Arts Professional Story: Michael Workman: On Bridge
What is the mission of Bridge?
Michael Workman
Basically, we negotiate leases for space that we see as geographically significant for working artists and do commerce with them. We rent out the space to Garden Fresh Gallery in unit 3D of the 119 North Peoria building, for instance, where we also currently maintain offices for Bridge in the back. There, we also rent out shared work space to a graphic designer, video artist and maintain a studio for a husband and wife team who make fiber art and painting. Tactically, it’s an attempt to provide affordable access for artists and arts professionals to high-visibility commercial art districts—at present mainly in the West Loop—where otherwise they might be priced out. Our best example of this is probably the studio space we maintain for 18 artists at 840 West Washington above the Transmission Auto Shop, right across the street from the Washington Street building that houses Thomas McCormick, Carrie Secrist and Kavi Gupta Gallery.
We do all these things and I like to think Bridge can take some credit for the cultural success of galleries like 1R and Bucket Rider (previously in the 119 North Peoria space we rent), who we gave their commercial start. In a way, our mission is to provide a way to build bridges to art for people in an American culture that works to maintain the illusion of us as individuals imprisoned in our own separate, inviolate worlds. Partly this is an effect of life in a consumerist, image-glutted culture, partly a matter of class differences, or it can even be read as a Midwestern mindset. After all, Chicago is often read as a laboratory for the American experiment, since the Columbian Exposition, much more so than coastal cities like New York and Los Angeles, which are much more international.
Recently in Chicago, this discussion about differences has been cast in the light of the art establishment versus the up-and-comers. Donald Young, Rhona Hoffman and Ann Nathan in River North and Richard Gray are consistently referenced as the gentry, with Kavi Gupta and Monique Meloche seen as their clear successors, and an ever-changing roster of new artist-run spaces, alt galleries and temporary, experimental spaces held up as examples of art at the other end of the continuum. Once, those were congealed as the Uncomfortable Spaces in Wicker Park, where there’s an effort now to reinvigorate that history as the West Town Gallery Network.
For me, it calls to mind long-gone spaces like Beret International and later, Standard Gallery, 1/Quarterly in Wicker Park and Unit B, Jesus Chrysler in Pilsen, and West Loop spaces like NFA and 1R, not to mention Dupreau, once a fabulous space all on its own farther north. It all goes back to the closing or migration of more established art galleries to less commercial, hipper districts that followed on the general creaky sense associated with decades-old mainstays such as the New Art Examiner and Art Chicago, organizations that had reached a point where the establishment cache they’d ridden for years finally collapsed into inertia. In the art world, the inability to change and grow leads to stagnation. As any artist will tell you, that’s death.
What questions do artists ask you most frequently?
The one I get hit with most often is “How can I be famous and successful?” usually quickly followed by “What can you do to help make me famous and successful?” It’s an unavoidable fact that artists just starting out or who are uninformed as to the actual mechanics of the art world think it’s somebody else’s responsibility to promote their work and establish their genius. It’s a shocking realization how many artists think that since you’re an arts administrator, or work in the arts in some capacity other than as an artist, that you somehow owe them a living. I mean, hey we’re enjoying all the clean living while artists are sweating it out in the creative netherworld. It’s a consequence, to some degree, of the overriding utilitarian premise of our culture that art is the pursuit at one extreme of the criminally insane and at the other of minor deities, who are of course also insane.
Artists, the received wisdom tells us, are the mental and psychological equivalents of children, mainly driven by appetite. I despise these kinds of stereotypes, and am deeply offended by artists who help propagate them by acting them out. Something happens with students coming out of any art school, they’re somehow ingrained with a truly annoying sense of entitlement, probably instilled in them by the institutions to satisfy the need to believe they’re somehow getting their money’s worth out of their education.
Early on, I reacted very badly to that attitude, especially after four years as the working class kid at a university where every other student was the son or daughter of some C.E.O. from Sony. My father worked the majority of his life for a company called Dana Corp., which manufactures axle parts for Ford and General Motors in a building with no cooling system. Four generations of Workman men gave their lives to that factory. When my own father first started out, he made five dollars an hour in a section called “the hell hole.” It’s a place where men were literally ground alive, lost hands and arms in machines for boring axle hubs before robots took over the more dangerous work and safety standards were improved. My father’s hands are still dark-tinted today from all the metal shavings embedded just beneath the skin of his fingers and palms.
I’m the first in my family to achieve any type of higher education. It led me to identify two distinct types of approach at university: those who were there for a degree and those who were there for an education. I was in the latter camp, and gravitated toward others with that mindset.
It leads to the next question I’m asked most often by artists, along the lines of “How could you not like my work?” or “How could you write something critical or negative about my art?” Artists freak out if you have anything other than glowing admiration for their work. If you’re an artist with work on public exhibit, please accept the fact that someone might write something critical about it and that this should be understood in the first instance as someone having taken an interest in your work. In the second instance it should be understood as someone offering you a perspective that you may not have considered. All in the interest of a process called dialogue where your art—the “thesis,” if you will, in this process, is met with an “antithesis,” the critical review, which will hopefully evolve in the mind of the public viewer into a “synthesis.”
Why did you start Bridge and what gap were you trying to fill?
It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment that Bridge entered our practice, since we were always working on a variety of creative projects. But it’s clear that this all started out as an attempt to develop a collaborative art project that could reach a large-scale audience. At first, we took a very personal approach. My wife, Marie Walz, is an artist and I was always the writer/entrepreneurial type in the family, but we were both intensely interested in a public life in the arts. We spent more evenings than I care to remember boozing our way through conversations about our favorite writers and artists, both locally and internationally, just talking. Nelson Algren still, to this day, has a huge presence in Wicker Park, for instance.
Marie was already plugged in, having gone to undergrad at the Art Institute and grad school at UIC, and was informed about the local Wicker Park scene—she’d shown with Joel Lieb’s Ten in One Gallery—so we could talk about Tough Gallery, Suitable, Bodybuilder and Sportsman, Law Office. The night we met through mutual friends at a bar, Kathy Acker had only just died of cancer. We’re both enthusiastic fans of queer culture, and spent most of the night bonding through her novels. Both of us came of age in the 1980’s, when art played a key role in the culture wars, especially as centered on the NEA public funding controversies.
Artists like the Guerilla Girls and Robert Mapplethorpe were heroes to me, pushing for women’s civil rights and making art about homosexuality during the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Mapplethorpe in particular, at a time when Reagan was ignoring the problem and Jesse Helms was preaching the evils of homosexuality. It was a time of intense moral paranoia that flung open the doors to Postmodernism, abject art, the ascendance of Cindy Sherman. AIDS caused a widespread high religious panic, with televangelists claiming it was a plague sent down by God to punish evildoers, and art about the disease quickly found a foothold in the culture. We had endless conversations about Tony Kushner’s Angels In America. All this reevaluation of the cultural influences on us as young people took place while I was still a student at Northwestern.
It was a perfect opportunity to start making decisions about our distinct creative passions and what we wanted our place in the art culture as it existed at the time to look like. I was a student of Charles Taylor, who was making regular annual visits to the campus to lecture. I’d read his Ethics of Authenticity, Sources of the Self: Making of the Modern Identity, and was impressed by his readings of Nagel, Daniel Dennett and Habermas, whose Legitimation Crisis was a must-read long before the stolen 2000 election in Florida. Northwestern had developed a reputation as a place for outstanding visiting lecturers, and rightly so. But Northwestern’s primarily an MBA factory. The Kellogg Business School’s the one department while I was there that it was really best known and most well-respected for, like science at the University of Chicago and law at Harvard. It influences everything in their curriculum, even the arts, which is centered around a study of the Classics. I have to outright credit the school with nudging along my entrepreneurial streak, success was a such a life-and-death proposition for Northwestern students.
Anyway, Habermas also lectured every fall, but it was Taylor whose ideas really captured my imagination and inspired me to apply a philosophical turn of mind to cultural questions. He really opened up Nagel for me, whose Mortal Questions, with essays on corruption in public office and sexual perversity were a kind of revelation that intellectual work could be conducted in the public square. My experience with Taylor was on the level of a mentorship for me, while I’m sure he took it as no different than his relationship with any other student in his class, though we corresponded for some time after graduation and I went on to publish transcribed recordings of his lectures in the earliest issues of Bridge.
That experience and all of those prior cultural influences convinced me to get involved, and I spent several years trying to find my place in this city, which I saw early on as very institutionalized, conservative and polarized. It still is, but I think the gap we fill helps to provide room for the moderate perspective, one that appreciates emerging art and those taking an entirely new direction in their work, as well as the established art world which has been doing the same work for years and always managed to keep it fresh. It’s somewhere between those two extremes that I think we fit in best.
Why has Bridge started focusing more on the art fair and less on publishing?
In 2000, when we published the first issue of Bridge in journal format, it was more a labor of love, a place where we could publish the writing and visual art projects of friends and artists whose work we admired. We did that up through the reverse-bound double issue when we looked up from our stacks and suddenly realized we had a twenty thousand dollar printer bill to contend with, and not nearly enough in advertising dollars to cover the expense. Our eyes then were often bigger than our stomachs. We took a long, hard look at the prospects and decided to go not-for-profit in hopes of finding sustainability through grants, individual donors, etc.
After working for the better part of a year to fill out the local, state and federal paperwork to obtain our 501 (c) (3) status, we rushed out to do the requisite fundraising and realized very quickly that we were small players on an intensely competitive battlefield. In an attempt to raise our visibility, we tried all manner of fundraising, telephone and email campaigns using an army of interns and volunteers. We achieved only marginal success and worse, people started to complain that we were bugging them for money all the time. And it’s true, we were very aggressive, we really wanted this to work. We said, “To hell with what people think,” and forged ahead.
We built up our subscriber base to a thousand or so, bought customized subscriber management software to keep track and purchased mailing lists from like-minded art organizations. Problem was, and you’ll get the same answers if you talk to the people who were involved with Ten By Ten or New Art Examiner magazines, there’s ultimately just not enough support in Chicago to sustain anything more than a DIY effort at a consumer magazine about the arts.
Even with a thousand subscribers, if they feel generous enough to pay you $10 or $20 for a year, you’ve spent that in a month or two. Besides printer’s bills of ten to twenty thousand per month, you’ve got an office with rent due, electric and gas bills, office supplies, payroll, toilet paper for the bathroom. Anything and everything costs money. Punk Planet, Venus, Lumpen and all those other “little” magazines manage to scrape by, but they’re largely labor of love-type projects, with a specific niche audience. Most of them exist for cultural reasons, and aren’t seen as having any market viability. Those that strive for it, once they start getting into print runs of ten and twenty thousand, they’re desperately in search of funds all the time.
Advertising was a big deal with us, we were floating on cloud nine every time we managed to land a contract for a $200 spot in the magazine. Small press distributors are notoriously bad at keeping up payments and several have simply folded up shop or delayed payments for as long as half a year, with no relief in sight. Large distributors like Ingram have dropped their small press divisions altogether.
At a certain point it obviously becomes futile to dream of a print run in the hundreds of thousands, which is literally the minimum required to get you listed with the big audit services, who report the accuracy of your print run numbers to advertising firms. We tried alternative means of raising funds, through side projects like the Shoebox Series; one-hundred artists donated multiples and we packaged them up in museum-grade archival boxes the exact dimensions of a shoebox. We sold them at Christmastime for a hundred bucks a piece, and did a good business for a few weeks a year with them. Then, interest faded. And this was with artists like Buzz Spector, Sabrina Raaf, Cody Hudson and Rodney Carswell, artists whose work sells for thousands and thousands of dollars in galleries. Nothing seemed to work. I begged and pleaded, borrowed and stole. My wife put in fifteen thousand of her own personal money and I invested five times that.
I always worked for free, for five years slaving and scraping together a magazine any way I could. We lived like crack addicts in the ghetto with machine gun volleys strafing the walls of our building. But it was never enough, and my wife and I were planning to start a family. It was time to make some hard choices. And that’s what it comes down to: money. If I had to name the primary obstacle to publishing an art/literature magazine in the Midwest and Chicago, I’d say the biggest is covering your costs. It’s nearly impossible to fund an art or lit magazine here capable of operating at any level above internet publication or zine. A few years ago the Dalkey Archive Press made a very serious push to open a branch of their press here with the intention of eventually relocating to the city. It was a total disaster.
If one of the most internationally well-respected small presses in the United States couldn’t get support, how can any rinky-dink zine mag manage to survive? Dalkey is a press publishing the work of Robert Creeley, David Markson, Ishmael Reed, Gilbert Sorrentino. Simply outstanding books by writers with international reputations bursting the seams of their backlist. Printed matter doesn’t do well here unless it’s a tour guide like Chicago Magazine or provides some other use-value, like listings. All the real consumer publishing comes out of New York, which is still the cultural capitol of the United States, and that’s just the way it is. The business community here knows and understands that, and refuses to support more experimental, cultural projects like Bridge Magazine was. Civic pride just can’t hold its own against the bottom line, no matter how culturally significant to the local grass roots.
I have an anecdote I tell: six months before we started doing the art fair, I couldn’t get a gallery to give me a hundred bucks for a display ad and now they happily turn over checks in excess of six thousand dollars each for a spot in the fair. “It’s the economy, stupid,” indeed. Each of those galleries has to make money themselves and there’s just no real proven effect to running an ad in a tiny art magazine, other maybe than to pat yourself on the back and say you did something nice for the local art culture.
Even so, I’m proud we managed to keep it going as a consumer magazine for as long as we did, and we have a truly impressive backlist of publications that are firmly part of art historical and publishing legacy in Chicago. We had amazing interviews: Kurt Vonnegut, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, we published original fiction by amazing young writers, and some of the finest poetry in the nation. All this and we kept the reviews coming, we sustained the record of local artist’s exhibits when all that was left was the Tribune and Sun-Times reviewing the new Van Gogh blockbuster at the Art Institute. We were the place where artists could get their first review, and a place where several critics now out there and writing for the art press cut their teeth. And it was a lot of fun. Hell, we wrote our own working role-playing game. How cool is that?
Michael Workman is Director of Bridge, NFP, a Chicago-based arts programming organization. Bridge, NFP, organizes annual Bridge Art Fairs in New York, Miami, Berlin and London and pioneered a multi-use facility that provides incubation space at 119 N. Peoria for developing arts organizations. Bridge, NFP, also formerly published Bridge Magazine, for which Workman served as Publisher and Editor-in-Chief. He is Art Editor for the Chicago alternative weekly newspaper, NewCity, and Chicago correspondent for Flash Art . His writing has appeared in New Art Examiner, the Chicago Reader, zingmagazine, TenbyTen and Contemporary magazine.
More Arts Professional Stories by Michael Workman:
On Art Fairs
On Being a Critic
On Chicago
On Getting Published