art proposal
Red Line Service
Led by people with a lived experience of homelessness, Red Line Service wields art world resources to build community, generating the sense of belonging and mutual care essential to securing and retaining housing. We collaborate with artists and cultural institutions to expand access to the art world avowing that art can break the bounds of ingrained social roles and structures and forge new realities in which all can flourish.
The Canon: A Definition
• A sanctioned set of objects, producers, distributors, and consumers – Sanction comes from a set of reading, looking, writing,
annunciating and distribution practices, shaped by a set of research methodologies that were founded in Enlightenment culture and developed in Neoliberal frameworks of specialization (art institutions and the degrees that sanction access to them)
• Sanction deliminates/encloses a field of cultural production (a la Bourdieu)
The traditional canon has been used as a Gate (it creates the outside.) If the canon is the house of art history, those outside it are culturally homeless. They are on the outside of educational resources, and outside other frameworks for consuming, producing, and critiquing art.
The canon produces alienation.
The Canon: Its Function within a Neo-Liberal Framework
The Canon: Can one remove barriers to it?
The traditional canon, though it has the aura of the objectively valuable, assumes that art is situated in social relations. (Beshty).
If the canon is to be salvaged, this social content must be made explicit and hierarchies for ranking that which is presently represented within the canon must be abandoned.
Red Line Service Institute – How We Remove Barriers to the Canon
RLS connects people to resources and spaces, generates data to encourage and support other institutions in integrating our values into their missions, and RLS assumes the assets of participants and encourages them to develop their assets to produce art
Red Line Service: Impact
On Housed Art World Colleagues:
By inviting curators and art producers to meet with our participants and discuss their practices, we curate the space that enables these traditional gatekeepers to practice opening the gates of art history
By emphasizing collaboration and interaction among all, we create unprecedented audiences for museums and galleries
Red Line Service: Impact
On participants:
i. Access ii. Self-expression/Advocacy iii. Social belonging
Red Line Service: Metrics We Refuse the Measures of Economic Value or Social Efficacy
Data Collection based on 3 assumptions Assumption 1
People experiencing homelessness are often not heard. If our mission is to listen carefully and to empower those with a lived experience through community and leadership service, then we have to hold ourselves accountable to hearing all voices. Our measures of efficacy should reflect whether or not we listened, not concentrate on measures that organizations collect for funding purposes, like how many people have been housed or fed.
Assumption 2
Red Line Service: Metrics We Refuse the Measures of Economic Value or Social Efficacy
No single organization can really claim responsibility for housing a person, since it takes a network of organizations - together- providing a range of services from health care, to social belonging, to meals, to art, to housing to ensure that a person has the agency and drive needed to secure and retain housing. Therefore, measures of outcomes that concentrate on numbers are inaccurate. We work together with a range of people and organizations to play our part in ending homelessness, not to count people.
Assumption 3
In order to receive “services”, “benevolence”, or “charity”, people with a lived often have to take surveys of self- esteem, hope, levels of confidence, to prove worthiness (although this is often posited as tracking their personal growth). Essentially they become the object and content of someone else’s research (whether that is academic research or the measured outcomes a not-for-profit uses to justify its funding). In order not to duplicate this process, in order not to make of any person with a lived experience an object of study or a reason for funding
Red Line Service: Metrics We Refuse the Measures of Economic Value or Social Efficacy
Conclusion
We reassert a simple principle about art: that it is not a commodity but a medium for human connection.
Art objects must be shown to be embedded in a network of social relations. Art as a medium for social belonging.
We see art history as a field, but in the current iteration of the art world, expertise describes itself in the terms of the market - as a sector.