Currently based
in Chicago and Auburn Indiana, Temporary Services is Brett Bloom and Marc
Fischer who started working together in Chicago in 1998. In 2008 they started
Half Letter Press, a publishing imprint and online store. Temporary Services also
produce exhibitions, events and projects. “The distinction between art practice
and other creative human endeavors is irrelevant to us. The best way of testing
our ideas has been to do them without waiting for permission or invitation. We
invent infrastructure or borrow it when necessary. Our name directly reflects
the desire to provide art as a service to others. It is a way for us to pay
attention to the social context in which art is produced and received.”
“Temporary Services seeks to create and participate in ethical
relationships that are not competitive and are mutually beneficial by
developing strategies for harnessing the ideas and energies of people who may
have never participated in an art project before, or who may feel excluded from
the art community.” Competition in the art world can stagnate the sharing of new
ideas. The implementation of such thinking begins with the institutions and
those in power that create the sense of paranoia—me vs them, and the idea of
collaboration becomes less and less. “We like collaboration because of the inherent challenges and
incredible possibilities that come from working with others. We are dedicated
to finding ways of working together while still maintaining our own individual
voices. A group is only healthy when the individuals are healthy.”
Half Letter Press
Half Letter Press is a publishing imprint and online store
initiated by Temporary Services. “We created Half Letter Press to publish and
distribute book and booklet length works by ourselves and others. We are
interested in using this endeavor to build long-term support and expanded
audiences for people that work creatively in experimental ways. We are
particularly interested in supporting people and projects that have had
difficulty finding financial and promotional assistance through mainstream
commercial channels.
Solo exhibition — Temporary Services: Socialized
Media – Designated Drivers, Interactive Records and the Booklet Cloud, Texas
State University, San Marcos, TX, March 19 – April 12, 2013
For Designated Drivers, Temporary Services invited an
international selection of twenty people and groups to each fill one
four-gigabyte USB flash drive with material of their choosing. The invited
participants for Designated Drivers have included mountains of material, much
of which cannot be found duplicated online. During the exhibition, visitors
will be able to load their own drives or laptops (or use a host computer and
CDrs or DVDrs) with any of the material they would like from each of the flash
drives mounted on the wall. File types include: MP3, JPEG, PNG, AIFF, TIFF,
PSD, WORD DOCs, PPT, MPEG, PDF, AVI, and more.
Interactive Records is a collection of vinyl LPs that are
designed in ways that champion participation, action, and a level of
involvement beyond listening. Some of the records are packaged like portable
exhibitions. This exhibition will mark the first showing of this collection
that Temporary Services has been assembling for several years.
The Booklet Cloud is an exploration of public
libraries which have become one of the last remaining spaces where people can gather
without expectation or requirement. As the future of libraries and their
buildings becomes increasingly precarious, this exhibition aims to expand an
understanding of the potential of libraries as sites of resistance, shelter,
preservation, creation and restitution, and to do so in a dynamically public
way as a functioning library of libraries.
The Self-Reliance School, Library, and Book Shop
The Self-Reliance
School is a collaboration between Temporary Services and Compound Yellow which
hosts classes, workshops, talks, public events, and includes a book shop, a
zine Mercado and more. Compound Yellow
is an autonomous site for learning, researching and making that consists of
multiple spaces for experimental exhibitions, public art, classes, workshops,
film screenings, recording, and events. The Self-Reliance Library is an
autonomous reading and creating library. It is a collection of older books and
reference materials that Temporary Services has found inspiring while doing our
own projects and living our lives, as well as new books we are just starting to
spend time with. The Self-Reliance Library contains recently published titles
that are still available as well as out of print books that you can find in
public libraries or on the secondary market. It includes a few of our own
publications as well.
The Library Project:
Harold Washington Library, 2001
With The
Library Project, Temporary Services is adding 100 new books and artists'
projects into the library holdings through a donation. The library has not been
told about the gifts they are going to receive. Every title has been checked
against Harold Washington's catalog to verify that each book is not already
owned by the library. Several books that are already in the collection, are
being added in creatively altered new versions. We are giving the Library books
that it has not acquired on its own. We believe these are books that it will
probably want to keep. Nearly all of the books are brand new and most of them
were published or created within the last few years.
Though composed
almost entirely of books by artists, this gift will infiltrate all of Harold
Washington Library and not merely the floor devoted to Visual and Performing
Arts. Creating new juxtapositions of materials not normally possible in common
library practice is one component of this project. Another major goal is to
bring obscure, subversive, self-published, hand-made, or limited edition works
by underexposed artists to a wider audience.
Sexy Politzei (Sexy Police), by Bruno Richard
Placing these
books and projects in the Harold Washington Library may be the most democratic
way of presenting this work within the City of Chicago. The Harold Washington
Library is centrally located and serves a large, diverse public. An average of
6,000 people visit the library every week. The library is just two blocks away
from Temporary Services' 202 South State Street office space - it is our
neighborhood library. More importantly, the library is easily accessible from
all parts of the city using public transportation. It is close to other major
cultural institutions and it is convenient for many people that commute to the
downtown area for school and work. All of these factors were major
considerations when the choice was made to place books in this
institution.
Every
reasonable effort has been made to make the donated books look like they
already belong to Harold Washington Library. They have call numbers on their
spines, manila cardholders that are ready for the due date cards provided at
the circulation desk, Reference stickers, and facsimiles of other Chicago
Public Library stamps and markings. Supplies have been purchased from the same
mail order outlets that most libraries use. In some cases, books that were
originally discarded by HWL were purchased from the library's store for their
bindings or stamped forms and cardholders. These tactics have been used to
properly integrate the artists' works using the library's preferred methods. It
is our hope that this effort will encourage the library to retain these books
so that they can actually circulate or remain in the building as reference
material.
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