Using tactics from Participatory Action Research, the authors reflect on their wide-ranging alternative assessment of Open Field’s first iteration, including interviews with Walker staff and off-site think-tank discussions.

“Art is what we do,” Carl Andre once said. “Culture is what is done to us.” Cultural critic Lewis Hyde, invoking the quote, adds, “It’s the ‘done to us’ part I’d like the citizen to avoid; let us be the constant makers of our cultural world.” In a recent conversation about creativity and copyright, democracy and the commons, Hyde expanded on the ideas in his book Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership.

“The question is not whether a museum should be a commons, but which model of the commons it should be,” says artists and new media professor Jon Ippolito, who looks at two models he considers highly compromised—the market and the zoo—as well as one he believes is closest to the original spirit of the commons—the tribe.

Rick Prelinger is best known as the founder of the Prelinger Archives, a vast collection of advertising, educational, and amateur films 
available for public use. A writer, filmmaker, and longtime advocate for the public domain, Prelinger discusse the Walker’s Open Field initiative, the relationship between commons and museums, and the complications of institutional forays into social practice.

“The political problem of today is not a lack of rigorous analysis, or a necessity for the revelation of the ‘truth,’” says theorist and Open Utopia creator Stephen Duncombe in a discussion on Open Field and collective utopia, “but instead the need for a radical imagination: a way to imagine a world different from the world we have today.”

“What does it mean to be creative as conscious social activity—to create a commons, rather than individualizing creativity?” —Josh McPhee Open Field is a three-year, summerlong project of the Walker Art Center that adopts the commons as a philosophical and programmatic framework to imagine a new kind of public gathering space. Grounded in the belief that creative agency is a requirement for…

“How people walk, interact, make love, snore in public, and do other intimately human and occasionally embarrassing things was a theme in much of his art,” writes Walker chief curator Darsie Alexander of Franz West, who passed away July 25, 2012, at age 65. She remembers the Austrian artist as a man engrossed in the “oddities and wonder of the physical realm.”