Working King’s city

Last night it was a full moon over Marietta, Georgia. I’m feeling blue, lonely and ineffective as a teacher. (Is the organization I am enjoined to more effectively instill in my courses a mere unsubtle veil for the workplace procedures that follow school as night follows day? Yeah, so, what if it is? What’s your job, anyhow?)

Today Sunday I am in Atlanta to listen to a Unitarian minister talk about Martin Luther King, Jr.. King’s friend, Whitney Young, was a member of the church, and King preached there. David Keyes was interesting – on a UU theologian’s idea of God as a network, as the connection between all things, versus King’s sense of a personal God, a presence realized in adversity the night King’s life was threatened in a phone call in Birmingham. Which God don’t you believe in? Chances are I don’t believe in that God either (Paul Tillich).

Then I drop into MOCA GA, which is listed as being open. But it’s not. They are deinstalling Andrew Ross’s exhibition (some promo is at: http://www.dospestaneos.com/?q=node/46). I see a little bit, maybe a third of it as the artist scrapes it off the floor. The floor is strewn with crumpled paper. As you look at the papers, you see that tiny figures have been cut from the sheets and mounted on the floor. They form little tableaux of tiny all-white paper people, some with weird Dzamas-like headdresses, cave people creeping up on hippos, or just standing all together in lines.The installation has that special unheimlich creepy feeling as the trash turns to figuration, and the paper people coming to life.

Ross is curated into the MOCA GA space by Joey Orr, who ran the innovative Shed Space exhibition series for some years (2000-04), shows in sheds in people’s backyards (described at: http://atlanta.creativeloafing.com/2004-08-05/arts_visualarts.html). Seeing these fellows as they deinstall with exhibitions manager Lisa Thrower’s help was inspiring to me. An art boost!

Things may still be possible…

Hello this is how you do it

...right, and then you fill in your text.

Slow Motion Revolution

Are we fooling ourselves? Or is something really going on....
Maybe like a -- "SLOW MOTION REVOLUTION"
or maybe it's just been a summer of the Deep Freeze...

Print - Close Window Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2005 14:10:30 -0700 (PDT) Subject: Re: Monday Night-- Trevor Paglen -- The Secret Bases -- 08.08.05, 7:30 P From: julie -- @ somewhere To: "Alan Moore" <awm13579@yahoo.com>
Hey Alan!I was going through old emails last week and found yours with the name ofyour friend in Argentina. Argh, it somehow got lost in the shuffle on my way there, sigh. It was a good trip, though -- just enough to get a sense of what goes on down there. We visited some museums, some of the sitesthat have weekly protests, a sort of organizing center, and tried to find a community garden (to no avail, but it made for an interesting trip to the suburbs nonetheless), among other activities. Oh, and we also went to Uruguay and rented bicycles in a smallish town on the Rio Plata -- Uruguay is a place you just never think you'll go. I did get to 16 Beaver last week to see the Belltown Paradise presentation-- it was really neat (I've never surfed and thus am lacking cool lingo). Did you see them at another site? I picked up a copy of the book, in case you didn't have a chance and would like to check it out. Anyway, the below sounds good, as well -- I'm going to plan to go.Thanks so much for continuing to send out these announcements -- it's really appreciated.
Julie
> Hi - that Friday last at ABC No Rio with Critical Mass & RMO etc. was> boss!! (old surfer lingo)> this guy Trevor is an inventive collaborative activist artist> he'll be good> -a

>>>> New York Friends,> Hi everyone. I wanted to let you know about an upcoming presentation I'm> doing at 16 Beaver on August 8. I hope that some of you can make it to the> talk/discussion. We'll be talking about secret military stuff and we'll> have> drinks afterward. [BOSS!] I've got some extremely weird stuff to show you from my> new project. Also, let me know if you want me to stop spamming you, ok?> Thanks.> Here are the details and a few pictures.> 16 Beaver Group> Where: 16 Beaver Street, 4th floor> NYC>
When: Monday Night 08.08.05 @ 7:30 pm>
http://www.16beavergroup.org/> http://www.paglen.org/> The Secret Bases:> Exploring the Pentagon's "Black World"> Trevor Paglen>> Over the last several years Pentagon spending on secret projects has> reached> unprecedented levels. This level of hidden military spending translates> into> a variety of extremely peculiar built environments and landscapes. From> the> popular phenomenon of "Area 51," to nondescript locales like the Helendale> Avionics Facility, the Southwest is littered with places where the> military> develops, tests, and operates technologies that "do not exist." Defense> industry insiders refer to this assemblage of clandestine infrastructures,> secret bases, and state capacities as the "black world" (and yes, they> really do talk like that).>> For geographers and cultural producers, these hidden military landscapes> pose bizarre visual and epistemic challenges and paradoxes. How might we> see> places whose very existence is a state secret? What are some empirical> means> that we can use to detect the presence of carefully constructed absences?> What happens when the norms of visuality and intelligibility begin to> collapse? What do these epistemic limit-cases look like? What do they> sound> like?>> In order to pursue this project, I have developed some unorthodox methods> to> research and document traces of hidden military landscapes, movements, and> economies. These techniques include "limit telephotography," symbology,> ad-hoc participatory anthropology, amateur geospatial intelligence> collection, plane-spotting, and military communications monitoring. In> this> presentation, I will demonstrate some of these unusual techniques and> discuss some of the projects that have come out of these efforts.>> Images:> Patch (this is not a joke...): "Tastes Like Chicken"> Image: The Tonopah Test Range at Night, distance = 20 miles>>>> Alan W. Moore> 135 Corson Ave.> Staten Isle, NY 10301> cel: 917 574 8392> video: http://www.brickhaus.com/amoore> MWF/Colab: 123 Scribner Ave SI NY 10301
"Come and get it!" - Barbeque Bob

“Blog this!”

Well, Art Life is over. The class has finished.
Everyone and -thing seems so depressed! It is essential to maintain optimism even when you have learned from the most reliable sources that the situation is even worse than you thought. Don’t let the reality being constructed for you sap your will. Go on and make it different.
Friday, when the "NY Post" carried pictures of a haggard Saddam in his jail cell, even as the "Times" ran two inside pages of an Afghani cab driver tortured to death by Americans in the invasion there I thought of Paul Werner’s scary post on his WOID letter http://homepages.nyu.edu/~ptw1/WOID.html about “Greuelpropaganda,” what Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels called "defensive war against atrocities propaganda." That’s what the government puts out when somebody’s called their bluff and raised embarrassing facts. This is a bad sign on the media horizon…
(Do you suppose that when the police came for them, those activists and political people in '30s Germany and '70s Latin America were experiencing depressive symptoms? What do you think they took for that?)
It is over, and yet Art Life continues. Putting this class together – or piling it up, maybe! – I have learned so much about what is happening in the world of creative resistance. Today was like the first session, no one showed up but Seth and Andrea, so we just had a chat. We tried to look at Nils Norman’s comic book for Thurrock in 2015 (the “graphic novel” at http://www.visionarythurrock.org.uk/docs/artists/nilsnorman/) but it wouldn’t launch. It’s charming, with the little South Park-style hippie greenies going around saving their blighted community. We looked at his vehicles, the Geocruiser (a converted bus), and the grandly named bicycle-mounted Gerard Winstanley Radical Gardening Space Reclamation Mobile Field Center and Weather Station. Then ambled over to the Danish design group N55 with their multiple “manuals.” These guys are an anarchist’s Ikea, with multiple splendidly articulated and suavely designed projects. Seth had also seen Temporary Services’ wonderful Mobile Structures Resources http://www.temporaryservices.org/mobile_struct_rsrce.html. And we didn’t even look at their Mobile Sign Systems page. Seeing all this makes one want to DO something! Uh-oh, art that makes you wanna make art is as bad as books that make you want to write.
* * *
Since it is unclear who is looking at this blog, I will post the readings I sent to our list for the final session, even though we did not discuss them. I will also probably continue this blog as I mull over the course experience – the final product will be a syllabus, which I’ll post to my website – which remains merely a gleam in my eye… (I may break down and download FrontPage – ugh!)
[my email to the class]
Dear Friends,
Here is the material I just added to the “Art Life” box at Mayday Books. Some of it you can just take, some of it you will have to take to the copy shop.

ONLINE – and only one copy in the box

A good article on recent protest art:
“Art Crimes: The Ebb, Flow & Dilemma of Protest Art,” by Kari Lydersen, 3.26.01
http://www.lipmagazine.org/articles/featlydersen_74_p.htm

A piece on a central problem in this kind of work – recuperation:
“The Revolution Will Not Be Commodified: Prolefeed and the co-opting of protest culture,” by The Mobiustrip, 2/23/02
http://www.the44.net/blog/rev1/

IN PRINT ONLY – 5 copies in the box

old stuff, chart of genealogy of classic avant-gardes –
George Maciunas, “Diagram of Historical Development of Fluxus” – oversized chart, 5 pieces, substantial overlap

“A Drink with a Twist” – Interview with Superflex about the Guarana project, Arthur [magazine], January 2005

Kate Fowle and Lars Bang Larsen, “Lunch Hour: Art, Community, Administrated Space and Unproductive Activity,” from Ted Purves, ed., What We Want Is Free (SUNY 2005)

Selections from “Digital Detournement,” a catalogue published by Ed Marszowski in 2003 for the Version 03 conference in Chicago
A survey of recent projects from this conference. Some idea of the most recent one, Ver. 05 just concluded, is at http://versionfest.com/version05/festival/archives/000334.html

print, only ONE copy (it’s big):
an extensive series of cases or project histories --
Ted Purves (and his seminar), “Handbook for Gift and Exchange-Based Art” from Purves, ed., What We Want Is Free (SUNY 2005)
this is 70 pages, 35 leaves

OTHER STUFF NOT IN THE BOX, but relevant and online –
This is a text I read from last week, a review by the Italian labor theorist Bifo about a book by the net art theorist Lovink – “Franco Bifo Berardi reviews Geert Lovink’s ‘dark fiber’”
http://www.generation-online.org/t/Bifosreview.htm

This is a text I’ve been mulling. The panel includes the theorist Brian Holmes, and artist Claire Pentecost, active in the Critical Art Ensemble defense effort.
Nataša Petrešin -- “Potentiality of a Cultural Resistance: Talk with Brian Holmes, Claire Pentecost, Marko Peljhan, Igor Zabel” – a 16 Beaver group “Journalisms” posting at –
http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/archives/001377.php

Stephen Wright at 16 Beaver May 2 2005

See http://www.16beavergroup.org/monday/ for his text – basically he interpolated this text in his talk last night… Here following are disconnected notes I made on what he said.
At the time I came in, he was saying that the contention that something is “just art” is used as a defense when the work is being censored. Instead, art [or “artivism,” “creactivist” work] should “corrode, pollute, infiltrate and contaminate” the real. This is “art without spectatorship,” art that is emerging as a “competence” (that is, the ability to do something; it strikes me like the old Greek idea of art as techne, i.e. as skill). Without the validating frame – the construction of which is the work of the artworld – “art is not visible as such.” [I thought this leaves aside the vernacular ‘frame,’ e.g. circuses and such.] “Only documentation [of activist work] confers art status” on this work. That is, when it is brought into the frame of the gallery or museum. [Is buzz, lore, and legend “documentation”?]
He spoke of Bureau d’Etudes, the French group. They had gone through college insisting upon one diploma for all three of them. After the collapse of the Somali government, they squatted the abandoned Somali embassy and began to issue documents. [Sounds like a fantastic project!]
(This I did not understand – “Intersubjectivity allows subjectivity to emerge.” Wright referenced a 1960 interview with Marcel Duchamp – at http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_4/interviews/md_guy/md_guy.html -- in this, Duchamp speaks of “a new feeling” that is black humor. I thought when you are looking at artistic practice as “affect production,” then the construction of feelings in the audience/observer is the principal object of study.)
Wright passed out the Bd’E’s monumental “World Government” poster/pamphlet or map, a work which relates to Mark Lombardi’s drawings and Oyvind Fahlstrom, who “used economic information as an art material” during the 1960s. The “World Gov’t” maps had been handed out during demonstrations. Wright described the affect produced by the piece as first curiosity; then desire to know more, and finally an urge to do something. But at no point does one say, “yes, but it’s just art.” That would be “enfeebling.” Competence, in Chomskyan linguistics, is what you have been being born into a language. You don’t have to perform it – it’s understanding, embedded perceptions and habits. (I’m not really clear on the translation from linguistic to artistic competence…) The work reaches the threshold of invisibility as art.
Wright spoke about the Yesmen, a very well know artivist group since the film came out last year. They arose out of RTmark, or ®™mark (“registered trademark mark”), the information mayhem investment website. He gave a brief précis of their spectacular career in impersonation, climaxing with a speech as WTO in Australia announcing the dissolution of the group, which was applauded by some executives who felt emboldened by the speech to express their feeling that the inequity of wealth needed to change. (Of course that’s Australia!) In this work, the relation between fiction and reality is blurred – it’s a kind of “reverse Quixotism” in which the fictional garb exposes the naked truth. In their impersonation of Dow Chemical in the Bhopal matter, the “system of legitimation was infiltrated and contaminated” when Yesmen appeared on BBC World News as Dow and announced they would pay for the cleanup and medical costs. Their stocks tumbled, and the real company was forced to come out and say they would do nothing for India. (The editor in chief of the TV program was fired.)
The Yesmen’s leisure suit project was shown in the Interventionist show at Mass MOCA. The main reason to show this kind of work in a gallery or museum is that “hopefully it will prove contagious.” Wright discussed another project in Argentina, the “escrache” work around the mass disappearances during the junta. Here artists play a key role in formulating and styling actions that are intended to “produce popular memory about what happened” during those times, and pointing the finger at the people who did the crimes. “The artists respect the absence of the 30,000 people [“disappeared,” i.e. killed by the Argentinian junta] through their own absence – the absence of art…. Art is present only in terms of its competence. It’s latent.”
Wright criticized the vogueish relational aesthetics of Nicolas Bourriaud. In this kind of work, “non-artistic actions are reimported into an artistic framework and considered artistic.” This is colonial, colonizing the lifeworld. “The symbolic capital of the artist is used to exploit what others are doing.” The key question is the relation between artistic and nonartistic labor. He gave as an example an artist who commissioned Afghani refugee women to make carpets to his designs, then exhibited and sold them for large sums. This work exploits the disproportionate “balance of power between art and the everyday.” Art enjoys great symbolic privilege. Amidst the current “fashion frenzy for politics” in the artworld, it is for Wright a question for artists of building their standing in the “reputational economy” or trading it in for “teeth in the real.” That is, “trading off real world effectivity for artistic visibility.”

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