Dada Economics, A Recovery Plan for the Arts

"There's always a chance you're going to get something you don't like, or is against the rules you established, or is outside of the framework of what you thought it was going to be, and that's part of what's very exciting about it."

Greg Lundgren just spread his hands and chuckled. It was Tuesday afternoon, and we were sitting in the dark front corner of Lundgren's bar, the Hideout, chatting about his upcoming exhibition at Bumbershoot, Dada Economics. For the past year, Lundgren, through his experimental art and theatre company Vital 5 Productions, has been in the process of giving out a total of nine $500
Arbitrary Art Grants (three of which will be done at Bumbershoot). The grants range from best performance art protest of performance art (at NW New Works this spring) to video submissions of dancing like you're being shot at. The works have been collected by Lundgren into Dada Economics, an anarchic, populist art exhibition that speaks to the latent—and in Lundgren's view, suppressed—creative capacity of the community at large.

Lundgren was just out of the office a couple doors down, where his main business,
Lundgren Monuments, has a show room. Wearing a jacket over a button-down white shirt, Lundgren was nominally drinking a glass of wine held gingerly in his injured right hand, the index finger of which was bandaged with a splint.

"It was a freak accident," he explained of the injury, "because a half-inch piece of masonite bounced off the ground and popped up like three inches and just ripped the whole top of my finger off. I really should have gotten stitches."

Lundgren is a King County native, having grown up on the East Side. In his early twenties, he moved to Southern California to pursue a career as an artist (he currently works primarily in glass; Lundgren Monuments creates custom glass funerary art, as well as architectural and other glass components), before retreating back to Seattle some seven years later, burnt out and intimidated by the contemporary art scene.

"I think that Seattle is a terrible place to maybe make money as an artist, it might be a terrible place to get a lot of world acclaim as an artist, but it's a fantastic place to make art works, and has a fantastic community to support that," he said of the contrast between his hometown and LA.

Back in 1996, Lundgren, through Vital 5, launched a Dada protest called "Artists For a Work Free America," which was intended as a one day performance art protest at the downtown federal building. One way or another, the idea stuck around as an aegis for Lundgren and like-minded cohorts to challenge the status quo in the contemporary art world, which they saw as closed off to the broader culture. The Arbitrary Art Grant series, which Lundgren began around 2000, was part of the democratizing principles AFWFA was founded on: a $500 grant (it's really more like a prize, though, coming after the work is completed) could compel members of the community to come together in remarkably creative ways.

This year, Vital 5 was inspired to ramp-up the Arbitrary Art Grant Program. In part, it was a response to the broader political culture. "It was drawn from this idea that, back in 2008, early 2009, there was so much talk about things being dysfunctional, things not working, things being broken, things being bankrupt, and there were all these economic stimulus packages and all these bail-out plans and all these big ways and big ideas from a bunch of very smart people who were trying to fix things," said Lundgren. "So Dada Economics was kind of referencing that trend in America by approaching the art world, and saying, 'What's wrong with the art world, and how would we go about fixing some of these problems?'"

Additionally, one of Lundgren's occasional collaborators, the theatre artist (among other things) Jennifer Zeyl, had already pitched a show to One Reel, Bumbershoot's organizer, based on another of Lundgren's works that she wanted to co-produce with him; when Lundgren took over the project from Zeyl, whose other commitments were causing her time-crunch problems, he saw the opportunity for the two projects to dovetail. The Arbitrary Art Grants would form the backbone of the exhibition, a public art show made by the public.

Through this summer, six grants were awarded for various fields. Aside from performance art and dance, mentioned above, there was one for writing (a novel about ping-pong balls), sculpture (for a sculpture in a shopping cart), art dealing (for turning yourself into a gallery wall and hanging art on yourself), and graphic design (for designing the poster for Dada Economics). Three more, for photography, architecture, and fashion design, will be awarded during Bumbershoot.

The response from participants has been impressive. Lundgren mentioned receiving 94 different poster submissions, which creates certain logistical problems. Dada Economics showcases as many of the participants as possible, not just the "winners," so Lundgren had to get creative about making the exhibition as engaging as possible while fitting so much content into the space, spread through two halls in the Northwest Rooms.

Of the graphic art submissions he explained: "The way that we're exhibiting it—instead of making nice little rows along the wall—I've bought telephone poles from the City of Seattle Light and had them chopped into six-foot sections and mounted them on bases, so there will this staggering of telephone poles in this area that we'll staple-gun all the posters to, like you'd staple-gun a poster for a rock concert."

"I'm a total populist is what I guess it boils down to," Lundgren said of the project. "And I think the health of the art world is dependent upon participation on a larger level if not a mass level. And the way you get participation on a mass level, whether its people that are making art or people that are buying art or people that are just looking at art, is making them feel like they're allowed to, that it doesn't have that exclusivity, that it's something that's not over their heads, that they don't have enough money, that they shouldn't be going there."

"People talk about the 'art world' and the 'real world,' and to me, I don't like that distinction of separating those two worlds."