Workshop #5

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