Second Workshop #1
February 10, 2007
The second using global media workshop met last Wednesday, sharing a hearty massaman curry and apple slices, chased by prosecco, red wine, and cider. Abi Spring drank brandy. Erik Palmer brought beer. The workshop’s focus is using media to reach or create new communities, near and far.
James Lord’s recollection of meeting Picasso (from his memoir, Picasso and Dora) introduced us to the subject of interpersonal media — being together with others in a room (or anywhere else). In 1944, Lord, with no proper introduction or invitation, visited Picasso at his rue des Grands-Augustins atelier and began a friendship that lasted the rest of Picasso’s life.
Lord was deceitful, allowing Picasso to believe he was injured in the war (and might have dark secrets from his work as an intelligence officer), but felt that in his deceit he was being “true to myself. Of course my aspiration was to become an artist.” We admired Lord’s single-mindedness but wondered if art is necessarily deceitful. Could we use deceit in pursuit of our goals? Could we really meet and connect to others by offering lies or partial truths?
Luisa Guyer pointed out that most people ask us to play roles — to our bosses we are a certain kind of worker; to our friends, a certain kind of friend. Melia Donovan remarked that she sometimes feels lost in ill-fitting roles. An artist who lived and worked in Chicago and San Francisco before moving to Portland, she now finds herself cast as a suburban mom, shuttling her 6-year old to and from school, or, equally strange, as a remote art critic posting sharply reasoned critiques on a highly-visible art blog, Port. Connecting to others in the midst of these contradictory images might be hard or elusive.
In Lord’s recollection, an intimate tête à tête with Picasso was soon followed by a crowd, on a morning when Picasso hosted Lord amidst a group of admirers. Lord shrank away from the group, sifting through a stack of paintings, and waited until Picasso could again pay attention to him alone.
We speculated on the difference between a couple and a group. A couple creates an interior space, while a group creates a public space in which we can perform and be watched. We explored this difference in two photos by Bill Owens. Further, there are different sorts of groups with different dynamics and potentials. For example, “a mob” is different from “a crowd.” We discussed the loss of self that sweeps over a mob. Individual psychology and will are displaced by a sudden upwelling of mob psychology and shared purpose.
What are the powers and benefits of making or being in a mob? TJ Norris recalled rock shows that catalyzed the pleasure of being in a mob: the power and energy in the dissolution of the self. My recollection of the pleasures of being in the mob at the WTO protests in Seattle was criticized by Erik Palmer as “so 1990s,” a friendly jest that probably intuited my deeper nostalgia for the real root of this pleasure — memories of marching on the closed freeway with my mom and dad to mourn the death of Martin Luther King jr. in 1968. When and how can a group bring strangers together in a common purpose? Can strangers coming together as a mob create a positive political force?
The workshop will explore the potentials and dangers of crowds (from as small as a seminar or dinner party to as large as a political rally or sports event) and mobs in next week’s readings: selections from Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power and excerpts from, Harry Kessler’s diaries of Weimar-era Berlin, published in English as Berlin In Lights.
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