Alternative Space, some history

From a historical perspective, one of the first cradles of alternative space is the United States, particularly in SoHo, New York, in the 1970s.

There were two reasons for the Soho’s appeal to American artists at the time. The first, objectively, is because of the expensive price situation in New York, as well as due to the heavy hierarchy of the gallery system, the art museum in New York has made artists find themselves. to less expensive spaces to work. The Soho area at that time is being included in the urban planning program and thus becomes an empty area with lots of warehouses, warehouses, or buildings.

But the new subjective reasons are important because it is these reasons, in my view, that the cause of creating a whole new set of standards for new forms of art practice and display. One of the subjective reasons is that New York artists, at the time, began to seek to counteract the hierarchy and commerciality of the New York art world. This protest culminated in New York artists’ protests organized by the Art Workers Coalition against Modern Art Museum (Museum of Modern Art), the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum​ for American art (Whitney Museum for American Art). Famous artists at that time such as Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Hans Haacke, and critics like Lucy Lippard, and Willoughby Sharp all participated in the rally.

From this motive of protest, they decided to find another model of artistic work, where creativity, surprise, pioneering were no longer dominated by commercial pressures and successes. , will be honored. And it was at that moment that not only did art practice itself change in alternative spaces, but also the relationship between art and life, the work and the public changed.

Formally, spaces called initial breaks in this Soho area are often empty spaces, in factories that are no longer in operation, or in wholesale warehouses, which are now vacant. . The use of abandoned space is an important characteristic of the space of the first time. On the other hand, these spaces have also freed the artist from the worn-out ways of old-fashioned art, as well as gradually creating a type of artist community in the form of a boat council, which is cradle for alternative art practices / behaviors.

One of the first alternative spaces was opened in October 1970 as 112 / Greene Street / Workshop, a space with a neutral name, its actual address. Space exhibits and works in the basement of the building owned by the artist. In the late 1970s, this space was renamed to White Columns (White Columns).

At that time, the artist was the head of the visual arts department of NationalEndowment for the Arts. Brian Doherty himself created a special funding for “Alternative Workspaces and Workshops” in 1972. Since then, the term “Alternative Space” has been put into regular use. media space, such as the title of an essay in American Art magazine (Art in America) in 1973, was “Soho style space” (Alternative Spaces – SoHo style). The official definition of space is the first way, perhaps by the British art critic given at the end of the 70s. “Alternative spaces are a general term, referring to a myriad of ways to display outside the commercial galleries and standard museums. It includes the use of a studio such as exhibition space, ways to use temporary buildings to display such specific, original works, and artist collaborations, or for the purpose of organizing an exhibition, or for the purpose of running a gallery for a long time … ”

From the perspective of artistic form, mobility, and new-style space environment of alternative spaces, as opposed to standard art spaces (often called white boxes [white cubes]) really has become a new area, filled with new opportunities and challenges for artists. Alain Kaprow, one of the fathers of performance art, once wrote “..full direction for environmental work (the first name of the installation art) is to put it into space. of life, less abstract, less like boxes, that is, take it out to the street, to crossroads, into shops or beaches …. The form of these spaces can conjure new ideas of artworks – as an interactive space with artists and the real world. ” The art form and artistic acts took place in the spaces that existed at the time, as described by artist Tina Girouard, “unspecified, and impossible”.