propositions press... 2.0

justseeds in milwaukee, again

I walked the 100 block of State Street some weeks ago and something didn’t feel right. I stopped and looked the storefronts up and down. It was gone. Ian’s on State was gone. I guess the WI Uprising—the social movement that lived on Ian’s pizza—is really over.

Not it is not. Ian’s, that is. I didn’t know they had moved across the street. As for the movement, it is going into hibernation, if you can call sleeping on a hair trigger hibernation.

*

In spring of 2009 the print media artists’ cooperative Justseeds opened a large-scale graphic art installation in the Union Art Gallery of UWM. I noted back then that the installation Which Side Are You On? was one of the most effective uses I had seen of an exceptionally difficult exhibition space. A cavernous zone with an odd foot print, the suffocating concrete architecture of the Union Art Gallery normally washes over whatever feeling emanates from the work on display. In that takeover, Justseeds did not merely tame the space, they bent it to their will.

In March of 2013 Justseeds does it again, only better than the first time. Compared to the earlier project the new installation, Uprisings: Images of Labor, is edited and simplified, but not in any way compromised or lessened. Elements have been reduced, formats unified, and the stylistically diverse design work, typography, and handworked imagery allowed full visibility. This time around the group attacks the walls neither as aggressively nor as freely as they did four years ago, but instead grabs attention through an aerial hanging of numerous but repeating forty-inch screen prints.
The multi-point messaging effectively broadens our ideas of what qualifies or defines itself as a labor struggle. At floor level the installation is a village of Justseeds activity and production—tables for blocks and brayers, books for sale (including, I was happy to see, a short stack of Deep Routes), small prints and publications on display, pulp vats and floor tarps for a papermaking station, and other stuff I didn’t get around to scrutinizing.

What is interesting to me is taking the two shows as a measure of time in social movement terms. Picture a line beginning in March of 2009 and ending in March 2013, with March 2011 in the center. The Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions and Arab Spring, the Wisconsin Uprising, the movement of indignados, Occupy Wall Street, and other insurgent flare-ups happened over the year halfway between the time of the two shows. In 2013, it makes some sense, in fact, to think of the current installation not as a “show” but an occupation. Not comparable to 2011’s actual social movement occupations of political space, obviously, I am speaking rather of a functional gesture and/or metaphorical act that extends the dream of those beautiful, frightening, and exhilarating occupations of 2011—events that currently sit on the two-years-later cusp of falling into the slow fade of memory. 

But Uprisings: Images of Labor is also more than a retrieval of the once-heady feeling of recent movements gone stale, particularly in Justseeds’ strategy of organizing a two-day free conference (shadowing the SGCI academic conference), of which I attended for a half day.
The programming created exactly that which our social movements need now, spaces in which partisans since dispersed by defeats and exhaustion can freshly connect, educate each other, exchange views, and be visible to one another.

Lane Hall and Lisa Moline's breakdown of OLB encounters with law enforcement set the afternoon tone of movement self-analysis.
By the time we had an intense twenty-minute audience discussion about feminist politics, feminist process, and feminist criticality following Meredith Stern’s afternoon presentation, a vibe of shared struggle and respectful inquiry settled into the room.
In other words, in an art event Justseeds created temporary conditions for what arose organically during the capitol rotunda occupation in Madison, the occupation of Zuccotti Park, and (on an incomparably huge scale) the occupation of Tahrir: a social forum. After 2011, the constituent elements of social movements are searching for space within which to locate themselves. Justseeds, with special effort by the Milwaukee-based members, has that space for a little while. In as potentially cold a gallery as the Union Art Gallery, this was a feat of social engineering equivalent in spirit to raccooning the birdfeeder.  

 

 

 

 

the persistence of (bookstores as more than) memory

The book publishing industry is going in a lot of different directions right now. Given the uneveness and increasing instability of the societies served by the long-form text, not only in terms of business climate but in areas of technology, consumer economics, and subcultural trends, it makes sense that the industry will stay in fractured flux for quite some time.

Against these conditions there appears this article about independent bookstores in Madison and Dane County from the Cap Times. It cheers greatly to read local media giving some love to our area’s small bookstores. But the author only scratched the surface. With each having a different story behind it, the article could have profiled other stores for a much longer article, easily. I do appreciate that the writer featured Arcadia Books (not to be confused with Arcadian Press). I had not known about this place and it looks terrific—judging from the website it strikes me as one of those semi-idyllic crapshoot businesses that are simply done well enough to make it. I am going to find an excuse to go to Spring Green.

Disappointingly, the author did not include any mention of Rainbow. Neither did he make note of the second-hand shops and discounters. Frugal Muse, Half-Price Books, and Stony Hill Antiques are all worth a browse. Board members suggested that we draft a letter in response, to have our say and, more importantly, help the article gain in scope. Pasted below is what we came up with.

Few are the cities of Madison’s size that can support so many bookstores. As the field of bookselling and distribution continues to shift, and as books themselves continue to diversify in form, I wonder which of our town's stores will ride the oncoming waves into a new golden age of books and if any will drown in the choices before them. 

 

Dear Cap Times:

We read Rob Thomas’s article about Madison’s independent bookstores with delight and optimism. Ten years ago, by which time the big box stores had crushed independents in nearly every retailing category, who would have predicted the demise of the chains? And again, only five years ago the e-book revolution promised another sharp turn towards a paperless world. But in towns with serious readers books and independent bookstores persist.

Books, it is true, we can buy straight from our screens to our mailboxes. But books are always better with their associated people. The friendships, debates, and hanging-out that come with finding the people that correspond to one’s books are what we at another of Madison’s independents, Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative, aim to provide—books that come attached to an open community of engaged citizens, adventurous thinkers, and committed activists. Our store hosts events and study groups once or twice a week, at least, thereby helping to cultivate the progressive and intellectual life of Madison.

When it comes to the bookselling business, the writing on the wall is never quite what it seems, except maybe in the reliably quirky space of your favorite independent bookstore. So please come out, not just to Rainbow, but to Frugal Muse, Room of One’s Own, Paul’s. Go to Driftless Books and Music in Viroqua and People’s in Milwaukee. And Woodland Pattern, and all the other independent booksellers we are lucky to have across southern Wisconsin. Browse the shelves and maybe buy a book, but either way, leave with something priceless: a community and a culture that belongs to where you live. 

Sincerely,

 

Dan S. Wang

Susannah Tahk

board members, Rainbow Bookstore Cooperative, Madison

mess hall ends its haul

Mess Hall is ending its run.

Alan Goldberg, the Rogers Park landlord with the exploratory sensibility who made available to Mess Hall its storefront space and economic freedom, is going in a different direction with the space. True to form, along with what might be happening at Mess Hall on an average month (such as the report on antifascist work in Greece, where the Golden Dawn party has been gaining strength, delivered by a touring Greek activist–that's happening tonight, March 1), Mess Hall is offering a series of discussions and events in response to its own end. 

Over the days that I received news of Mess Hall’s imminent closure I had been reading Jelena Stojanovic’s article “Internationaleries,” her short account of the continental post-war collectivism of radical artists. Mess Hall counts those histories as part of its lineage, but being reminded that groups of sprawling influence and eventual legend  often lasted much less long helps to put the ten years of Mess Hall into perspective. For example, Stojanovic’s text reminded me that the Lettrist International was active only from 1952-1957. People went on to work in other configurations, but as a body the LI only went for five or six years. As an experiment of its kind—shoestring, horizontal, volunteer, resolutely independent, radical in orientation—Mess Hall’s decade is an achievement in endurance. 

Obviously, compared to the lived time of the 1950s, the experience of time is much different now. Maybe five or six years then are the weirdly equivalent of ten now. The factors of distractions, mobility, instant and constant communication, life expectancy, and digitalization all have intensified, resulting in an ever more frequent oscillation between living in hyper-speed and hyper-inertia, back and forth between a brain overwhelmed with tasks and information to a body standing still with mental gears abruptly switched. The comparatively continuous ennui of twentieth-century life, the fat target of Situationist critique, has been superseded by the stop and go of everyday confusion in the last decade and a half. Mess Hall, which by its six-month anniversary had settled into the dormancy of a closed shop alternating with the liveliest of temporary inhabitations, was not entirely immune to the schizo-velocity of the neoliberal city. But from its beginning Mess Hall traveled the timelines according to a rhythm of its own making, self-liberated from career concerns and freed from the monthly deadlines of a standard lease. Ten years is a long grace period.

Mess Hall always was a kind of resistance against the mandatory scheduling of professionalized art activity. Over any given stretch of months, the calendar would be overlaid with serial meetings, day or weekend-long projects, semi-permanent experiments, and a sprinkling of one-off events, and all without much discernable regularity, plus the constant exercise of the most basic of freedoms, the freedom to do nothing. Going to Mess Hall blindly was nearly a guarantee that one would find a locked door and darkened space, but wandering in while an event was going on without pre-knowledge was just as certain to produce wonder, delight, lasting memories, and more than a few collaborations. For frequent passersby Mess Hall must have seemed strangely out of step with the rest of the working world—mostly dark and quiet, but then suddenly animated, doing an open/closed stutter step for years on end. Ten years seems like the proper duration for making such a statement about uncompromised time management and scheduling.

The origins of Mess Hall have been recounted in different places. The struggles within Mess Hall have been less well documented (or not at all), but from the inside those are some of the moments I remember most clearly. In my time as a keyholder the main points of contention centered around philosophies of money and non-commercialism, but questions of racial justice, authorship and credit, and individual keyholder responsibility also came into the picture from time to time. Later keyholder groups grappled with tensions similarly. As they always do within small groups, personalities informed the fault lines. Unlike the rigid purism of far too many politicized groups, Mess Hall keyholders could never argue their points from positions of certitude. The days of such power plays and bullying, I think we all had to acknowledge, were long over. That is not to say that feelings weren’t hurt, or that divergences in otherwise promising relationships didn’t result. Both happened, but the strength of intra-keyholder relationships that accumulated over the same course of struggle considerably out-weighed whatever fraying there was.

An extreme negative-positive ledger could also have been applied to the many Friends of Mess Hall. For every obnoxious drunk hanger-on, for every Soren Renner looking to make intellectual provocation, there were twenty regular positive contributors who took ownership, sometimes even keyholders but for holding a key, and who spread the message of Mess Hall far and wide.

I don’t know where the spirit of Mess Hall goes now, whether and how it manifests in a different place or time. I don’t know what the keyholders are thinking, if they feel that there is some unfinished business, or what is the internal strength of the final keyholder group. Like Mess Hall itself, I suppose, the legacy will be determined by the people who make use of its lessons and history, and those are available to whomever is ready put in the labor. I am sure I am not the only one looking forward to seeing who that will be, and what they will do.

*

Above photos, starting with top:

Letterpress printed poster for event with Janice Misurell-Mitchell, 2004.

Harold Mendez, wall drawing, The Geography of War, 2005.

Amos Kennedy Jr., letterpress posters, 2004.

*

If you are in Chicago this coming weekend, March 2, please join for one of the final and what looks to be another amazing Mess Hall event:

The Material Production of Cultural Spaces (II): Cooperatives

Saturday, March 2, 2013

2-5 PM

Mess Hall

6932 North Glenwood Ave., Chicago 

The second workshop in the final series focuses on cooperatives as practical and political experiments in creating shared resources and shared ownership. Guest presenters will give concise presentations on different co-op types; these presentations will serve as a basis for imagining other possibilities. Can we envision the proliferation of cooperatively-owned social/cultural spaces? OR what could community-owned counter-institutions look like? How do non-commercial or experimental spaces/projects actually work? How do they sustain themselves? From organizational forms to the dirty nuts and bolts of resources and logistics, what are some of the practical lessons learned from experiments in counter- institutions and alternative economies? 

Nicolas Lampert will present on the Justseeds Artists' Cooperative - how a decentralized collective of 25 artists from various cities across North America run a worker-owned print collective and how we sustain ourselves and contribute art to movements.   

Sara Black will present on Backstory Cafe and Social Center in Hyde Park/Woodlawn.

Kathleen Duffy will present on Dill Pickle, a member-owned food coop in Logan Square.   

Michael Carriere will present on a new experimental art space - ReciproCity - that is housed inside the Sweetwater Urban Farm in Milwaukee. 

Shelly McClone will present on the Riverwest Food Cooperative and the Riverwest Cooperative Alliance that includes the food co-op, People's Books Cooperative, and the Public House - a cooperative bar whose profits go to starting new cooperatives in the Riverwest neighborhood in Milwaukee.  

tales of pain from a winter's amble

Nighttime is the right time, says the neighborhood Great Horned Owl with the hoo hoo hoo call. On still, cold nights its call travels quickly through the air, with a clarity only possible when the air is dense, the trees bare, and human traffic at its nightly ebb. The owl seems at once near and far. Distances collapse. Winter ether renders live sound an expansion of itself, an aesthetic of season, weather, and time of day. 

For me the most spook-inducing sounds are to be found on frozen Lake Mendota. On nights with no breeze to whistle, the energy of ice more than a foot thick bowing according to the push and pull of late winter temperatures fills the aural void. Echo-ey pops and deep groans traveling along fissures supply moonlit ice strolls an abstract soundscape, without meaning, except that you are walking on this ice that is momentarily contained in an unbelievable tension.

Tonight I’m not worried about that, ice creaks and all. This time my stroll is interrupted by an intruder from within. Specifically, a toenail grown just long enough to irritate. The sharp corner of the nail (always trim toenails straight across, I was told growing up) digs painfully into the soft side of its neighboring digit with each push off the right foot. Each step is a wince. We have high quality of life expectations here in Madison, so this is a real downer.

Then I thought about Andy Murray. I watched him a couple weeks earlier in the Australian Open final. The cameras caught him changing socks between sets. His toes were taped, having blistered in a five-set match against Roger Federer only about forty-eight hours earlier. Ouch. I thought about my daughter, whose first injury as a dancer was a hurt toe at camp last summer. I thought about my own foot rot episode from when I was younger, on a long canoe trip. Once it set in it consistently worsened, going in a few days from nusiance to a jaw-clenching torture.

But the end of that trip was in sight. What is more, I was at an age when the pain provided a focus, lifted clouds of teenage confusion, and actually felt good because that. Enjoying acute pain is a young person’s sport.

Then I thought about my grandmother. And then my other grandmother. And my great aunts. They knew about pain around the toes, and for them there was no end in sight. They had small feet, the kind that come from binding. They were members of the last generation of women, already elderly in my childhood, to experience the binding; their daughters were not put through it. When I read mention of the foot binding process, it is usually described as a breaking of the arch. But the toenails also were sometimes left to grow, curled into their own flesh, after horrible pain to be finally crushed as well, or for the lucky, to be simply pulled out. Imagining the actual experience generations of Chinese women went through, “bound feet” seems too cozy an expression. It is one of those terms that sounds better than what the practice is in fact. Kind of like “extraordinary rendition.”

I wonder, did my grandmothers, as the lively girls they must have been, at times relish the pain? Men serving hard prison time speak of going into endurance mode, taking episodes of dissociation for the sake of mental survival. Sentenced to an indefinite duration of pain and permanent hobbling, a prison of their bodies, their families and social values, girls with small feet must have mastered the whole spectrum of coping psychology, including the mentality of the young athlete or disciple who learns to put pain into a box. But then to live with the new reality of small feet, small steps, and an eternally unsteady walk—what extremes of feeling or better yet unfeeling are necessary to manage the daily realities of such a fate? I will never know.

What I am complaining about, again? That toenail, the clipping of which I can already envision, only minutes away.

The irritation now respectfully ranks strictly at the low end on the pain spectrum signs you see at the clinic. Corrected in my thinking, the sensation feels more like a prompt than a sting, a reminder to me of the willingly and unwillingly experienced pains of the past and present world, even from within my own family history. It is a reminder that those considerable smarts and unfathomable sorrows have essentially no association with what small troubles I contend with. A toenail tonight only highlights the fact that in this mild life I am living I am mostly brutalized with music and other external forms of beauty—as long as oneself keeps from getting too cocky over thin ice. 

Finally, I realize that this is no pain-free zone in the world of our local owl, either. On the contrary, if the owl gets its way tonight some creature will feel all the wrenching unpleasantness of a full assault, to its limit, beyond which lies only numbness and shock–the anaesthetic, those short moments of a living death. In Desert Solitaire Edward Abbey wrote about the dread of the rabbit, surrounded by the voice of its hunter. My beauty is some other creature's pain, just as my grandmothers' pain was somebody else's beauty.

 

it's messed up, and i'm feeling at home

After six years of living in Madison, more or less, I have taken a liking to this town. I found an excellent community of activist intellectuals, a cell of radical designers and picture-makers, a reliable and enjoyable network of neighbors. I live about 150 yards from Lake Mendota, where our street ends with a primitive landing at water’s edge. The lake is recreational hell in the summer, but on a chilly still fall night one can meditate on the rocks and catch a whiff of the North Woods. There are always bands on the calendar worth seeing. The produce, cheeses, and meats available around here are among the best the nation has to offer. The many bike paths ensure safe coasting.

Great quality of life stuff is what bothered me about living here. Thankfully, the easy living is dying, and not just because the restaurant scene is overhyped to the point of embarrassment. The days—and decades—of being clueless and content in Madison are over.

The beginning of the end was signaled by the attacks on the public sector in February of 2011, to which the massive Wisconsin Uprising was a response. Wisconsin labor had been a victim of a previous generation’s success. Current workers enjoy standards of living hard-won by earlier struggles, lifestyles that had allowed workers to nearly forget that they are labor. But since the Uprising things are different, and working families in Madison know that from now until the end of their working lives and probably beyond, it will be a fight against Wisconsin’s right wing wrecking crew, currently led by the inimitably rodent-like Scott Walker. Walker and his lieutenants won their battles in the legislative halls but in the process woke the population. Austerity will do that.

The final shattering of Madison’s paradisiacal illusions comes from a different direction. Rather than from the stroke of an elected leader’s pen but in some respects seemingly as rapid, this blow takes the form of a demographic tidal wave, brown and black, surging via the late Millenials generation. One does not see it at the farmers’ markets, nor in the Overture Center lobby, nor in the crowds at the Badger football games. The Establishment class and culture in this town remain largely white.

But this complex future already resides in the public schools of Madison. The four general high schools range from 1500 to 2100 students. Various alternative programs serve another 400 high school-age students. The city as a whole is 7% African American and 7% Latino while the high schools are in aggregate 19% African American and 15% Latino. Along with the 9% Asian Americans, 8% self-described as mixed race, and the 0.5% Native Americans, the high schools serve a population only about 48% white. It’s California in the tenth grade.

Socioeconomic diversity is beautiful in the abstract, a make-believe harmony invoked by those flakey coexist bumper stickers one sees around the white neighborhoods of Madison. But in the flesh, the mixing of races and ethnicities brings with it a complicated set of problems, particularly when racial and ethnic groupings correspond to lines of class stratification and spatial segregation, as they do here. Because the dysfunctions of poverty are racialized and there is a generation gap on top of that, Madison’s aging white liberal establishment class is about to face its biggest test. Coexist, or turn reactionary.

Where are all these children of color coming from? The Latino kids are mostly of Mexican origin, but beyond that, I do not know of any pattern—whether they predominently are from another US city and/or whether most of them can trace lineage back to a particular set of places in Mexico. There probably is a pattern, but I do not know if any data has been collected. The Asian American kids seem to fall into three groups: children of East Asian/Asian-American professionals, children of South Asian/Asian-American professionals, and children of Southeast Asian-Americans, generally a working-class segment. It would make geographical sense for the Native kids to be mostly of Wisconsin tribal origins, for example Menominee, Ho-Chunk, or Oneida, but I do not know of any statistics regarding tribal membership.

The African-American kids are the most contradictory in terms of collective identity. Apart from a handful with African immigrant parentage, most of them moved to Madison from Chicago. A smaller number relocated from Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha, and Beloit.

Chicago, as a place of origin, is the contradiction because it is shared, but not. What I mean is, of the Chicago migrants, an individual student might have moved to Madison from the West Side, the South Side, Uptown, or one the inner ring suburbs such as Evanston, Maywood, Ford Heights, or Blue Island. Or from the pockets of poor and working-class African American residence that dot the suburbs, even the largely white western suburbs like Willowbrook or Lombard. Whatever “Chicago” means to an African American student relocated to Madison cannot be assumed as shared with another “Chicago” kid in its details because Chicago and its sprawling environs are themselves widely variable in terms of local character, even when narrowed to one socioeconomic class.

And yet, in relation to the other students, “Chicago” becomes a convenient group identity, threaded together through superficial commonalities. The condition of many African American youth, therefore, is one of being caught between the assigned identity of “Chicago” and a substantive meaninglessness of the same. What shared experience there is comes only after their relocation to Madison, primarily through the spatial segregation that results when the black folk without much money —and in Madison that is the vast majority—end up living in the parts of town offering the most affordable rents. Apart from the exceptional affordable rental building here or there, most African American residents of Madison end up in the concentrations of cheap rentals in segregated neighborhoods, parts of town where the streets don’t end at the lake. For example, the Owl Creek neighborhood of the far southeast, in the clusters of apartment complexes along Schroeder Road in the southwest, or the rentals around Allied Drive south of the Beltline. In a city built around four large and irregular lakes, being away from all of them may be the truest measure of isolation.

I do not know what Madison becomes as the town’s Sixties-descended liberal establishment runs its course as the dominant culture, but I am quite sure the city will look different than Madison of the Seventies, Eighties, and Nineties. What kind of a progressive formation steps up to defend what the earlier generation built—civil, middle-class, rational—as the right wing assaults on the public sphere sharpen, and the dysfunctional social dynamics perfected in our neighboring big cities threaten to reproduce themselves here? More to the point, how do we of the older generations and the youth who embody this emerging society together build the necessary progressive formations? There are few models and no certain paths forward, but failing to try is not an option.

What I see is a town long accustomed to a comparatively equitable distribution of modest affluence becoming a city not unlike others around the Great Lakes, separated into first, second, and third classes of citizens, colliding segments that enjoy the healthiest, best educated, and most tasteful lifeways against those made up of families trying to get by in the least hopeful of times.

But I must say I prefer living in a place that bundles external but proximate anxieties instead of allowing the space for endless indulgences in self-absorbed neuroses, high-brow escapist distractions, or views to faraway countries for reasons to decry imperialist policies. Post-Uprising life in Madison serves up global problems on a local platter, and that is a specialty we would do well to appreciate. 

detroit journals, 2012

10/30/2012: As of last Sunday and for the two evenings before that, this little frame house long abandoned and brought back to the world of warm bodies by the artist couple Jon Brumit and Sarah Wagner, was full of voices, movements, spirits. It was a Compass gathering. Now it is Tuesday and in the house are just I and the spiders. Even they are not much for company, static as they are for the cold season.

This latest of Detroit excursions started with my attentions on family at the beginning of the weekend and then shifted over to Compass by noon on Sunday, except for a short overlap on Saturday night. It was a bit stressful because there was no place near the D*Flux house for my family to stay, and no affordable vacancies in the downtown area because of the World Series, forcing me into driving between the city and Southfield, where the three of us stayed.

Helpfully, on this trip Rozalinda shared with me a few of her further thoughts on the social construct of nuclear parenting as it remains unaddressed in practice by the better part of the left movement spectrum. Her critique rings true, I must say especially in relation to parenting teenagers, who require very imaginative solutions to the problems posed by their needs. I never thought about it deeply before I became a parent myself, partly because frankly I never had to, and partly because the people closest to me with the divided attention problem mostly deal with small children. For better or worse, there is a popular starting point for the conversation about family-inclusive practices in relation to small children, and that is childcare (and how to best provide it, how to ensure its quality, how to pay for it, etc). I never did think about it much beyond that, even though childcare as conventionally imagined is ultimately on many levels a stop-gap. But for adolescents it is even harder because the conversation has no obvious starting point.

In any case, there were plenty of reasons for my time-segregated weekend having to do simply with scheduling and the aforementioned distances. So I only enjoyed about an hour of the full Compass effect on Friday night. It is wonderful to be with Compass collaborators in any situation, including the institutional setting of MOCAD for our screening of the Monsanto Hearings and book release, especially while the exhibition Vision in a Cornfield is up. On Sunday afternoon, after the second of the two lightly attended but invigorating public events, the group began to disperse. I missed not only the full group in its nighttime form of deep, joyful discussion lubricated by love, but also in its daytime form of group drift. In this instance the outing was conceived, researched, and scouted by Rozalinda B, in keeping with her work around Foreign Trade Zones and migrant labor justice in the Chicago area. Early Sunday morning the group ventured out to view selected Detroit FTZs, evidently containing the faceless warehouses in which is parked a considerable fraction of the world’s aluminum stocks. Who knew? Well, according to Compass research, Goldman Sachs knows this well. The London Metal Exchange is where the prices are set and the futures traded, but Detroit is where tons of the actual material is held.

By Sunday evening the group of nine melted down to five, with five leaving and one (me) rejoining. We were smaller but charged up fresh from an appearance by Cheri Honkala, the Green Party VP candidate, only about nine days before the election. Ms. Honkala, who described the Green Party ticket as "Jill Stein from Harvard, and Cheri Honkala from the School of Hard Knocks," laid into the System. She was not there to discuss the Green Party program, but rather to critique directly the deadliness of the status quo. She had as openers our Detroit acquaintences Maureen Taylor and Elena Herrada, and a special warm-up by the Rev. Pinckney of Benton Harbor. We couldn't pass up a photo op with Cheri.    

After that it was another freewheeling late night Compass gab-fest. Brian and Claire burned the threads brightly as usual. Such a pleasure, although I tend to get a little lost when the property rights discussion takes off. That is because unlike responsible intellectuals Claire and Brian, I never bothered to read John Locke. And I do not plan to, not after Nick S, a grad student from southern Illinois who joined us for the weekend, briefed us on what Locke says in his three applications of the Digger Winstanley's argument for autonomy to the argument for private property rights. Got it. Sort of.

*

10/31/2012: More powerful for me is what I am reading, a D*Flux house copy of The Algiers Motel Incident by John Hersey. The event as Hersey reports it is gripping by itself, but that he could not have known in 1967 what Detroit would become decades later makes reading it alone on cold rainy nights in Detroit in 2012—in fact, on both Devil’s Night and Halloween, still notorious nights in Detroit for the long shadow cast from the bad old days—feel especially elegiac. It is as if the Rebellion wrenched open a new set of historical possibilities, but none of them were taken, and I am visiting the city that grew from the default path that ensued. The New Left proved unable to avail itself of the new or refreshed opportunities due to unresolved contradictions within the movement. Big labor certainly could not either, bound in partnership as it was to the industrial capitalism that it ostensibly resisted. The forces of Black liberation failed in the same as well, due to their unresolved contradictions. Instead, the rot of corruption, dysfunction, and disinvestment set in, hollowing out the pride that once existed in the word public. The economic and physical void left when capital flees now moves into the last of the vulture stages: the late return of speculators, this time would-be emergency management profiteers.

Because Detroit has evolved into such a visually sublime city, with evidence of a once-dense urban terrain confirmed only through absence and fade, I cannot help but read the book with massive visualizations and curiosities about what Detroit looked like in 1967. Not the famous sights of Belle Isle, Tiger Stadium, or the flagship Hudson's department store, but the seedy stretches of Woodward, the commercial strips along Grand River and Gratiot, and the small machine shops and parts factories that dotted the city by the hundreds—the cityscapes that probably nobody bothered to record. All that remain are decaying fragments here and there. The moving imagery of the Prelinger compilation Lost Landscapes of Detroit helps, but much of it is in black & white, or very grainy and degraded color. Very beautiful in its aging, but I want images that are better preserved, still and not moving. The neon palm-decorated motel sign featuring the “Africa-whispering name” as described by Hersey, sits in my head tugging at retronaut pleasures, in full color. Thanks to the wonders of the Web and a vintage motel postcard, here it is, an answer to one of my desires: to have a picture of the Algiers Motel, which even by 1969 had been renamed, two years after the police killings of the Incident.

Today the corner of Woodward and Virginia Park bear the trace of previous decades in the negative, through empty spaces. The car wash behind the motel mentioned by Hersey is still there, but there is nothing but a lawn where the motel once stood.
In 1967 that and most other spaces were full I am guessing, but how healthy did they appear then? It says a lot about the illusions of our world today if Detroit entered its terminal crisis 45 years ago despite having visually apparent vitality.

The racism of the policemen involved in the incident is made evident particularly in the words of Robert Paille and David Senak. Theirs is a racism built of neither a pointed prejudice nor a self-aware loathing, but rather a pervasive and personally-felt negativity in attitude toward whole groups of people. It is a negativity that precludes any benefit of the doubt and any true witholding of judgment, not to mention forgiveness. On the contrary, it is a glacial racism of slowly accumulating resentments. Paille on the Negroes: “It just seems that the more you give these people, the more they want.” This again resonates deeply with this moment. It is a few days before the general election of 2012. The hard right hatred of Barack Obama exceeds anything that was directed at George W. Bush. The rich-poor white coalition of rural conservatives, suburban elites, and disappearing white workers is rabid. The feeling comes from resentment: the Obamas are living like kings while the rest of us are struggling, and they only got in there because of their race! Indeed the putrid slogan belies a constituency. 

Hersey draws a clear picture of the troubled entry into adulthood of directionless working class black urban young males–a latent force of talented, brutalized, traumatized beings now three generations lost. For example, from all the descriptions of him, one of the three youths killed, Auburey Pollard, comes across as too quick to fisticuffs and way more intense than was good for him. He is described as a promising draughtsman and generous guy, but he also clearly did not care to consider the consequences of playing the role of muscle. These none-too-flattering leanings are conveyed through the words of his own family and friends, not Hersey's imaginary rendition. But Hersey reports contradictions and reversals as they occur. For example, one of the witnesses and a friend of the deceased, Michael Clark, comes across as arrogant and uncooperative in court, to the point of dislikeability, even by most of the other young men. 

Presenting his unvarnished findings with regard to the flawed characters he found in researching this tale, Hersey's writing strangely hints at an age to come, in which the post-traumatic moral impurities, real or fabricated, of individuals are exploited expertly by the Right. The absolute injustice of the slayings–Pollard's clearly being a confessed police killing–is in no way lessened by the sometimes unsavory profiles of the young men. Hersey's research presents the criminal policemen, Officers Senak, August, and especially Paille, as surpassing the mediocrity of the victims in one chilling respect, at least: an insensitivity to their own violence. 

*

11/01/2012: I imagined coming to Detroit to think about and travel Cass Corridor and University Research Corridor. That was the ostensible starting point for my research residency at MOCAD, but my focus quickly devolved. By noon Monday, my first day alone, I fell into the general poking around that I often do when traveling solo. That day was spent waiting for messages to get to people I hoped to see (did I bother to arrange any of that beforehand? No, that would be way too organized), so I let myself get side-tracked by the products, the interiors, and the people of Hello Records, John King Books, Dabl’s African Bead Museum, Source Booksellers, Lo & Behold in Hamtramck, the food at the Yemeni Café, and the coffee and sweet rolls at Avalon. Those are the places I spent my money, and if the opportunity presented, time in conversation with shopkeepers and acquaintences.

I recommend a leisurely browsing of all the places named above, and eating at the Yemeni Café, a Hamtramck hang-out for Yemeni dudes (but warmly welcoming to all) that serves an excellent combination platter of lamb, vegetable gallaba, and fragrant rice. I cannot judge the food for its authenticity, but it was so tasty I went there three nights in a row. 

A big part of the week's equation was the crummy weather. The days forming the heart of my visit were dominated by storms, rains, and chilly winds blown through the interior by Hurricane Sandy. For three days I'd leave the house at about ten and not return until I holed up for the night starting at around eight o'clock. I stayed indoors during the day, just not in the house, but rather in stores, coffeeshops, and libraries, and driving around town. Instead of taking the walks I had hoped, I opted to stay warm, dry, and more or less sedentary. Staying warm meant leaving the house because it is heated by wood stove. The warmth is terrific, but it takes over an hour for the fire to attain a charcoaled state, and thereafter requires the constant feeding of wood. Being the sole occupant and therefore the only one working the stove, it was easier to only have to start and tend the fire at night and then let it die as I went to sleep, instead of having to keep it going during the day.

Hurricane Sandy was only one of the events that made this particular week memorable. There was also the aforementioned World Series and Devil's Night. The Tigers home games took place on Saturday and Sunday, losing both, and with that the Series. On Tuesday and Wednesday, for Devil's Night and Halloween, the city imposed an early curfew for youth.
 And  there was the imminent election, featuring a scion of Michigan royalty challenging the centrist African-American president, as well as a number of interesting ballot initiatives. On Monday I dropped by the Teamsters hall on Trumbull and picked up a yard sign.
I may not be a Michigan resident but the collective bargaining amendment put in front of the voters under Proposal 2 contained more than an echo of the WI Uprising.

To sum up the historic week: the Tigers lost, the storms of Sandy kept most people in and washed out the expected Devil's Night fires, and the Romney campaign pretty much threw in the towel on the candidate's home state. But rain or no rain, these were no ordinary days to be visiting Detroit.

 11/02/2012: My final night in Detroit was enlivened by the appearance of the artist Åsa Sonjasdotter. We met some years ago in New York. At that time she was just beginning a new job in Tromsø, in the far north of Norway, helping to establish an art department at the university there. She was back in the States to take part in a show in Cincinnati and had a week or two for traveling around the region. She'd made her way from New York to Ohio, from there to Chicago, and then back eastbound. Being a food activist and an artist of critical engagement, she had intense curiosity about Detroit. As well, she has experience traveling and working in some of the desolate urban industrial landscapes of the post-Soviet cities of northern Russia. 

We went to Windsor for Chinese food, confused the Homeland Security man upon re-entry with our convoluted stories in response to the question "how do you two know each other," and lingered into the night with discussions about art, politics, and of course Detroit. Jon gave us a tour of the D*Flux Sound House–a house around the corner from their homestead as of now entirely given over to sound installation/recording/performance experiments. The house itself is an instrument, set up currently with deep looping bass rumbles triggered by the opening of the front door. The interior paint job was executed by two visiting artists from L.A.

The next day, Friday, I left for family visits in Ann Arbor. Åsa stayed for another day or two, courtesy of Jon and Sarah, and continued her solo drift from there. In Ann Arbor I made a last acquisition in my research residency book hunting: a hardcover edition of Lewis Mumford's The Myth of the Machine. I skipped the Port Huron at 50 conference, napped at my uncle's house, and drove home with a mobile library of Detroit-related, -relevant, and/or Detroit-found titles. I resisted the urge to lift Jon's ratty copy of the Hersey book, partly because I knew I could find it in Madison. The next week, it might have even been on Election Day, I called Paul's. They had a copy for three dollars. Who really needs Amazon when you live in the mrcc?

 

 

 

 

 

 

questions for "confronting inequities"

So I'll be joining UW-Madison's Center for the Humanities for this event later today, the live stream of the fourth Creative Time Summit. This year's summit is organized around the problem of wealth inequities, phrases as "confronting inequities." I will be helping by leading a discussion over the lunch break. I wrote up a sheet of questions for the audience. It is pasted below.

The event is free and there will be refreshments. Please come if you are in the area. It goes for most of the day and anybody can drop in and out.

 

Creative Time Summit: Confronting Inequity

 For the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities live stream event, October 12, 2012

 

What does it mean to “confront inequity” when the labor movement has prioritized a non-confrontational mentality ever since the years of the Cold War?

 When do careers and professional status that depend on an economy of attention get in the way of confrontation? Does notoreity pay?

 How important is the public, as concept, political formation, and institutional infrastructure, in the struggle for wealth redistribution?

 How is wealth redistribution best represented visually? Aurally?

 What constituencies stand to gain the most from confronting inequity, whether actual wealth redistribution follows or not?

 How do inequities in wealth find expression and effect in the politics of military occupation and human-induced climate change?

 What affects are produced by income and wealth inequities? In what ways are these affects effectively politicized or de-politicized?

 How do inequities of wealth define the physical architecture of cities, suburbs, towns, and rural areas? And how does this architecture affect the production of art and culture?

 In the US, poor urban youth of color experience the most extreme effects of wealth inequities, arguably. When and how will they enter the conversation we are having?

 Racism and wealth inequities overlap in patterns of mutual reinforcement. How are they reinforced through the patterns of one’s own life, and how might those patterns be “confronted”?

 Do we who live and work in the multi-state Great Lakes/Upper Mississippi region have a special or particular contribution to offer this project of confronting inequities?

 What places on the planet are wealth inequities creating the most volatile instabilities, and what do those places have to do with where we are?

 What is wealth, anyway?

 

 

 

ox-bow to sundance, or benton harbor to braddock

This post belongs under the tag “mental-spatial corridors.” It is about how two places got connected in my mind—two places that I have never been, but were introduced to me by persons from those places, while we were visiting two other places. The two places I was introduced to are Benton Harbor, Michigan, and Braddock, Pennsylvania. The two places in which I found myself a visitor when getting these introductions are Ox-Bow and Sundance.

By description, Benton Harbor and Braddock are mirror images in comparison to Ox-Bow and Sundance, on the levels of institutional nature, class wealth, popular reputation, and racial composition. It is strange to be comparing municipalities against a private art school and a private resort, but they are all places—pieces of the earth, named and demarcated. Had I traveled to Benton Harbor or Braddock I probably would have visited particular places within the city. Instead, I only have the names of the cities—and what I have read and been told about them—to think of as places. With Ox-Bow and Sundance, by contrast, I have the real experience of having been to them, and more or less fixing them in memory with specifics of time, place, and sensory input.

But Benton Harbor and Braddock are places where people actually live, raise families, grow old, and die. People work at Ox-Bow and Sundance, and visit. Nobody really lives there. They are mostly places for employment and for retreating from where the visitors actually reside. So while I made it to neither Benton Harbor nor Braddock, I met people whose lives had been shaped by those places as children and who still maintain ties through family. To put it another way, Benton Harbor and Braddock host societies while Ox-Bow and Sundance are society hosts. Meeting somebody from Benton Harbor or Braddock is meaningful in a way that meeting someone “from Sundance” does not even make sense.

But these four places—two and two—were linked in my experience.

I was at each by invitation.* Given that my times at both Ox-Bow and Sundance were made possible by professional opportunities, I am realizing how my mental maps are often determined by the concretely capitalized opportunities of which I avail myself. Put another way, what does it say about our structures of creativity that I or any artist could associate Benton Harbor and Braddock not for their Rust Belt similarities alone, but for having discussed those deindustrialized cities while participating in programs at two notable pockets of the highly privileged? In the case of my 2012 summer, a Rust Belt corridor of poetic travel tying together Benton Harbor and Braddock became visible to me through real travel enabled by the wealth of the elites.

Benton Harbor has been on my mental radar ever since Alex Kotlowitz’s book The Other Side of the River: A Story of Two Towns, a Death, and America’s Dilemma was published in 1999. It was one of those books I never got around to reading but heard about plenty through the public media echo chamber, especially in Chicago, where I was living at the time and where Kotlowitz is a local literary star. In the last year or more Benton Harbor has been in the national news for the appointment of an unelected emergency manager to run the city. One of the controversies had to do with a land grab—related or unrelated, depending on who you ask—in which a jewel of a public park bequeathed to the city by a prominent Benton Harbor family many decades ago would be partly privatized through a golf course development. Rachel Maddow brought the story to a national audience, thereby shining a spotlight on the vultures that descend on broken cities, an increasingly common happening across the Rust Belt. There was a local resistance movement, led by a Reverend Pinkney. This was about all I knew of the story when I got to Ox-Bow, though the pattern sounded all-too-familiar.

A staff artist at Ox-Bow, Jerry Catania, a lifelong resident of Benton Harbor, offered me his perspective. He declined to criticize the emergency manager, spoke harshly about the decades of corruption and city mismanagement, and expressed relief over the city finally moving forward with some real changes, even if that meant having to accept the appointment of an emergency manager. Jerry described his years of frustration with the city commissioners as a small businessman, artist, and youth art educator. He pointed out that the new mayor, a youngish new-blood African American leader who is not a part of the old guard, cannot get the commissioners to co-operate with him, either. He also downplayed the land grab, describing the park as having been neglected for season upon season over decades, to the point of it being woefully underused and ignored. He was glad to have some reinvestment in the city, exclusive though the golf course may be.

I have no basis for evaluating any of Jerry’s opinions and testimony. All I can say is, he was sincere, informed, and committed to living and working in Benton Harbor, and is fully invested in its future. Far from a corporate type, or a conservative of any stripe, Jerry’s views are shaped by his experiences and first hand observations rather than an ideology. His vision was limited to the conventional, however. Jerry privileges tourism as the answer to Benton Harbor’s ailing economy, and did not seem to consider his city in the regional or global context. Such contextualization would not necessarily change his feelings about recent developments, but might open his imagination to a radically different lakefront of the future—one dependent on neither philanthropy nor private recreation, but on changed human relationships. Nonetheless, being immersed as I am in the daily struggles of public schooling through my daughter (and that is in Madison, a very well-funded system), I completely understand how everyday, all-the-time challenges push out visionary thinking—as I am sure the youth education Jerry is doing in Benton Harbor has its share of difficulties.

While at Ox-Bow I also became acquainted with the affable artist John Bankston. He spent his days there roaming the studios, including using up a couple of afternoons hunched over a woodblock in the print shop where Isak and I were teaching. Turns out John, too, is a native of Benton Harbor. Though San Francisco-based and influenced (see this video), John still has family in his hometown. I asked him if he stayed abreast of Benton Harbor news. He proceeded to run through the controversies with the familiarity of one who has the city’s history in his blood, but with the distance of a once-a-year former resident, long ago having left for higher education and a career. John did not have the same passion as Jerry, and instead spoke as one whose memories of the place ceased accumulation upon young adulthood. Taken together, Jerry and John brought a personal counterpoint to the reported stories I had heard and read, thereby inoculating me from quick conclusions about what is happening in Benton Harbor, and what an artist and activist like myself might have to say about it.

Fifteen hundred miles to the southwest of Ox-Bow is Sundance, the luxurious and spectacularly beautiful resort property owned by Robert Redford. It was the site for this year’s Creative Change Retreat, a gathering of cultural workers, donors and foundation people, and political organizers to which I was lucky enough to have been invited. My fellow artists in attendance included LaToya Ruby Frazier, a conceptual documentary photographer who hails from Braddock. Just as with Benton Harbor, I had heard and read about Braddock but never met anyone who actually grew up there as a native. What I knew was what most artists had heard—that Braddock was a mini-Detroit, that artists were moving there for the cheap property, and that controversies surrounded the town’s young activist mayor John Fetterman, a guy who ran with the idea that ramping up the arts could help revitalize the town. Most notoriously, he supposedly struck a marketing deal with Levi Strauss that in effect represented the town to the rest of the world, but paid fees straight to Fetterman’s non-profit instead of to the town’s treasury. The advertising campaign stamped Braddock as a "frontier," a place from where people fled and left empty. Frazier's family (and many others) never left.

LaToya added quite a bit of additional information from her perspective as one who has witnessed this latter-day influx of homesteading artists, most all of whom are white and many of whom come with some financial security of family assistance and/or upper middle class upbringing, and none of whom have the sensitivities or intimate knowledge needed to navigate the fraught terrain of competing local agendas, old divides, and the long-standing inequalities of power particular to the town. LaToya is in a delicate position, knowing as she does the nuances of the town’s politics while gaining art world recognition for her work. At the same time, she feels the burden and challenge of having a greater investment in the town’s future than the newcomers, if only because her relatives and longtime neighbors live there, and are not moving to the next hip town that catches an online buzz. Listening to her, I learned something about the complexities and unintended consequences of using arts as a catalyst for economic change. Also, she made me think hard about what it means to belong to a place, to be rooted so deeply that one’s work in some profound sense always will belong to that place.

And again, I felt like I had been introduced properly to Braddock without having gone there. That it was at Sundance that I had the opportunity to come face-to-face with the passionate commitment of a person fully invested in the town, and not at the town itself, begs the question, what exactly is this system of circulation we artists travel? What is the connection between Benton Harbor and Braddock, as represented by encounters with these people, when these encounters are engineered through the peculiar mobility afforded to contemporary artists?

The larger point is, the fact that these voices were delivered into my hearing through the vehicles of privilege that are Ox-Bow and Sundance underscores the complexity of any analysis I might offer of Benton Harbor’s political situation or of cultural politics in Braddock, and the contradictions of any position I might take. Based solely on the corridors of connection—the multifaceted, multi-directional streams that connect these four places for me—a democratic opposition equal to the forces of enclosure now at work will necessarily take forms far beyond the familiar. The contradictions cannot be resolved, so it will be a form that inhabits the contradictions, rather than ignores them. That is another way of saying, perhaps indirection of movement in today’s chaotically organized world is the fastest way to not only be genuinely introduced to a place otherwise superficially represented in media, but also to be reminded that the threads tying together places like Benton Harbor and Braddock, or Ox-Bow and Sundance, or any combination among the four, exist precisely because of the proximate flows of people, resources, and ideas—complex, yes, but ultimately organized according to the profit-generating logics of capital. This is not to be reductionist, but to acknowledge that living in and through these flows at times offers opportunities for relationships with places and fellow human beings that fall outside of the spectacularized relations constantly served.

]

Sometimes eighteen hundred words need some help. Consider the two views below, both hand drawn by me.

First is a conventional (if minimal) mapping of the four places. The direct scaling down of spatial relationships results in an image not at all compelling. In fact this map obscures the relationships that made the whole experience, that is to say, the relationships that brought all these thoughts into being.

And second is a poetic mapping, an indirect representation, one that takes into account the irresolvably different scales at work: individual personalities, the places one visits or is from, how information travels between people but also across space, and the global system that made these connections possible. If nothing else, the second map/image was a lot more fun to draw.

*These summer encounters only happened thanks to the amazing management at Ox-Bow and the visionary organizers from the Opportunity Agenda, who put together the Creative Change Retreat. 

interviewed by 小雨

Xiaoyu XIA, an astute student from Shanghai taking classes at the University of Chicago only for this summer, conducted an interview with me by email. It was in fulfillment for an assignment in Rebecca Zorach's summer course on Contemporary Art and Community. Xiaoyu wrote up the interview so skillfully, I had to share it. The section on Mess Hall is long because Rebecca had used one of my descriptions of Mess Hall as an assigned reading. Anybody seeking info on Mess Hall now would best be served by getting in touch with keyholders directly. 

＊

July 21, 2012

A Maze and a Map: A Conversation with Dan S. Wang

“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

― Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

One the night of his trip back to an ancestral hometown in Shandong province, China, Dan S. Wang, the independent artist who was born in the American Midwest in 1968 to immigrant parents, drew a sketch in his hotel. Later, as a printer, Wang turned it into an experimental printing, which looks like a map and a maze as well. Also, a series of printings then repeated these elements and patterns. See at http://prop-press.net/experimental.htm. Together they remind me of the novel by Jorge Luis Borges, A Garden of Forking Paths, in which the maze set up by Borges not only deludes a Chinese Professor to kill an eminent foreign Sinologist, but also, in an allegorical way, utters a question: who can represent China? Even more allegorically, the way to claim one’s identity is also the forking path of otherness– just like a map sometimes is also a maze?

And this leads to the theme of our conversation. But before that, I would like to apologize for not being able to have this interview in person and extend my appreciation for the support from Wang, who is now in Michigan for Ox-Box a summer artists’ camp.

Self Identity: “I have always been Chinese”

My questions mainly focused on the theme of “identity.” Inspired by those prints, my first question was still about that trip: is it root-seeking, a way to reclaim the self-identity as a Chinese person? By reclaiming this identity, to what extent do you think you can represent China as a overseas Chinese artist?

“It is not about ‘reclaiming’,” said Wang, “because I don’t feel that I have ever lost anything. I have always been Chinese, just a particular kind of Chinese. Insofar as I have a personal journey embedded in my work, it is only ‘claiming’ in the sense that, as one of the infinite variety of Chinese peoples around the world, I am taking part in the work of determining the spectrum of possibilities available under the identity category ‘Chinese.’ That is what I personally and professionally claim to represent, one possibility for what it means to be Chinese.”

And then, to answer my doubts on his intentional use of Chinese elements and its potential “danger,” he said, “[in claiming and representing this possibility], this of course requires a level of engagement with a variety of elements of culture that are shared broadly across the many Chinese peoples, ie language, value systems, relationship with the land, family relations, etc. I have always had differing levels of engagement, but enough to be secure in my identity as a specific variety of Chinese. My entire graduate school art output used signifiers of Chinese, Asian, Asian-American, and Chinese American culture and experience. I made a conscious decision in 1997 to end the use of those vocabularies exactly for the reason of exoticization, art world ghetto-ization, and other ways of being marginalized based on identity. On the positive side, I had also by then accumulated a backlog of concerns that had only peripheral connection to issues of identity, and I was anxious to create work about them. Since that time (about fifteen years ago) I have been very careful about when and where I emphasize ethnic identity, but because I work in a largely white art world, I do have occasion to make the emphasis regularly.”

The Identity of a Space: “Problems” are not necessarily unhealthy

When asked about his preference among the titles, Wang gave a short answer: “I would choose the title Independent Artist, because it allows for including within it the other two as roles and activity.” It seems that he kindly neglected the latter part of my question, which is about “the tension between these vocations, between the theoretical/academic thinking, the realistic concern and the aesthetic creativity”–but perhaps, he had already answered that.

However, my questions then are more relevant to his identity as an organizer. To outline the formation and identity of Mess Hall, Wang said: “Mess Hall is much more participatory than a conventional art space, meaning one that is modeled on commercial galleries, non-profit organizations, and even community art centers. Mess Hall was founded as an experiment informed by a wider spectrum of models and precedents. Anarchist infoshops of the 90s, antiwar drop-in centers of the 60s, communal settlements of the 70s, art collectives of 80s, Spanish and Italian social centers of 90s…these are some of the sources for how Mess Hall developed its culture of governance and management. In this way, Mess Hall departs from the artist/audience dichotomy enforced by art world institutions. I would say it has been a literally successful departure given that a number of people who simply participated regularly eventually became keyholders who helped to manage, maintain, and direct Mess Hall.”

True, but is there any problem in the process for nominating keyholders? “There were several intense arguments in my time as a keyholder, and I know that there have been some since.” Wang admitted, “The process for nominating keyholders was not systematic, at least that was my experience. Many factors went into the invitation and recruitment process, foremost among them the confidence in a nominee’s potential dedication to the work of internal dialogue, task-fulfillment, and efficient communication. At the same time, it was an informal process—there was never any formal application procedure, interview process, or time frame for adding keyholders. One’s professional or reputational status held little sway, and that is a good thing, quite at odds with art world tendencies, but one’s personal reputation mattered a great deal. The process was always somewhat contradictory, but it seemed to function. I cannot speak to the process as it is currently conducted.”

Then, presumably this “internal circularity” of Mess Hall does claim its self-identity as an art space, but could it be possible that, on the other hand, it also suggests the egoism and the possibility that it is but part of the culture industry which it should have been against to?

Again, this is a short but powerful answer: “I would say that the ‘problems’ of egoism and personality are not necessarily unhealthy, that a project like Mess Hall must include space for strong voices, for a fluid group dynamic rather than one made static through a fixed decision-making system, even if that means there is the potential for serious internal disagreement.”

The Identity of Art in Our Time: “Critical”, not “Radical”

After the last two layers of the theme, I assumed that our conversation might have touched on its third layer, that is, the identity of Art in modern society. Still, I am concerned about the intrinsic demarcation between “insider” and “outsider” within the so-called “identity”.

My next question may sound too idealistic (well, as idealistic as I always have been): “Could Art, especially the radical art, truly have the power to be oppositional to capitalism apparatus, or is it just another specimen of the apparatus itself?”

This is Wang’s answer: “There can be no ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of capitalism, only degrees of enclosure by capitalist logics and degrees of attention by capitalist entities. Whatever its potential for offering usable paths less constrained by capitalist logics, critical art consistently performs the service of exposing the workings and depth of historical capitalism. Even as attached to the apparatus itself, critical art can do this.” And after this, he added, “Note that I do not use the term ‘radical art’, but instead prefer the term ‘critical art’, which makes a reference to the critical theory tradition.”

To Wang, the difference between “radical art” and “critical art” really matters. At first, I thought this was just his accuracy on terminology as a researcher or probably his respect for the academic tradition from Frankfurt School. But his answer to my next question might have indicated something more profound.

In this question, I treated Mess Hall as a case study for the relationship between people and questioned its potentiality in “breaching capitalism's definition of social relations” as Wang had pointed out in his article. Wang gave a very detailed description and explanation: “Social relations as cultivated by Mess Hall represent a very small but nonetheless meaningful divergence from capitalist social relations, beginning with the landlord-renter relationship. Mess Hall owes its landlord very little in monetary terms, but quite a bit in terms of gratitude and respect. So it is different than the standard landlord-renter relationship, and even though there is a legal structure that codifies the power inequality, the informal economy of attention and reputation provides the keyholders with a power of their own, equal to or perhaps greater than that of the landlord. This is only one aspect of changed social relations at Mess Hall. ”

“Obviously, it is not about changing capitalism as a whole.” he added, “Nothing will outstrip capitalism but its own terminal contradictions—if the worldwide social revolutions of the 20th century could not, then any kind of art will not, either. But those contradictions are now taking the form of proliferating crises, at all scales and in all places. The instability we see all around us is a new norm. Projects like Mess Hall contribute by offering small examples of new stabilities, new forms of social security, a new aesthetics of governance and group decision-making. No matter how small, these realities will grow in value as the world we have inherited continues to crumble.”

Isn’t this the true meaning of being “critical”: always keep the acuteness to reality and never give up the patience and promise for future? At certain points, we may find the modernity just like a maze, so well-designed and so self-sufficient that embraced all of us, erasing our identity. But a maze also means a space pre-designed in itself, a possibility for us to escape. Isn’t this the true meaning of “critical”–isn’t this the true meaning of “art”–that the maze given by the reality is also a map for the future?

 

finding our global midwest

I am just returned from the Opportunity Agenda’s Creative Change Retreat 2012. The three full days we shared were filled with an effective combination of directed exercises, facilitated conversation, and free form socializing. The place was the Sundance Resort, a superlative setting with a worry-free culture of service, comfort, and natural beauty. The experience as a whole was complex, enormously inspiring, and indeed revitalizing. I can superficially summarize by saying the retreat was amazing and I feel very fortunate to have been invited. What the experience meant and what it might lead to requires a long moment of reflection. It is too soon to know.

The retreat was generative, that is for certain. I left thinking about many things, but one simple question stands out.

On the final afternoon, after participants had two days of forming new friendships and becoming acquainted with each other’s histories and thought processes, a program segment was reserved for Open Space Conversations, a time for participants to generate their own topics for small group discussions. People were asked to suggest a topic or question—anybody could do it—and then everybody else was free to group around whichever topic attracted them. Being too curious about what topics others would offer, and just being too slow to think on my feet, I failed to offer one of my own. It only occurred to me after the process had moved on, but I offer it now: where is the global Midwest?

I have been using the descriptive term “global Midwest” here and there, including once or twice at the retreat. Some of my Compass comrades may be using it, as well. But I myself have neither attended to the task of defining what it might mean, nor, perhaps more pointedly, located it. In some larger and indirect way all of the Compass work around the idea and reality of the mrcc is about locating it. Asking others to locate it, or simply posing the question of where it is, opens another pathway for thinking through the problem of place in the neoliberal age.

A radical reorientation stands at the heart of the question. The regionally demarcating term “Midwest” carries with itself a legacy of spatial orientation based on imperialistic Manifest Destiny. My feeling is that the descriptor “global” may productively upset the ways in which neoliberal structures reinforce Manifest Destiny, but only if we who are indigenous and immigrant, straight and queer, precarious and secure, bind our futures to a sense of place that stands in opposition to neoliberal logic. Capital has an answer to my question. What is our answer? Where is our global Midwest?

At the retreat I met Bao Phi, a spoken word artist and organizer of Vietnamese descent living and working in Minneapolis. He put his voice into the mix, exemplifying for me the task of revealing the contradictory "glocality" people live with everywhere, but especially in the Midwest. Dig this, a poem he performed for us at the retreat. Bao had another poem picked but in a last minute decision changed it this one because he had just learned of the verdict in the Private Danny Chen hazing case. The poem is, in Bao's words, "from a body of my work where I explore alternate and untold stories and perspectives from Vietnamese American lives, through fictional persona poems."

 

Mercy

Nguyen, John – ROTC, Iraq

 

Let my father know it is not

for his blood

that I fight this war.

 

His decision, made in Saigon.

Mine, made at a recruiting table in an L.A. high school

 

Let him know that his hands, which once cradled guns

in another war,

are not my hands.

 

Let his friends know the difference,

at least to us,

between a communist and an Iraqi

and understand why he won’t speak about me.

 

Let my mother know one day where she

does not fear violence an ocean away

where the body and home

are not always in a dance

toward fracture.

 

Let my little hippie sister’s letters to me, telling me it’s not my fault

I was sent to this unjust war, be true,

at least in the eyes of God.

 

Concerning my little brother

who stabbed a white man in San Jose for calling him a chink

let the judge presiding over his case

know that what my brother did,

he did in the name of war.

 

Let the last cradle of my tender vessel

not be this godforsaken Humvee.

 

Let this boredom, this blessed boredom,

easily fill that thin space between my finger

and the trigger.

 

If bullets should fly, let the air pounding from

my lungs as I run be my song.

 

Let my affection for the people here, for the children here,

be real, not sweetened by Nestle or Coca-Cola

or plastic toys Made in China.

 

Let them know I am trying to understand

no matter what I say or do,

it is never enough

because they never asked for this.

 

Let me not tear apart a people, a country, causing Iraqi food

become the nouvelle cuisine in twenty five years back home,

like they did to my people –

let me not become my father, and my son or daughter, myself,

wandering the wavering borders made by someone else.

Let me ask this and mean it,

Though I’m the one holding the gun.           

 

Let the globe on the desk be mightier than the grenade.

 

The soldier, who looked at me and snorted, gooks killing ragheads,

that would make a great video game, let him know a hatred

he never asked for and cannot reason with, and let him die with it

choking his sleep, and let it pass

onto his children and haunt his children’s children,

without mercy.

 

The Eminem wannabe Marine, who when freestyling in the cipher in our barracks squeaked me love you long time, saw me scowl at him, and who the night after left a bullet on my pillowcase with a pair of tiny lips scratched into the casing, let me not be tempted to be first, to beat him to the finish line of the race that he and his kind set up, let me not be tempted to line up the promise in the eye of my M-4 to the back of his bleached blond hair, let me not chain lightning from my finger through the hollow echo in the valley of the chamber through to the domed pellet of steel that would become his whistling reaper, let me not be the first, of he and I

 

to play God.  Let me not pull the trigger on his story.  But let everyone know

that I could have.

 

Let me pronounce the last names of the curly-haired Filipina twins in the next platoon correctly, even as they pronounce Nguyen as best they can.

 

Let every poor brown, black, yellow soul who signed up for college tuition have children who grow up to be NBA stars drafted for millions out of high school.

 

Let me have the courage to erase the names of the dead

from my cellphone.

 

Let my lover, in our most private darkness, know, that when I tell her

you have a Quixotic pussy

except

that your pussy tilts windmills –

let her know, that I mean

that she, the all of her,

has a gravitational pull

and I am only a man

helpless in her current

I am swept in her undertow

and I drown

gladly.

 

Let her know, as the Lord is my witness, that I have confessed

to doubting God

but I have never doubted

her.

 

If we mirror one another then let us be both our homelands –

she, the jagged edge of California, and I her reflection, the jigsaw

coast of Viet Nam, or one, the other,

 

and let no one say I fought this war to make a better world

for our unborn children.

 

Let them know, that I mean the first Persian Gulf,

let them know I mean Viet Nam, and Korea,

and the bombs that made blossoms of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,

let them know I mean every man that will call me gook

every man that will slap my sister behind a closed door

let them know I mean police beating down Cambodian kids

in the park

and people who make fun of my mother using welfare checks

at the supermarket

let them know I mean my father screaming in nightmares

and ghetto neighbors who call my parents gook

when walking by their front yard

Let them know I mean my uncles drinking themselves to death

and aunties losing life savings at blackjack and

white hunters killing Hmong in Wisconsin

and yes, let them know I mean this, here, now, Iraq,

when I say

Fuck this war.

 

Bao Phi