Placing the Artist

<p>The text that follows was a lecture given by Alanna Heiss during a conference that took place April 26–29, 1978, at LAICA, the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, housed on 2020 South Robertson Boulevard. Heiss’ text was published in a book titled The New Arts Space: A Summary of Alternative Visual Arts Organizations Prepared in Conjunction with a Conference. It focused on “curatorial” practice (this may be one of the first texts to use that adjectivized noun so common today), at a time when curating was not constituted as a parallel and at times even competitive practice to artistic research.</p> <p>In 1971, Alanna Heiss (b. 1943, Louisville, Kentucky), who worked in the arts in New York, filed for a four-day permit to conduct a film shoot under the Brooklyn Bridge. Instead, she organized an exhibition of contemporary art and performances there, which took place on May 24. She included more than twenty artists, such as Carl Andre, Bill Bollinger, Jene Highstein (her partner at the time), Sol LeWitt, Richard Nonas, Dennis Oppenheim, Philip Glass, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Dorothea Rockburne. Shortly afterward, she founded the non-profit Institute for Art and Urban Resources, dedicated to utilizing abandoned buildings all over New York for exhibitions, performances, and studios. She was close to artists such as Matta-Clark and others whose urban interventions inspired her practice outside the modernist white cube. Among the important venues of the institute was the Clocktower in downtown Manhattan, which provided a location for various radical events and artworks such as Matta-Clark’s Clock Shower. In 1976, the exhibition “Rooms” at an old school building in Queens led to the new P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center/Institute for Art and Urban Resources…</p>