Thinking in Public

This website is devoted to a practice based upon a conviction: artists have a role to play in the world – their contribution lies not only in producing works of art; they can create solutions for public issues, and innovate methods for thinking through complex problems. For artist Donald Fels, the network is the medium. His work explores the routes that connect people with commodities, institutions with their environments. He has been artist in residence, often the first, with corporations, public agencies, museums, research institutes, schools, and community organizations.

Residencies begin with lines of inquiry:

How does an institution extend into the world?

What are the relationships between its people, the public, and what it produces?

How may an institution communicate what it does to the communities with which it interacts?

The answers lie in stories. Research is a major element of the residencies; for Fels, research is the search for narrative. What histories, what objects serve to communicate what an institution does? For nearly two decades the work Fels has shown in galleries and museums has focused on commodities: ubiquitous materials, like rubber and tin, that constitute everyday life, yet whose complex articulations over time and space are largely invisible.

The identities of institutions and commodities are difficult to get at because they’re embodied in movement: in actions that are generated and things that are produced. Their very utility makes one forget that they’re sites of significant articulation. The rubber tree (the subject of years of research in South-east Asia and an exhibition at the Tacoma Art Museum), like the research hospital (the place of a 2004 residency), is a great nexus of relationships. Through collaborations of his own with the different elements involved, Fels uncoils the lines that lead into and out from the matters at hand and communicates the distinct cultures that are created therein. 

To tell these stories is to create connections between an institution’s past and its present, between what lies within an institution and those it hopes to welcome in. In some cases, the conversations that Fels facilitates are the primary product; performances of a sort, staged between people sitting down to talk, which he guides into events where people end up thinking over things they hadn’t before ever considered. The conversations generate a map of the inherent characteristics of the institution, and introduce new directions for thought and action.

Residencies have also resulted in works of sculpture, detailed proposals for future projects, and collaborations with performers, scientists, visual artists, and other institutions. He is currently leading a team composed of an archeologist, geologist, geographer, and philosopher, which will map the hidden waterscapes beneath Seattle; they will excavate the city’s past as a way of drawing up an idea of its future.

Fels views the role of the artist to be one of seeing – making the complex clear by breaking it down to forms that can be communicated. In order for a pattern to be legible it must involve a certain level of collaboration between component parts – at a certain point, a line must intersect another, a shape must be echoed in the form of a distant curve. Fels searches for such points of intersection; the value he creates in his residencies lies in the dialogue and collaboration he brokers inside the institution and the relationships he creates to its outside. By deeply researching the nature of an institution, he is able to lead it into greater interaction with its world.