Artists--perhaps in response to the increasingly craven art market--are creating another art world that explores other ways to make culture. In league with progressive curators--or acting as curators--many artists are interested, among several other fields of inquiry, in the work of untrained, non-professional makers of visual culture. Amateurs is presented through August 9th at the CCA Wattis Institute by Ralph Rugoff, former director of the Wattis returning from his new home in London for one final project.

Eighteen artists are included in the exhibition, which can be broken out into three general approaches to the subject.

Artists archiving amateur artists' work
Both Johanna Billing and Phil Collins make their own work which centers around the work of amateurs. Billing presents a videotape of a Croatian children's chorus rehearsing a treacly Disney song. According to the catalogue this is an essay on the impact of globalized economics. Phil Collins' silkscreens reproduce amateur music reviews by a young unknown, Steven Patrick Morrissey, who later became a well-known rock musician. Cameron Jamie continues his brilliant explication of the underside of American culture (see his Backyard Wrestling work) with photo documentation of the scary-for-all-the-wrong-reasons amateur Halloween spook houses.

Cameron Jamie, Spook House (Hangman), 2003. C-print

Another subgenre is actual work by amateurs. Long March Project, a Beijing collective, shows selections from an archive they solicited of 16,000 traditional paper cutter's works, including statements by and photographs of the artists. Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane show video documentation and sculpture by a variety of folk artists and performing artists in England. One very short video shows a half dozen people on a stage competing, apparently, to blow the most smoke from their pipes. Jim Shaw shows a selection of his thrift store painting collection, enhanced by his deadpan and accurate titles.

Andrea Bowers makes drawings depicting people participating in civil disobedience; their political actions are celebrated and aestheticized in her works, but the notion of amateur is stretched particularly thin here.

Andrea Bowers, Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Drawing - Go Perfectly Limp and Be Carried Away, 2004, (detail) triptych. Graphite on paper

Artists collaborating with or inveigling amateurs into their work
Jeremy Deller, Harrell Fletcher, Yoshua Okun and Javier Tellez all show video of performances by amateurs, organized by the artists. Deller organized a large-scale reenactment of a labor/police riot of the 80s, including some of the actual original participants. Fletcher organized a performance of Shakespeare in a retirement home. Okun enlisted street people in East LA to improvise soap opera stories using a furniture store as their set. Tellez reenacted Oedipus Rex using actors from a mental hospital wearing Noh masks to particularly wooden effect.

Jeremy Deller, The Battle of Orgreave, 17 June 2001. Video still

Jeffrey Vallance wrote letters to every US Senator asking for an original drawing. The responses he received, ranging from brush-offs to drawings by aides to two or three actual attempts by Senators, are on view in a grid of identical frames. Like so much of his work, it is tragicomic and hard to stop reading.

Artists making work outside their fields thus becoming amateurs themselves
Josh Greene, Vallance and Eric Wesley take on wholly new professions. Greene offers to hold regular hours meeting with the public as an unlicensed therapist in the gallery. Vallance founded and operates his own micro-history museum in a trunk (on Richard Nixon), not one of the more appropriate inclusions in the exhibition. Eric Wesley researches starting his own micro-scale tobacco-growing and marketing business, a work of yet undiscovered interest.

Jennifer Bornstein, Hirsch Perlman and Simon Starling make art in ways that force them to take up new skills. Bornstein makes short, extremely low budget 8mm films with a DIY aesthetic. Perlman makes night photographs using primitive cameras. Starling makes projects in which he finds himself forced to learn boatbuilding and the mechanics of how to make a solar-powered moped and shows the detritus of his efforts.

In an often useful catalogue essay, John Roberts traces the history of modernist and contemporary art's attraction to the amateur. He points out that artists began to embrace failure and incompetence as traits that inherently rejected the values of the salon and academy and the artist's middle class supporters. The dilemma for Roberts is that today "Staged incompetence...[has] become the modern academic language of the moment." He adds "This rejection and its strategies of incompetence-as-competence are taught."

The artist-as-amateur possesses, therefore, a particular kind of ventriloquized voice in contemporary culture. The identification with technical incompetence or awkwardness, the use of low forms, the staging of 'failure,' or the placement of the production of work in the hands of nonartists signifies the artist as someone who speaks through that which is "other."

Roberts concludes with a plea for real top-to-bottom democratization of the society, a democratization that the shared stage between artists and amateurs only parodies, for him. That Rugoff included Robert's essay, which often questions the premises of the show, is greatly to his credit.

Rugoff's curatorial essay argues that the "conceptual adventurousness" of the amateur "is a kind of rebuke to the self-imposed limits accepted by professional artists." I am at times uneasy when I see artists working in ways that feel exploitative or derivative; at the same time I am attracted, like Rugoff, to the energy, wit, honesty and embrace of life so often reflected in the work of amateurs. It has been one of the breakthroughs in curating of recent years that the work of amateurs as well as artifacts, material culture as well as fine art, are finding their ways into museum exhibitions. The Wattis Institute, under both Rugoff and his successor, Jens Hoffman, has been a Bay Area leader in this regard and should be acknowledged for that valuable contribution.

For more information about this and other exhibitions at the Wattis Institute visit www.wattis.org