Third Workshop #1

The using global media workshop met in Berlin, Germany, for six sessions over three days, May 24 – 26. The workshop was organized with the Canadian artists, Hadley Howes and Maxwell Stephens, and held in their studio at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district. I asked Hadley and Maxwell to invite ten colleagues to the workshop, and in exchange I offered to run it “at cost.” The group split the costs of food, and I didn’t charge tuition.

Originating in this personal invitation to a kind of collective party, the workshop enjoyed an easy-going, festive spirit, even while it flirted with the potential shortcomings of informality. We met each day at one in the afternoon, took a break around six, then reconvened for dinner, which ended by midnight or one AM. These habits significantly shifted the conventions of the workshop.

After a long morning spent shopping on the Mariannenplatz, Maxwell, Hadley, and I wheeled our plaid shopping cart, heavy with dinner supplies, back to the park-like grounds of the 19th century Bethanien, a former hospital that now houses artists’ studios and two squats. Max and Hadley’s studio is on the third floor, a big room split by two pillars, where we arranged a table and 14 chairs near the windows, and set out a buffet of coffee and sweets.

Many of the workshop members knew each other, and all had the common bond of friendship with Hadley and Maxwell. As with other workshops, I began by describing my work and my reasons for inviting the others into this project. In brief, I am a writer who cares about politics (the negotiation of power) and I’m curious about the powers of different kinds of mediation. In particular, I am drawn to the power of material media (which, in the case of books, enable both writer and reader to have tremendous agency and autonomy) but I wonder if interpersonal media (which always make me nervous) might not harbor some essential resources to help us live fully and well. I described the using global media workshop as itself a kind of open source multi-media technology that I encouraged the others to use as they wish. I then asked each of the workshop members to say what media they’ve been engaged with and what questions they want to pursue in the workshop.

While I had assigned a list of readings that workshop members studied in advance and was prepared to cover some of the topics addressed in previous workshops, I chose to set those things aside and focus my attention on the people in the room. The subject of “interpersonal media” (that is, the ways that being together with other people acts as a medium for the transmission of our work, our selves, etc.) might best unfold, I thought, if I didn’t fill up the space with my planned instruction, but simply allowed the people in the room to interact and speak as they pleased. So, I chose to give a simple, minimal focus to our session — please tell us what media you are engaged with now and what media you want to discuss with the workshop — that I described to them, and then I sat and listened.

In abandoning the prepared materials, I chose to be a host rather than an instructor. As host, my obligations were to make everyone feel welcome, to transfer the power to speak or make choices to all of them, deliberately and clearly, to observe and mark beginnings and endings, and most of all to be attentive. By listening, I thought, I could create a space of attention. The force of listening might compel the group to enter this space of attention together. My hope was to make a capacious space of listening and find out how the workshop would fill it.

I asked Hadley to start. I took notes as she described the décor project, but now my notes blur with memories of the other times and documents by which I’ve learned of this project. There’s even a beautiful book here beside me, now, on my table, and plenty of good information on the internet, that call into question the value of my notes and memory. Why didn’t I record the workshop’s conversations and transcribe them? Why do I always interpose this clumsy process of listening, remembering, and writing? More on that later.

Hadley described how she and Maxwell initiate the collaborations in their décor project, by writing a letter to the curator, collector, or gallery director (usually) with whom they’d like to work. They propose sending a formal questionnaire, meeting and, ultimately, rearranging his or her furniture.
By inviting this “audience of one,” Hadley and Maxwell hope to split open the binary of their own collaboration into a triangle. The letter of invitation, always on paper, leads to a personal exchange, and eventually to Hadley and Maxwell’s arrival at their collaborator’s private quarters. There, free from prying eyes, they reorganize the décor and have it photographed by Sven Boecker. The photos are then displayed in the museum or gallery of their collaborator. The project ends with a last letter, “a personal public letter” of thanks to the collaborator.

Workshop members noted the ways this project moves across different media, shifting from the formality of letters into the interpersonal form of conversation, and then into a kind of bodily invasion and rearrangement of space, which produces a fine art object, a photograph. Maxwell said they are drawn to inhabit the discontinuities between different media, the gaps and breaks that open between them.

The workshop showed keen interest in these descriptions. Many members had gotten to know Hadley and Maxwell socially during the six months the pair had been living in Berlin, but still knew little about their work. It was interesting to see how a much-desired conversation, which daily sociality had not enabled, now occurred thanks to a minimal declaration of purpose. A similar thing happened when Michael Baers spoke. Much longer resident in Berlin and better known to many in the group, he had nevertheless spoken in detail about his work to only a few.

Michael told us about his “meta comics,” a series of intimate conversations about art, politics, and theory that he records and photographs. From this record he composes cartoon essays in the form of comic books (sequenced panels on newsprint, often staple bound) to carry the content of a complex philosophical dialogue. The drawings are clean and “realistic” (drawn from photos), and the text is sometimes verbatim from the actual conversations and sometimes made up.

Michael produces the meta comics in large runs (3000 – 10,000) that are usually deployed in a gallery display. In one instance, he filled a gallery with copies of tabloids stacked to make a fort. As copies were taken away by visitors the fort was slowly dismantled. Printing enough copies to build a fort inevitably leaves a surplus, and Michael distributes the numerous leftovers “as you will.” Among Michael’s interests, for the workshop, was finding new methods of distribution.

Michael also discussed his participation in Tirdad Zolghadr’s weeklong “seminar” at the United Nations Plaza. UN Plaza is a project directed by Anton Vidokle, co-curator of the Manifesta 6 exhibition (scuttled due to political disagreements in the host city of Nicosia), a continuation of some projects Manifesta 6 sought to frame or enable — specifically exploring the exhibition as school. Michael described one evening at which Tirdad literalized what many at UN Plaza experienced as a tacit divide between the experts/performers/instructors/stars and the audience/students/or whathaveyou. The kitchen had become a kind of “green room” or “after party” to which a select few had entry, and so one evening Tirdad put the panel of experts in the kitchen for a conversation that would be sent on a live video feed to an audience in a separate room. Thus the divide would be literalized. Due to bad technology, the sound was poor and the frustrated audience chose to barricade the experts inside the kitchen, trapping them there. The kitchen is the seat of real power.

Turning back to the meta comics, we asked Michael if participants in his discussions ever complained about the end result, and he described the complaint of one, a friend, that the finished cartoon put wrinkles where there were none in life. Christian Struck pointed out that Michael is begging exactly these sorts of misunderstandings by using comics for documentary work. But this slippage, this gap between the forms of documentary and cartoon, is what interests Michael. He referred us to the films of Harun Faruki as a kind of parallel project.

In retrospect, its also interesting to note how rigorously Michael converts the unpredictability and heterogeneity of interpersonal media (the conversation) into a more formal and unified discourse that can be fixed and deployed widely (in the form of a printed object). This is true of any program of documentation, but Michael’s choice to let his hand intercede (converting photos into drawings) and rewrite the conversations as he wishes makes the shift especially pointed. Just as I am doing here — constructing a written narrative from my notes of our conversation — Michael transforms the negotiated, evanescent meanings of interpersonal discourse into a fixed performance of subjectivity and calls it (a part of) his art practice. Mea culpa.

As Michael was wrapping up, Ralf de Moll who knows Michael’s work well, pretended he was a curator and asked what he should offer Michael to get him to work. “I’m open,” Ralf promised. “Just tell me what you want.” Evidently, no matter what the artist wants, the curator wants to have a conversation. What dynamics of power obtain within the form of “personal conversation” that makes it so attractive to directors, curators, and others who are backed by great institutional power? Interpersonal mediation is a survival skill for most artists.

At this point, more than an hour had passed and we were only two people into a conversation that would move through the work of ten. Normally I am uneasy with a slow pace and I try driving the workshop forward by focusing on a specific question and asking that we address our comments to it. But I had managed, somehow, to become interested without a driving purpose. Sitting in the sun dappled room with these intriguing people, I felt no compulsion to focus or hurry.
Things were sufficient as is, rather than being a means toward an end (such as a lesson to be taught, an answer to a posed question, etc.). Further, I was beginning to enjoy a kind of spaciousness and ease I rarely feel with a group in conversation together. There was a breeze. We had plenty.

An earlier conversation with Hadley and Maxwell kept coming to mind, concerning what they call, comically, “blurbic discourse.” They believe a radically constricted form, such as the five-minute talk, the 50-word essay, the blurb, can produce a dynamic and vital discourse. I share their engagement with this abbreviated form, and their suspicion of flabby middling forms that inflate blurbs into big essays. But I also suspect that at the other end of things, far beyond a “reasonable length,” there is a vast, purposeless space in which discourse unfolds like a night flower to become a space of thinking without center or edge, a purposefulness without purpose, that can also produce vitality and rich meanings. I felt I was sinking into just such a space.

Ralf de Moll said that he and Christiané Dellbrügge, his collaborator, had joined the workshop to “be spies,” and because of friendship with Hadley and Maxwell. He said he didn’t know what a workshop was and came in order to find out. Indicating the room, I said “this is a workshop.” Ralf went on to describe a life, and art practice, with Christiané in which it is a pleasure to be lazy and enjoy the day but “people keep coming to challenge us,” and this results in work and projects .

Recently that meant responding to a conflict involving squatters and the kunstlerhaus (the artists residencies, including that of Hadley and Maxwell) at Bethanien. While both uses of Bethanien go back to the 1970s, recent pressures toward gentrification of the surrounding Kreuzberg neighborhood have recast the fate of the building as a symbol in that outside struggle. Some want the kunstlerhaus and other “legitimate” arts organizations to consolidate their control of the facility, displacing the squatters; others want to incorporate the squats in a legitimate authority with legal ownership of the buildings and guarantee their future, with or without the kunstlerhaus.

Dellbrügge and de Moll, as Ralf and Christiané call their collaborative art practice, created a project called New Harmony (after the utopia of Owen) that used research, writing, public speaking and discussions, a gallery display, and a published book to address this struggle through a single, pointed question: “should we stay or should we go?” They proposed that the artists of the kunstlerhaus leave Bethanien and squat a different site, an abandoned amusement park on the Spree River. They would cede Bethanien to the squatters. New Harmony culminated in a public gathering at which a vote was taken on this single, pointed question.

I admired the ways Ralf and Christiané used simple, clear forms to coral the dangers and potentials of interpersonal conversation into a productive, navigable process. For example, the provision of a concluding yes/no question cast a net of purposefulness and focus over an assembly that could then be as varied and rich as possible without seeming to get “off track.” Theatrical devices — such as the careful organization of the space, a circular “arena” modeled on the agora of Athens, in which any voice could be heard without amplification, and all present looked at each other — and the use of green or red placards to indicate a “yes” we go and squat the amusement park, or “no” we stay and join the squatters here in pursuit of full ownership of Bethanien — formalized a space of performance. Their use of the printed exhibition catalog and the gallery display showed a similarly nimble use of normative forms to enable potentially rogue discourses.

Discussion of the New Harmony project led to a general interest in artists residencies and Ralf and Christiané’s experience as students in the German art academy. No, I’ve misremembered! In fact that discussion came only after Christian Struck spoke about his experiences, currently, as a student of philosophy. As a comparison, Ralf and Christiané described their time as students of a German art academy, given studio space, time, colleagues, materials, and opportunities that allowed them to work. Ralf and Christiané’s narrative shed some light on the culture that shapes a resource like the Bethanien, and out of which a project like UN Plaza might be considered a critique. An artists residency offers, essentially, a continuation of the art academy, minus the excellent canteen, as Ralf pointed out. (The kitchen, again.)

Michel de Broin reacted to the question of what media he is working in by producing a kind of elegant evasion, a beautiful arabesque of verbal abstractions that located his art firmly in a realm of intention and thought without admitting to any material form or medium. In particular he said he is “involved in putting an object into existence on its own so that it can operate in relation to conditions.” As curious as I was about the medium of this work, the material he works with, Michel was uninterested in describing such things.

Into this decorative impasse, Michael Baers interjected that he recalled a certain bicycle Michel built, one that poured out smoke as it went, and at this Michel brightened. The smoking bicycle! Of course he could talk about that. Interested in resource conservation, yet charmed by the power of smoke, Michel built a sleek, chrome smoke-belching machine, like a sort of tailpipe, strapped to the body of the bicycle and powered by the cyclist. He showed us pictures of the bike being ridden in Berlin. I asked if he wanted the image to travel far. Michel said he preferred for the object to have a rich local life. The image could travel, but it didn’t matter how far or to what effect; the meaning of the work is in the local instance of the object (perhaps where it can “operate in relation to conditions…”).

Michel’s interest in resource conservation also drives a habit of recycling, and this reminded him of a second project, in Paris, where he created a simple, portable “rocket launcher” (a pump with some water) that let him turn discarded plastic water bottles into rockets that he fired all over Paris. Pictures show a modest, but spectacular eruption of water driving a soaring plastic bottle into postcard views of Paris (by the Eiffel Tower, in front of the Sacré Coeur), and it was easy to see the whimsy and charm of his recycling (turning garbage into art). But any rocket launcher brings with it other issues, and the workshop was not surprised to hear Michel’s pointed description of the poor treatment the French often reserve for their various colonials (including Quebecois alongside the more visible “other” of North African and Arab French). He made the rocket launcher while living in the banlieue of Paris in a residency for foreign artists.

Antonia Hirsch described her interest in mediated systems, such as language or standards of measurement, that have ideological biases which she articulates and makes visible in the conduct of her work. For example, she asked a number of people to “estimate the length of one meter” using their hands, photographed each of them doing so, and then showed the photos in a gallery. In another piece, she drew national borders precisely on a gallery wall, resizing the images proportionate to such metrics as annual rainfall or gross domestic product (GDP), etc. (Now that I think about it, I’m not even sure Antonia described this project in the workshop, but it is well documented on the internet, and so I feel more confident of my description here than I do of my memory of what she actually told us. Draw your own conclusions.)

Antonia also mentioned the international date line as an example of an ideologically driven arbiter of measurement, a line that shifts the powers of various speculative stock exchanges by organizing them, arbitrarily, in time. While she is very comfortable using the conventions of gallery or museum presentation, Antonia has also stepped outside the gallery, for example by distributing mass produced copies of her “Anthropometrics” series as posters around Vancouver and seeing the copies rapidly disappear. While these disposable, cheaply reproduced images clearly differ from the archival quality photos she sells in the gallery, we speculated on the ways they might disrupt the value system of that economy, and Antonia seemed to like the questions this potential disruption raised. Ralf asked if she would prevent anyone, say a curator or gallerist, from taking and re-showing the poster images, but I don’t recall Antonia’s response.

When we turned our attention to Christian Struck, he described his difference from the rest of the group, pointing out that he is the youngest, and that, while he is interested in art, he is not yet an artist. Christian said that his work in various media does not constitute a practice, per se, just dabbling. He doesn’t regard his university-assigned essay writing as his own “work,” but as the compulsory production of a student in a university system. He told us the workshop interests him as a way to learn the differences between different media, so he might choose one to work in.

Something, perhaps Christian’s insistence on a different narrative, interfered with my ability to listen or record well. My notes at this point became cryptic and fragmented. Accustomed to the story of an artist producing work, ready to hear that, I was at a loss to hear the shape and trajectory of Christian’s account. My notes read, in total: “November manifest. Jean Breau, situationist map of town. Ranciére ‘ignorant schoolmaster’ paradigm.” I recall making an effort to fold Christian back into solidarity with the rest of us, despite his insistence that he occupied a different, other, position. Instead of simply listening I was disturbed and searched for terms on which he would be rendered the same as us. I’m not sure what to make of it. I wasn’t exhausted. In fact, I felt an unusual burst of energy during this exchange; but Christian managed to disrupt some tacit structure that I hadn’t articulated yet, but was evidently dependent on. I needed not just a common purpose, but something more like a common storyline — a story in which we all come to the table on roughly equal terms looking for things we can each, equally, be expected to provide. Unprepared for exceptions to this storyline I did not hear Christian’s, and when faced with it I tried blurring the differences.

After Christiané Delbrügge demurred, saying that her work had been discussed when Ralf spoke, Mark Neufeld swiftly dispelled my miasma by describing himself as a painter who works with oil on canvas, among other things. Mark discussed a new project in which he will translate the 19th century German “wild west” novel, Winnetou I, by Karl May (the best selling German author ever), into English using the Google translation program. Mark will publish this as a hard bound book called the “Google translation edition of Karl May.” At the same time, Mark is painting copies of the canonical Wild West paintings of Frederic Remington using only his left-hand, so that the two translations are similarly flawed.

In both cases, Marks subjects the masculine myths woven from the slim thread of North American history to deliberately ham-fisted interpretations. He has his way with them. I suggested that the impairment of left-handed painting was not analogous to Google translation, that Mark’s left hand was more capable than Google. A parallel impairment might be something more like reason-clouding drugs or a mechanical painting device. Mark’s fascination with May, who influenced several generations of German men (Adolph Hitler revered May as the greatest German writer of the 19th century), amused Ralf, who suggested that Mark attend the Karl May festivities in Bad Segeberg, Schleswig-Holstein, and in Rathen, near where May was born. Ralf and Lukas described these open-air reenactments as a kind of performance kitsch.

I asked Mark if these myths of masculinity had been impressed on him as a boy growing up in North America: had his body in a sense been pressured by the ideals that fantasists like May and Remington propagated with such great success? Maybe, in a kind of parallel operation to what I saw both Michael Baers and I doing — corralling the messy negotiations of interpersonal discourses into more thoroughly controlled objects that we could “have our way with” — Mark was taking the reins of masculinity away from pop culture. Mark listened, but did not read it the same way. He said he hopes to learn more about publishing options, how to make the book well and distribute it. Michael recommended that we read Hal Foster’s “The Expressive Fallacy.”

Lukas Matthaei, who had been sitting and listening for nearly five hours, smiled when I thanked him for his patience. He is a theater director and told us about some recent projects that combine live acting with mediated presentations, such as live video feeds, films, or video recordings. With his company, matthaei & konsorten, he makes “the production of discourse” via “performing arts.” In one project an Oy! band (a fast loud punk form often associated with nationalist or fascist skinheads) played onstage at an historic 1906 theater in Berlin. They turned their backs to the auditorium and played to a small audience of their own fans seated downstage while spectators filled the auditorium behind them, watching this small concert and Fassbinder’s 1979 film “The Third Generation” on a huge screen behind the band and their friends. Throughout, the band’s singer shouted lines from the movie amidst his lyrics. Then the lights in the auditorium went up and the singer turned and told the spectators to get out; then they went on playing. Lukas said of this piece that it allowed him to work with people he would not otherwise meet.

I’m not sure if the theater was in Berlin, but I notice that the work of matthaei & konsorten is well documented online; also, Hadley and Maxwell are available for gmail chat. It seems absurd that I’d travel 6000 miles to scribble notes about work that is documented online and would require a few emails or phone calls to clarify. It presses the question of interpersonal media: what difference did it make to sit in a room with each other, and not just rely on printed or digital information? The question goes back to the body with all of its non-verbal communications, its discomforts and impulses that play out in a room but are erased by distance and the buffer of an intervening medium, such as a book or a website. That buffer is not just the physical distance and autonomy that mediation allows, but the imposition of a refined sense of purpose and usefulness. Processed and formalized to accommodate the logic of a material or digital media (i.e., turned into an essay, a document, a picture, a transcriptions, etc.) interpersonal encounters become pre-digested and ready for consumption. They are made ready for our efficient disposal, our right relation, and so they satisfy a hunger that the irreducible presence of other people never can.

As I told the workshop at the beginning of the day, my preference has always been for material media that give the reader and the writer autonomy from each other — separation, privacy. Intimacy is easier in such a mediated space because it is private; it feels safe. I love to write and to read alone, where meanings can blossom and erupt. The fluid boundaries of bodies together create an estuarial ecology full of thresholds and vertigo, a space without autonomous control or clarity, a space of danger. Lukas’s placement of the Oy! band on the gilded stage of the state theater enacted and formalized exactly this vertigo. Who would cross the threshold onto the stage?

Most of Lukas’s work dwells in this estuarial space of bodies together. Or else it draws attention to the ways that intervening technologies clarify (or neutralize) such a space. He described a current project in Stuttgart that begins with interviews of people in the neighborhood of the theater. The first encounter is talking and listening. The interviews provide material for the performance, as well as helping shape performance strategies that included mixing professional actors and non-professionals, leading the audience to the theater via “non-theater” public spaces in which “embedded actors,” unbeknownst to the audience, were already conducting the performance, and live video feeds into the theater of other groups being led along the same route on their way to join those who had already assembled. Further, this method then casts its form back in time to ensnare the initial interviews themselves as being a part of the piece, occasions of nonprofessional performance that marked the project’s beginning.

What struck me most was the danger of unstructured performance. The further Lukas strayed from the architecture of the theater, or the professionalization of his practice, or the legal framework of a commission, or the rational pursuit of purposeful research — the closer he came, that is, to personal conversations with strangers — the more like a crazy person he became. It interests me that purposeless conversation with strangers is read as an inappropriate, asocial behavior. It is either dangerous or boring. This later charge interests me most. I wonder if boredom is a defensive screen that intercedes when our power to consume has been disabled (leaving us stranded in purposefulness without purpose).

I ended the afternoon by acknowledging that the day was not what I had expected. Given the evolving form of the workshop and the fact that it seemed likely to stray far from the readings or the plan of previous workshops, I offered everyone the option of making of it what they would. Participants were invited to attend any or all of the remaining five sessions, and then we cleared the table and got ready for dinner. I’ll post a report of dinner, our second session, in the next day or two.