propositions press

the dying art of hitchhiking

Traveling the Madison-Chicago expressway corridor is all about routine. Lots of people do it on a regular basis. In other words it can be very boring, as predictable as zipping across concrete at 70 mph can be.

So it was a treat when the other day I picked up a hitchhiker for the first time in quite a few years, as much for me as for him. This man was sitting on the side of the road at an entrance to a South Beloit truck stop with a sign that said I-39 South. He and his dog rode with me for about fifteen miles, to where our temporarily common paths diverged.

It had been years since I had given a lift to a thumb-traveler, mainly because I do not see hitchhikers very often anymore, even though it seems that I drive more frequently than ever. Hitchhiking is a mode of travel that seems to have declined markedly in the last fifteen or twenty years. You would think that with the rise in gas and automobile prices and unemployment among the young we would be seeing an uptick in hitching. But no. These days the culture of Fear, now as American as apple pie, trumps even the once-powerful national longing for adventure and the irresistable draw of a free ride. Instead of hitting the road and exploring this vast land our young men (not sure hitching was ever that imaginable for women) are sitting on couches, scared of what is over the horizon, brave enough only to do battle in make believe video worlds. Do we need any more evidence of the empire in decay? 

Turns out this fellow was a brother of the road, a modern day vagabond, what Hunter S. Thompson would have called a Road Person. John was his name, shabby but very polite, looking weary after ten years of hitching and tramping. The story he told me was that he had to reach Missouri to apply for a new ID card, the last state from which he’d had one issued. His wallet had been stolen a year earlier and since then he’d had nothing but trouble finding work and a stable living situation. Even when he could find the work (he had all his construction worker tools with him), he’d have trouble getting hired.

Starting out from Florida at age 21 and now 31, having gone through his young man’s period of deadhead drifting and numerous cross-country sojourns, John was ready to stay put for a while in Green Bay, where he’d found a steady job with a builder friend. He wants to get an apartment of his own but that was all on hold until he could show Somebody Who Matters a proper ID.

We spent our short time together trading thoughts about hitching rides, how things have changed since I hitched a few trips back in the 1980s. Together we bemoned the security state and what it has done to relations between strangers. He said what irks him the most are the strapping clean-cut white dudes driving pick-ups who never stop to let him catch a ride in the box. It would not bother him, he testified, except that he still gets a fair share of rides from little old women driving alone. I said it is ironic, but perhaps unsurprising. Sometimes the people who have the least reason to fear are the most fearful. 

John likes to draw. When I dropped him off he took the time to pull out a couple of his drawings, pieced together from notebook paper and rolled for travel. The first he calls Dragon and Harlot, based on an episode from the Book of Revelations. He explained to me that he was scared out of his wild phase through the harsher parts of the Bible.

The second is a Sponge Bob Jerry he did as a gift for his niece who is a young, post-Jerry deadhead. Imagine growing up with Jerry Garcia as a departed mythical figure but having Sponge Bob Square Pants as a very present television companion. Considered in that way, I suppose this picture makes sense.

So, where is all that dark matter of cultural production that Greg Sholette talks about? Some of it, at least, is on the side of the road, waiting for a ride. As soon as I pulled away, John went back into an undetectability in relation to me and most of modern America—he has no email address, phone number, street address, or cyberpresence. John is still in that other America, the one I passed through every now and then in younger years, but that has become largely invisible to not only the mainstream, but all of the mediated cultural spheres we live and work in–the art world, academia, creative industries, "alternative scenes." Though I feel for his exhaustion, I am gratified to know that it still exists.

 

l.a. report

I am just returned from a very short trip to Los Angeles. The excuse for the trip was having the chance to present a paper about The Journey West at the College Art Association’s annual conference. In the weeks leading up to the trip I found myself in conversations with art friends that went one of two ways. Either they would say, “Are you going to CAA? Let’s get together.” Or else it would be something along the lines of “I can’t believe all these people go to CAA. It is so lame.”

I have never fully understood the gripes about CAA. It is true that CAA excludes participation because of its registration fees, and that the format is not very imaginative. But what do people expect? The conference for any professional organization costs a lot to stage, and CAA's registration fees are much more affordable than that of organizations in many other fields. And while colleges and universities range from semi-accessible to elite and exclusive, they are not exactly the same as corporations or government institutions. They are knowledge and education factories, and as such offer a space for protected intellectual activity on a limited but real and substantive basis. As a vehicle for serious discourse and the sharing of ideas, I find CAA much more palatable than, say, the add-on symposia or discussion events that seem to be attaching themselves to all the commercial art fairs.

I have been to CAA eight times. Some of my friends think that is a lot. I first started going because for about three years after I finished my degree program, I had no functional intellectual community. I would save for the trip and that would be my big travel expenditure for the year. From the beginning I always worked in visits to family and friends, too. The conference alone was never enough to fully justify a trip, especially without free couches to sleep on.

Then I found my community of artists and researchers. I stopped going to CAA for about five or six years, except for once when I had a chance to present for the first time (and visit a friend I had not seen in years). Then I attended again in 2011, playing the role of editor and coordinator of the annual newsletter of the Radical Art Caucus, for the first of two years. I have gotten something out of RAC and CAA. I figured it was time to give back, in a capacity appropriately minor to my life as an adjunct professor.

This year I was at the conference for only a couple of hours besides the time of our presentation, plus a little time for shopping at the conference book fair afterward. My Columbia College colleague Annika Marie gave a great lecture on Ad Reinhardt’s cartoons. Our session was organized incredibly well by fellow Madisonite Laurie Beth Clark, we received good feedback, and the whole presentation exercise was valuable in advancing our understanding of The Journey West. A highlight of the conference was seeing the work of my Madison brothers, Lewis Koch and Patrick JB Flynn on display. Lewis’s book marked down to a clearance price.
Yup, that is cheap. I left it for somebody else; I already have a copy. Patrick got the design gig for the new Baffler. Very sweet to see it being pushed.
I got the newsletter put together, this time with a poem by mrcc resident poet Matthias Regan as the featured art content. But I did not even have a chance to see the hard copies in action at the conference.

So that was CAA. 

More interesting was speaking about the Wisconsin Uprising on Friday night at the Public School in Chinatown. The attendance was almost as good as that for our CAA session (about eighteen), but in a much better space with a non-academic audience. As an autonomous educational entity, it was impressive–something we who are trying to keep the Madison Autonomous University alive can aspire to. As a social space, it was lovely. As a community, it was supportive and welcoming. I am a fan, and it was a privilege to have the floor there for an evening. And I must say, the interest in the Wisconsin political situation was enthusiastic.

I stayed with my friend Ava. She was one of the original Mess Hall keyholders. For the past year and half she has been working as a project manager of a large real estate development called Atwater Crossing, or ATX. The last time I was in LA was in October of 2010. Ava was just about to start on the job then, and drove me around the complex. There were only something like five or ten tenants then. Now there are something like forty. Nearly all of them are creative industry or arts-related concerns. She took me there again this time, to scope out the buzzing restaurant scene. It reminded me of large developments in China—creative industry and design-oriented businesses taking root in clusters, but here it was with more substance and breadth. The interactive media companies are there, but so are theater companies. Crafty artist’s studios are there, but so is Pomegranate Pictures, who make videos for System of a Down. You won’t find that in China. 

ATX is very impressive, all the more so for Ava having managed it all without hardly any staff until about a week ago.

Before heading out to catch my overnight return flight Ava and her boyfriend treated me to an excellent departure dinner at Lou, on Vine. The restaurant had an outline map of the US on one wall, with handwritten names and arrows pointing to their sources. They had probably twenty or twenty-five different suppliers named from across the country. Well, well, well. The state outside California with the most suppliers named was Wisconsin, with four. And that is where I was headed. Home, sweet cheesy home, where all the battles are currently raging. Including about Wisconsin farmers supplying not upscale wine bars in LA, but the neighbors of the farmers. In about six hours time, I landed in Milwaukee. Back in the midwest, home of the emerging locavore economy and KillerSpin (in airports).

 

 

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?

 

closing down the drum tower office

The first and most important phase of The Journey West is a wrap. My collaborator and the project’s heavy-lifter Stephanie Rothenberg is in Beijing for another day or so, bringing the Drum Tower travel office to a close.

 

Was it a success? Yes. Why? Because it happened. The point being, staging something like this is not a small achievement for two foreign artists working in China for short periods without any kind of gallery, residency, or curatorial support. The essential support we found, we found by ourselves, and without it the project certainly would have been less fully realized. But as it happened plenty of folks chipped in with substantive involvement. For example, Elaine Wing-ah Ho and the Homeshop crew made the worker performances, Lee Ambrozy offered lots of feedback and supportive writing on Artforum.cn, Ed Sanderson made himself a critical observer from the get-go, and Peggy Wang is busy roping us into her world of research even as I type. Plus lots of others, to be named in the future.

So what happens now? Mainly it is a matter of continuing to build the discourse through secondary exhibitions and conference presentations. There are so many angles to this project and each one of them is so complex that the constraints of group shows and conference panels will be helpful in giving us occasions to focus on just one or two angles at a time. Also, having the distance of a show or conference in North America will inevitably help to clarify some of the outstanding issues made visible by the Drum Tower storefront, but that we simply did not have time to address while in Beijing.

Selected material generated through The Journey West project will make appearances in group shows in Buffalo and Brooklyn in the late summer and early fall, and possibly in a couple of conference gigs for 2012. Details posted here later as things develop.

As for the travel office itself, another iteration will be appropriate in time. I think that will happen only if and when the groundwork has been properly laid for a trip to really take place. With the way things work in China, we may find it easier to arrange a tour without going through the retailing of it. In which case, the Drum Tower travel office will go down in history as a one-time show, installation, and performance, in the best tradition of China's avant garde.

 

a chimerican revolutionary celebration

Tomorrow, July 1, 2011, is the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. There will be many celebrations and occasions of reflection and appreciation, in all media. Chinese internet portals will be festooned with commemorative banners, television specials will air, and a major motion picture will be released. You can't miss the Party's birthday decorations around town, not least in Tiananmen Square:

There is no way to fairly assess both the accomplishments and disasters of Communist Party Rule in anything less than a multi-volume study. As much as the cold warriors of the West would have us believe that communist systems are simply and only evil, the fact remains that for China the CCP was the only force able to impose stability after a half century of unbelievable social and economic chaos. This is something that the Party itself never ceases to boast. On the other hand, it is also true that the Party makes mistakes, sometimes on a massive scale. Some of the worst problems facing China now are being exacerbated by issues having to do with the political system. Without being prepared to write a long essay about specific things, it is pointless to go beyond saying that.

But what I can say is, what would be better than following the Party's party, with a celebration of our own, and to do it Beijing. Especially since the Fourth of July is only three days later. So, here it is:

Celebrate American Independence Day with The Journey West! 

Monday July 4, 2011 at 19:00 2011年7月4日 周一 19:00 

Parade begins at 19:00 sharp at The Journey West Travel Office. 

Come celebrate the day America became America and declared independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain on July 4, 1776.

To commemorate this historic event that happens every year in America we will hold an abridged reading of the Declaration of Independence followed by a parade of simulated fireworks, fire eating, jugglers, music and classic American BBQ (barbecue) featuring hot dogs with all the fixings, corn-on-the-cob, Coca-cola, Pepsi and of course apple pie! Special discount price on all package tours! 

来参加美国独立日的庆典！庆祝美国在1776年7月4日从大不列颠王国独立出来。为了纪念这一历史性事件，我们将宣读部分独立宣言的内容，同时还准备了烟花，音乐，魔术及传统美式烧烤，热狗，汉堡包，番茄酱，可口可乐，百事可乐以及必不可少的苹果派！  

The Journey West Travel Office/西游旅行社 is a performative installation that casts a critical eye on global tourism created by American artists Dan S. Wang and Stephanie Rothenberg.

The travel office is open Saturday and Sunday from 12:00-15:00 through July 17th and by special appointment (bestjourneywest@gmail.com) 

Recent post about the project on Artforum.com.cn:

“西游计划”的网站设计；西南部的“大美国实验基地游”项目是由一个隐藏的军事基地，政府的秘密空中旅行，和监狱的著名权威Trevor Paglen领团。

“西游计划”（“The Journey West”）是两位美国艺术家王念华（Dan S. Wang，中西部）和史蒂.罗森博格（Stephanie Rothenberg，纽约）的合作项目，他们在北京创立了一个旅游机构，推销另类的“美国游”，他们也让几位旅游机构的工作人员，帮助将旅游项目推广给公众，同时也举办与旅游相关的艺术家表演，七月中旬结束。关于项目详情，可登陆网站, 七月四日美国国庆日，他们将举办派对，用传统食物（玉米和热狗）待客，还有吞火和杂耍表演。以下罗森博格谈艺术项目。

我的作品运用相似的消费者交流方式，比如旅行社，或者我的“血汗工厂”，或者脱口秀，以有点荒诞的形式提醒我们对自己在经济体制内所起的作用的意识。通过让一切极端和夸大化，暴露出组织结构和它的机械性。这也是我们想让旅游办所要做的事情，但因为太新颖了，很难预料人们能从当中获得什么。

但它却是贯穿了事实和虚构的界限，因为这些旅游都是真实的，但当中虚假的部分，我们完全是一个功能性的旅行机构，同时又是一个艺术项目。作为新的商人，也许在鼓楼我们并没有最佳的市场策略，我们尚不知道如何将这些旅游活动售出，也许明年夏天我们会回来，开着一个小车，去三里屯或CBD。

我们的目的是想挑战主流旅游，这些旅游都是围绕地标性的景观等级展开，我们想要质疑的是这些地标性景观的重要性。比如，每个人都想去好莱坞，想看山上的好莱坞地标，它代表着一种文化或一个群体，但这些其实是很空洞的或表面的。所以，我们提供由艺术家打造的旅行，作为导游，这些艺术家们都是更能介入社会的导游，比如“自由女神半日游”，一位环保主义者带领人们穿行中央公园，在那里你可以觅食。这些都是具有教育性的项目，是那些未被听到的声音，它们研究政治和历史，某个地区当前的社会环境，比主流旅游所承载的要多得多。但它们也会给出你为何想去一个城市或公园的主要原因。我们要挑战的就是主导性的历史。

这个机构是想构建露西-里帕德（Lucy Lippard）在《本土传统》（Lure of the Local）中所说的“批判性旅游”（critical tourism）。我们也正在看迪恩-麦康纳（Dean MacCannel）的《旅客阶层理论》（Theory of the Tourist Class），这个是对托斯丹-凡勃伦（Thorstein Veblen）100年前写的《休闲阶级理论》的谐谑，此书在今日依然言之凿凿。

 这项目最初的想法是王念华和我碰到了一个来纽约的南方朋友。我们讨论的文化标识完全是和历史断裂，

这也是全球化的一个问题之一，有趣的是它们在不同文化里被重新语境化的方式，这些我和Dan在这里都感受过。我们经历的究竟是一种模拟产物还是一种普遍化的全球文化？其它国家是否仍受到美国文化的影响？

在爱德华-伯汀斯基（Edward Burtynsky）的《人造风景》里，一位中国女孩带领着参加了一座中国工厂，她所运用的言辞具有美国企业文化色彩，但是与中国式价值观结合起来的，所以我们在旅游行业里雇佣年轻的中国人，这样，他们做推销，我们帮助整合。我们想知道的是再次挪用意味着设么？中国正在挪用我们的企业文化，但他们赋予其自己的价值观，之后卖回给我们。我们想反过来，将它们（在美国的旅行）卖给中国观众。

这些都是和我们对旅游的批评、文化标识、保真性有关。还包含一个完全不同的元素：展览模式。一种表演与装置艺术但逃跑传统画廊则发生于公共空间。我在北京碰到过几个中国艺术家，都是在这种关系性和情势性的状态下创作，如Michael Yuen和他的驴车，或者如马永峰和Forget Art。

这是一种文化殖民主义么？很多这样的情势关系艺术出自欧洲的社会政治运动，策略性媒介和方式在美国以“批判艺术体”（Critical Art Ensemble) 这样的人开始。它们是对这个商业化、

单一的艺术世界的回应，人们从哪里受到这些影响而做这样的事情呢？就如Forget Art的澡堂介入一样“地点：龙泉洗浴”项目，我觉得那真是非常明智的，之所以行之有效，因为也是在草场地。

— 文/ 采访 / 安静

 

http://artforum.com.cn/words/3667 

 

The travel office is located at 43 Zhonglouwan Hutong Dongcheng District

东城区钟楼湾胡同43号

directly between the historic Drum and Bell Towers and next to the Drum and Bell bar.

Check our website for details on special events and package tour discounts http://www.bestjourneywest.com. 

 

************************************** 

 

Dan S. Wang http://prop-press.typepad.com 

Stephanie Rothenberg http://www.pan-o-matic.com

 

 

towards home, but still drifting

The China Drift continued even as the traveling group fractured and parts went in different directions. Wuhan was the place from which the big group, which grew over the first week to twenty-two or so, started to lose members. Xiao, Qu Ge, Orienna, Michael, Emi, Desiree, Jing, and Gordon all caught Thursday night trains back to Beijing. Gao Bei stayed to visit her family and I think SiSi went to another town to see hers. Elaine returned to Beijing the next night.

From Lashihai it was I who fell behind first. After two days together at the Lijiang Studio, I waved goodbye to Jay, Sarah, Ula, Claire, Brian, Stephanie, and Mai Dian as they rode off in the studio’s van, bound for Wumu on the rainy third morning. After another two days with just myself and the neighboring He family for company, I flew back to Beijing, rejoining Jing and Gordon. One night later, Ula and Stephanie caught up to Gordon, Joseph, and I for food and beer in Caochangdi. Stephanie and Ula brought stories of mountain liquors and pictographic scripts from Wumu, the remote Naxi mountain village. I wished I had gone with them until I heard about the rain and stomach bugs.

I had to get back to Beijing a day before them in any case. I needed a day to visit a future niece at the Shepherd’s Field Children’s Village way out of the city, practically in Tianjin. The outing mixed family stuff with research, which is to say, I was quite curious about Shepherd’s Field. It is a full service foster home for Chinese orphans with special needs that grew out of the Philip Hayden Foundation, a fifteen year-old service organization founded by an American couple dedicated to helping orphans in China. I was told that there are currently some 75 children in residence. A minority of them will be adopted into forever families (that is the lingo of American child services culture, something we’ve learned as we have gone through that culture ourselves). Some children will live at Shepherd’s Field for years.

Where would China be without all these Christians helping out? I am sure the society would be worse off, and that there would be many fewer social services than exist now. But I don’t think there would be any hugely increased number of Christian converts. I know that there are intense cultures of Chinese Christianity in both Taiwan and Singapore, as well as overseas. And yes there have been religious movements in China, some of them quite potent on a political level, from the Taipings to Falun Dafa. But I simply cannot imagine a faith like Christianity (which, let’s face it, is founded on some pretty outlandish stories) gaining serious mainstream traction in post-’89, post-idealism mainland China. After all, the missionaries of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not manage to reshape China in any ultimately significant way, even though they fed millions of poor and hungry. My bet is, to most Chinese Christianity is, in the end, something that will always seem foreign. And therefore irrelevant to them, but for the concrete contributions the Christians can make.

More universal, and deserving of more effort to connect and weave narratives are the analysis of and the shared discontents around the concrete conditions of life. The Drift, at its best as an encounter-based research method, extends odd and specific strands of connection, far beyond the convoluted theologies of the proselytizers. So as the China Drift participants went off on our separate ways, I am sure many of us continued to draw connections. That was the case for me when I found myself eighteen hours beyond Beijing, traveling by pick-up from the Bainbridge Island ferry landing to to the Poulsbo home of climate and conservation scientists Jennie Hoffman and Daniel Froehlich, on the Kitsap Peninsula across the water from Seattle. My first stop: the grave of Chief Seattle, he of the famous words that laced a requiem for his land and culture with the biocentrism we dream of today. What place to kiss the ground of my country could be more American–and more global. And true to the experience of drifting over histories, places and cultures, thoughts about common fates and all the rest, I was just a little surprised to find that Chief Seattle had been, according to his gravestone, baptized. Those Christians again. Maybe they'll get us all in the end, Chinese or not.

Later that evening Dan continued telling me about the local history, Poulsbo’s Norwegian heritage, the raising of Seattle, and so forth. In the process we came across this photograph by Asahel Curtis documenting the flattening of old Seattle’s Denny Hill, a project also known as the Denny Regrade. The earthen towers visible in the photograph are the property owner holdouts who demanded better compensation or maybe just refused to leave. Having just returned from the land of the nail house, I thought I was seeing double, through time and space.

The part of Seattle that was reshaped by the Denny Regrade eventually became known as Belltown. Decades after whatever upheavels caused by the Denny Regrade had been settled or forgotten, artist Brett Bloom documented the neighborhood’s recent creative efforts to humanize the available public space. I remember learning something about Belltown when Brett and Ava Bromberg released the book seven years ago. But it was not until this trip, with China’s nail houses, big hydroengineering projects, and, most of all, the report we received while in Wuhan about the property megadeveloper OCT’s plans for an amusement park on the shores of Wuhan’s jewel, Donghu, fresh in my mind that the work in Belltown resonated. Now I wonder, after the futility of a last stand, whether in the face of corrupt developers or unstoppable eminent domain, what are the struggles and achievements to come, even on the same piece of land? What the Denny Regrade showed is that after the development happens, other problems and challenges emerge; it is always a matter of spatial politics in the end, and there is never a perfectly satisfactory (or even minimally functional) spatial arrangement for every stake holder. There is only another political problem.

I spent my first night back on North American soil managing my jet leg constructively—a 3:30 AM departure for the backlands of Fort Lewis and McChord AFB, to help out with some bird banding. It was the first session of the season for this particular station, one of several maintained by the Puget Sound Bird Observatory.
The data collected is given over to the MAPS program of the Institute for Bird Populations, one of the only continent-wide research programs that allows for a large-scale picture of bird populations, without which conservation management would be comparatively blind.

Dan told me the story of how the MAPS program came to be. It had to do with the timing of radioactive releases from the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, the suspicion that catastrophic breeding failures among certain West Coast raptors that year were linked to the April 26 disaster, but then not having the data to conclusively determine whether the radioactive iodine cloud could in fact be counted as the aberrant factor. Thus the MAPS program was born, to build a global perspective on bird population trends across species, through continental units. Obviously, with the Fukishima disaster still unfolding, not to mention the acceleration of climate change and habitat destruction, the work of collecting data is more important now than ever.

That said, it is science, meaning, attachments to presuppositions must be held minimal, even if those presuppositions are somewhat operational. There are simply too many factors at play at the level of detailed interaction between organisms and environment. Dan himself offered that the data collection helps with the broad outlines of what’s going on, but in the end the whole effort is still an educated gamble. While the physical laws point us toward definite conclusions (ie greenhouse gases work in a known way, therefore the planet is warming), the complexity of the planet’s natural systems makes management often less than straightforward. To the politically minded inhabitant of planet Earth and the politically-minded experimental artist, it is where our work exists: careful diagnosis, experimental strategies of response, and uncertain outcome.

 

 

china drift: reflections on the lijiang studio

What a relief. The houseflies have gone to bed.

The flies, the spiders, the farm cats, and the rain are constant reminders of where Lijiang Studio is. As are the bits of Naxi speech that constantly waft in from the nearby fields and farmyards. This is Naxi farming country, the valley and community of Lashihai, about an hour beyond Lijiang, over a mountain pass via an increasingly congested and very narrow two-lane highway filled with a line of breadloaf taxis and heavy trucks carrying gravel, rock, and lumber. It is not the easiest place to get to, but it is not the most difficult, either.

Wholly unlike the common language of Mandarin and all other regional variants of Chinese, Naxi is the main tongue of Lashihai. All my efforts to improve my language skills (one new word a day!) would have been of little use here, except that most all of the Naxi speak the common tongue, too. Their bilingualism intrigues me, since it represents a kind of bi-culturalism, and even bi-nationalism—these folks are at once Naxi and Chinese. But the contemporaneity of hybrid or multivalent identities that city people and other modern creatures get accustomed to seems somehow far away from Lashihai. After all, much of life around here goes on as it long has, maybe for centuries. Media penetration is minimal, social life is interwoven with daily and seasonal labor, foods are mostly local, and the cash economy leaves a comparatively light imprint. Life is slow, cyclical, weather-dependent, and, if the word still means anything at all, traditional. And yet, this is hardly a pre-modern environment. Most obviously, the Chinese state governs, and that includes administering large projects such as building an earthen dam for water control around Lashihai (also the name of the nearby lake) in the 1950s and again more recently, or, presently, building a new highway that will cut through the valley. Also, there are the schools. They now teach English beginning in the elementary grades, producing some rudimentary trilingualism among the younger Naxi. And there are the contemporary artists.

We blog, photograph, document, install, paint, draw, film, write, discuss, taste, study, take long walks, get inspired—a whole suite of behaviors that don’t have much to do with the life of the native people. Or, rather, didn’t used to have much to do with their life. But Jay Brown, American by birth and Chinese by adaptation, has been living on and off in Lashihai for nearly a decade. With the incremental improvements he, his neighbors, and his resident artists have made to the compound that is Lijiang Studio, one can really say he has moved in. As have the procession of resident artists who come for weeks or months at a time. For our brief time here, the China Drift crew, including we four Compass comrades, played the part of this relatively constant presence of artists. 

It is easy to immediately pose here the same question that vexes artists back in cities like Chicago. And that is, what is our role in the process of gentrification and development? Except here, the forces are not entirely familiar, the fault lines less clear, and the minority people possibly being put at risk of displacement (culturally and/or spatially) seem rather savvy to the ways of power as seen in their adaptations to the loopholes around them. For example, as with other people in China, many of the Naxi around here build structures on lands that they know will be taken for new roads. Especially on such lands, in fact, in order to increase the compensation they will be due. It is the Chinese version of eminent domain—they can’t fight it, so they figure they’ll increase the value of their land by improving it before the road comes. To achieve this they will build without any regard for permits or legality, essentially changing “the facts on the ground.” And for decades they have existed semi-autonomously under the umbrella of the People’s Republic of China, and for centuries before that, under the waxing and waning reach of the imperial dynasties. Somehow they’ve managed to persist as a culture and a people. If the Naxi are a people who have negotiated contradictory social forces and locations successfully for generations, then what is going on perhaps is just another chapter in a continuous tale begun long ago, and at least co-authored by them rather than for them. 

But do the visiting artists—let us just say, does the Lijiang Studio—have something to do with this development? Of course they and it do, but I think we should avoid the question of effect and impact. Those concerns are a smokescreen, an incubator of liberal guilt, and a distraction from the more important problem of grappling with ethical relations. The question I do want to ask is, what is the most responsible way to build a working relationship between visiting outsiders (who bring their own culture, and in the case of our six people coming together, our own society) and the Naxi of Lashihai? The answer is difficult to grasp positively, but fairly easy to identify in the negative. For example, the Ancient Town tourist market of Lijiang offers a model that seems most definitely undesirable and not worth replicating. Stall after stall, scores of them, offering “authorized” minority handicrafts, food stuffs, musical recordings, and assorted souvenirs, along with Naxi-led pony rides and costumed performers, reduce the relationship between visitors to one of seller and buyer, and the Naxi sellers themselves into competing retailers.

 

The arrangement at Lijiang Studio is very different. There, the visitors are expected to be producers primarily and consumers secondarily. We come to make, to create, to build, design, express, grow, and learn. Not to buy, and only to consume as our sustenance demands. There isn’t much of a place for such activity in the Ancient Town. So far, so good. But create what? Art objects and art images? Or a society, economy, and culture that brings people from the far corners of the earth into affectionate, mutually supportive, and productive contact? If it is the former, exclusively, then we might as well forget the whole project and go back to the Western-oriented hang-outs in Lijiang. Thankfully, and it is pretty obvious once you are there, Lijiang Studio leans heavily towards the latter set of possibilities. But how do visitors—people who are known in advance to be leaving at some point in the future, whether that’s weeks, months, or years, and probably are not returning—help to create the worlds implied by the latter?

One way to think about it is to understand that investments are always limited. There aren’t too many examples of unlimited investment in this world. Therefore the limited inputs of any given resident artist should not by itself be reason to discount the truth of their contribution. On the concrete level, I’m afraid to offer any suggestions on “what to do.” Partly, that is because I am not familiar enough with the workings of the Studio and the Lashihai milieu to confidently prescribe a course of action, having only spent a few days there. But also it is because I believe that mapping the appropriate ethical relations is a site-specific project in the most literal sense, meaning such a map is specific to each one of us, and follows the contours of not only our skill sets and life histories, but also of our own spiritual callings. That is not to say that there aren’t any models. At the Lijiang Studio, Jay Brown has been mapping these relations according to his callings for years now, creating a model, with the help of his Naxi neighbors and resident artists. We on the Drift were fortunate to travel the territory with him for a little while, adding our footnotes to the map he has been drawing.

 

on wisconsin, back to the art

With all the crazy political stuff going on in FitzWalkerstan, aka the state formerly known as Wisconsin, over the last two months, I have not had time to write posts about art. I can make up for some of that with a quick review of shows I’ve seen in recent weeks.

First there was Pittsburgh. There I managed to catch the Paul Thek Diver retrospective at the Carnegie Museum of Art. I count myself lucky. This is one of those shows for which the hype is well-deserved. I haven’t seen a big show that’s hit me with such impact since Mies in America. After seeing it, I feel secure in saying that for all the new studio Ph.d’s, artist-friendly curators, and global art world integration, we just don’t make artists like Paul Thek anymore.

The highlights were three. First, the early wax sculptures that gained Thek his renown were truly blossom-like in their over-ripe ickiness, but perfectly balanced out by the coolness of metal and glass. Additionally, all of the materials gained through age, in equal parts retro-neato 1960 artifacture but still nightmarishly brutal. Secondly, the surviving images and elements of the wild, whole-gallery installations that he did in European kunsthalles in the 1970s fill a whole I didn’t realize existed in the history of installation art. The partial nature of what survives adds to the intrigue and good fortune we feel, piecing together the story of a feral and fertile art world moment. Finally, there is the recreated hanging of his final show, just before his death by AIDS. The first two highlights are each amazing, but the presentation of the final show proved the most moving in the end, with the dying artist all but ignored by the New York art world that once adored him.

Three other shows at the Carnegie were bonuses. I wandered into the hall in which the show You Are Here: Architecture and Experience was installed and discovered the etchings and video of Cyprien Gaillard. The small etchings mashed up mountainous landscapes with modernist block high rise buildings of the public housing kind. His striking video Desniansky Raio, set in (and above, in some cool ariel footage) a monumental social housing complex outside Kiev, reminds a midwesterner like myself that the massive blocks of public housing I associate with Chicago were in fact an international phenomenon. I’d like to see more of this guy’s work and I am sure we will since he is still on the young side (barely thirty, I think).

Then there was a loose installation by Haegue Yang that filled a medium sized room with odd arrangements of exposed metal racks strung with wires, light sockets, cables looped, knotted, and hung, and an assortment of metal parts. It was a bit chaotic and hard to read—though the materials seemed very deliberate, the positioning betrayed no real system. But the direct content was supplied by four television monitors on carts positioned around the room running Martha Rosler videos from her Semiotics of the Kitchen era. Odd combination, for sure, and I'm not totally buying Yang's work, but I’d never seen those videos. So why not roll with it.

The biggest and best surprise at the Carnegie was the Andrey Avinoff show in the works on paper gallery. Wow. This guy was a noted field naturalist specializing in butterflies and an amazing biological illustrator who also served as the director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History for nearly twenty years. He was also a semi-closeted fine artist who painted and drew beautifully, with an exquisite hand, shimmering colors, and a runaway imagination. And, he was a mostly-closeted gay man who painted and drew a number of lovely homoerotic works, and was one of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey’s go-to consultants on matters of homosexuality. The show included specimen cases of butterflies he had collected in Tibet and other faraway places. Like I said, wow.

I am sorry to end the Pittsburgh art report on a downer, but that is what the Ayanah Moor show at the 707 Penn Gallery was. The full wall coverage of all-text screen prints made for a striking visual experience upon entering the space, but once into the detail, the work couldn't keep its promise. The texts read as pretty interesting, the lettering was stylish but not distracting, and the voices speak to the universal experience of communities describing themselves and their home social worlds, in this case black women scenes in different American cities. But there were only something like five different voices/cities, texts/prints. For the artist who uses printmaking to cover walls, the problem always becomes one of multiples versus redundancy. If it is really about multiples, then commit to a very small number of different prints. Let’s say, one. One, repeated over and over becomes a kind of patterned drone or unending repetition, either of which has its own kind of power. If there are five, arranged with no discernible pattern, and the walls are covered by simply repeating those five, then it’s an experience of redundancy—for the viewer, it becomes an experience of always searching for more and never finding it. The expectation of complexity is raised but not delivered. That was the case here, which is not so unusual in itself, but for the fact that what I've seen of Moor's in reproduction kind of blew me away, so this was a disappointment. 

I’ll report on shows viewed in Madison and Chicago before long. 

 

a new york journal

I just reached home after two weekends in Chicago and the days in between in New York. I went for the CAA conference, or at least that was the excuse. The last time I was in New York was the fall of 2008. It was September, around when Barack Obama’s candidacy first started to take on a sense of inevitability. The stakes of the presidential election had been raised that very week with the $600 billion bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers. Creative Time’s Democracy in America Convergence Center opened over the days I was there and so did Signs of Change show at Exit Art. There was a sense of possibility in the air and in the season.

This time it was different. Signs of Change is now a wonderful book as well as an exhibition. A little more than two years into the Barack Obama administration, the United States is in the full grips of a conservative reaction. How appropriate is it that the only show I managed to see in a week in New York was AbEx in NY at Moma. Not that the AbEx artists were conservative (Motherwell’s Spanish Revolution elegies positively radiated with the vitality of revolutions, then and now), but the retreat into formalism, individual spiritual journeys, and abstract systems is a path that always stands in high relief in times when retreat from the political seems perversely reasonable from a survival standpoint. I was fortunate to walk through the show with one who knows about painting, my neighbor from Madison Derrick Buisch. True to myself, I found the drawings and work on paper as or more satisfying than the canvases. But as far as seeing other shows goes, fortunately this was New York, which meant I could see some cool and canonical things without having to go out of my way, such as…

 

The conservative climate of the nation was not in evidence at the conference. It being CAA, there were quite a few sessions that included a radical or leftist scholarship. My contribution to the conference was managing the production of the Radical Art Caucus newsletter and helping to distribute it on site. This year’s was the first issue overseen by me. The heavy lifting was done by Sam Gould of Red76, whom I drafted in by suggesting to him that we make it an issue of the Journal of Radical Shimming. Being a touch manic and always open-minded about audiences and opportunities, he jumped aboard. Sam, in turn, brought into the project (it had by this point become “a project”) our friend Mike Wolf. The two of them engaged in an extended Google chat done over two sessions about something they’re calling “critical imaginative communities.” You can read that chat here. 

Sam did the layout and the interior graphic art. I assembled the newsletter text and fed him the files. I composed and proofed the front page display text in hand-set wood and metal type, scanned it, and sent that to Sam for use in the layout. Sam had a line on a very reasonable printer in Queens, arranged for 1500 to be printed, and had the invoice sent to me.

 

Joanna Gardner-Huggett, our RAC secretary, took on the task of receiving the delivery at the hotel, right near the conference site. Over the days of the conference I called her probably ten or twelve times, trying to figure out how to pick up another bundle. The three co-presidents, Linnea Wren, Travis Nygard, and Kaylee Spencer, kept getting them from her, too. Joanna managed the central distribution point well and with good humor. Together we distributed nearly all at the conference. I blanketed the first Dark Matter session, and Alan W. Moore had the second Dark Matter session well-supplied. I started a couple of stacks going around in the jam-packed Centennial Session on Feminism. I passed them out at the Diasporic Asian Art Network meeting and at the University of Southern California reception. I got them into the hands of Margo Machida, Nicholas Mirzoeff, and Martha Rosler. Through run-ins, I got them to some of the friendly faces I first met at other conferences: Richard Meyer, Peter Mortonböck, and Helge Mooshammer. I got them to some people who are name-checked in the interior cascade of critical art players. They seemed to enjoy finding others they recognized in the jumble, and wondered about the names they didn’t know. 

JRS #12 definitely reached hundreds and hundreds of people in the field whom I do not know, and who possibly do not know any of us who were involved in the project. Also, the conference was a great place to make guerrilla placements, like at the book fair. In that sense, making use of CAA as a ready-made audience was a big success. At the same time, there could be some big improvements. For one thing, the listings info was incomplete in one vital area, announcing RAC’s Friday evening meeting and reception. Which, by the way, turned out to be organized as a terrific discussion with two visiting union organizers. I just didn’t have the information when we needed it for inclusion. And for another, the readability of the text in Sam’s radical art tribe graphic was compromised in some key places, which blunted the intended messaging. But no matter—we got it done and distributed, much to the expressed delight of many a conference goer, with only about three weeks lead time, a small budget, and only partial available attention. Not bad for a first effort, and in spirit very true to the best Red76 work.

Other highlights from those days included visiting the activist and videographer Dara Greenwald (who is taking it easy and slow while undergoing medical treatment), getting to see for the first time my collaborators Ryan Griffis and Sarah Ross present in a public event setting (along with Lize Mogel and Sarah Kanouse), and catching up with my crash-pad host Naeem (who was in full-press deadline mode). Oh yeah, and the Mubarak regime fell. That was crazy—sitting in sessions or hitting sessions with stacks of the newsletter while receiving Egypt update texts from Naeem, including a blow by blow account of the president’s final, intrasigient address to the nation.

Finally, I crossed the Whitestone Bridge for an overnight visit to Connecticut to see an elderly uncle who no longer travels. I had never driven that part of the country and was blown away by the many miles of decades and decades worth of suburban overflow from the city. Rolling past all the wealth, the northern end of what the Don Draper character once called “the Cash Belt,” all I could think of were prep school feeder populations and quiet desperation amid the boatloads of taste. The stone walls visible along the Merritt Parkway screamed affluence; the age and history represented by the hundreds-year-old wall work only come into play as a corollary to the modern day wealth of the area. Once in Cheshire, the village where my uncle has lived for 45 years, the blue collar returned to the landscape in the form of Aldi stores and Chinese buffets.

 

 

 

winter retreat in the mrcc, 2011



This past weekend twelve artist/writer/collaborators came in four vehicles from three surrounding states to gather in Madison for our third annual winter retreat. For most of the time my home was the setting for the assemblage. This group of people, which over the years has ranged at times between eleven and fifteen or so individuals, sometimes uses the name Compass but more often than that uses no name. What we hold in common is a vocabulary–the vocabulary of the MRCC–and web of relationships between us, many of them collaborative.

 

I don’t know how long these retreats will continue. It has been only three years, but already it feels like a tradition, an experience that remains a constant as the particulars of our various individual lives change for better and worse. I can hardly expect that these wintry weekends continue for decades, as did the summer retreats of Grace Lee and Jimmy Boggs, Lyman and Freddy Paine, but, hey, you never know.

One of the pleasures as a host was to have these comrades browse our books. It helps me look at them again through somebody else's eyes. And who doesn't like talking about books?

Certainly we have challenges as a group, in terms of basic self-definition and process. These are something of an issue, or at least a source of potential (and sometimes actual) frustration when it comes to doing anything beyond the basics of socializing and preparing food together. But I am confident that these gummy points can and will be smoothed out if we keep meeting and doing things together; the ideas in circulation amongst us are simply too compelling to abandon, not to mention the demands of our historical age. Mutualism is the countercredo in the neoliberal age of privatized solutions, and no matter its frustrations, offers the joys of a different path. Even as we continue to train ourselves in the ways of collective thinking, we’ll enjoy the simple opportunity to be together, trade ideas, and get comfortable and silly together. Plus, we actually did get some work done on our current projects; directions for 2011 have been set, mapping radical corridors from Beardstown to Beijing to Buenos Aires. Stay tuned.

Oh, and I should say, explore the meaning of place together. As when in early January of 2009 we visited the birthplace and museum of President Herbert Hoover, outside Iowa City. This time around it wasn't a site we visited, but rather a person. A Madison person, sociologist Erik Olin Wright. "Real utopias" was the topic of discussion. As a group, we brought participatory planning in Rosario, Argentina, the Just Coffee cooperative in Madison, the la FEM coffee growers cooperative in Nicaraugua, and Mess Hall in Chicago into one conversation.

And after it was all over, all the eating~

and the cooking~

the walking on water (lovely photo by Rozalinda)~

And posing for a picture~

Messy finally could find a seat again.