Recently, the CLP lab had the privilege of interviewing Michael Workman, the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Chicago-based multimedia arts collective Bridge. He gave insight into Bridge’s mission, its challenges, and the nitty-gritty of running a non-profit arts collective. You can find more of his work at michaelworkmanstudio.com.
Darya Foroohar: How did you come up with the idea of Bridge?
Michael Workman: Publishing a journal was an idea recommended to me by both Kurt Vonnegut (who I interviewed for our first edition of the Bridge Journal) and Saul Bellow (who I’d written to prior to launch when he was living in Boston, asking for advice). Both were enthusiastic supporters of independent literary publishing and first encouraged me to start the publication. As for the idea of Bridge, at the time, I was a philosophy student in an era when philosophy and art were deeply intertwined. In those early days when Postmodernism was just starting to emerge, I was attending classes at Northwestern with visiting scholars such as Charles Taylor and Derrida, and actively looking for new ways words and images and the variety of artistic disciplines influence and define each other, what at the time was being referred to as the field of “new genres” studies, work that emerges out of an evolving sense of interdisciplinarity. Our goal from the start was to look at where artistic disciplines intersect and influence or inform one another, and to focus on those “bridges” between them.
DF: How do you manage a collective that features so many different mediums?
MW: “Manage” is perhaps not the correct word – we have an agreed upon framework as an artistic collective – each iteration of the journal as the central work of our group efforts has come about because a group of artists got together to take a deep dive into their own specific field of expertise and to write and think about it as a form of public scholarship. Eventually, as an artistic collective, we decided to form a 501 (c) 3 not for profit in order both to take advantage of the support system available to NPOs, but also to structurally evolve the organizational effort into more of a public service role. Today, that decision has opened doors organizationally that has allowed us to cultivate our central publishing and programming missions in a lot of different directions.
Primarily, the way it works is that members serve as volunteer editors in the discipline of their expertise – currently, Meghan Lamb runs Fiction, Michelle Kranicke is our Dance Section Editor, David Sundry is our Architecture Editor, Spencer Hutchinson runs Poetry, Kristin Mariani runs Couture, Mark Tschaepe is our Philosophy Section Editor and Laura Kina runs Visual Art and I serve as Editor-in-Chief. They write and produce material for their sections of the journal, and oversee (to whatever degree they are able) coverage that falls under their section of the magazine, in our books division, and any outside programs we may present.
The strength of the collective is also founded on an ethic of labor exchange – our members do things in a verifiable, tangible way for one another. Any new members who come into the collective just looking to advance their own self-interest or agendas don’t last very long, nor do those who aren’t willing to put in the work. It’s a substantial commitment. There’s a tangible sense of mutual support throughout the members of the collective, who do things as variable as share venue space, perform in each other’s events, write grants and provide specialized skills from basic tech savvy that another member may not have to more evolved expertise such as book design and layout, film and video editing, sound design – everything imaginable, and all of it available in exchange (or often gifted) among our membership for free. In fact, some of our productions would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars were they purchased “market rate,” so there’s a liberationist guiding principle to what we do – I like to think of the collective as our own little “Raft of the Medusa,” with all of us as individual artists working together to survive the vicissitudes of getting our own work out there together.
DF: How do you balance publicizing each individual project and publicizing Bridge as a whole?
MW: We work on programming slates – our annual slate of programs starts with the Bridge Journal of course, which we publish, as it says in our mission statement, “whenever there’s sufficient quality material to merit publication.”
That may be annually, or whenever. There’s no time frame, though we do usually publish once a year. Then we also publish an online magazine that runs seasonally at bridge-chicago.org from the end of February to the start of June, and the end of August to the end of December every year. We redefine our programming every season, but the cornerstone is our Monday morning 8am slot, which is news, reviews, articles, essays, op-eds, interviews, all the usual magazine-style writing and reporting. As mentioned above, volunteer collective members edit the sections of their expertise and we also publish work by a paid community of freelancers, so that the publication is open to all practitioners.
Having this system cemented in place helps us balance publicity efforts when we are bringing a new project into play, whether its a specialized feature for the magazine, a new title for Bridge Books or our specialized imprints including StepSister and Hurm Editions presses, or outside programming, such as our reading series at Open Books Pilsen, any exhibitions we choose to mount, or the art fairs we produced alongside Art Basel, Armory Show and Frieze before those kind of expositions as a whole became tasteless graveyards of creativity.
Ultimately, once we take something on, whatever it is, it becomes a Bridge-branded production, which allows us to focus on the specific project we’ve undertaken. That allows us to not worry so much about promoting Bridge, our audiences for which see it operating in all these various capacities, and differentiated by its ability to operate across disciplines, and promoting the specific projects that we collectively decide to produce.
DF: How have you/Bridge collaborated with other Chicago-based art organizations?
MW: We have collaborated with a wide variety of organizations over the years, in a variety of different ways. We worked with the MCA to present Propositional Worlds, a joint program or instructional and interactionist dance and performance with SITE/less Chicago, for example. We work with the Open Books franchise to present an annual slate of featured readings and open mics at their Pilsen store. We have staged exhibitions at the Evanston Art Center, and art spaces such as Material, and recently presented a performance and slate of readers for a books release event at the Neubauer Collegium for Stacy Hardy’s “An Archaeology of Holes.”
I think there’s something about Chicago as the birthplace of social practice art and of social services in the tradition of Jane Addams that infuses our approach to art-making as collaborative by definition. There are also a long-recognized problems of available infrastructure for art-making in Chicago that any student who has graduated recognizes immediately upon graduation. While you’re a part of the institution, you have access to a lot of infrastructure, technology, expertise, and a variety of other systemic tools that you lose access to after graduation. There’s also not an industry apparatus available to access – the gallery system here is anemic, and there’s no L.A. film industry system to tap for support. Unlike New York, we don’t have the collector base provided by Wall Street money or the international culture interchange of the United Nations. So, where do you go next to pursue your work? Many people leave.
All of which is to say that the “how” of our collaboration is often one of necessity – we pool talent from across disciplines both as a part of the collective, from our freelancers, and in partnership with institutions to not only provide civic engagement but also staging of the best from the specific areas of interest within that pool. There are times when we step out of our editorial roles, get together as an artistic collective, and discuss our goals, connections, ways of activating networks – and it helps that our core collective is a reliable group who cares about ensuring their deliverables.
DF: What is the biggest challenge of running Bridge?
MW: Funding support. We have received smaller-bore funding support (i.e. 10k and under) from the NEA, Illinois Arts Council, the Hyde Park Art Center’s Artist Run fund and a variety of other types of grant support, but we make literal pennies on our publications, and most of our programming is presented out of pocket by our members.
DF: What was the process of getting public funding/recognition as an Illinois NFP?
MW: The process for becoming a 501 (c) 3 itself is not difficult. You start publishing or staging events on your own, then it takes roughly a year to file articles of incorporation with the state, acquire a federal employee identification (FEIN) number, and file an application for recognition of special tax status with the IRS. Presto, you’re operating as a not for profit. Then, you’re eligible to apply for a whole field of financial aid that’s largely available only to NPOs with that specific tax status, and you enter into the competitive world of grant writing.
I’d like to take a moment to articulate how funding support is deeply flawed in the U.S. more generally, and I think there’s a widespread, long standing recognition that arts funding in America is largely based on a private-funding model that’s completely trash when compared and contrasted with the funding support available in other countries. Artists are essentially treated like gig workers, with no formalized “unemployment insurance” system in place whatsoever. I too end up taking on gig work here and there to make ends meet. Most of us have no savings, rent due and are almost always about to run out of income in two weeks. There are zero protections for artists / gig workers. But accepting the reality of constant precarity [sic] just seems to come with the territory.
What does exist in the form of the current grant ecosystem is a deeply flawed network of institutional funding sources that pits artists against one-another, and is sometimes very insider-y when private funding is used – unlike, say, an NEA grant, which undergoes specific rigorous evaluation processes, private funding may just whittle down to “who you know.” If not who you know, then how you want to be perceived, and very often that can mean a specific kind of strategic essentialist or venture philanthropy agenda (both of which I complain about endlessly and which very few people care to discuss).
But also, at a very baseline level, when it comes to funding, you’re immediately thrown into an ecosystem not necessarily just based on merit, and I like to complain that nobody wants to water the seeds, just the flowers. Meaning that funders don’t want to help foster work at the idea stage, they want a fully-grown flower they can point to as a “result” of their funding (and that they can therefore ride the coattails of) without the substantial commitment that has gone in to growing that seed into a flower in the first place.
There’s also the problem of stringency, for example. I’ll give you an irl instance: for about three months, we were in talks to be onboarded with the Donnelly foundation for multiple-year support, and their process involves sending out an evaluator who attends an event of your choice, and recommends whether to move forward with support or not. Well, in this instance, they sent their evaluator out to an exhibition we were hosting – an exhibition of photographs by an artistic collective member who had documented his wife’s death from cancer through photographs of the wards they had been forced to inhabit in throughout their treatment – and we had apparently listed the start time of the event incorrectly on our website.
Well, this evaluator came in, asked which one of us was from Bridge, and announced he was going to “chew us out” about the error. Afterward, the Donnelly rep we’d been speaking with simply ghosted us, despite multiple attempts to discuss the issue. Ultimately, we’re a DIY collective, doing what we can and doing it all ourselves, so applying the same standards of production doesn’t make sense – there’s not enough room in the current “grant marketplace” as it is to support the full diversity of artistic enterprises out there in the world, and a lack of recognition that independent organizations like ours aren’t corporations at heart, we do the best we can and sometimes it can seem as though we’re getting punished for even trying.
DF: Do you solicit contributors?
MW: Yes! Each of our members is a fan of practitioners in their own field, and working with Bridge can open doors to meeting or working with them, and we often encourage this. Early on, we all also saw the publication as a way for audiences to encounter the work of high-profile artists who have appeared in our pages, such as Miranda July or David Cronenberg, for example, as a way of getting a “handle” on the work of lesser-known practitioners. Some of our best work comes from practitioners we have invited to contribute helping to open the doors to new audiences for emerging practitioners across the variety of disciplines we work to platform. It also helps that we are able to employ the specialized languages critical to understanding finer points across a vast variety of disciplines.
DF: What aspect of Bridge do you enjoy the most?
MW: The work and the relationships. One point of pride about Bridge for me is that we make decisions editorially or as curators, thinkers, artists and collective members about the artwork without the commercial pressures that might otherwise define them. Our approach isn’t founded on a model of coverage to help sell tickets so those we cover will spend more advertising dollars with us. Much of the masscult approach to art is to scale some career ladder that requires art market engineering, for example, which can lead to supporting hollow, dehumanized work. So when we publish work in the journal, I am enthusiastically a fan of everything in it because the benchmark we have employed is that of the quality of the work itself.
Art-making of any kind is also isolating, lonely work. So, Bridge serves as well as a wonderful kind of interface for forming relationships with people who I may otherwise never have crossed paths. This was true from the earliest days of publishing the journal, when we would receive postcards from readers in New Delhi or Alabama, or wherever the print copies had managed to travel in their lives as pass-on copies. Bridge is not only an engine for connecting art and artistic disciplines, but so many people have written to tell me they met their significant others, had children, found their first gallery or museum exhibition through our work. Those stories restore my faith in humanity.
DF: Do you think the mission of Bridge has evolved since the collective’s founding?
MW: Yes, most certainly. We have undergone a variety of different “epochs” or eras as both an artistic collective with entirely new membership from earlier iterations of the collective, each of who bring their own personal interests, fascinations and intellectual curiosities to bear on the organization. There’s also really two basic types of organization – those run by executives and those administered by professional, rule-based bureaucracies. I think our earlier iterations were more driven by my role as the Executive Director, with an artistic collective that eventually evolved into a paid staff, though because it became purely driven by economics, perhaps not one always with as deep a personal investment in the organization.
Today, Bridge is much more an organization defined by degrees of personal investment as a collective, with each of us benefitting from the ethos of gifting and labor exchanges as a system of mutual aid. I also like to point out that these differences are very structural – our earlier iterations of the organization were built on executive decision making with the barest of organizational documents, including pretty basic bylaws. Today, we not only have custom-written bylaws tailored to the processes, needs and expectations of our organization, but a constitution that defines who we are as a collective identity, our general operational framework, and that provides chain of command and succession structures – so that were I or any one of us to pass on, there are directions in place for the survival of the organization in perpetuity – should some enterprising, ambitious people choose to take it on and keep it running.
I think that in part has also come with the realization that the Bridge Journal, and the majority of the work we produce are also living archives of art and cultural production in Chicago and the greater Midwest that can all just go away if it’s not cared for. There’s a much more keen realization as to the shared art and cultural heritage embedded in the work we do, and concern for its historical preservation in a way that we may not have been cognizant of previously.
As well, we have experimented with different publishing and programming – during our art fair / exposition era, we were generating gross revenues in excess of three million dollars annually, and operating in a way that prioritized market interests as a service to the gallery network who we saw at the time (very naively, I must say) as the best representatives of the artistic ecosystems we wanted to support. In fact, the advent of the internet and social media has dramatically altered those ecosystems to empower and provide a degree of autonomy to individual artists to cultivate their own studios as organizations competitive with what galleries are able to provide. There’s no more ardent supporter than yourselves for your own work – we are always going to be our own best advocates and Bridge has always sought to be at the forefront of that social service aspect of the artistic ecosystem we inhabit. Our focus specifically on a broader definition of what publishing can include, and a broader embrace of more elastic definitions that can include but often go beyond what exhibitions, performance, expos, “public art” and whatever else we decide to present as programming runs deep in terms of what we as an organization are willing to put our collective energies behind today.