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As an employee of Oregon's largest university, I am enmeshed in a bureaucratic machine both monstrous and humorous. I interact with administrative assistants in a similar position to mine throughout the university system on a daily basis.
For a show called The Incidental Person, currently up at Apex Art in NYC, I've collected phrases from my colleagues that they wish they could stamp on the paperwork passing across their desks and service windows. The result (as seen in the phrases at the top of this entry) is a collection of rubber stamps less invisible and less anonymous than Date Received, Copy, Urgent or Paid.
Contributors to the collection include Dan Ward, Cashier, Rachel Browne, Cashier, Sarah Roberts, Data Specialist, Andrew Bremner, Program Assistant, Connie Blumthal, Receptionist, Ruby Ramirez, Office Specialist, Colyn Ward, Office Specialist, Mercy Joy Luebke, Human Resources Coordinator, and Trudy Pellechia and Tammy Hooper, Human Resources Assistants.
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Antony Hudek on The Incidental Person:
"The late British artist John Latham (1921-2006) coined the expression "the Incidental Person" in the context of Artist Placement Group, known as APG, which he co-founded in 1966 with Barbara Steveni, Jeffrey Shaw and Barry Flanagan. Contrary to most artist placement schemes, APG emphasized process, interaction and the artist's independence in relation to the host institution, rather than any short-term tangible outcome. Like an unbiased observer or a third-party mediator, the Incidental Person placed through APG in industry, government, education or the non-profit sector would negotiate the terms of the invitation from the institution in question and adapt the nature of her or his intervention accordingly. This incidental function, as Latham explained, "is more to watch the doings and listen to the noises, and to eliminate from the output the signs of a received idea as being of the work." Latham stresses the incidental person's approach, that is, a certain position or attitude vis-à-vis the context in which she or he is placed. In other words, the identity of the incidental person is secondary to the effect she or he has on a given situation, for the aim of the incidental person is not to be anything in particular but instead "to generate maximum public involvement, and maximum enthusiasm which goes with the involvement."
Open Engagement is a three-day conference that will happen May 14-17, 2010, in Portland, Oregon.
This conference is an intensive, immersive, around the clock experience. Open Engagement is approached as a social art work in itself. Artists (perhaps artists like yourself) will create housing, food, transportation, exhibitions, partnerships, tours, special events and include of multiple audiences from their own interests and practices, building on the ideas explored throughout the conference.
Open Engagement is a free conference. Contributors are not asked to pay a registration fee and the public will not be charged to attend. Contributors will be housed in Portland homes, paired with a host based on common interests, provided with bicycles and public transportation options, invited to dinners emphasizing slow food and community cooking, and invited out on the town in the evenings. Open Engagement is a conference, an exhibition/performance venue, a mini-residency and workshops. Participants will partake in experiences that connect them with each other: artists, art institutions, audiences, and communities.
You are invited to contribute to Open Engagement: Making Things, Making Things Better, Making Things Worse by submitting projects, performances, tours, presentations, or panel ideas. Other formats are also welcomed. You are encouraged to think of ways to connect peers and colleagues at this conference, connect and engage a greater community and work across disciplines.
All interested individuals are encouraged to submit proposals. This conference is not exclusive to artists.
What is Open Engagement about?
The artists involved in Open Engagement: Making Things, Making Things Better, Making Things Worse, challenge our traditional ideas of what art is and does. These artist's projects mediate the contemporary frameworks of art as service, as social space, as activism, as interactions, and as relationships, and tackle subject matter ranging from urban planning, alternative pedagogy, play, fiction, sustainability, political conflict and the social role of the artist.
Can socially engaged art do more harm than good? Are there ethical responsibilities for social art? Does socially engaged art have to do civic or public good? Can there be transdisciplinary approaches to contemporary art making that would contribute to issues such as urban planning and sustainability? As both urban planning and contemporary art imagine new worlds, how can art projects be seen as potential models for living?
How do I submit a proposal?
Part 1: Propose a project, paper, performance, discussion, intervention panel (or other format) that relates to the theme of the conference (500 word max).
Part 2: Write a short bio (100 words or less).
Part 3: Fill out the OE-application-form.pdf. We want to help you make interesting connections at this conference, and this will help us facilitate that.
DEADLINE:
January 15, 11:59pm 2010 (Pacific Standard Time)
I've been following the Dill Pickle Club's antics for a while now, and am happy to announce that I'm contributing a piece to their upcoming fundraiser at Eyeful Gallery.
For this show, I worked with the members of the band Dislexyss (full disclosure: my boyfriend and his best friend since kindergarten) to realize the manifestation of one of their album covers. You see, Dislexyss doesn't actually produce a whole lot of music. They do, however, produce a lot of drawings for album covers. Notebooks full of them. When asked whether they'd be interested in working with me to bring one of the drawings out of the notebook and into the world, Shamanology was the first pick. Fans and supporters of Dislexyss are invited to stop by Eyeful Gallery during the month of December and pick up a limited edition mug/listening receptacle, ala Shamanology.
The Eyeful Gallery | 625 NW Everett #104
December 3 - January 3
Wednesday - Sunday 12PM - 6PM
Full details: www.dillpickleclub.com
After our idyllic tenure at Gallery Homeland, we're moving Stock to PNCA this Sunday. Why? PNCA has chairs and tables on site! No more borrowing trucks and rousing volunteers to schlep 10 tables and 50+ chairs from all over the city and back.
This month's artists include: Rachel Peddersen & Mia Nolting, Hannah Jickling and Lori Gilbert, Jolyn Fry, Nicole Lavelle, Public Social University, Michael Reinsch, Lisa Schonberg and Shawn Creeden, Sea Change Gallery, Shelby Davis and Crystal Schenk, Working Theatre Collective and Pete Yahnke.
We reached our max capacity for the event (111 people!) sometime around 8 PM today.
Off to the farmer's market tomorrow to see what they have for us.
I've been following two different threads of discussion regarding the Creative Time Summit "Revolutions in Public Practice" that took place in NYC a week or so ago. The summit was a one-day conference where 35 different artists gave 30 minute presentations about their work at the NY Public Library.
The discussions I've been following are taking place on the Art Forum and Frieze Magazine blogs, respectively.
Public Opinion came out first. I've read other commentary by Claire Bishop before, such as her Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics as well as The Social Turn. I find her writing too vitriolic to seem helpful, but still interesting. Even more interesting to me is the conversations that go on around her writing, for example the entire thread found on the Leisure Arts blog here, here, and here.
After that healthy dose of cynicism, it was interesting to see the dialogue that showed up after the Frieze review, "Underneath the Nine-Hour-Long Conference, the Beach!"
I'd be interested to hear what other people think about this development.
In this iteration of InCUBATE's Sunday Soup, the InCUBATE people have teamed up with the group Material Exchange and artist Adam Bobette to open Repair Shop at CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, NY.
Repair Shop will host a bar, a soup kitchen and will also be open to repair physical objects. Money raised from repair fees and soup and alcohol fees will be awarded as a grant at the end of the show in December.
I realized that I haven't posted about STOCK yet on Urban Honking -
Stock is a monthly public dinner event and presentation series, which funds small to medium-sized artist projects. I work on this project with two other individuals: Ariana Jacob and Amber Bell.
Hosted by Gallery Homeland in Portland, Oregon, diners pay a modest $10 for a dinner of homemade soup and other local delicacies and the chance to take part in deciding which artist proposal will receive the evening's proceeds. In other words, the dinner's profits immediately become an artists grant, which is awarded according to the choice of the diners. Winning artists will present their completed work at the following Stock dinner.
The last artists to receive a grant from Stock, Mariah Maines and Jess Hirsch, took home $500 in cash at the end of the evening. (!) They'll be presenting on what they did with the money this Sunday.
In addition to the presentation, we will have six proposals vying to win October's pot of gold from the following artists:
- Tesar Freeman & Claire LaMont
- Sandy Sampson
- Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen
- Forrest Martin
- Jamie Marie Waelchli
- Abra Ancliffe
We'll also be unveiling our new two-round (aka runoff) voting system.
Will you vote to fund start-up costs for a magazine, help an artist purchase supplies for a large-scale installation, support a stay-at-home lecture series, buy books for a specially curated library, pay artist fees for a talented-yet-unrecognized artist or assist in a campaign to remove a plaque from the park blocks?
RSVP to portlandstock at gmail dot com
When and where?
Sunday, October 18, 6-8 PM (do rsvp. dinner is first come first serve)
Gallery Homeland, SE 11th and Division
Tomorrow I'm leaving for a residency called Signal Fire. Unlike other residency programs where artists are invited to stay on privately owned land, Signal Fire hosts its artists in a mobile home at the end of a logging road in the Mount Hood National Forest. According to Tarp and Amy, the organizers at Signal Fire, I don't actually have to accomplish anything during my stay. However, in daydreaming about how I'd like to spend my time, I couldn't help but come up with an action plan.
For the residency, I have invited three friends and fellow artists, Michael Reinsch, Ariana Jacob and Eric Steen, to engage in a five day discussion and research project focused around the tensions associated with choosing vs. making peace with the communities we are a part of in contemporary culture. Michael, Ariana and Eric have been invited to co-develop and influence the sequencing of daily activities and have agreed to structure our residency like an adult summer camp with daily reading assignments, unstructured leisure time and campfire discussions in the evenings.
My inspiration for this research project has to do with a joke some friends have about people who they'd "invite to the farm," as in the farm they plan to live on after the apocalypse. The format of the Signal Fire residency, with it's parameters of isolation in the wilderness, reminds me of back to the land utopian ideals, and the complication of those ideals that arises when people attempt to live them in tandem with others. I'm interested in thinking about what it means to be someone worthy of being on the farm, and what implications that idea has to us as artists and citizens.
In a way, I've put together my own farm. I'm not sure that I can recommend these individuals for day to day post-apocalyptic survival, however they are friends of mine who have unique insights into what it means to walk the line between chosen and incidental communities.
Ariana Jacob's parents raised her in a remote location in Canada for the early part of her life while they lived off of the grid and grew their own food. Starting her life removed from any specific community, Ariana has spent her adult life exploring what it means to make a community, participating in the music and art culture of Olympia, WA, working as part of the collective management team at People's Co-op and using art projects to ask questions about what it means to belong in our society.
Eric Steen grew up in the tight knit world of evangelical Christianity in the Bay Area. In his work, he often explores the ways in which people outside of the Christian community manifest their beliefs in the greater common good. While not religious, the utopian visions, pedagogical methodologies, science fiction movies and beer drinking communities Eric explores in his art projects rely on some level of faith or the suspension of disbelief as a mechanism for creating an idealized world.
Michael Reinsch claims that his only experience of belonging to a community occurred during the five years he played trombone in the Marion County Citizen's Band during Oktoberfest in Mt. Angel, Oregon. He attributes his feelings of alienation to his own lack of ability to perceive his connectedness to others and compensates for these feelings by creating performance pieces that resemble parties and festivals that only he is invited to fully participate in.
I recently ended a five year collaboration with a group of artists who worked together to create an entire country complete with passports, flags and a currency of love and friendship. Having completed that project, I am using this residency to continue researching group dynamics, conflict and intentional community building.
Below is a brief reading list we've compiled together and a list of activities we've talked about trying out. I'll take some pictures and post them here later. Also, we will be participating in an exhibit of all of the inaugural season residents' work at Igloo Gallery October 1.
Reading/Activity list: Chapters 1-2 Spell of the Sensuous, "Composting" from Writing Down the Bones, Drop City, Digging a latrine, Material Thinking Sh*t Boots (apparently aka sh*thead), helping Eric to learn to sit up straight, baritone ukelele performances, Interview between Jerry Brown and Ivan Illich, and telling our life stories in an hour or less.
Tonight I"ll be unveiling a new project, The Doris Ennis Collection, at Shine a Light, an event the PSU Social Practice MFA students are presenting along with the Portland Art Museum. The night's events are $12 - there will be lots of music and a different activity/project starting every 15 minutes during its 6 hour run time.
Shine a Light
A Night at the Museum:
Saturday, September 19
6:00 P - 12:00 A
Today I've been reading an interview between Ivan Illich and Jerry Brown that I found whilst exploirng my Delicious contacts page. It gives me a different lens through which to reflect upon the value The M.O.S.T. placed on feelings of love and friendship. Mostlandia had an entire bureau, The Love and Friendship Index (LFI), devoted to measuring the populace's feelings of love and friendship and reporting those feelings as frequently as local news stations report on the weather. The Mostlandian economy was built around the LFI, and multiple bureaus (eg. Your Fan for a Day Group, The Cabinet of Well Being, The What to Say Program, Clapping Team, Friday Night Movie Club) addressed the root causes of a low LFI . I always wondered how feelings of belonging could translate into politics. Intuitively I've always felt that a correlation exists, but have had trouble articulating it. I think the articulation I'm looking for lies somewhere between the two passages below.
an excerpt:
"Now, friendship in the Greek tradition, in the Roman tradition, in the old tradition, was always viewed as the highest point which virtue can reach. Virtue meaning here the habitual facility of doing the good thing which is fostered by what the Greeks called politaea, political life, community life. I know it was a political life in which I wouldn't have liked to participate, with the slaves around and with the women excluded, but I still have to go to Plato or to Cicero. They conceived of friendship as a flowering, a supreme flowering of the interaction which happens in a good political society....So we start with a world where the good society creates the virtue and the virtue is the basis of friendship. Now it's reversed. Now it seems we have to create the friendship and in the context of the friendship virtue is practiced and that might lead to a community which might lead to a society which might be a whole other kind of politics."
And, this quote from Hugo of St. Victor, written in the 12th Century
"To my dear brother Ronolfe from Hugh, a sinner. Love never ends. When I first heard this I knew it was true. But now, dearest brother, I have the personal experience of fully knowing that love never ends. For I was a foreigner. I met you in a strange land. But that land was not really strange for I found friends there. I don't know whether I first made friends or was made one, but I found love there and I loved it and I could not tire of it for it was sweet to me and I filled my heart with it and was sad that my heart could hold so little. I could not take in all that there was but I took in as much as I could. I filled up all the space I had but I could not fit in all I found so I accepted what I could and weighed down with this precious gift I didn't feel any burden because my full heart sustained me. And now having made a long journey I find my heart still warmed and none of the gift has been lost for love never ends."
If you decide to go ahead and read it, I'd recommend listening to the podcast listed here: To Long, Too Long.
I've been listening to all of the podcasts on this blog at work lately. I'm not sure whether I feel like the answers to the questions raised are satisfying to me, but the music is taking me there.
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