UNIT #06 SOCIETY FOR THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF THE ARTS Acting As grunt gallery 116-350 East 2nd Avenue Vancouver, BC V5T4R8 www.grunt.bc.ca (604) 875-9516 fax 604 877-0073 glennal@telus.net Mr Glenn Alteen Director Charitable # 070 4197-22-27 BC Society # S15893 Project Title Junkie Reading Room (working title) Requested Amount $12000 2004-2005 Total Budget $26150 Start Date November 2004 End Date March 2005 Board President Bobbi Kozinuk Project Manager Glenn Alteen Executive Director Glenn Alteen Director grunt gallery is organized with in the Unit 306 Society and runs programming in contemporary art for the past 20 years. We are situated on East 2nd Avenue in our own facility purchased through a capital campaign in 1995. We have long term engagements with many of Vancouver's artistic communities most notably the aboriginal communities. Hans Winkler's project is to set up a Reading Room in Vancouver consisting of books that have been recommended by the drug addicts community. The Junkie Reading Room would be a project directed at the general Vancouver community and will be hosted in a public library NOT in the Downtown Eastside. grunt will produce this project in the winter of 2005. We are currently in discussions with Vancouver Public Library and are expressing a strong interest in the project. This project by Hans Winkler looks at the large drug addict communities in Vancouver and attempts to read behind the statistics to explore this population in more humanist ways. The projects attempts to engage the community in a project that doesn't look like contemporary art but provides people with new insights into this unknown section of the community. Vancouver has some of the highest addictions rates in North America and the problems of the Downtown Eastside have attracted national and international attention. The four pillars drug policies are a reaction to the large community of addicts in the city. Winkler's project wants to look behind the addictions. Who are these people? What do they read? Winkler and grunt will work with the people and institutions of the downtown eastside. As consultants for the project Reg Daggitt a downtown eastside addictions counselor is connecting us to the network of addiction counselors in the city. This would be mostly addicts in recovery or at least in treatment. And artist activist Carel Moisewitsch will connect us to the network of addiction groups in the downtown eastside. She has worked on the Downtown Eastside with the Portland Hotel for many years and more recently through art programs and teaching. With their support we will canvas the addict communities to get recommendations of books for the reading room and then amass as many of these books as possible to be included in the final project. Hans Winkler makes art works and interventions that are specific to the places he produces them. Winkler came to Vancouver in the winter of 2004 and spent three days in the city looking at the various areas and situations. We at grunt were introduced to Winkler through Italian gallery director Vittorio Urbani who produced a project for Winkler in 2002 (grunt has been collaborating with Venice Gallery Nuova Icona since 2000 on a range of performances and exhibitions.) His work for Nuova Icona "un incidente in gondola" was not a performance, but an orchestrated accident. The artist considered it as a piece of sculpture, or as a social sculpture. Hans Winkler borrows the symbol of Venice - the gondola with the gondoliers. Winkler, sat on the gondola as it sunk into the canal. The project addressed a City flooded with tourism and continually struggling with the preservation of sinking monuments. With this work Hans Winkler showed the fragile line between reality and fantasy, between truth and manipulation. Hans Winkler is a German artist living between Berlin and New York. Until 2000 he worked in collaboration with artist Stefan Micheel under the label "p. 1.1. red". His work, in which some elements of irony and destabilization become crucial, is based on interventions often in an urban context. The Actions of Hans Winkler are mostly seen as interventions into the reality of daily life and the perceptions of popular symbols. With p.t.t.red he knocked off the peak of the highest German mountain, the Zugspitze, brought the stone into a Berlin gallery and crushed it in a concrete mixer. In another project in 1996 on a warm New York summer night p.t.t.red covertly changed the illumination spotlights of the Statue of Liberty into beams of bright red light. Junkie Reading Room is an innovative and interactive projects that brings elements of the community closer together. Its also a social experiment as no one knows what the final reading room contents will look like. It encourages curiosity and engagement. It gives us another perspective to explore. Time line for the Junkie Reading Room October 2004 Co-ordinator begins project November 2004 Artists visits Vancouver's begins Preproduction. December Distribute and collect questionnaires. Compile book list January 2005 Deliver list to Vancouver Public Library where staff will pull the books from the shelves February 2005 Install the Reading Room, Media launch of event, open to the public March 2005 End of project, de-install, Final Reports Budget Artist Fees $3000 Project Co-ordination $2000 Design $ 500 Web Design $2000 Publicist $ 750 Total Fees $8250 Preproduction Costs Air Fare Artist (New York City) $ 1100 Accomodation and Per diem $ 700 Printing $ 300 Postage Shopping $ 300 Total Preproduction Costs $2400 Production Costs Air Fare Artist (San Francisco) $ 300 Accomodation and Per diem $ 700 Room Rental $2500 Library Costs Staff Time $6000 Printing $1200 Installation $2000 Press packs $ 500 Advertising $2300 Total Production Costs $15500 Total Costs $26150 Revenues grunt gallery program budget $7000 Library Space Donation $2500 Canada Council Travel Grant $1650 BC Arts Council Project Grant $3000 Vancouver Foundation $12000 Total Revenues $26150