propositions press

22-3254: a great finish

Before I turn the page on the just-completed spring 2012 semester at Columbia College, I must make mention of the final project work done by my students. The course 22-3254 was called Making Print Media Political, and the last assignment was to produce and disseminate work without traditional authorship. In the course I exposed the students to work that is overtly political in both traditional fine art contexts (typically distinguished by standard authorship), on the one hand, and in a functional, social struggle, or guerrilla context (with authorship de-emphasized or erased altogether), on the other. The idea behind the last assignment was to free the students from the constraints imposed by authored work. They took the assignment to heart and pushed limits in both content and dissemination strategies. I cautioned them properly, outlining what kinds of gray legality govern even the smallest kinds of public dissemination. In fact, one of them ended up in handcuffs while executing his work. He talked his out of trouble, but was forced by Chicago police to give up his documentary images. I gave him full credit.

Overall, the results were impressive. One student who lives by dumpster diving made some wonderful hand-drawn signs to mark his favorite dumpsters, as if they were regular stores. He affixed them to nearby alley fences or on the dumpsters themselves. Another simply accelerated what she’d been doing more or less constantly since last fall: make posters for Occupy Chicago and Occupy Columbia. I critiqued her designs pretty thoroughly but I could not hide my pleasure. And some I could not constructively critique at all. Like this one. It is too good.

A pair of students made some bookmarks with partial but recognizable images of famous figures on one side and a date with a QR code on the other. The dates and codes lead to online information about what that person had said on that date. The statement is of a surprising or lesser known nature, somehow “political,” and certainly controversial. The students went to two different bookstores, Quimby’s in Wicker Park and a suburban Barnes & Noble. In both settings they made guerrilla placements using your standard reverse-shoplifting technique. Not surprisingly, the Barnes & Noble staff warned them off a few times while Quimby’s workers said nothing.

Several of the more pointed productions are worth showing here. One is this excellent appropriation of Magritte’s The Treachery of Images. The student had been obsessing over the Berlin Conference of 1884, at which the division of the continent by the European powers into defined territories was superimposed upon the many indigenous identities, languages, and generations-long homelands. Divided up without regard to the indigenous groupings, the Berlin Conference bequeathed to the modern nations of Africa a fate fraught with conflict, through broken cultural affinities and inappropriate unities. This work takes Magritte’s jab at the intangibility of representations to another level of futility, that of the tragic and unwanted inheritance. The student produced it as a poster, but we discussed it as a t-shirt. I would buy one.

 

Another student frontally addressed a college controversy surrounding the president of the college. With different campus constituencies applying pressure on the administration all year long—students, both full and part-time faculty, and staffers from various research units from around the college, President Warrick Carter at one point cracked. He very publicly lost his cool during his annual State of the College address, thereby sealing his reputation negatively in the minds of many students. To recall a moment Dr. Carter will never live down, this anonymous project made itself felt at Manifest—a prime occasion for a campus statement.

  

     

Finally, two students with different projects attacked the advertising on CTA trains. According to the intentions of their respective projects each achieved mixed results. The trains are a tempting venue, but harder to invade than one might think, and at the same time less interactive than one might assume. For the great majority of passengers, the train is about passivity and this can be overlooked in the design of placards that ask for response via Twitter (as one of the projects did). But in an instance of the art making leading to the production of a valuable image despite the unrealized intended outcome, one of them came away with this striking picture.

I would have difficulty coming up with a better document of the profound crisis within which we Americans all now simply accept as everyday life—the security/control-society on one side, and the speculative gambling economy, on the other. Both social poisons served up in the bite-sized portion of an individually comprehended and internalized advertisement. A bigger problem, indeed.

the sticker pack of 22-3254

How does one teach the art of intervention? This is an important question for more and more teaching artists, if only because so many of the artists who do the kind of work that doesn’t get rewarded by the commercial art market have found spaces of livelihood in the art schools, universities, colleges, and K-12 schools as education labor. But it is more than that. The arts of social engagement (involving every discipline) have opened necessary avenues of practical citizenship and political action. In the visual arts, an area in which a lot of theorizing about and validation of social engagement now goes on, the question feels heavy. The fact that so much art activity these days is about and/or actually involves teaching, learning, and education, adds urgency simply for the fact of the pedagogical mode being put on the aesthetic agenda.

It is against this inquiry that I had an opportunity recently to try out a modest intervention exercise for the students in the class I am teaching right now at Columbia College, 22-3254 Special Topics: Making Print Political. The short description is the students designed and assembled a handsome pack of five stickers and distributed them at a March 19 anti-war panel discussion event unannounced.

I have done projects of a social engagement nature with students in the past, but only as a visiting artist at other schools. This is the first time I had the opportunity to embed such an exercise into one of my own classes. This is how the project came together.

Critical Encounters (or CE) is a year-long campus wide theme and series of inquiries at Columbia College Chicago, around which a faculty fellow coordinates programming, teaching, and academic activity from a variety of disciplines and fields. For the 2011-12 school year the CE theme is Rights, Radicals, + Revolution. A great list of starting point inquiries can be found here. The course I am teaching right now was offered under the auspices of the CE initiative.

The CE initiative also issues small project-based grants to faculty and students to help them realize creative projects during the semester that fall outside of their normal work and specifically is intended to advance the conversation around the CE theme. I was awarded one of these grants to fund a project with my class using commercially produced print media to be disseminated at the March 19 event.

Learning the art of intervention requires the stakes of a real audience, and we were not going to assemble an audience on our own. Piggy-backing on somebody else’s event was the way to go, especially a panel event. Moreover, the panel format practically begs for intervention. Panels are by nature tedious, but boring formats for discussions about peace and social justice issues—ie, about how the world needs to be different—are particularly disheartening. Even if rather unintrusive, adding an unannounced element could only help expand the experience for those in attendance.

More importantly, the timing worked. The successful grantees would only be notified the first week of February, two weeks into the fourteen-week semester. Not knowing until then left me in the position of hedging a simple project against the potentially short time frame for execution. Pushing the completion date out beyond Spring Break would have interfered with the last and most ambitious assignments of the semester; getting something together before then was impossible given the concentrated material I had already planned for the first half of the course. In essence, the CE grant project, if it were to happen, was fated to be a side project within the regular course work. For all these reasons, March 19 made for a convenient target date (the class meets on Mondays). For conceptual reasons, the event lent our project a built-in significance and starting point for interpretation, it marking the ninth anniverary of the 2003 beginning of the Iraq War.

It was an intervention with no name. But it had everything else—a good look and feel, material simplicity, insistent but non-ideological politics, a deserving occasion, and a collaborative spirit. After reviewing ideas, format, material options, and costs, we decided to go with stickers as the medium. We did not discuss the desired outcome of the intervention, but I am not sure that conversation would have been very useful anyway. For one thing, the students are neither fully agreed politically, nor on average fully committed to their positions—they are in midst of political educations. It would be a good exchange, but it would have been premature for the purposes of determining a unified direction. We will discuss outcome in the debriefing.

The stickers were good for breaking up the project into tasks. In addition to creating the graphic designs, performing the on-site distribution, and designing the packet were the main tasks. Some of the students have online channels through which they can share the documentation. Everybody contributed.

Instead of a single clear and explicit message, we went with the idea of an assortment of designs, without stylistic unity, and with an openess to messaging. The design work was split among five students, with each allowed to interpret the meaning of the event openly. The students came up with fifteen designs out of which the entire group decided on a final five for the stickers. I am certainly biased, but I think they are amazing. As a way to take the event's audience and therefore the conversation to places positively beyond the event's announced topics of peace and anti-militarism, the art object was undoubtedly a success.

 

Once the first stage of conceptual conversations were done, I played the role as coordinator, making sure that people stayed observant of the calendar, kept track of the spending, did all the online ordering, and received the finished materials. Here we are, for assembling the packs.

Then a team went to the Cultural Center to distribute and document. We had guesses about the event’s audience, in terms of size and profile, but no certainty until we got there. Turns out it was a small crowd, and worse yet, only two of the four scheduled speakers made it. The event energy was low. Rather than viewing that as a failure, I prefer to think of us as having made the event far more interesting than it would have been otherwise. Here we are, gifting them away.

 

Here's a dude checking them out. He was decked out in Occupy buttons and carried with him a few copies of an Occupy publication. I think it was the Occupied Chicago Tribune. 

The project was an exercise in experiential learning, and was intended to show students how to make something simple but meaningful, using some standard strategies of activist and socially-engaged art. Conceptually, the intent was to put a friendly wrinkle into a politically-informed but fatally unimaginative event. I would say our goal was achieved, even if the bar was set fairly low. But to that end, a spectrum of learning purposes were fulfilled, from the universal lesson of meeting a tight deadline with a quality product, to the accumulation of concrete experience in producing print media art work.  

The more complex questions having to do with performative interventions, the aesthetics of what Brian Holmes calls 'event work,' what the institutionalization of activist art bodes, how art interventions might figure in revitalizing a moribund leftist culture, and so forth, remain to be explored. But teaching the art of interventions reproduces presumed values and priorities–even a modest project like ours does this, because of its institutional sponsorship (and attendant taboos), the inequities inherent in a teacher/student arrangement, and many other manifestations of the power structure embedded in the conditions surrounding this project. Given that, I look forward to seeing more critical analysis of such teaching, hopefully beginning with our debriefing.

a book, from cell 29 to room 458 (with an ocean view)

Steamed clams for dinner and a marion berry cobbler for dessert. Sideways rain and a cozy fire in the hotel room. Hot tubs, a movie, and a book. A view of waves pounding, the tide coming in, and a jigsaw puzzle on the table. 

For a short two days we are doing what winter vacationers do on the Oregon coast every year, plus enjoying this year’s speciality: Santorum jokes. 

Vacations are about getting away, but like all our Oregon trips, this one is the yearly homecoming. Our household has Oregon roots on both sides, so our trips fall under the heading of our travel corridors: back and forth, once a year, Portland/Salem/the coast to Madison/Chicago/the Midwest. But on this trip out the book I have before me takes me back the way I came, back to the places where a lot of it started for me, namely Detroit and Chicago.

I found this volume in the anarchism section at Powell’s in Portland. I was about to pass on it because $40 is a lot to pay for an old book that has seen better days.
The spine is damaged and the copyright page is torn. The corners are turned and overall, despite its lasting beauty and impressive durability–appreciate the lettering on the cover: gilded and feathered elegance in anarchism!–it is a book that clearly has been through many hands. But this isn’t just any title or any volume. This is a book of writings by Albert Parsons (aka husband of Lucy Parsons), one of the Haymarket martyrs and an anarchist printer, published posthumously. I cannot say for sure if it is a first edition, but it is copyright dated 1887 with no other dates, and the book has the look, feel, and construction of an object 125 years old. So, really, it would have been difficult to forgo even without this clincher: upon examination I noticed that it bears a stamp from the Wayne State University Libraries.

Therefore it is entirely conceivable that this very object passed through the hands of the Detroit anarchists who made up the radical world that influenced a good number of us teenagers back in the 1980s in the suburbs of Oakland County. Maybe the Detroit printer Fredy Perlman, who helped to usher into the English-speaking world the thought of Debord and the Situationists, held this very book in his hands. Maybe the activist lawyer Kenneth Cockrel, who did so much work for the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and who had earned a degree in political science from Wayne State, had racked up overdue fines on this book. Mine is not as good a story as my bibliophile friend Kevin Connolly’s tale for the ages, but in terms of a single book tracing a personal and social history generations after its publication, and the possiblities of connections we can now dream about, it is the best I have had.

But what does the journey of this volume say about the corridors of time and space that a strain of radicalism may travel? The book took shape in the cell of a wrongly condemned anarchist in the Cook County Jail,

 became a published reality shortly after the state-sanctioned murder of the author, landed for who knows how many years in the collection at Wayne State, which for many decades was one of the most accessible of America’s public urban universities. And then the book was returned to commercial circulation via Powell’s Books. Between those steps there were undoubtedly other stops—circulation through private collections, sales and re-sales, years on the shelves belonging to now unknown shops, libraries, owners, or borrowers--maybe in Michigan, maybe in Oregon, and who knows where else. In early 2012 it comes into my hands, slightly callused from guitar and presswork but mostly soft like an intellectual’s, suffering invisibly from carpal tunnel, to take back to the Midwest. Is it the completion of a circle or just another returned book in the great cosmic radical library? 

Given the battles being fought in Wisconsin, the Rahm Emanuel mayoral disaster unfolding in Chicago, and the ongoing contested destruction and reconstruction of Detroit, it feels good to be returning home with a book that others used in their midwestern-global struggles from earlier times. Maybe the timing puts a digestible veneer on my hydrocarbon privileges. If it were only about collecting this would be just another instance of radical nostalgia. To safeguard against that, who, in my turn, can I influence? Anybody out there want to borrow this book?

 

SHoP, justseeds, ivaw: printing views and conversation this weekend

Two events this Saturday, December 3, one in Chicago, one in New York, both have to do with printing, with contributions from me.

In Chicago, South Side Projections will be screening Typeface, the Kartemquin documentary about the Hamilton Wood Type Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. April Sheridan of CBPA put together a small show of letterpress work to go along with the film. I'll be bringing a couple of pieces to show. Plus, there will be a roundtable discussion after the film on the history and future of letterpress. Respondents include film director Justine Nagan, April Sheridan, Martha Chiplis of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Celene Aubrey of the Lillstreet Art Center, and me.

Event starts at 7 pm, but the venue, SHoP, will have activity going all afternoon, too.

5638 South Woodlawn Avenue
Chicago, Illinois

Full details on the SHoP website.

*

The New York event is the reception for the brand new War Is Trauma print portfolio from Justseeds and IVAW. I'm proud to say, not only did I contribute a print to this collection, but I helped Nicolas Lampert and Sgt. Aaron Hughes print the portfolio covers on my SP-15. We did it on Combat Paper, no less.

7 - 10pm
@ Booklyn, 37 Greenpoint Ave. 4th Floor,                                                                                    Brooklyn, New York

The show will be up from December 3, 2011 - January 8, 2012. Full details on the Justseeds blog.

The portfolio is a terrific collection of thirty-some prints by a combination of Justseeds artists,

Josh MacPhee (Brooklyn)
Mary Tremonte (Pittsburgh)
Kevin Caplicki (Brooklyn)
Chris Stain (Queens)
Thea Gahr (Portland, OR)
Bec Young (Pittsburgh)
Erik Ruin (Philadelphia)
Pete Yahnke (Albuquerque)
Alec Dunn (Portland, OR)
Colin Matthes (Milwaukee)
Nicolas Lampert (Milwaukee)
Jesse Purcell (Montreal)
Roger Peet (Portland, OR)
Molly Fair (Brooklyn),
Santiago Armengod (Mexico City)
Shaun Slifer (Pittsburg)
Dylan AT Miner (E. Lansing)

 IVAW artists,

Drew Cameron (Army Veteran, Vermont)
Joyce Wagner (Marine Veteran, Pittsburgh)
Aaron Hughes (IL Army National Guard Veteran, Chicago)
Jeremy Bergren (Marine Veteran, North Carolina)
Peter Sullivan (IL Army National Guard Veteran, Chicago)
Chris Arendt (MI Army National Guard Veteran, Michigan)
Malachi Muncy (TX Army National Guard Veteran, Texas)
Ash Kyrie (WI Army National Guard Veteran, Wisconsin)

and a handful of invited "allies" of those two organizations: 

Bay Area Civilian Soldier Alliance: Siri Margerin and Nave Fortin 
Michael Rakowitz (Chicago)
Marshall Weber (Booklyn Artists Alliance, Brooklyn, NY)
Harrell Fletcher and Transformazium with Brettiny Hucks
Gayla Jean Clemons
Deon Archie
Deshon LeGrand (Portland, OR / Braddock, PA)
Temporary Services (Chicago, Philadelphia, Copenhagen)

And me, as a late addition to the allies list. Nicolas called me up to see if I could make a 16x12 print in an edition of 130 less than three weeks before the deadline. Of course I had to say yes! 

psychedelic recall

“What’s going on in this country, it’s fascism, simple as that.”

The stranger who spoke those words to me had not attended and did not even know about the Saturday noontime rally on Capitol Square, at which there was an estimated crowd of 40,000 celebrating the recently launched campaign to recall Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. On the square the spirits were high, and the consciousness evident. This was the massive and genuinely popular Wisconsin movement, again visibly churning to life. But the critical pronouncment above came neither from the rally stage nor from any of the scores of petition-gathering volunteers, nor from a protest sign. It came later that evening, from the mouth of the guy in his early 50s sitting next to me at the Furthur show.

“The people are distracted by this bullshit corporate media, which is all lies and pure bullshit. What’s that show, Three Men and a Half, or some shit. Fuckin’ bullshit. And in the meantime the rich are putting up a police state, and nobody fuckin’ notices. They’re defunding schools, keeping people stupid. It’s fascism!”

This man was pissed, possibly in despair, but clear-sighted. When I asked him what he did for a living, he admitted embarrassment and then proceeded to tell me all about the new gold rush of the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota, where he has been working as a contractor for six months at a time. He was embarrassed because, as he put it, “It’s a goddam free for all out there, 4 billion barrels of recoverable oil, maybe more, with no consideration for any kind of environmental responsibility. And it’s insulated. You don’t see any big oil company that you’d recognize. Only Halliburton, and a lot of companies like Halliburton that nobody’s every heard of. It’s fucked up. I hate it.”

And right then the band went into Throwing Stones.

Picture a bright blue ball, just spinning, spinnin free,
Dizzy with eternity.
Paint it with a skin of sky,
Brush in some clouds and sea,
Call it home for you and me.

This encounter did not happen at a political rally. Or did it? I spent $110 on two Furthur shows this weekend, outside Chicago and in Madison. Very un-critical art of me. Not radical.

It was great.

Not because the boys opened the party with a raging Sugar Magnolia and Chimenti wailed the keys on a tightly shuffling Stagger Lee in Friday’s first set, or because they hit the euphoric passages of The Eleven and St. Stephen with full, thunderous volume in the second set. And not because they offered up favorite cover Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues in Saturday night’s first set, or because the band pummeled Viola Lee Blues and Bobby crushed the vocals on Death Don’t Have No Mercy in the second set.

Those are some of the reasons the shows were excellent for Deadheads, something I most certainly am. But these nights were not merely about Dead fandom. They were about an old counterculture meeting a new moment of economic and cultural upheavel.

The thoughts that came to me during the shows had to do with if and how those nights connected with the times of the heterogenous psychedelic counterculture before “Deadhead” gained meaning as a defined subcultural identity, and which had emerged visibly already by the early and mid-70s. Having come into the scene in the age of the mega-Dead (from 1987 on—basically the years after Garcia’s diabetic coma), aesthetically speaking the ur-mythical early days had always felt rather remote, even with Captain Trips on stage. By then the concert experiences had become packaged and predictable, all the more so for having attained the status of a major concert draw. By the 90s, the band was falling apart in terms of internal communication and the concert experience ran on the fumes of cliches. I had tickets to two shows at The Palace in Auburn Hills, Michigan, in 1992. The first show was so flat that my friend and I gave our tickets to the second show to some “miracle”-seeking fans, who looked extra-pathetic given the sorry performance they were dying to see.

By contrast, the Furthur shows of this past weekend were meaningful on an intellectual and aesthetic level I have never felt before. The shows were great because they gave me time, space, and stimulation to think—and feel—through the political sensations of our day. To really stop and wonder about this cultural moment in America, in so many ways seeming to be on the edge of a cliff—or, more promisingly, on the take-off edge of a growth spurt of a kind. That Furthur remains a direct link to some of the most important American cultural experiments of the Sixties—open-ended, bravely good humored, at once literati and working class, astonishingly amateur, and selectively provincial—figured importantly in the experience.

My musing began with the questions, what does it mean for a few thousand people to gather for an evening party, many of them wigged out on mushrooms, Ecstasy, or acid, plus copious amounts of grass, shaking to music supplied by a fresh-sounding and expertly performing outfit directly descended from the original house band for the Acid Tests of forty-six years ago? What does it mean for this event to be happening in a time of unrest, persistent economic crisis, and a general deep questioning of values? Can a form of hedonistic revelry borne out of a turbulent and revolutionary time from a generation and a half ago maintain purchase on a measure of meaning that goes beyond a consumer experience—and maybe even opens doors to new pleasures and, therefore, desires? What are the changed structural circumstances, from then to now, that might limit the reach of the experience, or re-inscribe fresh meanings?

The discontents and desires out there, products of a generalized injustice, so personally felt and expressed in the America of 2011, had me reaching for the poignancy of forty year-old lyrics, my ears pulling them out of the mix. See the romantic indignation of Hunter’s losers and wharf rats.

Half of my life
I spent doin’ time for
some other fucker’s crime…

Measured in pure pleasure, the Rosemont show was the better of the two. It was a happy crowd, ready for a high energy party. The first set put us on notice. The band was tight. The unusually coherent second set, full of high points and seamless transitions, took me to the recordings of the early Seventies, the mindfully groovey playing I never got to hear in the late Grateful Dead. I could only think, so this is what this music is supposed to feel like. Music sung to the hassled longhairs of 1969, newly resonant in the contested space that is brutalized Occupy America, 2011. A basic message we can all relate to, from Ron Paul supporters to the drummers of Zucotti, and everbody who has been hassled post 9/11—which is to say, everybody. Get off our backs. Let us be. Stop telling us what to do.

Ooo, Freedom!

 Ooo, Liberty!

Oh-wo, leave me alone

I want to find my own way home

I expected the Madison show to have some discernible political vibe, simply because of the setting—there were sure to be recall campaign volunteers out, fans with buttons and Wisconsin solidarity t-shirts on. Appropriately, the music was darker than the previous night’s jolly ride, more bluesy, sadder songs, and hard driving rock. Less ecstatic.

Saturday night’s message seemed to be that nowadays, we are losers, all of us. But we can wallow together if we are fortunate enough to escape the various wars (dodging the draft then, evading the creditors now), score a ticket and a ride. And for an evening at least, a diversion of mind and body that might be more than only a diversion, with the right dosage and preparation, can still be had.

It used to be said that the Grateful Dead weren’t the best at what they do, they were they only ones who do what they do. That is no longer true, and hasn’t been for quite some time. The second generation jam bands, not to mention the modern psychedelia of techno tribes and orchestral pop, reached maturity long ago. Now the kids have a lot of choices. Consequently, the Madison show wasn’t a sellout. Not even close. The upper sections were were sparsely attended, mostly with people who wanted lots of space to “white person wiggle,” as Jim DeRogatis would say. But the floor was another story. It was full, with many from the upper reaches having come down. And here again, as I scanned the floor party, I wondered, is this what those 70s Winterland shows felt like—intimate and non-glamorous, and decidedly not the hottest ticket in town?

Like my discontented new friend—whom I never would have met at an activist event, or at Mess Hall, or through a critical art project—people are back to speaking and working against the system, and most importantly, hating it while having to make do in it. 

We used to play for silver, now we play for life;
And one's for sport and one's for blood at the point of a knife.
And now the die is shaken, now the die must fall.
There ain't a winner in the game, he don't go home with all.
Not with all.

For me, the guy made the occasion more than a party. Maybe not a political rally, but even better, a politicized reenactment of Deadhead social memory once in danger of being permanently overtaken by stylized consumerism and now returned to the truth of an aesthetic experience, a pre-enactment of times to come. We are going “furthur” indeed, both forward and back.

*lyrics from Throwing Stones, Wharf Rat, Liberty, and Jack Straw.

 

book points, furniture joints: John Preus and The World As Text

The Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College commissioned me to write a text to accompany the exhibition The World As Text from earlier in the summer, organized by artist John Preus. The publishing schedule has been pushed back, the show is over, and I have not been given any info on a definite timeframe. But that is what a blog is for. Here it is.

– Dan

Book Points, Furniture Joints: John Preus and The World As Text

❆

What do books ask of us, besides some time with our minds and our eyes? Our ears, fingers, and palms? Our butts and our backs? Using a book usually means using all of these things. The comfortable functionality of most ordinary books is based on conventions that attend to the act of reading, that is, bringing all these body parts into coordination. But while the average paperback bears evidence of considerations that go into making a book a user friendly object, the space beyond the reader’s body almost always seems to lie outside the bookmaker or designer’s purview. And still the books demand of us—their readers, borrowers, and collectors—a consideration of space and support, of storage and display solutions. Books need a furnished space in which we can read them, look at them, and learn from them. A collection of artists’ books want even more, neither the false neutrality nor the ostentatiousness of a collecting institution, but rather a space equal to the books themselves.

✴

For decades now artists have been making books and book systems that take note of the space in which books get read and browsed. That attention could be negative, as in the literally passive aggression of Jorn and Debord’s sandpaper-bound memoires. Or utopian, as in the swarming circumvention of commercial art scenes and the creation of autonomous networks through mail art, which so often made use of book forms. The fine press bookmakers who create amazing hand-bound or letterpress printed books that seduce through aesthetics and celebrate a shared history of analog skills, situate their books self-consciously or not in the conservative surroundings of the special collections libraries or within vitrines in museums and art centers. Artists of a revolutionary nature have sometimes reworked the relationship between books and printed matter and their spaces of study altogether, as in Temporary Services’ Binder Archives. But it seems the “reading room” itself remains under-developed as, ideally, an aesthetically unpredictable but eminently functional space.

✼

Lots of books need to be disposed of. Bad novels, mass market paperbacks, textbooks, pamphlets, ring binders, magazines, and manuals of all kind overflow the bottom tier secondary markets. That is, if they are lucky enough to make any stops at all before going to the recyclers, incinerators, and landfills—in the case of mass market paperbacks, sometimes from the store rack straight to the dump, unsold much less unread. Books-on-demand and the new legitimacy of self-publishing are bringing books into existence that as of yet have no clear long term place in the world. E-books promise a whole other universe of waste, plastic, recoverable heavy metals, and unread gigabytes. Perhaps the Adam Batemans of the future will arrange thousands of e-book readers in carefully interlocked stacks. On the other hand, ever more books are collected, protected, conserved, and put away with some notion of perpetuity—or else treated as a semi-liquid investment. The pool of buyers of vintage, antiquarian, and collectible books, magazines, newspapers, maps, cards, art books, and comic books, has been greatly enlarged by the Internet marketplace, bringing in who knows how many buyers who otherwise might never have found access to such objects. Other than bidding and buying, the disparate online world of book wealth includes the viewable items of special collections libraries, the pictures of personal collections that generate bookshelf envy, and the occasional news item about institutional acquisitions of personal libraries and archives of notable persons. Electronic media in all its forms and uses in relation to books only makes the problem of real space functionality and purpose if not more urgent, then at least more neglected. Just ask any librarian, or for that matter, the former strategists of Borders. 

✥

How many of us have furnished our own homes in ways shaped by the spaces of books, from out in the world? I have a favorite reading chair. It is a sturdy Danish armchair with a torn leather seat that I rescued from the curb in Hyde Park, which also happens to be one of the best neighborhoods for finding books—new, used, and thrown away. That chair, both in my front room and on the curb where I found it, represents the way in which books exist not just a medium and a technology in themselves, but also as a core form around which revolves a particular field of behavior and material support. I have a friend who bought a table from a public library that was in the process of replacing their furniture, repurposing it as a kitchen table. How many and what kinds of books had spent time on that four-legged construction? Weeks after making the purchase at the library garage sale, he found a clue—may ’68 had been carved roughly into the skirt. In the case of my chair, somebody’s junked furniture eventually got plugged meaningfully into another person’s life through the activity of armchair reading. My friend’s table, once the site of quiet study and silent subversion surrounded by public stacks, now supports lively multi-generational conversations and the conviviality of family life, surrounded by a private collection of books. In both cases, we as secondary users and owners came into an inheritance of furniture that merged with the past and present of books.

❉

With The World As Text, artist, designer, and builder John Preus works with and about books for the fourth time.* In each case a client or an exhibition space invited Preus or the collaborative group that he was a part of to design a solution to a problem having to do with books. Books themselves are not one of his media and in none of the four projects did he or the group select the books for which they built structures. His responsibilities essentially ended where the books began. Thus, on one level Preus relates to books as do all busy people in that he simply wishes he had more time to read, finding in them the world of ideas. But having to meet the design needs posed by book collecting clients or book-centered exhibitions reveals aspects of the life, materiality, and use of books that most people, including most book artists, do not think about. Moreover the privileged perspective into books that may be gained by designing and building reading and display spaces, as well as objects made out of books, becomes quite interesting when set in relation to Preus’s constant interest, the inheritance and mutation of building and architectural materials and their utility. The question is, how and where does his evolving understanding and view of books, book collections, and book culture dovetail with his larger commitments to building out of materials—often scavenged or drawn from streams of surplus—that contain particular histories of design put into use, cultural patterns, and economic conditions.

❀

As with my friend’s table or my chair, the desks and chairs in The World As Text have been brought out of one bookish environment (maybe an office, maybe a waiting room) and put into another. The difference is that Preus and his team were charged with no mere task of salvage and re-use, but rather of formal mutation within the confines of overall functionality—in other words, to create furniture that leaves the realm of furniture, but still functions as furniture. It is an ambition to match that of those who curated the books on display, as well as of those who authored, designed, and crafted the books themselves. The measure of success then, might also be those of the books. That is to say, will the creations of Preus and his team—not only the discrete objects, but also the reading room as a whole—live on after the show, as the best books live on after they are returned to the shelf? My guess is that Preus himself will only grant success when he sees that the project lives on as not only material evidence, to be seen and used again, but rather as the most powerful inheritance of all: as inspiration.

 

* The projects were:

2nd-hand reading room, threewalls, Chicago

Another Story, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago

Dorchester Project, Chicago

John has designed and assembled storage systems for several private residences, as well. Check out the Dilettante Studios site.

 

from the we are wisconsin book release

Video documentation of the panel conversation from the book release event that happened the other night in Chicago, right here. Micah and Peter were terrific, check it out.

we are wisconsin: the book

On Wednesday evening I’ll be at the book release for We Are Wisconsin at the Chicago offices of In These Times, in conjunction with the exhibition of Wisconsin Uprising posters and signs now up at Art In These Times. The evening opens at 6:30 PM and the speakers begin at 7:30 PM.

Erica Sagrans, the editor and coordinator of the book, will open with an introduction. Then three contributors, Peter Rickman, Micah Uetricht, and myself, will each take a few minutes to make some remarks.

Erica sent around a prepartory email to the three of us with a useful bundle of questions, intended as starting points for the discussions that will undoubtedly last into the fall season. They are worth posting here, for all who have invested time, labor, and spirit in the Wisconsin movement to consider.

What is your vision of the strategy for going forward in Wisconsin or with this fight more broadly--with a Walker recall, 2012 elections, other electoral or non-electoral strategies?

-- What did the media miss in telling this story?

--  A pervasive theory about the 2008 election was that progressives hit a ceiling with involvement and massive turnout of the Democratic base and young people and people of color. During the Wisconsin protests, lots of new people got involved--were these people who hadn't been involved in '08? What would we have to do in 2012 to get these people involved and active in elections?

-- Was the Wisconsin fight fundamentally about labor rights and unions, or something else?

-- A remarkable thing about what happened in Wisconsin, and particularly with the recalls, was alliances between groups on the left that otherwise wouldn't have worked together--how do you think that happened, or do you see that continuing? What have been the benefits as well as the challenges to that?

-- We know about the incredible protests that unfolded in Madison, but less talked about is what happened and is still happening around the state. Can you talk about how a movement was built statewide with less likely people and places involved?

-- One of the defining aspects of these protests was how many people who had previously not been at all political got involved and got politicized or radicalized. Also defining was the re-politicization of many established institutions and unions. How did that happen?

-- How do you think the half a year of this movement compares with the timeframes of other social movements? Is this the birth of a new social movement, and can social movements have geographic components?

-- How are groups in Wisconsin planning to counter the influx of corporate money that has influenced the recent recalls and will influence the Walker recall effort?

-- What role did technology and the internet play in driving action, distributing information, and telling the story of the Wisconsin protests? How did online and offline work together?  

 

In These Times

2040 N. Milwaukee Ave.

2nd Floor
Chicago, USA
Western Stop on Blue Line
http://artinthesetimes.wordpress.com/
http://www.wearewisconsinbook.com/

 

before i leave

I am wrapping up my teaching duties for the semester; summer is around the corner. True to the short springs of the upper midwest, it’s about to get warm after only week or two of sixty-degree weather. Up until late April spring had been all chilly rain and occasional flurries, as cold to the bones and body as the frosty air of winter proper. The shock of summer heat will be made greater by travel. A week from now I will be in Beijing, under the blazing, hazy sun of their hot season. It will be my eighth trip to China. Each time the experience becomes more familiar, but I don’t think it will ever feel routine. Maybe because the older I get the more I feel rooted to the midwest of my birth, youth, and adulthood, going to China will never feel like a casual trip, even as I spend more time there. Perhaps the more I live in both places, the more I understand the distance between them. Getting ready for a trip to the other side of the planet is a good time recap some recent art experiences. 

I made it to the Wisconsin Labor: A Contemporary Portrait show at the Watrous. It was full of photographic images and some video that faithfully, respectfully, and affectionately document the people who perform the work that makes Wisconsin. Workers in the agricultural, retail, hospitality, tourism, manufacturing and other sectors besides, are represented, with the subjects mostly shown in their occupational environment. 

But I left a tiny bit disappointed. The show could have and, really, should have been more ambitious in its concept. Of course, there is the increased urgency of addressing ideas having to do with workers’ rights because of Wisconsin’s current political climate—ie Scott Walker’s all-out neoliberal assault on all things public. But obviously the timing of the show cannot be planned in relation to a spontaneous social movement. So it is not that. 

Rather, I wished that the exhibition concept incorporated some analysis of Wisconsin’s economic system as it exists in the region and world. Maybe that can’t happen, since it would mean addressing the logics of globalization. But this is the problem: the concept and reality of both Wisconsin as an easily defined place, and labor as a self-evident category of human activity, are no longer the stable realities they were one or two generations ago. How, for example, is the work of those who live in Wisconsin but work a job across a state line to be categorized? Are we not “Wisconsin” labor? For that matter, what about the workers who make all the stuff that is imported into Wisconsin? What about the call center employees in India performing customer service for a Wisconsin company? What about the financiers and traders on Wall Street or in Dubai who invest in Wisconsin mortgages? Are they not Wisconsin labor? To me, the most glaring oversight on the labor side, for that matter, was the absence of the unemployed, especially those in the job hunt. Looking for work, it is often said, is a full time job in itself. I see this at the public library all the time—jobless folks working on applications, resumes, cover letters, and browsing the jobs listings over and over. 

Also there is the question of our present Great Recession, which as many of the more forthright social scientists will admit is actually a depression. This was hardly touched on in the show, but it defines the economics of all but the wealthiest households these days, and most certainly shapes the lifes of the working people represented in the show. To me, this is a picture of Wisconsin labor:

 

That's my favorite local music store, Good ‘n’ Loud, closed down due to a weak economy.

Deeper still, how about this for a picture of Wisconsin (or “Michigan,” or “California,” or “American” labor:

 

Automation, at the most quotidian level, rendering redundant a candy store or snack counter worker. These conveniences are so deeply naturalized by now that we hardly think of them as part of an economic logic that makes human beings unnecessary. Only the booths where a parking lot attendant once sat reminds us that unemployment is built into our economy’s tendency toward real and imagined increases in efficiency. 

I also caught the MDW Fair in Chicago. I browsed the last two hours of the Sunday it was open. Even though it was near to closing time, the energy was great, and as expected delivered a social experience as much as an art experience. This was an event organized by and for Chicago, and damn the big shot outsider buyers courted by Art Chicago and pretty much all the standard commercial fairs of other cities–that seemed to be the attitude, especially considering that scheduling it for only one weekend later would have brought it into direct comparison with Art Chicago and Next (favorably, is what most people I talked to felt). The organizers—Threewalls, Roots & Culture, and Public Media Institute—did an excellent job of bringing on board every grassroots initiative, small art publisher or bookstory, apartment gallery, non-commercial space, oddball collective in Chicago, and even some local art school departments. 

The bottom floor of the Geo Lofts was an open floor display of various sculptures and constructed projects. For me the highlight was getting to see Hui-min Tsen and James Barry’s Mt. Baldy Expedition boat, finally:

 

The second floor was all booths, tables, and exhibition walls. Regional Relationships, AREA Chicago, and Half Letter Press were all there, along with some cool things and people I hadn’t known of before. Like this:

 You know I'm a sucker for all things Aldi.

I was very happy (!) to see the Happy Collaborationists (a group of Columbia College alumni making fun things happen around town, including Anna, pictured below), a bizarre and super engaging floor arrangement in the Green Gallery booth, and the free-standing kiosk of the Silver Galleon Press. There were public discussions all day on Saturday and Sunday on the third floor, along with the first public display of the Threewalls CSA project. There was also a small room with a display of Dorchester Project plans, a Hyde Park Art Center exhibition space, and Philip von Zweck’s untitled free editioning project to which I was thrilled to contribute a drawing.

All in all,
satisfying. That’s saying a lot for an art fair.

 

remembering kathryn hixson

Many of us who work in or had passed through the Chicago art world of the 1990s and 2000s were shocked to learn that Kathryn Hixson died suddenly on Sunday, November 7. By the time I got to know her Kathryn was established as a writer, critic, and the editor of New Art Examiner. She had some advanced training as an artist but I never knew her as one. She was a Carleton alumna and that was an early connection between us. After I found that out, I wasn't surprised to hear about her migration from art making to art writing. That seemed like a shift somebody who went to Carleton would easily make.

Kathryn gave me some of my first breaks as a writer. We were in the audience at a panel at the Smart Museum of Art's exhibition Ecologies. I asked a question from the floor–now I can't remember what it was. Kathryn, who I'd met only briefly before then, told me she liked the question and asked me to review the show. She offered to make it one of their longer "extended" reviews. I said yes and that was my first paid piece of writing.

A few months later, she asked me to write a long article about Kerry James Marshall, timed to coincide with his February keynote at CAA in Chicago that year. She set me up to visit Kerry's studio and it turned out to be the beginning of my following Kerry's work up close for about ten years now. I will always be grateful to Kathryn for thinking of me then. She could have assigned it to a more experienced writer but was looking for fresh voices. Writing that piece, I wanted to satisfy her more than anyone.

I know Kathryn gave chances and advice to many other young writers and artists, too. She was that wonderful combination of critical and generous.

After New Art Examiner folded I would run into Kathryn here and there, casually catch up on her curatorial projects when we talked, and hear about her taking jobs or positions. Though I'm sure she would touch people in the positive ways that she touched me wherever she was, I sometimes wondered if she would find herself a position of wide reach again; I always hoped that she would.