Pictured: our friends, DAMP

If you happen to be visiting the southern hemisphere, come see The M.O.S.T.’s contribution to the Group Group Show at the Victorian College of the Arts! I’ll be in Melbourne visiting from March 26-April 6, and would love to visit with some of our Australandian citizens.

For more information about the Group Group Show, click here.

Labels: MOST

Some of you may remember 1992 as the year you entered middle school, or the year that William Jefferson Clinton was elected President of the United States of American.

Today, February 29th, also marks the 4th leap year anniversary of The M.O.S.T. being the first arts group to land on the moon.

Labels: MOST

I lead a class focusing on the idea of collaboration for the social practice critical theory independent study group.

The more I learn about negotiation (which is my elective this quarter), the more I am starting to think of each interaction we have as artists with the audience as a kind of negotiation. Negotiators are trying to “create value” for the other side and to persuade them into thinking about the issue at hand in a new way. So in theory, as artists, we can decide to have a collaborative style or competitive style or avoidant style with our audience, or with other artists, or with funding institutions. So, instead of thinking of negotiating as something a lawyer does, we might have fun seeing negotiation as something each of us does in every interaction we have with another person. I have been wondering what it would be like to try and match different artists with different conflict styles. Do painters negotiate with their audience in different ways than social praciticioners? If so, how?

For the class, I had people:

1. Take a Confict Styles test. We read through descriptions of five different conflict styles – competitive, avoidant, compromising, accomodating, and collaborative – and then tried to come up with examples of specific situations where different conflict styles would be helpful or not helpful. For example, we talked about how being competitive is helpful in a military or sport situation, but maybe onot in a situation where you want to build a relationship. We also talked about how this test is really only relevant to Western individualist cultures and not to people from Eastern Asian collectivist cultures, such as Thailand where Varinthorn is from.

2. After the discussion of conflict styles at a personal level, we moved into discussion around the Introduction from the book Collectivism After Modernism edited by Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette. We reviewed how societal perception of collectivism has changed in America since World War 2 and also after 9/11. We talked about reasons why the American government (democrats and republicans) and the mass media might prefer the American population to have a competitive mindset, and what effects that has on our culture.

We also talked about what can happen when the artist collaborates with their audience or
with other artists. We how Varinthorn wonders if using the web and language of advertising in her work is not collaborative enough, and how maybe other parts of her work are collaborative.

I haven’t fully wrapped my head around these ideas, but feel like I am headed into rich territory. It is great having this opportunity to look at collaboration from historical, political, economic and conflict resolution lenses, and to then be able to bring this discussion back into the art realm.

Labels: collaboration

The MOST is preparing to participate in a show with our friends DAMP in Melbourne, Austraila centered around artists who work in groups.
We have decided to display a variety of cardboard reproductions of various ‘tools’ we use in our work together, such as safety cones, stamps, briefcases, staplers etc.

I spent most of the day Friday trying to get consensus with the rest of the group about what text we should use to represent ourselves in a catalogue related to the show, and what 3 images we should use to explain our process and compliment the items that will go in the show.
We picked the phrase, “It’s not a matter of where it is, but how to get there” to represent how we work as a group, both in terms of how we think of Mostlandia, and how we come to decisions collectively. We began talking about this at 7 AM Friday morning and chose the following images for the catalogue at 12AM Saturday morning:

Labels: MOST

During this Committee Meeting, Eric, Chris and I met to begin sketching our plans for Rudy. We drew a lot of pictures and decided on how to visually categorize the information we collected. We also divvied up tasks and developed an equipment list.

Labels: Committee

After 7 meetings with Rudy, Chris, Eric and I have split off to prepare a document of some kind that provides Rudy with some possible creative trajectories he can take in order to enhance Junior Ambassadors. The three of us met first to come up with as many possible ideas as we could think of. We used the Consensus Workshop technique where you brainstorm individually on small pieces of paper, post those ideas on the wall in groups, and begin organizing the groups. Our process looked like this:

We used orange sticky notes to indicate general categories for our suggestions, and pink to indicate ideas we see as possible “paradigm shifts” as in ideas that would require a change in thinking from Rudy.

After arranging the ideas into groupings, we spent time discussing what to do with the information. As Rudy provided us with two maps showing his desires in relation the food cart, we discussed the possibility of creating a map of our own in which to present our ideas back to Rudy. We discussed ways in which to make this map interactive and three dimensional, in order to mimic the ways in which Rudy can choose to take a birds-eye view, man-on-the-street view or any view in between towards his situation. We are working beyond this point to develop and create the map.

Labels: Committee