Tuesday, November 7, 2017

Temporary Services



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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