October 2006 Archives

Ahoy friends,

We began week 5 looking at Vedem, the hand-made zine that boys in Terezin made while imprisoned there between 1942 and 1944. You read from it very beautifully and I was delighted to hear the words come alive in the room. It was noted that the magazine was never distributed or used as a medium to connect the group who wrote it to strangers; rather, they produced it each week to read out loud to each other on Friday evenings. The importance of making an object — just to facilitate and embody an interpersonal relation — seems poignant here, especially when one notes how the long-suppressed texts survived as objects (as a set of the magazines) and eventually reached us and many others. The objects became history.

We turned from this rare text to a text of mass culture, Marshall McLuhan's Understanding Media. McLuhan's distinction between "hot media" and "cool media" was discussed, particularly the relativism and flux in those terms. McLuhan characterized telephones, cartoons, and TV, among other things, as "cool," because they offer "low definition" transmission — the listener or viewer needs to fill in a lot of blanks. He called radio, ideograms, and movies "hot" because they are "high definition" — they have great precision and present a saturated field of info.

But the temperature of any medium is matter of flux and context. A medium may be hot and cool down or be cool and get "hotted up." Similarly a medium might be cool in the hands of one artist and hot in the hands of another. Also it might be cool in a certain historical context and hot in another. The cycle of cool media "hotting up" to an explosive saturation (or of a hot media cooling) and then in "the typical reversal" being displaced by a new cool medium (or being reconfigured into a hot medium) was noted. For instance, McLuhan observed that the development of an abstract phonetic alphabet deployed through "repeatable print" brought a huge shift that "hotted up" the medium of writing and "led to nationalism and the religious wars of the sixteenth century."

At this point things went downhill. Daunted by the prospect of moving paragraph-by-paragraph through the text, I insisted that we jump forward to McLuhan's closing remarks. I gave short shrift and a muddled interpretation to the intervening pages and then introduced our special guest, mail artist Daniel J. Mitchell.

I have been so unsatisfied with my attempts to bring the readings into discussion that I am going to abandon my initial plan to not give any home work. Please consider the story of Gertrude Stein's publication (excerpted from Hugh Ford’s book, Published in Paris) as a piece of homework. Read it. It tells a remarkable story. Pick out a passage you especially like and be ready to read that passage to us next week. Our discussion will blossom from what you pick. I'll only ask three or four volunteers to read selections, so don't worry about fucking up. If no one volunteers I will frown and cry a silent tear, inside. Next week I will give you a text that we will consider the following Monday and ask the same.

Daniel Mitchell was a fascinating guest and we learned of his personal practice of sending things that interest him (and that he has worked upon artistically) to friends by mail. He distinguishes these nomadic objects from other art he makes at home, which is to be possessed and enjoyed without the mail. He's excited about reciprocity but does not require it. Money is of little concern in this work, but the identity of the recipient and Daniel's involvement with that person are important. The differences between these interpersonal strategies and the work of an ad firm were discussed. We also speculated about a mail art practice that reaches strangers, but no one said they would try it.

The rest of the night was spent talking about the printers on the attached contact list, discussing the jobs they had done and what they had done well. For those of you who missed the discussion (Sarah and Marcus), I'm happy to go through the list with you during a break at next week's class or during the half-hour after we finish. There's a lot of information that I didn't put on the document but gave out loud during class (because I read somewhere that people process information better if they write it down).

Could each of you with printers (or others) to recommend please send us your lists by e-mail? As we did with my list, I'm happy to get the annotations and info from you verbally at the beginning of next Monday's class. Or, you can write it on the document. And please be ready to share your selection of an especially interesting passage in the Gertrude Stein text.

Finally, we will be shifting our discussion away from books and onto the subject of objects generally. So, please bring an object that arrived in your life and triggered something meaningful or valuable to you. If you'd like to point our attention to an object that isn't portable, maybe you could bring a picture of it.

Thanks again,

Matthew

Dear fellow travelers,

Thank you for a mellow evening of object appreciation and engagement with our fascinating guest, Vanessa. She sends her hellos and thank yous in an e-mail that I have appended to the bottom of this one. While I used meeting #4 as a break from the Xeroxed readings (mostly so I could be sure we got to everything within the allotted 3 hours), next week we'll again incorporate readings. I intend to focus us inside a text more substantially than I have in past weeks.

By the way, that reminds me to alert you to the delicious surprise I embedded within week 3's reading pile, a 1975 essay by John O'Neill called "Gay Technology and the Body Politic." It comes from a very good, if dated, anthology called The Body as a Medium of Expression, edited by Jonathan Benthall and Ted Polhemus. Anyone intrigued by O'Neill's wild poetics should also look for his longer treatment of the subject in a book called Wild Sociology. As you read, you'll find that O'Neill is, sadly, not using "gay" in its then current meaning of homosexual, but rather in the sense Nietzsche gave it in his book The Gay Science. "Gay" is way of thinking that refigures the relation between reason and poetic imagination as they shape (or give rise to) possible truths. Maybe that's what we've all meant by "gay" all along. O'Neill's text is essentially an appreciation of psychedelic rock.

Workshop 4 focused, for me, around the art of printed objects and their circulation. We were shown some beautiful objects and learned a little about the (for the most part) personal or aleatory (that means "by chance") channels that brought them to us. It was interesting to see how the special circumstances of their delivery (whether in the hands of a friend, or by accident on a public bus) helped give them meaning and a lasting "aura." These floated to us like special gifts amidst a sea of anonymous products. While I take pleasure in this, I also feel it is further discouragement for those who still dream of a populist politics that is linked to mass culture. Is meaning always personal? Can an object link us and empower us as a mass?

I felt that the potential for such modest and personal efforts to catalyze broader meanings among many people, friends and strangers, was exemplified by the way Vanessa has conducted her work. Rather than isolating film-making as her art, she has created a network of people, events, and infrastructure via a kind of art-practice of organizing. She makes films, but she also makes a culture/economy. I'm interested in the way her posters function in that culture/economy. They announce the care with which everything is being made. They spread the word. And, they remain afterwards as mementos and reminders of the meanings and value of what got done and what else may yet get done. Objects are great. If designed and made right, they do a lot of work and communicating while you go off and do whatever else you're doing. Because they endure and travel more than we do, it's worth investing in them.

I also felt that Vanessa exemplified the interdependence of the three "types of media" we've been considering. In her practice, we can see how interpersonal gatherings (that darkened room full of people with a beam of light passing by overhead), well-made objects (the posters as well as the films), and a virtual space of interaction and contact (her website) interact to make a whole organism of culture.

We closed by looking at the $400 mass market book. I hope it is evident from some of my themes (the possibility of catalyzing mass politics) that this object holds a special place in our discussions. While it has emerged from a very narrow, personal artistic practice, it masquerades as an anonymous, machine-made object of mass culture. Obviously, important next steps need to follow for it to become part of mass culture — the decoy must convince arbiters of a market sufficiently that product demand is catalyzed and more copies are made — but it's an elegant and thought-provoking gesture.

I asked that next Monday you bring contact info for at least one (and hopefully two or three or more) people/companies you've really enjoyed working with to make and/or distribute print objects. I'll bring a bundle of those too. We'll focus on this resource list of people and businesses who can help us make and move beautiful print objects, and we'll read a little bit about the ways objects move among people to make meanings and communities. No guest next Monday.

A special request: I have been invited to a can't-miss meeting in New York on Monday December 4. Could each of you please tell me your availability for an extra meeting on: Thursday November 30; Wednesday December 6, Thursday December 7 or Monday December 18. I need this as soon as you can send it. And please tell me, also, if you feel a change in schedule is unacceptable. I'm very very sorry to be having to ask for it.

Questions? Don't hesitate to engage the group via e-mail between classes. And e-mail or call me anytime you need to.

Matthew

Hello friends,

Thanks for going the extra hour. Time got sort of elastic, but next week.... Honest, I bet we'll be done on time next week. Regardless, I wanted to highlight a few things in class 3's opening conversation about small gatherings and the closing one about crowds and the possibility of ever having a truly public space (a discussion that was triggered by the flaws and indecencies of my project proposal).

First we focused on the way a small gathering is shaped by the design of invitations and the way we distribute the invitation. This can be anything from a handmade object or a flyer to an ad or billboard. We talked about the tendency of advertisers to mimic "invitations" by appearing to speak directly, personally, to the recipient. It was noted that large organizations often pretend to be persons, and that persons can pretend to be large organizations. Given this variability, it was suggested that two values might be held up as ethical yardsticks or “good manners” for guiding our choices about invitation/advertising: (1) we should seek symmetrical relationships, that is, when speaking to persons, speak as persons, and when speaking to large organizations speak as large organizations; (2) we should make sure we can follow through on the relationships we invite people into. Advertisers sometimes incite or invite us into desires they can't possibly satisfy.

Second, we talked a little bit about money and whether to charge money at small events. It was noted that a door charge is often not necessary for covering costs and that charging money establishes a consumer relation; people who have paid often feel they owe nothing else, they can check out or be autonomous; people who are "hosted" (given something for free) usually feel obliged to pay something else, such as "paying attention." I suggested that we make a logo/sign that says "trade accepted" and encourage local events that charge money to post that sign at the door, inviting conversation about trade and fair terms for non-money exchange with whomever is interested. I didn't mention (but I want to add now) that the back room events (at which I organize and pay for a chef, live music, publication, and a guest artist) are budgeted so that whomever wants to get in pays their share of the total cost. Each event costs about $2000, so the seats cost around $45 each, making a direct break-even relation between the audience and the chef/musicians/guest etc. I am seduced by the elegance of this relationship.

It was also noted that the elements of most events (the crowd, the venue, the food, say, or the music) already exist in great profusion (and great quality) throughout the city, and that our role as organizers might simply be to assemble the pre-existing parts and give a name to the evening.

Last, regarding small gatherings, we talked about the role of the host who welcomes people and shows that he or she cares that each guest came. This aside devolved quickly into a summary reference to forms and formalism, a kind of overriding thought that small gatherings can basically mix and match available forms — it is "a class" "a show" " a lecture" "a funeral" "a rally," etc.; its at a club, a restaurant, a school, in a field, at a house, etc.; its run by a promoter, a church, a school, the PTA, homocore, etc. — and by doing so raise expectations that the event will either satisfy or frustrate. On an optimistic note, we were all encouraged to falsely inhabit the proprietary forms of large companies (give a press conference for PGE!), and The Yes Men were held up as an example of this.

We then turned to large crowds. I hope you noticed how much the crowd scenes in Harry Kessler's diary read like movie scenes. I believe we can't imagine the interior life of the massive public crowds of, say, 1918 and revert, instead, to recalling movie images of such a crowd as seen from the outside. I wonder why the interior life of such a crowd (as also described and analyzed by Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power) is so foreign to us now and whether such public power has disappeared from our world entirely. I forgot to direct your attention to the Xerox of Mexican Modernity, by Ruben Gallo. It is the reading about stadiums. Gallo discusses the use of the stadium to corral and choreograph the spectacle of the crowd and make it, essentially, cinematic. The interior power of the crowd becomes neutralized and turned into a consumable image of power via orchestration and film. He describes the way Hitler did exactly that. (By the way, "Vasconcelos" is Jose Vasconcelos, a powerful politician in post-Revolution Mexico, circa 1920s - 1940s, who organized the construction and use of monumental national stadiums in that country. He was also a great advocate for Nazis in Mexico.)

We ended with my proposal for a public event. I want to experience a real public space, a real crowd, and I wonder why it is so rare now. I suggested that a real public space would interrupt and interfere with private space and private concerns. It would disrupt our private lives sufficiently to be frightening and reviled. My rather crude ideas for creating such a space and inhabiting it were rightly criticized for also being physically dangerous and impractical. It was also pointed out that if we are interested in making a real public space happen (and I believe such a space comes into being only when occupied by a crowd, not when empty or sparsely used) we need to find a clear, forceful way to announce exactly that purpose and suggest its virtues.

I hope the latter discussion left us with some disquiet about the difficulty of imagining or making public space or a crowd. I hope we're uncomfortable with the common alternative of making highly regulated, temporary, and non-disruptive spaces for crowds that become, essentially, private gathering (I’m thinking of sanctioned rallies and well-policed protests, events that I thoroughly enjoy and would even work hard to create; I’m also thinking of more modest public events such as lectures, public performance, dinners, shows, classes, etc.). I hope we're left with a keen feeling of the difference between events that bring together "closed crowds" in a manageable, interpersonal space and the rare (perhaps disappeared) potential for "open crowds" (these are Canetti's terms) that threaten the hegemony of private life by asserting the existence of a public consciousness and being.

In closing that discussion let me point you to two URLs that can further inform our thinking. One is my own essay about the WTO protests of 1999. I wrote it as the events unfolded, turning the essay as the last events the essay describes happened. It is online at http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=2733 The second is an instructive site about the use of the freeway is a space of public discourse, a site Marc pointed out at www.freewayblogger.com

Nest week will be a lot of fun. We will exit from the troubling realm of human contact and organizing people to form a medium of expression. Our focus will shift to book-objects that can travel around and gather a community together just by circulating and being read. I'd like to begin the evening with "show and tell." So, please bring a book-object or other piece of printed matter that especially charms or charmed you, both in its physical qualities and contents and in the way it entered your life and/or moves through the world. We'll each get to "show and tell" one of these, but feel free to bring along more than one example. I know I will! And our guest will be Vanessa Renwick.

Alright, my fellow travelers. Thank you so much for taking part in this.

Matthew

Thanks for a very stimulating class. Next week we will begin by returning to the list of "practical choices" one faces when organizing gatherings and events. I will fill out the abstract categories by giving you some specific approaches I've used (or I've seen others use) to deal with such issues as inclusiveness/exclusiveness, making symmetrical relations, keeping control over an event versus letting it go, hosting, finding the right room (or beach!), making the mix, and a few others.

We'll also return to the readings I gave you at the end of class last night. It occurred to me that the Harry Kessler reading (which is from his diaries, published in English as Berlin in Lights) covers events that might be unfamiliar to you. Germany in 1918 underwent a revolution, called the November Revolution, that (much like its counterpart revolution in Russia the year before) deposed an old monarchy and unleashed populist, democratic forces including strong communist parties. But in Germany, a populist anti-communist party, the socialist democratic party (SPD), took control. By January 1919 (when Kessler's diary pages begin), the communists, especially the Sparticists, behind the leadership of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, threatened to overwhelm the SPD government and bring a real communist revolution. It is this battle, fought largely in the streets of Berlin (and ending with Liebknecht's and Luxemburg's arrests and deaths), that we witness through Kessler's diary. (This struggle also gave birth to the German Freikorps, groups of populist SPD vigilantes unleashed against the Sparticists, who formed the vanguard of the Nazi movement that would grow to overwhelm Germany in the 1930s.) Kessler, working as a diplomat for the SPD government, was as suspicious of the communist leadership as he had been dismissive of the old Kaiser.

Okay, that reading together with the Canetti excerpt (from Crowds and Power) are meant to remind us of the political dimensions of people gathering in public space and of the potentials that people gathering together have -- if, and only if, the space where they gather is sufficiently important to the civic/political life of the state.

Which brings me to our other pending business, to which we'll return next Monday: a proposal for working on a public gathering. I outlined an ambitious project to gather a large crowd in a significant public space. I'd like you all to keep that thought on hold (and to yourselves) until we meet again next Monday. At that meeting I will present a clear, concise page describing the reasons and methods of that proposed project. And we can take (or leave) it from there. I'd strongly prefer that we take the next step on this in person, in class, and not in detailed discussion online or with others. Thanks so much for that.

And remember, next week Vanessa Renwick will visit to talk to us about taking her film shows on the road. As I did with Michael Hebberoy, I'll send you some URLs for background on Vanessa later this week. See you next Monday.

Matthew

Hello workshop,

Thank you for contributing to our first installment last night. The range of backgrounds and projects you've all brought to the workshop is astounding. I promise not to squander that resource. I hope our first meeting established that the problem of using global media -- of connecting to or creating communities near and far -- is happening against the background of two divergent systems: the proprietary economy and the "open source" economy. I think the contradictory needs of these two systems can rob us of clear relationships; much of our work, in this class, will be to understand a new etiquette for reaching and working with others, given that we live amidst this mix of proprietary and "open source" projects and methods. I hope the Bataille reading will shadow our understanding of the "open source" economy by suggesting some of the costs, power trips, and limitations of giving things away, or exchanging gifts. I hope the costs of giving, sharing, and establishing non-money relations are clear, just as the cost of using cash is clear.

I was interested to hear some concern about the insularity of small networks. If we limit the conduct and reach of our work sufficiently well to guarantee that the audience, setting, etc. of our work -- the whole thing -- is under our control, how can we then reach, meet, or work with strangers, with people new to us? Also, can we use a limited reach (producing a small number of items, or circulating them narrowly, or working only with a narrow range of people) to give clear meaning to the work we do, so that when it is encountered in the world, its rarity gives it potency and energy and meaning?

In regards to interpersonal media (by which I mean any gathering of people together in one place), how do these questions of scale and inclusivity or exclusivity play out? In our next meeting, we will focus specifically on creating such events and the tools that can help us scale them as we wish and make the kind of mix we want. I'll also want to revisit the question of how such things grow. Specifically, whether growing from a narrow, small scale to a bigger one -- becoming visible and successful in a larger or even mass market -- might undermine the value or meanings of a project. If something is undermined by growth, how can we avoid that? Or should we avoid that?

Later this week, I'll contact you as a group to ask about our e-mail question. And I'll fill you in on Michael Hebberoy's work. He will visit us for an hour next Monday. He has first-hand experience with growing a focused, narrow "interpersonal medium" (the family supper table) into a larger business that became part of a very big, competitive market (and then seeing it morph and mutate as a result). Look for that communique before Saturday.

By the way, I have "bcc"d you because I haven't yet asked which e-mail addresses you want to share with the group. Reply to me with your desired e-mail and I'll send out the next communique to a "cc" list for all to see.

Again, thanks.

Matthew