propositions press... 2.0

a field trip, in truths

[This essay was included in Meandering Methodologies, Deviant Disciplines, a publication produced by Public Art Saint Paul. The book is the final document from the four-year City Art Collaboratory project that brought scientists into collaboration with artists.]

My interest in science and art resonates with what philosopher Alain Badiou calls the “truth process” in his book Ethics. Written as the Yugoslav Wars unfolded, and particularly with the failed response of the Western powers in mind, Badiou composed his system to counter moral systems based on the so-called natural rights of man. He targets the cynical flexibility resulting from the universalizing claims of liberal humanism. With Badiou’s framework in mind, I found myself intrigued by the field trip taken by City Art Collaboratory scientists and artists to Coldwater Spring, as reported on the City Art Collaboratory blog. Knowing that the area around Coldwater Spring, above the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, was the site of an anti-road campaign only several years after the Yugoslav Wars, I wonder if applying Badiou’s language to a consideration of that site adds productive complexity to his ethics of truth, between abstraction and materiality, in space more than time. In understanding Coldwater Spring as a source not only of water but also of truths, and considering the ethical demands it might make in turn, I hope to advance Badiou’s political aims, which I share.

Reviewing Badiou’s system is the place to start. Greatly simplified, Badiou describes the truth process as opening with the event—a specific circumstance that occurs in time, immanently rupturing a situation, and that, whatever its temporal duration, “vanishes as soon as it appears.”1 The event divides consciousness, or a historical narrative, or a demarcation between self and other, or one’s relation to an imagined ideal, into the situation before and the situation after. But once perceived, the event is always already over. Those who experience the event are afterward called to observe a fidelity to it, and this is the basis for Badiou’s ethics. Performing this fidelity—thereby becoming an agent of truth, touching the eternal—is the ethic of the truth process. In plain language, I take this to mean carrying forward with new being, new thinking, or changed conduct that has been demanded by the revelatory event. A basic ethical failure is to go forward as if the event had not happened. The most extreme infidelity is the simulacrum of a truth, a dishonesty that legitimizes war. For Badiou, this is evil.

To support his analysis, Badiou returns repeatedly to his four-fold subjective “types”, across a spectrum from intimate to public realms: politics, love, science, and art. In politics, the subject is induced through mass experience; society is the actor. Love resides at the opposite end of the intimacy spectrum, inducing a subject in the space between individual persons. Science and art serve as intermediate zones in which the individual and the social meet. To take one of the many instances where Badiou uses the fourfold matrix to illustrate his point, he lists as exemplary events in order of politics, love, science, and art, “the French Revolution of 1792, the meeting of Heloise and Abelard, Galileo’s creation of physics, and Haydn’s invention of the classical musical style.”2 Thus, in politics he means revolution. By love, he means the life-changing intensity of amorous relations between individuals. Science and art, activity attributable to either individual practitioners or group efforts based on shared frameworks, produce paradigm-shifting insights. But he never presents his cherry-picked examples of events as existing within layers of history, much less in relation to one another.

Moving beyond the decontextualized examples of truth events he prefers, grounding Badiou’s language in a particular place reveals that different subject types may articulate truths along a common thread; in the Coldwater example that follows, in some sense all four are present. The different events entail multiple fidelities but are bound by relation of varying depths of time to the same place. Together, they produce a compound truth, at times contradictory but moving toward resolution. We could say the original truth is the spring itself, the existence of which was and is a hydrogeological event that occurs outside of human purpose.

Science can make truths legible in ways that no other endeavor can, but in contrast to the theory of relativity or the invention calculus, the self-evidence of the spring precludes the need for a formally presented insight. All science of the spring, from the earliest descriptions by explorers to latter-day hydrological measurements, only supplements the fundamental fact of flowing water.

 3

A series of Coldwater truths across subject types can be traced back to a work of art: a shimmering 1856 watercolor landscape by Alfred Sully, a commissioned officer and West Point graduate. The painting depicts the area from the perspective of the western bank of the Mississippi, above the confluence; Coldwater Spring is in the wooded foreground and Fort Snelling is off in the distance. The picture glows with summer light and the expansive skies of the northern prairie, capturing a moment when the settling of Minnesota was beginning to accelerate, and the sacred place Mndota (“where the waters meet”) was subsumed by its strategic significance. As the subject type art, the watercolor preserves a truth in the image and also exists as a truth-event in its objecthood. Sully’s image presents an event not as artistic innovation (Badiou’s preferred art reference), but as a document of opposing vectors—that of the free Dakota lands as represented by the unfenced terrain, or the simulacrum of democracy advanced by the settler nation, monumentalized by the fort. Competing fidelities ensued, resulting in the Dakota Uprising of 1862.

Sully seems to have observed a fidelity to the events of his own artistic creations. Even as he carried out his orders to secure territory, Sully is reputed to have been an advocate for Indians, treating them fairly and honestly, if not softly. To add to the truth in art already present in his Mississippi riverscape, an event in love seems to have emerged between the Anglo Sully and the great romance of his life, Manuela, his first wife, a Californian Chicana who died tragically young. Later, perhaps readable as a sort of fidelity to his mixed first marriage, Sully wed a French-Yankton woman in the Minnesota Territory, thereby contributing to the polyglot universe he found in the territorial settlements. One of Sully’s granddaughters was Ella Deloria, an ethnographer who conducted formal research on Navajo, Lumbee, and Lakota cultures. The social scientific reports she helped author contributed to both government recognition and tribal self-recognition. These published reports were events in Badiou’s sense; the reclamation and growth of tribal identities are the fidelity.

To add to these linked events in art, love, and science, and to complete the poetic redemption of the compound truth, one of Sully’s further descendants, the activist writer Vine Deloria Jr., carried forth a four-generations-late fidelity to the 1862 Dakota Uprising that Sully himself played a part in suppressing. Deloria’s 1969 book Custer Died for Your Sins helped to shape contemporary indigenous political consciousness and became a key text in the resurgence of native resistance against the imperialism of which his great-grandfather was a historical agent. Moreover, Custer Died for Your Sins came wrapped up in an event of its own moment—in the subject type politics at global scale, i.e., the worldwide systemic convulsions of the late 1960s and early 70s. A generation after that, a fidelity to the heyday of Red Power was an element in the production of a new political event, one that returns the thread to Coldwater Spring.

In 1997, in response to a planned highway widening and new interchange that threatened the spring and nearby sacred stand of oaks, a resistance movement rose up and established itself physically as an outlaw road-block encampment that became known as the Minnehaha Free State. Eventually, this became the nation’s longest ever blockage of a government road construction project. The campaign was comprised of those fighting to preserve the oaks, property owners resisting eminent domain, and the Mendota Mdewakanton Dakota, whose claims to tribal identity are interwoven with their claim on the spring. The Minnehaha Free State produced a militancy that kept the encampment going for sixteen months—we could say this was partly in fidelity to the indigenous rights and identity articulated by, among others, Vine Deloria.

The area being defended was the geographic heart of a truth-event, fidelity to which was evident not only in the road-block, but even more so through the years of grassroots political action, testimony in public hearings, court challenges, and other kinds of dedicated resistance. That fidelity prevailed to the degree that Coldwater Spring remains free flowing, and, through persistent striving, it was eventually granted governmental protection. In grappling with the problem of ethical consistency—key to combatting the moral flexibility of the neoliberal human rights frame—Badiou posits perseverance (in performing one’s fidelity to an event) as the opposite of opinion. The preservation demands made by the activists of the Free State may not have been achieved in total (the oaks were destroyed), but the perseverance following the event undoubtedly exposed the original position of the state—technocratically insisting on the road and dismissing concerns about the spring, but then later scaling back those plans—as mere opinion.

The truths of Coldwater Spring described in terms of Badiou’s system of ethics begins with the spring itself. Additionally, the spring exists as, and in relation to, multiple events, with fidelity to one event sometimes contributing to the production of another. It meanders through all four of Badiou’s subject types, by way of bloodline or political narrative. In a constructive departure from Badiou’s theory, applying his language to Coldwater Spring shows that a particular point of departure in space breaks linear time, stacking events into a single, compound truth. Furthermore, the original event, unlike the disappearing acts of Badiou’s exemplary events, remains open, perpetually reinvigorated by its flowing water.

Seen this way, the City Art Collaboratory visitors who quaffed clear water from the spring may yet express fidelities to the land in ways unforeseen, or may find themselves ensnared in their own Coldwater-threaded events—certainly in the science or arts of their training, but equally as likely, in politics or love. The hypocrisies of capital’s moralistic cloak will never be punctured without the blades of compound truths—Badiou supplies the language, but Coldwater Spring is the pure fact and the gushing event.

1 Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, translated by Peter Hallward (Brooklyn: Verso, 2001), 67.

2 Ibid., p. 41.

3 Image supplied by Beinecke Digital Collection of Yale University Library.

justseeds in milwaukee, again

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

mess hall ends its haul

Mess Hall is ending its run.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

Above photos, starting with top:

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

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

Amos Kennedy Jr., letterpress posters, 2004.

*

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

The Material Production of Cultural Spaces (II): Cooperatives

Saturday, March 2, 2013

2-5 PM

Mess Hall

6932 North Glenwood Ave., Chicago 

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

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

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

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

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

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

detroit journals, 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

 

just like people, caution!! poster gets around

The Fourth of July is as good a day as any to say no matter how unfriendly to immigrants the immigration laws get, the United States is still a country of immigrants. The laws and policies themselves do not change that. Proportionally, the population is now more foreign-born than it has been for decades. Therefore I suppose it is not surprising that the broadside Caution Migrant Workers of Arizona that Nicolas Lampert and I printed up in the spring of 2010 continues finding audiences, now mainly in the form of its enlarged wall-hung gallery version.

The first exhibition for the enlarged piece was in Arizona. Very appropriate, yes. But as familiar as the immigrant narrative is, in some states the story is relatively new, as are the attendant anxieties. For example, parts of the Southeast—for generations the most proportionally native-born region—have seen its Latino population spike over the last decade, bringing in whole new communities, flavors, and sounds to cities and towns across several states. So we are happy to have our piece now on display in North Carolina, at UNC-Greensboro’s Weatherspoon Art Museum, in the very timely exhibition Zone of Contention: The US/Mexico Border.

Here is a gallery shot of the opening from June 16. I am glad to see that a young African American viewer is snapping a digital image of the poster, since the poster is an appropriation of an abolitionist broadside from the 1840s. Our piece was done before the recent Supreme Court ruling upheld the main provision of Arizona’s SB 1070. The meaning of that word CAUTION!! is more weighty now, after the ruling. If anything, the ruling brings the parallel between antebellum and contemporary liberation paranoias even closer.

Next up for the piece will be in a show called artWORK, opening in our backyard, at the Crossman Gallery at UW-Whitewater in September.

As Caution Migrant Workers of Arizona circulates, I imagine it intersecting with the circulation of humans. Will there be Salvadoran-born custodian who takes a moment out of her after-hours gallery cleaning to view the piece? Will a South African-born professor take his class to the museum to view the show? At what fleeting points in their circulatory systems do this particular art object and the narrative of human migration become one? 

If you want to kick around these questions with the poster in your own home, I remind you that a screen printed version of the poster is still available from Justseeds, as well as the original letterpress printed one.

 

 

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.

from the archives, our first site specific work

I found this old slide the other day. It is from the spring of 1990.

Miyo Kachi, Dan Froehlich, and I were students at the time. We rented the lower flat of a house in Northfield, west of the Cannon River, almost exactly between the two campuses. We (and our frequent guest Sarah Van Orman) called our home Pineapple House.

The house didn't come with a compost bin and the idea of household composting was still kind of a subcultural thing at the time. But we were all former Farmhouse residents, so composting had already become second nature to us. I remember that we can been "saving" our kitchen waste over the cold Minnesota winter, ie collecting it in a can or bucket out back, leaving it frozen until the spring thaws. As it warmed, we had to build a bin for it.

As it happened, Miyo and I were in a sculpture class together that spring. She had scavenged this cyclone fencing material and a clump of chicken wire. So we collaborated on this compost bin project in satisfaction of one of our assignments, the site specific project. We planted the bin on this little slope that ran across the property like the step into a sunken living room, about the only distinguishing feature of the backyard; you can see the brick supports on the back end, keeping the hardware cloth bottom level. For the critique we christened the bin with a banana peel, also visible.

I'm not sure if it was used much–the end of the school year came and we all moved out in a matter a few weeks. But it is funny to see this pic now, before I knew about all the different currents among artists that this project relates to. It just goes to show, often artists find their way to where they are through modest beginnings of intuition and immediate needs, without worrying about the formalities of discourse, art history, and proper theorizing. We had non-academic reasons to be creative. What mattered in this case, and what I am concerned about now even as I look at this image, is how the bin performed. It still strikes me as nice looking and a clever reuse of found materials, especially considering our somewhat limited skills at that time. But obviously it is not going to facilitate a hot compost, or be very convenient for turning.

Maybe Miyo and I could plan on designing an improved version for the project's 2015 25th anniversary. 

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! 

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.

 

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.