Second Workshop #3
February 25, 2007

We began by viewing group photographs by Richard Avedon that Erik Palmer had selected in response to our discussion about groups (the ways they form, the special pleasures and potentials they have, their organization and dynamics). Avedon posed groups in the studio and, less frequently, took pictures of groups in the street or at special occasions. Erik maintains that in both cases you “see Avedon in the photo.” That is, the artist’s objectives and methods are evident in every aspect of the photo. Part of the allure of these photographs is the way they seem to host spontaneous, highly-individual expressions (on the part of those portrayed) within a rigorously artificial geometry (imposed by the artist). They look sculptural, even as each “object” expresses a personality.

This achievement put us in mind, again, of Harry Kessler’s diary, which also made group dynamics legible through the aesthetic force of the observer’s lens. Through the power of his artful composition and compelling descriptions, Kessler turned the swirling chaos of mob actions in 1919 Berlin into a cinematic series of revolutionary events. He organized groups and scenes and thereby gave us highly-individual portraits that drew their power and clarity from the artifice of their transmission to us.

An Avedon photo or a Kessler text are both highly aestheticized — yet both give us pleasingly rich ways to develop our understanding of groups as they are in life. Through the artistic observer, we come to understand the dynamics of groups. The workshop will bear this in mind when we design our own events, and we will be ready to accommodate the need for an outside observer, a creator of images, to transform the events into something memorable and graspable, which is to say into art. What is the fate or experience of groups that have no outside observer, or that never become art?

Luisa Guyer gave us a little background about Elias Canetti, the Nobel-prize-winning writer, born in Bulgaria in 1905, whose undergraduate years were spent in Vienna. In particular, Luisa told us how Canetti, a Sephardic Jew, witnessed a Nazi mob’s burning of the Palace of Justice in Vienna in 1927 and then spent decades trying to understand these events, resulting in his massive study, Crowds and Power.

Sergio Pastor noted the similarity between Canetti’s belief that crowds are ravenously desirous of expansion — wanting ever greater and greater connection to an ever greater and greater crowd — and Marshall McLuhan’s characterization of the individual immersed in mass media (a kind of virtual crowd) as being suddenly, ravenously “connected” and desirous of ever greater connectedness. The presence of this desire amidst a virtual crowd — in the absence of other real bodies — feels like vertigo: a feeling very familiar to workshop members who spend a lot of time online.

For Canetti, unlike McLuhan, it is the physical press of real bodies, compacting into a mass, a mob, that forces each of us past our usual flinching-when-touched and into the vertigo of a crowd mentality. The individual will gives way to shared desire; the mind sinks deep into the body. While we elided Canetti’s many fine distinctions (the difference between an “open” and a “closed” crowd; the difference between a “pack” and a “crowd,” the many kinds of packs, etc.) we agreed that the mob energy he was mostly concerned with is one we rarely experience today, even in situations that we describe as “crowds.”

Our special guest for the evening, Beth Burns, who is the co-founder and co-director of P:ear, was asked if she ever deliberately uses the allure and power of “the pack” as an instrument of engagement at P:ear. Yes, she admitted, she often relies on the kids who’ve internalized the culture of P:ear to communicate customs to newcomers, either by displaying behaviors in common, like a pack, or by telling them the rules explicitly.

We came to understand P:ear as nothing more than a room arranged in a certain way, containing Beth and her cohorts, Pippa Arend and Joy Cartier (they are co-founders; others work with them, both as staff and as volunteers). With that, they catalyze a group of kids to be citizens. These are the essential elements of their project. There are no set methods, no benchmarks, no formalized evaluation: There is just the room, properly arranged, and the three of them.

At P:ear this simple tool — gathering people together — is the means for equipping otherwise disadvantaged kids with the relationships and skills that can help them live fully as citizens with others (whether family, friends, or strangers). While the real work of P:ear unfolds entirely in the conduct of these relationships, shaped and housed by their facility, Beth allowed that she and Pippa and Joy do a lot of external work to make P:ear legible to outsiders, such as those who fund and support it.

When raising money or educating supporters outside P:ear, the founders are obliged to describe methods, suggest benchmarks, or carry out evaluations that have little to do with the relationships at the core of their work. They don’t involve the kids in that, if they can avoid it. In this way, they are both inside the group (to work) and outside of it (as observers who make artful images to convey P:ear’s meanings to others).

Beth had dozens of salty tales, some of them top secret, and we could have profitably spent several more hours with her. But our workshop needed to organize a gathering (as a way to explore “interpersonal media”), and time was running short. The following suggestions were made: we should circulate books with bookmarks that encourage readers/finders to check into a website that can track the journey of the books; we should go to Aces on S.E. 39th street and do something or other with each other or with others; we should take advantage of Melia’s invitation to use the Hunter College gallery in NYC and create something there; we should masquerade as people whom we are not in some public or commercial space; we should go to “the Jesus compound” at S.E. 52nd and Duke, and be ready to interact.

These fragments were not enough. More fully developed, specific proposals for a gathering will be considered at the start of the next session, and not after that. Don’t be shy! In closing, everyone was asked to bring an object next time, some special thing that has enchanted and enriched us by its arrival from elsewhere, and which we continue to think about or cherish for whatever reasons. It is expected that many of these objects will be printed matter, some of them bound, but hoped that not all of them will be. Next week, we will conclude our exploration of interpersonal media with two special guests, Michael Hebberoy (ex-Ripe, now www.onepot.org) and Sam Gould (Red76), and begin our inquiry into material media by sharing the special objects that we’ve brought.

In the meantime, consider the following question: What is “public opinion?” This idea, so common sense and prevalent today, began only after printing, distribution, and related social changes made a medium — the public — that could be said to have an opinion. How does a “public” form and how does it form its opinions? How do we sense public opinion and how is it expressed and disseminated? Does public opinion exist outside of its expression and dissemination? (That is, is there any such thing as “public opinion” without mass media telling us what the “public opinion” is?) Can it be an instrument outside of mass media?

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