Place Project @ The Bowery

Gone are the days of MTV constantly distracting us from our friends whilst at the pub, banished by the Place Project from The Bowery at least. Everyone is welcome and will be able to drink cans of Red Stripe and cocktails in teacups as per usual. However, the venue will be a little different during the Place Project week, due to a carefully selected range of work by emerging and established artists. These works should include a variety of installations and interventions, forming the backdrop for a generous number of workshops, events and performances.

It is important to stress that the Place Project is not simply using the Bowery as a venue for an art exhibition: it is aiming to use art to enrich the original reason for the existence of a bar. The artists involved will take the ideas of relaxing, chatting, drinking, interacting and communicating and they will adjust and add to the existing environment specifically with these issues in mind. If we look at the existing bar and people as chemicals in a reaction that produces sociability, Place Project would be the catalyst.

The theory behind the project owes a great deal to the various reactions to Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics. To summarise a whole philosophy into a single sentence, Bourriaud mooted the idea that, rather than there being a simple dialogue between a work of art and its viewer, contemporary art affects the relationships between the viewers. What better place then for art, than one deliberately designed for people to interact and relate to each other? So if you come to The Bowery expect a bar, but one that’s enhanced, enriched and without MTV. [Mark Herbert]