With Free For All, Temporary Services is giving away over 9,000 items! These items cover an immense range of practices from art making to religious pamphleteering. David Shrigley has contributed hilarious, photocopied booklets originally made for a friend's wedding. Shy Girl has donated hundreds of stickers made by hand that have check-boxes onthem next to which appear several choices (normally used graffiti-style, they are like abstract, public opinion polls). Jews for Jesus has sent multiple copies of a tract they put out co-opting the characters from South Park to push their own agenda (a frightening example of how once radical strategies of resisting conservative agendas have been taken over by groups like this)! Krista Peel made watercolors that fit into tiny medicine capsules allowing you to easily ingest her artwork.

Some of the material in FFA was found and reproduced specifically for this exhibition. This includes fliers by an unknown person we like to call the Ancient Order Guy. The fliers are on folded, 8 1/2 x 11, photocopied paper. They warn of vast conspiracies orchestrated by a group identified as the Ancient Order. Complex numerical calculations become proofs of the devious activities this group is responsible for. The originals were found distributed anonymously in free newspaper dispensers throughout the city over a period of many months.

There is one religious tract from the Fellowship Tract League that should be mentioned. Part of its cover is used for the cover of this booklet. On the tract's cover in large, bold letters are the words "Absolutely Free". Underneath them is the following text:

It has already been paid for by someone else. Please read on to find out more.

This tract isn't honestly giving you something for free. It is pushing its own religious agenda. Its goal is to trick you into accepting its belief system. The tract functions in a manner that is the direct opposite of how we want FFA to work.
 
The items mentioned in the previous paragraphs are a very small sample of what is included in FFA. They may not be the items that everyone sees or picks up, but there are many items that will function in a very similar manner to those mentioned.
 
Nothing is asked in return for receiving all of the material in FFA. It is hoped however that the exhibition will be shared and continued in various manners once people take things away with them. Special boxes were designed and are provided to keep the items together. The boxes allow for the easy transport of the material home. An accompanying text of re-exhibition strategies suggests ways someone can extend the project. But, ultimately, how this is done is up to each person.

FFA establishes a context for distributing art that the work of many of the artists involved rarely enjoys. It is simply not enough to make multiple copies of artwork and think that this is participating in broader, contemporary culture - the bulk of multiples made by artists today just ape the aesthetics of mass production in an attempt to cash in on the afterglow of a once radical gesture. Most artists' multiples fail to live up to their promise of being relatively cheap to produce in quantity because little to no effort is made to distribute them outside the usual art circles. The work is allowed no opportunity to compete visually or conceptually with other objects in the world. FFA acknowledges and emphasizes the expanded context that this material exists in. This is part of the service that we provide; we seek to ever expand the contexts in which art is understood.

The way that things are given out for free plays an important role in how people respond to what they receive. The items in FFA aren't being handed out on the street from one person to another. This method of distribution is often seen, by the person receiving the material, as intrusive. It shuts people off from something that they might actually want. Or put another way, it doesn't allow someone to comfortably make a choice if they want the item or not. This clearly happens on a daily basis in conjunction with those handing out religious tracts or distributing advertising supplements. If these actions are particularly aggressive, then the person who encounters them is all the more likely to avoid them in the future.

We are interested in finding ways to present work in a manner that is open to larger numbers of people. We felt that FFA wouldn't make sense in our office space so it has been done in a place where the items are accessible to passersby. Every step has been taken to make people feel included. Getting those who normally don't seek out art to engage our work is an ever-pressing concern. It has been difficult in the past to get large numbers of people from the neighborhood to come into our space. For FFA, Temporary Services was lent an old storefront that we could, appropriately enough, use for free. We are presenting FFA on a Saturday afternoon in order to avoid the exclusive, party atmosphere typical of evening gallery openings in this neighborhood. We are using make-shift methods of distribution and display that are commonly found in flea markets, garage sales and craft shows. These forms are familiar and people feel comfortable approaching them on their own. An atmosphere encouraging peoples' voluntary participation is what we seek to provide. This service is open to anyone. No one is being forced to pay to get in or to have the things we are giving away.

Along with seeking to make art more relevant to larger groups of people, Temporary Services is committed to non-commercial methods of art production, distribution and reception at a time when this is becoming increasingly rare. Art needs to be moved out of "underground" and exclusive positions and to do that, an enormous amount of re-constructive and outreach work must be done. There are more ways of structuring relationships with others than through making and spending money. FFA begins to move art out of its hiding place into a position where it becomes relevant to the lives of increasingly more people. Giving the work away in large quantities is a way of allowing people to live with art and further integrate it into their lives without having to drop hundreds or thousands of dollars for this privilege. Ideally, we would like to do this project on a massive scale drawing thousands of people. Efforts of this magnitude are something we are developing strategies for and working toward.
 
Presenting FFA as a self-replicating exhibit will extend it well beyond the scope of normal exhibitions. Over a hundred mini-versions of FFA will get taken to different destinations and will be shared in many different capacities. Artists that participated in the show will get collections of each others work that they can share with yet more artists and viewers. Nearly all of the artists and organizations in FFA have provided contact information allowing viewers to respond to the people whose work they have taken home. While we have no direct way of tracking or gauging how FFA actually gets extended, if each person that takes material shares it with at least one other person, then the impact of the exhibition gets doubled. We know that this will happen given the strange and engaging qualities of a lot of the work presented. A partial collection of work from this show has already been presented at Indiana University in Bloomington. The full range of materials will be on display at Flaxman Library at the School of the Art Institute in March. At the end of the show the portable exhibit will become a permanent part of the Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection within the library.