Glasstire Hacked! CAMH Artist’s Guerilla Post!

by Bill Davenport August 22, 2014

At 9:22 a.m. on Friday, August 22, Houston artist and Glasstire contributor Carrie Marie Schneider used her access to Glasstire’s website to insert a guerilla article.

Titled “Right Here, Right Now: Houston, Hearing from CAMH’s Director” the post’s quotes were drawn from early 70s articles about then-CAMH-director Sebastian “Lefty” Adler, rather than Bill Arning, the CAMH’s current director. Schneider had no further comment.

Schneider, along with Houston artists Nathaniel Donnett and Debra Barrera is featured Right Here, Right Now: Houston at the CAMH, opening tonight from 6:30-9 p.m.

Glasstire publisher Rainey Knudson said of the incursion: “I think it’s funny. This is exactly what artists are supposed to do,” after cancelling Schneider’s site access.

The full text of the rogue post is here:

Right Here, Right Now: Houston, Hearing from CAMH’s Director

By Carrie Marie Schneider

Today the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston opens with a show entitled “Right Here, Right Now: Houston” featuring the work of local artists. In anticipation of this exhibition, and concurrent with the institution’s 65th anniversary season, I sat down with the Director of the CAMH to learn more.

 CAMH ceiling grid

Why did the CAMH choose to show local Houston artists?

I feel it should be one of our responsibilities to recognize the [local] artists who present new ideas and a fresh approach. It is one of our responsibilities. Museums and art centers are so preoccupied with exhibitions that they tend to forget the artists. We do not intend to make the museum a sacred temple. We mean to research new ideas. For too long now, we in the museums have considered the artist merely as a commodity to be used, but the artist today is someone who uses [their] imagination to produce something more than just an object to be collected. I think the real savers of the environment will be the young creative people who understand the problems of an urban society and can change that society for the better. I think artists should work directly with city planners. People say that’s being done now, but it’s just tokenism. I’ve talked about paying artists to come to the museum and innovate and people tell me it’s a silly idea, that we’re doing the artists a favor. Well, I say you can’t get a scientist to work for you without paying him. Why should we treat our artists any differently?

How could the CAMH afford such a proposal?

We’re going to dispose with a lot of the unnecessary crap that most museums get stuck with.  This museum cannot be either an Acropolis or a country club and it won’t be. It’s going be a place to move things- and it’s…flexible enough so that it can function inside and out as an artistic medium in which artists can create imaginative works. The outside walls have a reflective skin, so that the whole building can be turned into a light sculpture. We hope to make everyone aware of sensations they may have forgotten or have never experienced. We have to get over the idea that all art must be viewed under glass and at a distance.

I look forward to seeing that.

This place won’t just be concerned with exhibitions, either. [We’ll have] an after-school program with a thousand kids enrolled.  And I don’t mean making things to take home to Mama. The idea is to take a kid and make him aware of his environment, that’s all. [We’ll get] seven-year-olds making fountains. We’re trying to develop awareness, not art, and we’ll do it with rock music or whatever else it takes.

That’s a big education initiative, but is it really the CAMH’s place?

I believe in a total education program. I want to develop a living center for the community. We need people from the public schools in here with us. The education department has been a dirty word in museums, but public school teachers are vitally important. I’ve got to take time to meet with teachers and find out what their kids want and need, and not just send them a lot of stuff they don’t need. I want to get this museum involved with college students, too. Let them install shows and get them working directly with artists. It is not Culture on a Corner. We plan to bring visiting artists and to take a role in the development of the whole city, by bringing statements, via exhibitions, about urban development. One day art forms will be flowing out TO people rather than being collected IN what we now think of as museums. Art can’t be divorced from people. Art is society and society is art. Art today moves out of museums and into the whole city.

That is all impressively ambitious, but really, how could you afford it?

I’m concerned with here. I came here because I believed Houston was capable of vigorous art activity. I know it is now. The money is here, the resources haven’t been tapped. Houston is potentially able to support contemporary art as few other places can. And who’s in a better position to act as liaison between the artists and the corporations than the museum?

And how will the board be convinced to go along with it?

I’m one of the few museum directors in the country whose trustees don’t interfere with museum programs and I couldn’t have that freedom in Los Angeles or New York or anywhere else. I gave a lecture at the Chamber of Commerce not long ago, and told them a lot of things that would have horrified conservatives in other cities, and when it was all over a lot of those businessmen told me, “I like what you said.”

What’s the impetus behind these policies?

Artists today aren’t interested in selling works to collectors – at least, not the artists I want to work with. This will enable an artist to come in here and use the museum, not just show in it. We’ve got to put the human thing back into our museums, and the only people who can do it are artists.

Right Here, Right Now: Houston opens at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston August 22 at 6:30 pm and is on view until November 30, 2014.

4 comments

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4 comments

Robert Boyd August 22, 2014 - 10:41

OK, I have to ask. Did Bill Arning really say all this stuff, or is this just a clever act of detournement on Schneider’s part?

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Robert Boyd August 22, 2014 - 12:06

Um, obviously my questions has been answered.

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Bill Arning August 22, 2014 - 12:07

I wish I had said them but they are all from the legendary directors of CAMH’s first years in this building. The collapsing of time and the timelessness of these issues is pretty fascinating. Good piece

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Mark Maher August 22, 2014 - 14:34

Ok, a lot of opaque local shenanigans, people. But I very much valued the rant itself. As an American artist and curator in Helsinki, much of what is written (wrapped in ennui and yearning) happens here on a daily basis. Airports – magical things.

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