Author (#35)February 2007 Archives
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?
The evening began with Walter Ruttmann’s beautiful silent film, “Berlin: Symphony of a City,” playing against the far wall of our meeting room. It was both a portal into one of our subjects (Berlin, between the wars) and a demonstration of the exciting new projector Matthew bought that day off Craig’s List.
Amidst a delicious bounty of rigatoni putanesca and salad (thank you Melia Donovan), we focused on gatherings — any event at which a group gathers together, whether intimately (as in a class, a dinner, a small party) or en mass (as in street protests, a music audience, the crowd at a sports match). We hope to understand and use our ability to get together, physically, as a means for reaching or catalyzing new communities near and far.
Sergio Pastor discussed a recent memorial for his friend who died when his bike was hit by a car. Many divergent groups were drawn to the memorial – family, close friends, some who had just read the news, bike activists. A microphone was provided, but there was no program, and Sergio was impressed that the various groups melded tightly together as the evening went on. The stories people told knit these separate groups into a single fabric, not by leadership or design, but by a kind of underlying common desire. Abi Spring, drinking Jim Beam, recalled an evening when her mother started a brawl at a dance hall near Fort Lewis, in Tacoma, by setting off an M-80. The crowd, mostly soldiers who would soon be shipped off to war, was ready to riot, and the sharp noise gave them all permission to do so. Leslie Miller, new to the class, told us about a weekend sponsored by her church when she was young, at which dozens of teens were taken away from home and subjected to an intense “brainwashing” that culminated in a public pledge of fidelity to the church. This annual gathering was called “Chrysalis,” and Leslie recalled the pressure of her peers in a public group all making their identical declarations. TJ Norris recalled the mosh-pit at a Nina Hagen show (mosh pits being a potent gathering place of bodies together for many members of the class) and a ceremony at which his Aunt, a nun, was made to give vows. Stephanie Snyder told us about a riot in Athens that seemed to coalesce from out of nowhere; thousands of people shot guns and fought and struggled. 16 people died and the new government, the object of this protest, resigned the next day.
Stephanie’s recollection made us ask where in Portland one would go to riot. Is there a public space that matters enough that its disruption would topple a government, or even do anything more than trigger a news story? Pioneer Court House Square was criticized for its inessentialness (do what you like there, it matters to hardly anyone), and the Park Blocks were discussed fondly, but also thought to be peripheral to the smooth functioning of the city.
Luisa Guyer was reminded of the excitement she felt last Spring when the immigration marches occupied some downtown streets. The size of the crowd, their simultaneous variety (many ages, races, classes) and unity (the white shirts, a single, clear message) compelled her to rush and join them. Whatever elusive power and potential we feel there is in a mob of people together in public space was, we agreed, evident and active at the immigration march.
Melia Donovan asked if we considered public transportation (the bus or the MAX) to be a kind of public space. Does gathering there catalyze any of this nascent power? She recalled the way NY subway passengers will be crushed up against one another and yet maintain a kind of solitude. In Tokyo, also, I recalled, crowds are crushed in against one another, shoved by white-gloved handlers, and yet retain a kind of isolated dignity that isn’t at all social. We discussed the times that car- or bus-loads will share a conversation (as in a stalled or blacked-out car) and the temporariness of that intimacy; how one feels the joy of solidarity and then sheds it easily just as soon as the emergency is over and the car doors open.
This potpourri of gatherings comprised our research sample, and we added to it the many examples of gatherings documented in Harry Kessler’s diaries of Weimar Berlin, Berlin In Lights. Kessler’s eventful days included dinner parties, tete a tetes, club room rendezvous, mass marches, riots, backroom negotiations, parliamentary meetings, night club debauches, diplomatic summits, and nearly every possible kind of gathering, large and small, in this intensely social, crisis-ridden European capital. The excerpts we read from his diary covered the tumultuous months of 1918-1919, during which the abdication of the Kaiser opened up a space of revolutionary crisis. Where, we asked ourselves, did power lie in the landscape of all these kinds of public meetings? Was power in the back rooms of the Reichstag, where the revolution’s make-shift committees met? Was power in the dining room of Paul Cassirer, where Kessler met with a small coterie of cultural and political operatives? Was power in the mass demonstrations that swept through the city’s squares and streets, threatening lives and livelihoods?
While our answers were inconclusive, they gave rise to questions about the hiding places of power in our city, in the social landscapes we navigate. Luisa recalled arriving at a Starbucks one morning to see a horrifying picture of Iraqi car bomb victims on the front page of the New York Times. No one seemed to take notice and the business of coffee drinking went on, undisturbed. Luisa felt powerless, defeated by the sheer indifference of her surroundings (and even a part of herself) to the incontrovertible horror of the image on the newspapers. Was there no power in any of those gathered to do anything, to react together against what faced them?
Her example made us question where “public space” is, and what conditions constitute a public. Is Starbucks a public space? Despite its private ownership and control, it is the space where many go to see and be with strangers. Even our prototypical public spaces, such as the European café opening out onto a public square, are riddled with private ownership and control. Yet they, nevertheless, manage to constitute a public space by the ways that they function.
Erik Palmer reminded us that Euro American public culture has its roots in the private coffee shops of, for example, London in the 18th century, where two changes — (1) the publication of the first weekly tabloids,, such as The Tattler and The Spectator, that were distributed through coffee shops, and (2) the conduct of public discussions in those same gathering places — gave rise to what we now call “public opinion.” He urged us to read Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno on this subject (and we will). Erik also asked us to consider the difference between a crowd or group and institutions. When does a group become an institution? And, how does that shift change the nature of their function, both for those affected by the group’s/institution’s actions and for those operating within the group or institution?
I asked the class to think about the most positive threads in this great, motley fabric of group and crowd phenomena — the powers and potentials that uplifted them, that they desired and thought well of — and to start thinking pragmatically about ways to trigger those potentials through a future event. Next week, we will try to plan a gathering that could catalyze the powers and potentials of the crowd, the mass — the power of people gathering together. We will also meet with our special guest for the evening, Beth Burns, whose work shaping and running the youth resource center, P:ear, offers an excellent example of activating space for others to gather in and use.
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.