Factory Direct: Pittsburgh showcased the artwork of fourteen established contemporary artists invited to conduct artist residencies in Pittsburgh-based factories. Artists worked closely with the management teams and factory workers within their host facilities to plan and execute a new work of art based on the factory’s history, technologies, materials, and/or processes. Sheyi Bankale met Eric C Shiner, Director of The Andy Warhol Museum, to discuss the profoundly intuitive nature of works where integrity played a crucial role.

Sheyi Bankale (SB): Factory Direct: Pittsburgh at The Andy Warhol Museum. The exhibition initiative has challenged artists to devise collaborations of high artistic merit by incubating them within the local commercial industries of Pittsburgh. Sounds so simple but, the question is, why?

Eric C. Shiner (ECS): Pittsburgh is the historic hub of industry and innovation in America, quite literally turning out the steel, aluminium and glass that built most of this country in the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries. I’ve always been very interested in how and where art and industry meet, and when I was a graduate student at Yale, I received a fellowship to work at Artspace, a wonderful nonprofit gallery in New Haven. While there, Denise Markonish, then the curator (now curator at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) was working on Factory Direct: New Haven, and I quickly became embedded in the project. It was stressful and exhilarating in equal measure, and the conversations and art objects that emerged from the collaborations there were complex and compelling on a multitude of planes. As soon as I became curator of The Andy Warhol Museum, I knew that I had to reproduce the Factory Direct franchise here due to our role as one of America’s leading centres of innovation – both a century ago and, luckily, again today.

SB: Does the role of curating take on new meaning in this case. As in a laboratory where the outcome of success or failure is removed?

ECS: The beauty of this project is that it becomes a laboratory of testing a hypothesis on several levels. Not only is the standard curatorial process made to rethink itself, as the curator is quite literally involved in the process of conceptualizing and making the object from square one, but the very nature of art-making is also forced to enter a new realm based on experimentation and risk-taking. And this is true not only of the artist’s side of the equation but so too with the industrial collaborator, as the workers in each host factory or industry must also throw their standard way of doing things to the wind, helping the artist to make the project a reality. The entire exhibition becomes a learning laboratory, both before and after it is installed. Now, it is up to our visitors to make their own discoveries as they navigate the show.

SB: The dialogue surrounding collaborations are invariably based on theme, material, application and process. These relate to all elements of collaborative development and realization, such as the varying roles of and relationships between curator, commercial partner and artist within the processes of decision-making. As well as the exhibition concept with artist’s intentions, placing of works in relation to each other as well as the off-site framework. My question is, critics will ask, why the narcissistic preoccupation with commercial practitioners. Does it represent a refusal of critical practice as a public and political activity? Or should it be read as wholly innocent: merely descriptive – a way of thematizing a body of works for the purpose of exhibition?

ECS: I would strongly disagree that our engagement with commercial practitioners and manufacturers is in any way problematic or narcissistic. Artists have been collaborating with industrial partners and tradesmen and women for centuries, seeking out input, advice and actual labour when they are unable to make, build or install a component of their work on their own. I think that pairing art and industry is a natural connection and that neither can exist without the other […] both groups use their skill sets to make objects that help society […] some directly, others philosophically.

SB: Each artist responds to the collaboration from different perspectives and experiences through intellectual and emotional encounters. While seeking to provoke this reflection, what were the instinctive considerations and processes that the collaborations have developed through the experience?

ECS: As with any collaborative effort, some relationships developed during the course of the residencies were full-tilt love fests, while others were frequented with turbulence and misunderstanding. But in the end, each pairing was able to find a common language and shared goal in order to produce a work that both sides could be proud of.

SB: Did the curatorial objectives clash at any point with the reality of practicalities in the art-making?

ECS: We started the curatorial process with a completely open mind, knowing full well that some projects would not be realized to their full potential, as is inevitable with this type of project. Some projects ultimately became conceptual in nature or were presented as models/sketches of what the ultimate project would have been. But we are very committed to realizing these few projects when it is possible to do so, whether that be a year from now or ten years from now.

SB: Will you discuss the common denominators and/or expanded on the complexities shared in the successes or, indeed, failures of the various collaborative projects?

ECS: That’s easy. Most of the relationships started off on polite footing, then hit a stage when both sides weren’t quite understanding the other, but quickly, a shared vocabulary emerged and both sides soon realised that the act of making doesn’t differ too much between what an artist makes and what a company makes. It’s all a matter of scale, really. Of course, some interactions were more dramatic than others, but in the end, I think everyone had a great experience in one way or another.

SB: The strategy here seems to consist of displaying new works in a functioning commercial space. This is a significant move in the politics and strategies of coded industrial representation. Is the idea to disturb and subvert the relations of industrial identification and place recognition on the power of collaborative artistic response?

ECS: The idea to show the work in a former industrial space (a mattress factory) and current commercial space (a storage facility) was important to us for two reasons. The first goal was to make a nod in the direction of Andy Warhol’s Silver Factory, revisiting the idea of studio as industrial space, but in this case flipping the table and making an industrial space a studio (many of the works were assembled in the exhibition space directly). Secondly, we wanted to install the exhibition in a non-museum space so that we might avoid the sad-but-true tendency for people not to come see a show as they might feel that a museum is an elitist institution made only for certain economic classes. The Warhol is most certainly NEVER that sort of museum and, in fact, we do everything we can do deconstruct that notion, but in this case I thought it would be important to make the show free and accessible to anyone who wanted to come and see it, thus our decision to use a former industrial facility in one of Pittsburgh’s most heavily trafficked commercial areas, The Strip District.

SB: Is the intention, as part of a wider strategy, the creation of an ‘off-site’ to make readily accessible the work to a more diverse audience, and attract interesting critical debate?

ECS: Yes, absolutely as I just outlined above. We do everything in our power to make our exhibitions and the museum as accessible to as broad an audience as possible. Our core values rotate around the ideas of making the anomaly the paradigm and giving voice to those who don’t have it. We, therefore, strive to make our programmes easily available, and we hope that the conversations that arise from our exhibitions and programmes help fuel our audience’s passion for thinking outside the box.

SB: It would be refreshing to realise, as part of the collaborative process, there was the making for relationships that reach beyond the exhibition?

ECS: Absolutely. The relationships developed during the project are real, and many will be lasting. Several artists remain in regular contact with their ‘co-workers’ at their host institutions, and at least three pairings have plans to work together in the future. One company is even considering reviving a long-extinct arts-paired-with-industry programme, once vital to their operation. If that happens, I think many other companies will take note. Wouldn’t it be grand if companies, as a matter of course, had an artist-in-residence in their offices or factories? I think the conversations that would emerge would be fantastic. It would give artists a studio space for free, which would allow them the time and space necessary to create their work while, on the other hand, it would give the host company a constant creative source to be tapped into at any time. It’s an interesting concept for the future, and one that I certainly hope might become a reality more and more.