (Art History Department, 2003). MA in Cultural

Policy and Cultural Management at the University of Arts

in Belgrade (UNESCO Program, 2005); MA Thesis (Status

of Curatorial Practices in the Post-Socialist Condition)

under the supervision of Prof. Misko Suvakovic, University

of Arts Belgrade, 2005. Since 2001 active in various

international programs (Artists Space Gallery, New York;

Guggenheim Collection, Venice; SKC Gallery, Belgrade).

His research interests range from interdisciplinary analyses

of contemporary visual arts, the politics of education, and

curatorial studies to art theory, and political, social and

economic aspects of aesthetic discourses. He has been

curating projects and exhibitions in Serbia and abroad,

among which Splav Meduze (upcoming); Never Means

Nothing; Contrasted Working World (CWW); Art as

Option for Action; Private Dancers; A Life Less Glamorous;

Dis-Economy of Life; Beograd nekad i sad; Micropol. He

has participated in numerous international curatorial

programs (South Korea, Spain, Armenia, Italy, Germany, The

Netherlands) and has been lecturing in Egypt, France, Italy,

Austria, Belgium, Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia, Hungary,

Romania, Switzerland, Turkey, Portugal.


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)*&%"*%+,

I cant remember who rst jokingly told Abby and

me that we were the Earnesty Patrol. Earnesty

isnt a real word. Earnesty Patrol is oxymoronic

why should earnestness need enforcing? Isnt it

one of those qualities in people that just comes

naturally? Earnestness needs both coaxing and di-

scouraging. It can appear both routinely and with

tremendous diculty. I cant convince you that

earnesty is a real word (it isnt). But I might try to

prove that Earnesty Patrol is more of a fruitful pa-

radox than an oxymoron.

Abby (Satinsky) and I, along with three other fol-

ks (Matthew Joynt, Roman Petruniak, and our late

friend Ben Schaafsma), have worked together for

ve years as InCUBATE, an informal research group

focused on exploring new approaches to arts ad-

ministration and funding. In addition to organi-zing exhibitions and writing together, we ran free

public events and a residency program out of a


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storefront in Chicago. The most visible and endu-

ring project created during that time was Sunday

Soup. One Sunday a month we would organize abrunch meal. People paid ten dollars to eat. The

prot became a grant. Everyone who came to eat

looked at proposals we had collected and voted on

the creative project (it wasnt limited solely to art

projects) they wanted to receive the money. After

three years, wed given away somewhere around4000 dollars. This model of funding, not much

dierent from church bake sales or Boy Scout spa-

ghetti dinners infused with the spice of democra-

cy, has since been taken up by organizers in over

forty cities around the worldfrom Santa Fe to

Kiev and Toronto to Tampa Bay.

Sunday Soup brought us into direct contact with

artists whose work, whether they care for the term

or not, is often described as social practice. The ori-

ginal Earnesty Patrol joke was made in reference

to the social practice art world, where earnestness

is stock-in-trade. See, for example, the titles of a few

projects from 2011s Open Engagement Conferen-

ce, organized annually by Portland State Universi-

tys Social Practice MFA concentration: Food Cart

Work Songs, Temporary Library of Sentimental

Objects, The Cake and Eat it Collective. Countless

critical texts have arraigned social practice, its ear-nest dimension proving a juicy target. Ive cringed

over this sort of work plenty of timesearnestness


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can obscure poor planning, failed outcomes, and

even the artists own ignorance of his or her con-

textbut I dont think that means it should auto-matically invalidate the work. When the Earnesty

Patrol joke was made, I didnt understand which

side of that ghtsincere or skepticalthe joke-

teller assumed I was patrolling.

The truth is I cant pick a side. Choosing one clo-

ses down too many possibilities. For now I under-

stand Earnesty Patrol to mean evaluating both

my own and others work in two ways: honestly

allowing earnestness to play out on its own termsand maintaining a clear eye about the trappings of

sincere conviction itself. Sincerity is only valuable

so long as its main conviction is that convictions

themselves can change; living might bring expe-

riences that force us to hop nimbly between our

convictions like rocks in a stream.

The texts Ive listed here are my rocks. Against char-

ges of relativism, all Ill say is that as I perched on

each rockdevoured each textI felt it no less

solid than the one before. That doesnt mean Id

jump back to every rock Ive been on, but it does

mean that their order in the stream and my owncourse among them led me to the spot Im in now

and help me decide where Ill leap next. Only re-


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and help me decide where Ill leap next. Only re-

cently have I opened myself to reading earnestly

and to believing that, immediately obvious or not,all of the texts that pass across my desk are con-

nected. Gardening, English grammar, rock music,

Florida history, political theory, homesteading,

comedy, art, Monterey (California), philosophy,

and baseball. A book read for pleasure might just

as easily serve me in a professional capacity as abook read in school. If theres one thing I hope this

list imparts, its that texts relate to a world much

larger than any one persons reading list or any one

persons discipline. Take the below quote from Carl

Wilson for example. It comes from Lets Talk About

Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, his book aboutCeline Dion and Wilsons struggle to understand

his own taste and that of others.

This is what I mean by democracynot a limp

open-mindedness, but actively grappling with

people and things not like me, which brings with it

the perilous question of what I am like. Democracy,

that dangerous, paradoxical and mostly unattem-

pted ideal, sees that the self is insucient, depen-

dent for denition on otherness, and chooses not

only to accept that but to celebrate it, to stake eve-

rything on it. Through democracy, which demands

we meet strangers as equals, we perhaps becomeless strangers to ourselves.

Bryce Dwyer, Chicago, 2011


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-&.%"+/*-0&!)!0)/1"-.2#

Jane Addams, 1910, Twenty Years at Hull House, (New York:

Penguin, 1998).

David Allen, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Pro-

ductivity, (New York: Penguin, 2002).

Art and Social Practice MFA concentration at Portland State

University, Open Engagement Conference, 2007, 2010,

and 2011, .

Gregory Bateson, 1972, Steps to an Ecology of Mind, (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2000).

Jim Bouton, 1970, Ball Four, (New York: Macmillan, 1990).

Stewart Brand, ed., The Whole Earth Catalog, 1968-72, .

Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millenium, (New York:

Vintage, 1988).

Michel de Certeau, trans. Steven Rendall, The Practice of

Everyday Life Volume One, (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1984).


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Creative Time, The Creative Time Summit, 2009, 2010, and

2011, .

John Dewey, 1934, Art as Experience, (New York: Capricorn

Books, 1958).

John Dewey, 1925, Experience and Nature, (New York: Dover,

1958).

Umberto Eco, 1965, trans. Ellen Esrock, The Aesthetics of Cha-

osmos: The Middle Ages of James Joyce, (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1989).

Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration

for the State of Florida, Florida: A Guide to the Southernmost

State, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939).

Benjamin Franklin, 1791, The Autobiography of Benjamin

Franklin, (New York: Dover, 1996).

Dolly Freed, 1978, Possum Living: How to Live Well Without

a Job and With (Almost) No Money, (Portland, OR: Tin House,

2010).

Bryan Garner, 1998, Garners Modern American Usage, Third


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Edition, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

Shannon Hayes, Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domestici-

ty from a Consumer Culture, (Richmondville, NY: Left to Write

Press, 2010).

Pablo Helguera, Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Mate-

rials and Techniques Handbook, (New York: Jorge Pinto, 2011).

William James, Diary from April 30, 1870, The Writings of Wil-

liam James, (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1977): 7-8.

William James, 1907, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old

Ways of Thinking, (New York: Dover, 1995).

Thomas Jeerson, Thomas Jeersons Garden Book: 1766-1824, (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society,

1944).

Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, JeKelly,

ed., (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

Noreen Malone, The Kids Are Actually Sort of Alright: Myscrewed, coddled, self-absorbed, mocked, surprisingly resi-

lient generation, New York,


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< h t t p : / / n y m a g . c o m / n e w s / f e a t u r e s / m y - g e n e r a -

tion-2011-10/>.

Merlin Mann, Cranking, 43 Folders, April 22, 2011,

.

Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Cen-

tury, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club, (New York: Farrar,

Strauss and Giroux, 2002).

John Muir, How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive: A Manual of

Step-By-Step Procedures for the Compleat Idiot, (Emeryville,

CA: Avalon Travel Publishing, 1969).

John Muir, 1973, The Velvet Monkey Wrench, (Sante Fe, NM:

John Muir Publications, 1980).

Eileen Myles, Inferno: A Poets Novel, (New York: OR Books,

2010).

Charles Sanders Peirce, 1868. Some Consequences of Four In-capacities, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, (New York: Dover,

1955).


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David Robbins, Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History of

Twentieth-Century Comedy, (Copenhagen: Pork Salad Press,

2011).

Yuriko Saito, Everyday Aesthetics, (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2007).

Ben Schaafsma, 2005-8, The Center for Working Things Out,

.

Richard Shusterman, 1992, Pragmatist Aesthetics, (Lanham,

MD: Rowman & Littleeld, 2000).

Kurt Spellmeyer, Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities

for the Twenty-First Century, (Albany, NY: State University

of New York Press, 2003).

John Steinbeck, Cannery Row, (New York: Viking, 1945).

Randall Szott, LeisureArts, .

Temporary Services, Self-Reliance Library, (Chicago: Half-Let-

ter Press, 2010).

Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835, Democracy in America, (New York:


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Penguin, 2003).

John Hodgman and Jesse Thorn, Ob-Law-Di, Ob-Law-Da,

The Judge John Hodgman Podcast, June 23, 2011. .

Ian Peel, The Unknown Paul McCartney: McCartney and the

Avant-Garde, (London: Reynolds & Hearn, 2002).

Agnes Varda, dir., The Gleaners and I, (Paris: Cin Tamaris,

2000).

David Foster Wallace, Authority and American Usage, in

Consider the Lobster, (New York: Little, Brown and Company,

2006): 66-127.

Cornel West, 1994, Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in

America, (New York: Routledge, 2008).

Eliot Wiggington, ed., The Foxre Book, Garden City, (New

York: Anchor, 1972).

Carl Wilson, Lets Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Ta-

ste, (New York: Continuum, 2008).


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Bryce in Ernest

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