Artist Book

Casey Gollan and Victoria Sobel are 2015–2017 Vera List Center Fellows whose project is part of the Vera List Center’s Post Democracy cycle of programs. Addressing what they refer to as incisive mission-creep of cultural institutions, Gollan and Sobel LARP a means of building culture that is activated, distributed, and durational. Faced with the wholesale corporate restructuring of cultural institutions, the artists entertain the inevitability of the financialization of educational and cultural systems as well as the possibilities of resituating them.

Victoria Sobel and Casey Gollan’s work grapples with incoherence, non-aspiration, and compromise in the face of entropic institutions, systems, and paradigms. During their fellowship, they explore alternative models of student governance, transparency, and accountability, informed by their ongoing engagement around the controversial introduction of tuition at Cooper Union, their alma mater. With deep commitment to the possibility of reform and resistance from within educational institutions that are subject to increasing pressures to corporatize, they enact new forms of collaboration and organizing that stretch the limits of institutional critique, calling for a shared space of “para-institutionality.” They are two of the many co-founders of Free Cooper Union, which coordinated direct actions and creative interventions framing the college’s tuition crisis as part of a national debate on higher education.

This publication follows an artist talk Post-Democracy Paradise-Lost, which introduced a series of public encounters that took place at The New School over the course of Sobel and Gollan’s VLC Fellowship. The first encounter included artist Jeffrey Scudder, who provided the cover artwork for the publication.