Celebrate a new engagement

When going to an art museum, one can typically expect to find sculptures and paintings on the wall to observe. But at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s new project, “Engagement Party,” the art is not something to look at but to partake in.

For the next three years starting this Thursday, selected groups of artists will set up three-month-long residencies at the MOCA Grand Avenue, where they will present a program on the first Thursday of every month.

The first group, or collective, that is taking up residence at MOCA is called Finishing School, a group that explores art, design and technology through interventions and audience engagement.

Finishing School’s first event is called Executive Order Karaoke, during which participants sing mixes of popular karaoke songs with lyrics that have been switched out for executive orders from the Bush administration.

The other events include: Little Pharma Drug Run, during which participants dress up as pharmaceuticals and take a bike tour of some of Los Angeles’ drugstores; and Finding Joy, a reference to the military term for establishing radio contact, where participants will be taught to make foxhole radios and then move around the museum picking up transmissions of museum employees talking about joy and happiness.

“All three of them engage the public, have participatory qualities to them and deal with some of the larger themes that we’re interested in as a collective, in terms of politics and critical theory and technology and play,” said Ed Giardina, a member of Finishing School.

Giardina also explained Finishing School’s unique approach to art: “Finishing School does believe that, when we approach projects, it is important that the artwork address the audience in a very specific way so that they are participants.

“A lot of times our work takes the form of praxis, which is activities or objects that facilitate some sort of engagement in theory, and then there’s a sort of learning process.”

Finishing School first developed this participatory type of art in 2001 when working together on a curatorial project that inspired them to connect more with the audience and actually try to teach the viewers something.

“We took that first curatorial project and used it as a blueprint to form Finishing School as a collective ““ that we would engage in these types of projects where we would have a more direct connection between the artist and the viewer,” Giardina said.

Projects such as those that Finishing School develops are often called something other than art, and Finishing School willingly acknowledges that.

“We’ve definitely been accused of being activists, not artists, and we’re OK with that,” Giardina said.

This may seem like a very cutting-edge, risky undertaking for a museum, but with a generous grant from the James Irvine Foundation, MOCA has been able to take this risk and redefine itself as a museum.

Aandrea Stang, MOCA’s senior education program manager, explained why MOCA chose to take on this project.

“MOCA has traditionally been a fairly progressive institution that had a lot to offer a more cutting-edge audience, and as the museum gets very close to its 30th birthday, there was a re-examination of how we’re doing in terms of that,” Stang said.

The grant has enabled the museum’s experimentation with this type of activist art.

“This isn’t something that you see every day that a museum is taking on. Through the extremely generous funding from the Irvine foundation, we’ve been encouraged to really take these risks and examine their successes and their failures,” she said.

The title “Engagement Party” reflects the collectives’ activist nature and different approach to art.

“The collectives that we have become the most interested in working with are somehow socially (or) politically engaged and are examining our culture in a more activist kind of way. We wanted to play off of that,” Stang said.

Although Finishing School will address serious political and social topics during its residency, the project also aims to employ a tone of entertainment and fun with each individual event.

“In terms of the party part, this is serious art-making, and with each event we’re definitely going to have a very rigorous examination of some aspect of society. But at the same time we want people to feel like they can come and participate, and there’s a chance for conversation, dialogue (and) examination over wine and crackers.”

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