Next project?

Max, of the Libertad Skool Collective wants to make an "Art Life" intensive. I like the idea, but am frightened of the work. Does anyone have the impulse to work on this with me & Max?
Check 'em out...
Libertad Skool Collective
Our liberation doesn't just happen on the streets,
it must come from within.
http://www.impassionedinsurrection.info/libertadskool/index.html

What we are reading next...

I been busy – got to see Richard Barbrook twice, once at Postmasters and again at 16 Beaver. The gig was admirably prepped with links to his texts at – 16beavergroup.org/monday/ . Barbrook is being hosted by Trebor Scholz's Insitute of Distributed Creativity, which is producing a conference on new media education in a week or so at the CUNY Graduate Center.
So, yeah, this class and next has been about gifts and labor (mostly) -- so we are reading:
a text about the Mess Hall in Chicago -- http://messhall.org -- the text is "What Is Mess Hall?" which is on this website
Maja Kuzmanovic and Sha Xin Wei, “Sustainable Arenas for Weedy Sociality” at “[foam]” -- http://f0.am/publications/2002_diac/
The Survival Coupons project distributed by the art group Škart during the war in Serbia (1997-2000) – these look better in color at http://www.nyfa.org/nyfacurrent/skart/skart_page4_survivalcommons_part1.htm
texts about Temescal Amity Works -- www.amityworks.org
“The World is Ours” by Alice Kim from The New Art Examiner (Chicago; Sept./Oct. 2001) – a review of Department of Space and Land Reclamation
http://counterproductiveindustries.com/dslrPressPages/dslrPress_NAE.html -- (counterproductiveindustries.com has lots of other stuff there, too, we’ll look at later)
Generosity projects -- http://welcomebb.org.uk/projects/generosity.html -- a report on a conference in San Francisco in 2002
table of contents for Ted Purves, ed., “What We Want Is Free”
from the online ‘zine “runme.org - say it with software art!,” a story by Jacob Lillemose on the Simple Sex Site Cyborg Link Harvester by Sintron
http://www.runme.org/feature/read/+ssslh/+76
review of the exhibition "Work Ethic": at Baltimore Museum of Art, by T.J. Demos in ArtForum, Feb, 2004
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_6_42/ai_113389512
one article by Marina Vishmidt, “Precarious Straits” from Mute #29 Winter/Spring ’05 is at --http://www.metamute.com/look/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=1&NrIssue=29&NrSection=10&NrArticle=1469
and for theory,
the links page of the 2002 “Free Biennial” has lots of stuff on the gift economy, and info on and texts by artists we can talk about:
http://www.freewords.org/fwlinks.html
The key text here, and reproduced all over the web, is anarchist anthropologist David Graeber’s "Marcel Mauss: Give It Away,” which is about the author of “The Gift,” a classic small book on the gift economy.
and of course the big lump of text, Brian Holmes, "The Flexible Personality: For a New Cultural Critique," a 22-page PDF at http://www.noemalab.org/sections/ideas/ideas_articles/holmes_personality.html

Monday Night - Richard Barbrook

I saw Richard Barbrook last night... then a family crisis -- I'll blog the gig later this week... Or you can catch him tonight. He's good, and with the right questions could illuminate the landscape.

What: Discussion - Open Platform
Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th floor (directions below)
When: Monday Night 04.25.05 @ 7:30 Pm
Who: Open To All
This monday Richard will explain his three concepts for 'Imaginary Futures', (see below) a discussion to follow ... prepare you questions!
_________________________________________
2. About 'Imaginary Futures'
In the modern world, our understanding of the present is often shaped by sci-fi fantasies about what is to come.
Ironically, the most influential of these visions of the future are already decades old. We are already living in the times when they were supposed to have come true. In his presentations, Richard Barbrook will analyze the origins and evolution of three imaginary futures: artificial intelligence; the information society; and the gift culture. By showing that the future is what it used to be, he will argue that it is time for us to invent new futures… _________________________________________
4. Link to more Barbrook writings
http://www.hrc.wmin.ac.uk/theory-author.html
and
a short video in which Richard explains his 3 key concepts
http://blog.distributedcreativity.org

Slowly turning over…

That last class was fun. I’d brought too many books, and had to take them home… (ugh!, a lug). That night, a massive party at Arleen Schloss & Ray Kelly’s lofts commemorated the 20th anniversary of the Plexus event “Purgatorio” at Cuando cultural center. It was a kind of extended “happening,” chaotic, sexy, exciting, and fabulously meaningless. All long gone, and long ago. Remembrance of a good time… Sunday Leon Golub was remembered at the Cooper Union Great Hall. It was packed. Golub was a great painter, renowned for his giant sized canvases depicting military irregulars torturing prisoners. Throughout his career, he and partner Nancy Spero were active in organizing political groups among artists. They had lived in Paris, and were appalled to see the U.S. take up the imperial role of France in Indochina. Leon worked to organize the Peace Tower in L.A. in 1967, and in New York he was active in the Art Workers Coalition, and later in Artists Call (against U.S. intervention in Central America). As a painter with roots in Abstract Expressionism, Golub is almost a classic social realist. He is one of the “castigators of society.” In the words of Rob Storr, he paints “things that you know to be so but you found difficult to think about.” Today he is “barely tolerated and rarely mentioned in academia.”
I ran out after the memorial despite seeing many friends in the lobby drinking the free wine (what a great combination! memorial and a kind of wake…), and shot up to Paula Cooper Gallery for the remnant benefit auction to benefit Critical Art Ensemble’s defense (http://www.caedefensefund.org/). This is a well known case, I thought, of the artist who is being prosecuted under Patriot Act bio-terrorism provisions because the group’s work targets Monsanto Corporation products… and now a second member of the group looks likely to be indicted. But many people have never heard of this! Well, the artists came out, the collectors followed, and CAE defense raised a grand chunk of change for legal defense.
Monday night I went to see Coco Fusco talk to a global cities class at NYU about her project for the 1997 Johannesburg Biennial, “Passbook Control Station.” Coco talked about her college days, when in 1978 she encountered the divestiture movement, in which activist students sought to force schools to drop their South African investments. It worked, and the apartheid policy ended. Still, Coco noted, “you cannot overturn decades of social conditioning overnight,” and her trip to Johannesburg with its intense poverty, elaborate security measures, and atmosphere of “enforced calm” impressed her deeply. She felt as if she had undergone a time travel journey to the era of Reconstruction (the post-slavery USA of the 1870s). The project she conceived for curator Olui Enwezor’s biennial was a “re-enactment” of the passbook control system – a station for making the passbooks, and another for checking them – that ruled the lives of blacks and people of color in South Africa during the Apartheid period. The project was fascinating, since it really hit a nerve with the South Africans, both black and white.
It was interesting she referred to it as a “re-enactment,” since in this case an artist is borrowing from a kind of popular theatrics – the long-running culture of battlefield re-enactors, and the historical parks which feature personages in the dress, trade shops and manners of people in the past. She seemed to be borrowing quite directly from the recent re-enactments of slavery, most notably at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. These dramatic reminiscences of a deeply traumatic past have elicited heartfelt reactions from the public, crying children, outrage and “intervention” on behalf of the actors playing slaves… Much of the same kind of reaction appears to have happened during Fusco’s piece in Johannesburg.
Well, I don’t know who is reading this… But next week we’re going into structure for real. Reading my article in the “Journal of Radical Political Economy” (Fall ’04) on the political economy of art, and looking at Mary Anne Staniszewski, Believing Is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art.
In terms of what we’re trying to get over here, I recommend you read also Stevphen Shukaitis’ intro to his Greenpepper magazine issue on “Life Beyond the Market.” Although this issue is not yet online, Shukaitis posted the essay to the Au-Top-Sy list: http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/aut-op-sy/2004m08/msg00059.htm.
BTW -- This is Complacent.org (see last week’s blog about William Etundi of same). They are having a planning meeting for a block party upcoming. This should be a good opportunity to see artists thinking collectively about what they can do that is exciting and provocative.
Thursday, April 21st
7pm to 9pm (or so)
At Subtonic (below Tonic)
@ 107 Norfolk Street,Details at – http://www.firstwarmnight.com/dreamers/

Quick trip to Grassroots Media Conference

Saturday afternoon after class I trotted over to New School for the Grassroots Media conference (website: http://www.nycgrassrootsmedia.org/ ) for the panel called “Culture Jam 101: You Are a Thinly Veiled Threat.” This was William Etundi Jr., of Complacent.org, Swoon who is with Toyshop, and Reverend Billy (Bill Talen) and his partner Savitri D. Promo: “Here we are in the thick of a culture grown complacent on consumerism, complicity and coercion. A sustainable movement is empowered by confronting and evolving the cultural assumptions of the moment – a goal not easily achieved through traditional protest. Here lies the world of culture jam, of renegade art, of guerrilla actions aimed at shaking the foundation of Apathetic America. This hands-on workshop will ‘teach’ you nothing. Our goal is to awaken the brilliance you already have. Short video introductions and brief anecdotes of our experiences in the street will open to an interactive dialogue on the logistics, challenges and possibilities in cultural evolution. We will explain the tools we use while working with you to build your own seditious solutions – after all you are not a consumer, you are a thinly veiled threat.”
Okay. I arrived as Will Otundi was talking about engaging people directly with his work. He’s a very good great speaker, reducing and punching his message well. The website has samples of his rhetoric: http://www.complacent.org/index2.shtml. He was in the middle of a video showing him showing videos on the streets in Harlem during the 4th of July fireworks, so his projection was on a building in front of the fireworks, using them as backdrop. “Anybody can do this,” he said. You need only a laptop, power source, and a projector. Numerous substantive conversations came out of this action. Then, said Will, “take a photo, take a video and put it online” and people will see it in remote places and then they can copy your actions (emulation). Build your email list – that’s your audience. “I hate the word ‘culture jam’,” he said. “It’s about no definitions.” (Throughout this panel I got the sense of these people trying to slip definitions that have already been laid down about what kind of work this is and how it operates.) Will said don’t worry about what kind of effect you are going to have on the wider world. You will change your life and change the life of your friends. On the practical side, “you’re going to get arrested if you do anything interesting.”
Cali (aka Swoon) had trouble with her laptop, so Will took questions. His work, he said, is not always specific in content and intention. He will “just try to wake people, shake people,” affect their perceptions and get them thinking. I asked what was the difference between what he did and art. He said, “I exploit art. I’m not an artist.” (This categorical denial of artisthood is not unfamiliar among artists…) “But I say that I’m an artist sometimes when the cops talk to me,” since that can sometimes help him avoid arrest!
Cali, aka Swoon, is a street artist who works with Toyshop Collective (http://www.toyshopcollective.com/). She is, she says, absolutely an artist. She does not culture jam – she ignores the mainstream, and creates a “direct parallel” with her actions. She disparages conventional political art – “You know what it is asking you for” when you see it. That “creates a closedness.… I want to break with that relationship.” She is into a parallel culture which you create with your own hands. She makes woodblock and linoleum prints on painters’ tarps, cuts them out and pastes them on the street. (She softens the linoleum with an iron, making it easier to cut.) She is inventive with materials, and does “deface” billboards by pasting up rolls of pre-decorated “sign writer’s bond” paper. She also wheeled away free news distribution boxes, painted all over them, and replaced them on the street with new content! She observes, “Collective action is really powerful.” She urges all to be “active citizens and physically changing your city.” She loves to see walls on the street get attacked. “As soon as the first tag goes up it’s open season on that wall.” She showed a community art project where the work the kids did on paper rolls was immediately pasted over a nearby billboard. Clearly the Toyshop bunch has lots of fun. She showed a slide from a street party they put on where they constructed a giant xylophone out of junk metal and wheeled it through the streets.
She referenced John Berger’s book Shape of a Pocket. “Empathy and compassion are outside commerce,” she said. “If you can make that, you can make something outside the system.” (That’s the pocket Berger speaks of.) She also recalled the legendary hijack of the Staten Island ferry where Toyshop boarded dressed as pirates and demanded, “Take this boat to Staten Island!” (What could the ferry crew do but comply?)
Reverend Billy and Savitri spoke next for Church of Stop Shopping. (Bill of course is a world famous dynamic speaker and writer: http://www.revbilly.com/ ). He concentrates on “the micro gesture,” and “the gesture of talking and listening.” Again, this is the kind of interaction that cannot be commodified. Savitri: “We do into transnational stores and do work.” They use a three part analytic system of 1) broken gesture, 2) volume, and 3) content. (I cannot really explain this better.) Bill: “There’s nothing as charged as a human violation of a transnational chain store.” And of course, “We love to deny that we are artists.” Savitri: About Starbucks – “they are the culture jammers,” they do it better than we could dream of. Starbucks finances studies of conditions in the growing regions. They gather the data, and then it doesn’t come out (although study results are posted: see http://www.coverco.org/), and it certainly doesn’t effect their operations. According to Global Exchange, only 2% of the coffee Starbucks uses is fair trade (i.e., produced under reasonably equitable conditions that do not impoverish workers). They spend more advertising that they are ecological and into fair trade than they do realizing those corporate objectives. Church of Stop Shopping seek to “break up the rote gesture of shopping,” and “get people to recognize the labor history and resource history of products.” Both Billy and Savitri are rooted in the theater. He returned to the idea that “talking and listening is the most basic kind of media.” He extolled the “blessed state of embarrassment” when “the commodity wall” is breached. When the line, or barrier is crossed and dialogue begins. It’s not really about face offs and breaking the law, Savitri said, it’s about “how to life the line.”
Bill then led the panel and audience to a nearby Starbucks to undertake a “shoplifting” action – that was to be enter the store, take up a product (any physical object in the store), and think about its past, where it came from. Then lift it up and “curse the distance” between its presence in the store and the site of its production…
This action sounded almost like political metaphysics, not an illegal confrontation, and I wanted to go. But I ran over to the panel “Beauty and the Beast: Aesthetics in the Era of Global Activism” where I caught the tail end. They were thick in a discussion of advertising as and versus activist cultural work. Problems like the “recuperation” (as the Situationists called it) of activist strategies, like the new MTV2 stencil ad campaign which is based on activist graffiti. Paul Chan, who worked with Friends of William Blake (the 18th century printer-artist) on the Peoples’ Map for the RNC protests (see http://www.rncguide.com/about.shtml ), and who is I’m sorry to have to say, a Red Hot Artist – see his website http://www.nationalphilistine.com/. He, like Swoon in the other panel, drew a distinction between advertising and activist cultural work (work with signs, art, what have you). He spoke of the 1968 rising in Czechoslovakia (put down by the Soviets under Brezhnev) where activists changed traffic signs, painting them white. The intention was not to communicate, but to “create anxiety and confusion.” We need to see progressive media differently than conventional media work or advertising. A redhead I take to be Jacquie Soohen of Big Noise Films reminded the audience that “advertising is not an aesthetic – it’s defined by its function.”
I went to the afterparty hosted by Clamor magazine (at http://www.clamormagazine.org/ ), but they weren’t very friendly so I blew.
-Alan Moore

The Anxiety of Prep

Wondering what to do tomorrow – it’s tough when your class doesn’t happen. Then what? I come across this great polemical statement by Christoph Spehr, speaking for Tebor Scholz’s Institute for Distributed Creativity on new media education (conference upcoming CUNY Grad Center May 6). He’s talking about how education works in a post-socialist world where neo-liberal capitalism no longer has to be smart:

"Today, institutionalized education is nothing more than an occupational army standing in a country formerly called education, and its main order is to prevent that something happens. It does not create something, it does not even try to teach anything. It only >shows the instruments< of today¹s society, the crude and cruel rules of sheer competition, and exterminates any spaces and processes that could get out of control, that could create something dangerous. The Bush fundamentalism gets down to the simple formula that the U.S. is always right because they have the fattest ass in the world. You can¹t really call that an ideology. It¹s an act of humiliating its enemies by displaying unchallenged dumbness. And as such, it works."
(that’s at http://newmediaeducation.org/ click on sidebar 01.19 Christoph Spehr)

Ouch. Elsewhere in this text, Spehr talks about the shock of the classroom situation, about how he thinks education really works. I try some of this, speaking this week to Maureen Connor’s class at Queens College. I was booked to talk about the New Museum’s “East Village USA” show and began by asking, “Any questions?” The class laughed. But I wish now I’d had the guts to simply go straight into it that way, slowly, ruminatively considering and evoking questions. Because in any consideration of history, it’s what matters first – your questions now.
So what about tomorrow! Eeanhhh! It’s spozed to be post-’68 modes… So I’ll skew it that way, and go back over last week’s ground, and see what comes up. And videotape it. It’s odd when the class has yet to meet. Maybe it will take all 8 weeks for that to happen…

First Meeting -- me and Seth at a table...

...with a hairy guy at the computer ignoring us. That's right, rain and wind kept everyone away from the Fusion Museum in the LES this afternoon. It was just me and Seth Weiss of Mayday Books hanging and chatting. Well, me discoursing, since I'd showed up all set to launch into the "modes of practice" session, using examples from the classic avant-gardes, and '60s movements. (See syllabus/plan at http://new-space.mahost.org/alan.html.) This spectacular no-show flameout got me to thinking I should maybe try and do a TV show instead of mucking about with a stale academic format... This is a "free university," right?
One thing I had wanted to talk about with the phantom group was the sheer hopelessness of the "Art Life" project. Why? Well, as I just commented at NewsGrist http://newsgrist.typepad.com/), it's the class nature of the artworld. I replied to their posting of excerpts of Jerry Salz's review of the P.S. 1 show "Greater New York." ("Lesser New York," by J. Saltz, review of "GNY," Mar.13-Sept. 26, 2005, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Queens, N.Y. – full review is posted at http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/jsaltz/saltz3-29-05.asp).
Salz’s text is not really about the art -- it's about the social situation of the institutional artworld's selection process. What struck me was that Salz directly describes the class nature of the art world. He uses the words "coming-out party or cotilion ball" to describe the show, then reveals that 28 of the artists are from the big-ticket school Columbia. Woof! This is not in the least surprising, but it does seem as if the curatorial team landed with a big thump on the side of the status quo. Maybe it's nostalgia for the post-modernist unity of the '60s with guys making single things like Daniel Buren (at the Guggenheim) and Barry Le Va (whose show is still up in Phillly). This uncoded admission in Salz's review struck me forcefully, as I am beginning to do "Art Life.” My idea is to argue that the strategies of elite art -- most unknown even to educated people -- offer a repertory of devices activists can begin to use to promote their issues into public consciousness. This is already happening, of course. I wanna see it happen more. Maybe that too is '70s nostalgia...
See ya next time!