"Dark Matter into Light": A Round-Table Discussion

Today there are signs of increased attention to informal art production and production networks. A wave of "slacker chic" making the circuits of the galleries joins attempts to historicize the inclusive East Village scene of the 1980s and also sometimes-more-than-passing glances at contemporary street art. These symptoms of a groundswell of interest in the art world's purported others have not gone unrecognized or untheorized; in a series of recent essays, artist and writer Gregory Sholette used an astronomical metaphor to frame the vast realm of below-the-radar production, calling it the "dark matter" to the art world's "light matter." As Sholette describes the former term, it applies to a range of practices such as "home-crafts, makeshift memorials, Internet art galleries, amateur photography and pornography, Sunday-painters, self-published newsletters and fan-zines" as well as "artists who self-consciously work outside and/or against the parameters of the mainstream art world for reasons of political and social critique." Paralleling the relations between gray economies and legal ones, these dark practices exist in dynamic and symbiotic, if usually unrecognized, relationships to the more visible art world.