Laboratories for Artists

There’s a lot of news to update here, but today just a note of recognition:

Last night we held the 4th edition of The Democratic Field, ALI’s ongoing collaboration with the Verbatim Performance Lab, directed by Joe Salvatore. I started working with Joe in 2016, and in 2017 we worked together on the groundbreaking “Her Opponent,” which leveraged the capacities of actors to re-embody familiar political figures while also applying variables like gender, race, and age.

Joe ran with this, and it became the experimental methodology for the Verbatim Performance Lab, which has created a formal ‘entity’ with which it’s been a pleasure to continue to innovate and collaborate. Last night in conversation with some attendees at the event, a recognition occurred to me. It was the artists’-literacies framework that Joe and I applied to our conversations that helped uncover the need for an artistic laboratory - the Verbatim Performance Lab. Every artist is a researcher; mostly this goes unrecognized or unarticulated. Once artists encounter the framework of artists’ literacies, that recogniztion and articulation becomes abundantly clear. And then, I guess, that artist can go and open a lab!

I’ve found the term ‘lab’ often overused by organizations trying to put on an innovative front, but in this case it makes perfect sense. What Artists’ Literacies does is enable artists to discover how and why they might need a laboratory of their own. Artists produce knowledge through research, and that research takes the form of experiments and making. There is a certain kind of art-making that can take place in a studio. That product-based, outcome-focused, and often solitary intuitive production has enormous value, but all too often it is easy to co-opt towards ends that the artist themselves did not intend or is not entirely pleased to be fulfilling. Combining studio work with laboratory work balances the artists’ practice, re-emphasizing the beautiful symmetry of knowing and not-knowing which drives creative work, and keeps the artist’s process alive and vital all the way through to realizing opportunities that might have previously been unimaginable.