THE HYBRID ART MARKET RESEARCH PROJECT
1965 - 1966
The HYBRID project was perpetrated by Peter Phillips, another British artist living and working in New York, and me in the years 1965-6.
It was a satirical attack on the contemporary art world, and was occasioned by my first sense of disenchantment with that situation, which occurred after only one year of working in New York and exhibiting successfully in major art galleries in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.
It had quickly become apparent that virtually any work produced by an artist who was established in that world would be greeted with uncritical enthusiasm, provided of course that it included the essential ingredient, novelty.
Marketing was based on confidence; therefore there was no room for doubt. Dealers would say that they could sell the work of any artist, the implication being that selling was the skill, not the creative process, and in that culture this remains essentially true.
HYBRID was an attempt to follow this to its logical conclusion, to remove all individual input, and to apply only commercial techniques to the creative process. Our intention was to ask people what they wanted, and then to give it to them. It was intended as an insult to the status quo, but the status quo being as it is, HYBRID was also greeted with enthusiasm, absorbed and digested - which in a way proved the point we were attempting to make.
Initially we did not seriously contemplate actually completing the process; the point was to call attention to the banality of much that was going on. To that end we aped market research methods. We made two boxes which contained samples of colour, texture, materials, finishes, shapes and even fluorescent light. All of these tended to the fashionable, of course; very little provision was made for anyone who might wish to propose a painting on canvas, for instance.
Our target audience we termed art literates. We questioned not the person in the street, but those who controlled the contemporary art world and gave it its form - dealers, critics, museum curators and collectors. During the summer of 1965 we went about wearing our HYBRID buttons and carried out our research in New York and London. Virtually all the great and the good of the art world at that time filled in our forms.
As the process continued it became apparent that we might as well complete it. We averaged our results prepared a blueprint of the HYBRID, and made two at full scale and twenty-five maquette versions.
We had an exhibition of them at the Kornblee Gallery on Madison Avenue and sold them all. Time Magazine devoted a full page to the project, and Life Magazine gave us four pages of cover. Some art magazines were afraid to refer to HYBRID, but two important contemporary critics - Laurence Alloway and Gene Swenson - wrote major articles about it, only the latter understanding that HYBRID was a critical attack.
All of the research documents, one of the research kits, and one of the full-scale HYBRIDS are now in the permanent collection of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard.
Gerald Laing
August 2002