Workshop #3

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