Chase Jarvis At Ace Hotel: Collaborative Photo-Art Project

PSFK dropped by the Ace Hotel today to meet innovative photographer Chase Jarvis and his team as they were finalizing the set up of a new installation in one of New York’s most creative spaces.

Jarvis’ project ‘Dasein: An Invitation to Hang‘ is a crowdsourced photo project where visitors to the hotel can photograph themselves with Polaroid cameras and add their pictures to a gallery of hundreds of images. A dedicated Tumblr will accept digital submissions – which will appear on the rotating screen of an iPad in the exhibition and a few of which will be printed and added each day to the evolving collage.

When aggregated, Jarvis hopes that the photography will “readily precipitate” a simple, yet profound, matter of ‘being there’, that he argues irrevocably reflects what it means to be human.

PSFK readers can submit their images here. Jarvis hopes that he will receive submissions of ‘snapshots’ – expressions of “being” and “everyday-ness”. The snapshot, he says, is our most basic visual language, yet for being a fundamental, visual building block that expresses a world’s culture–our human “being there”. Snapshot images represent a touching sense of freedom that is absent in most photographs that are typically celebrated, hung in galleries, museums, and installations. Jarvis says that the snapshot has never been properly celebrated. He believes that the time is now ripe for that celebration.

On his site Jarvis says:

To display this work in such a manner is to give full commitment to the actual image and the collective consciousness of a worldwide aggregate of artists. One may derive sheer pleasure simply from the collection of snapshots, from the lives of those lived out in the printed image however, this installation aims to be more than just a collection of photos. It is an expression of “being” and “everyday-ness”; and–perhaps more importantly–its structure is an open challenge to the status quo, signaling an imminent paradigm shift. Not only will well-known artists hang next to unknown artists, will I hang next to you, but everyone will own it and no one will own it; it may be difficult or impossible to categorize, and we will celebrate the new notions of openness, accessibility, distribution, and the democratization of creativity. Moreover, the conversation about open participation in the project becomes a meta-narrative beyond the underlying subject matter of the installation. It is appropriated by the work, and therefore becomes an integral part of it.

The typical gatekeepers of the art world–through a self perpetuating model that they themselves have perhaps unintentionally surrendered to–manicure the money, the pedigree, and the privilege of those who most typically participate. This project alone cannot subvert this pattern, but perhaps it can be another straw on the camel’s back and suspend the gatekeepers attention, even for just a moment in time.

The hope is that together we can re-contextualize this work–both the snapshots and their display. We will celebrate this aggregated installation with or without the establishment. If it’s able to be recognized by the canon rather than perceived as a threat, even for a moment, then we have achieved something. If it’s not worthy of such attention–either via lack of merit or otherwise–then at least we have made something together and thrown it at convention.

For now, art history is written by the academics. I hope Dasein: An Invitation to Hang and other projects like it to come, indicate a shift. Not a shift to displace the academic rigor that underpins the status quo, because there are some ways in which their function is helpful and necessary. I intend rather a shift that allows our culture’s art history to be written collectively by those who intellectualize the work concurrently with the vast sum of picture-takers that actually live the work.

Chase Jarvis: Invitation To Hang