Taken from a 2009 Rupture:
My first TAA came as somewhat of a surprise to me, some of my raving mates said they were taking part in an underground art thing in a pub near Smithfields and asked if I fancied showing up and lending a hand, so I did. I showed up and found the pub a bustle of activity, someone pointed me to a darkish cellar, where my mates weren't, so I wondered back to the door and got chatting with the chap who was collecting donations from the viewing public. It turned out he had better things to do and so within minutes of getting there I was in charge of the door, and the donations tin.
At first, using my societally trained brain patterns this seemed insane, why would you trust some bloke you hardly knew with such responsibility based purely on him saying he knew some crew of ravers? But in the horizontally organised world I was entering, what mattered was who was up for doing what and the fact that I volunteered was enough.
I've been to lots more TAA since then, and the best ones are always like that first one, a mad chaos of frenetic activity in a random building, for a week. A mix and blend of people who get on by cooperation and discussion (sometimes quite heated) rather than through structure and hierarchy. Noone tells anyone what to do, but there's plenty to be done, and most often enough willing hands to do it.
As the TAAs became more regular in London the Random Artists weren't quite so random any more, they knew each other, and had formed into groups, structure was appearing from the choas. Whilst I'd hesitate to say that this was per se bad it did seem to mean people slipped back into more hierarchical modes of behaviour, waiting to be told what to do, rather than seeing what needed to be done and just doing it.
Fortunately people in the group realised that this was happening and two things happened, one was the creation of collectives who wished to do more structured and curated art exhibitions and the other was the exporting of the TAA concept to other cities. Both these strategies seemed to work, but the former was a step away from the TAA. The latter tho worked wonders, the TAAs that then took place round the country were full of that productive chaos.
The art produced and shown at TAAs may be better or worse than other art, I'm sure an infinite number of critics will be along to debate it shortly, but the excellent thing about a TAA is the feeling of freedom it engenders in the participants. Whilst you may have a good experience if you go to a TAA, you sure to have a lifechanging experience if you help run one.
- belliDJarunt
