Workshop #4

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