Author (#35)June 2007 Archives

Our fifth meeting, on my last afternoon in Berlin, persists as a hazy, picture of pleasurable conversation around the big table in Hadley and Maxwell’s studio. I know it was Saturday, and not Thursday or Friday, because Patricia Reed was with us, but little else is certain. Hard to tell if it’s my memory or my will that’s failing. A note from Hadley reminds me that Patricia (an artist whom we invited to the workshop to discuss her work after the collapse of Manifesta 6, in which she was included) mentioned “the kinetic elite,” a phrase I had also seen in a story by Tirdad Zolghadr. I see m-trends.org credits Rem Koolhaas with coining this neologism.

(I suspect that Koolhaas, like Mies before him, will become the terminal point of credit for a forest of stray phrases that emerge from the culture around him. It certainly sounds like Koolhaas. Which reminds me, I do recall a conversation from the second evening of the Berlin workshop, the dinner that exceeded my control, during which Ralf de Moll and Christiané Dellbrügge and I discussed Koolhaas and his manipulation of the client. I’m not sure I meant it, but I argued that Koolhaas is a master of the unfolding narrative, that his great skill is for composing a story that ensnares the client and all other instrumental parties in the ambitions of the designer; that having made this miracle of a story, woven this fabric in which everyone sees their own desires, the actual design of the building is secondary, a piece of follow-through that is neither excellent nor poor, nor really of much consequence. The building will have a much less lasting presence than the story. It is an aftereffect, like the headache one suffers after an especially long and memorable movie. )

Patricia, Hadley, Maxwell, and I were joined by Lukas Matthaei, Christian Struck, Michel de Broin, Mark Neufeld, and Michael Baers. Though Michel arrived late, I began the session by acknowledging his request that I “teach a little bit” and gave a brief presentation about the methods and costs of publishing. But, is memory playing tricks again? I’m remembering the discussion of Fillip and The Organ, which I earlier ascribed to the Friday afternoon session (see: Third Workshop #3). Perhaps I repeated myself, on Lukas and Patricia’s behalf? A long gmail chat with Hadley and Maxwell today, while they were in the Berlin evening and I in the Portland morning, turned up the following:

Madley: ah yes, saturday... ok hold on going to look for the note book...
can't remember what we were writing in...
10:21 AM
me: Some images would be fine, especially if you've got any images of Saturday. But as for notes. Just any small recollections will probably do.
Madley: think we sent you a good image of saturday with the boy on the bike in the foreground and a couple folks looking out the window...maybe you already used it though
ok, here are some quotes:
me: Something to open the flood gates of memory...
Madley: "you start out already refused"
think that was you.
"bomblets"
michael.
10:23 AM
me: Hhhmmm...
I'm drawing a blank here.
Madley: "your but first" michael after there was a but, but but...war with um, maybe patricia?
me: A war?
10:24 AM
Madley: "all those blog sites... its like going to the holiday inn, they're all the same." Patricia
me: Nice!
Madley: um, ok, maybe just competition, a but competition, not sure what about.
me: Oh yes. Patricia uses the "top 20" to surf YouTube.
Madley: yes.
me: A butt competition?
H-O-T!
10:25 AM
Madley: wit and nimbleness as important components to design... think that might have been you.
me: Right, that was the day I got stuck on wit.
Madley: yes, the butt competition, nothing to do with Paris.
me: Nothing.
Madley: "kinetic elite" patricia
me: I see her cute younger brother got mugged.
Not Patricia's.
Nice phrase.
Madley: "wit is the first three letters of withholding" that's you of course
me: But wait, I just saw that in print elsewhere.
10:26 AM
Madley: oh yes, and we talked about insurance companies and the production of fear...
that was fun.
me: Really. Maybe it was a piece by that man who did the kitchen Skype seminar.
Madley: and Lukas showed us the QUINTURA site
me: Oh, I loved that. Production of fear. That was Lukas talking about the corporate site. But now you're on to the second table. My amnesia is with the first table.

The day had been divided between two tables. The first, around which we sat passing small printed objects, was the site of our conversation about printing and design strategies. The second, after a short break, brought two computers into the mix so that we could focus on digital media. It was at the second table that Lukas showed us a superb search engine called quintura.com. The quintura engine organizes subjects spatially, so that a kind of web of connected subjects appears and reorganizes as one clicks and opens whatever is of interest. Lukas put in my name, and my father came up below and to my left.

It is interesting to me, that the production of my narrative, here on this blog for the workshop (up until this point a useful, organizing act of recording) now becomes entirely secondary and inadequate. With quintura.com fully operational a mere hyperlink away, filling your mental space with my narrative is a little like nattering in someone’s ear while they are trying to think. You have a narrative already, a sequence of thinking and being assembled by moving through the web, link by link, consuming and producing at once — my narration of that movement can only be derivative, a secondary overlay.

In a digital environment, the architecture of the web itself imposes a narrative, simply by shaping a space through which the thinking mind moves. This link-by-link journey does not require a narrator because it is itself narration. Social interactions and relationships to objects do not organize us this way. Our encounters with those media — the interpersonal and material — are discreet, multivalent, and leave room for (even beckon) the narrating intelligence that is the teacher, the critic, the reporter, the workshop leader, the artist, the writer. Not so digital media. Digital media simply require users/producers, those weirdly instrumental indwellers who function inside this system as nodes that produce by using and use by producing. Our best metaphors for this process, these positions, are organic: in the web we are like cells in a body, or synapses in a system of nerves — fully integrated and unbounded; neither willful nor coerced; neither origin nor endpoint; neither user nor producer, but all of these things at once.

I wonder if the disappearance of narrative into the architecture of the medium itself plays a role in this radical repositioning of the thinking and acting subject? Digital media position us, paradoxically, as agents of an organism that makes nonsense of our agency (as if cells could struggle for power over other cells inside of a body); digital media let us consume by producing; digital media make us active and willful, while negating the place of individual will or action. Do digital media do all this, I wonder, by embedding the articulation of narrative into the system’s architecture? Relieved (robbed?) of the burden of narration, do we necessarily then ascend (sink?) into this new position of integration? And is this a kind of liberation?

If I say it is, then my work here, as narrator, becomes a reactionary force dragging us back into old relationships of dominance and submission (ones that might comfort me by being familiar even as they plunge us into old, dead-end struggles). If I say it isn’t, then my narration becomes a kind of liberation politics, reclaiming agency in the face of technologies that might rob us of it. Is this a useful dichotomy? I wonder, will we talk less and less as digital media become more immersive and complete?

In a day or two, my last account of Berlin: our dinner (and sixth meeting) on Saturday night, at which Patricia told us in detail about her work.

Despite blustery winds and gathering clouds, we took our picnic supplies out to the Bethanien’s lawn, Friday evening, May 25, to convene the third using global media workshop over barbecue, beer, proseco, and vodka. A small blanket was laid on the grass and workshop members Ralf de Moll, Christiané Dellbrügge, Christian Struck, Michel de Broin, Hadley, Maxwell, and I lolled about on it, sipping cold drinks and waiting for Mark Neufeld to arrive with the portable grill. Within ten minutes thunder and lightning erupted and the wind whipped the trees into a frenzy. The party hurried back into the studio as torrents of rain broke from the sky.

Christian and I stayed outside, already soaked, and enjoyed the fresh rains and violence of the storm. It was spectacular. Branches split from trees and the rain blew sideways. Hadley and Christian’s friend Sonjia (or it might have been Kiki) joined us for awhile until the storm calmed, and then we went inside. Upstairs we found a full house. The six who had spent the day together were now joined by seven more, some of whom had attended Thursday’s sessions, and some of whom were new. Three more guests, later in the evening, made our gathering very much a festive meeting place for new friends. As such, the coherence between afternoon and evening sessions that we had enjoyed on day one was displaced by a different social energy, and dinner unfolded like the first night of an island-marooned shipwreck, with all of us enjoying our common bond of surviving the storm.

Ralf de Moll performed a heroic rescue of the reluctant barbecue, nursing shy flames into full fury and puffing on nascent coals. While Maxwell videoed these ministrations, Michael Baers prepared a delicious potato salad, and the chatty ensemble filled the studio with conversation and bright excitement. Severed from the agenda of the day, I found my own train of thought adrift, and I was quick to hitch it to the pleasure of making the feast we were about to enjoy together.

This second evening was easily the most delicious and convivial dinner of the three our workshop enjoyed together. Ralf and Christiané had brought especially good sausages, including a truffle sausage that was more delicate and subtle than any I’d tasted before. The table was filled with excellent food — the potato salad, the asparagus (grilled and drenched in a superb butter), salad, and a remarkable fruit and fresh cream dessert Vanessa Ohlraun had prepared — and the room was alive with multiple, divergent conversations that I failed to track.

Of all the workshop sessions, this was the one that most thoroughly exceeded the agenda of the workshop leader or of the workshop’s established conversation. As such, it was a space of maximum autonomy and freedom, and perhaps generated exchanges that aren’t possible within the customary forms of the workshop. But what it might have gained in openness it lost in coherence or accountability. I am forced to leave it to the fifteen other people present that night to account for the conversations and exchanges we had (if they even find any value in that exercise).

Was our dinner a coherent space of discourse? Was it a heterotopia? Did it “expand the perceptual coordinates of the community” (to use Ranciere’s terms)? Was it a session of the using global media workshop at all? I leave it to those present to tell me. In a day or two I will post my account of the fifth session in Berlin, Saturday afternoon’s discussion of material media and digital media.

On Friday morning, May 25, Hadley, Maxwell, and I wheeled the plaid shopping cart out to fetch some of the excellent weiß spargel that’s been filling the German markets. This thick, white asparagus would be part of our barbecue that night, for the workshop’s evening session. We also bought meats, chips, bread, salad, more beer and proseco, and a bottle of “Standard” vodka, an especially clean, fresh vodka that we put on ice for the evening.

The afternoon session was focused on material media, meaning those objects that can depart from us and travel through the world independently, thereby connecting us to others in a shared conversation. We made a pile of such things on the big table and conducted our discussion by simply pulling out the ones we liked and asking questions. So, just as the first day had unfolded via the logic of people in a room together, I hoped this day would be shaped by the material things we’d gathered. In attendance were Hadley, Maxwell, Michael Baers, Michel de Broin, and Christian Struck.

Nearly all of us brought printed matter. Michael Baers shared copies of his Meta Comics, which were satisfyingly tabloid and printed on cheap newsprint. Interestingly, some that were printed in blue ink with “better” typefaces engaged me less; they occupied an uncomfortable middle ground between the populist rhetoric of tabloid newspapers and the collectible/commodity rhetoric of fine art. The tabloid’s indifference to damage or decay excites me. I took Michel de Broin’s well-made softbound catalog (documenting his own work) in hand and whacked it against the tabloid comic over and over, demonstrating the comics’ superior resilience. By contrast, it only took a passing smear of newsprint ink to “completely ruin” Michel’s book. (Though, Michel said he doesn’t mind a smudge or smear, and, indeed, even after the attack his catalog still looked very handsome, roguish, like early Marlon Brando.)

We turned our attention to two art journals that use unbound newsprint, but with very different goals and style. One, Fillip, is a tabloid-sized quarterly printed on a fine, heavy stock with very clean, formalist design. The other, The Organ (now defunct), was a remarkably wide broadsheet on cheap newsprint that borrowed design strategies from mid-20th century newspapers. Both spoke about contemporary art practice from the point of view of a North American city, Fillip from Vancouver, BC, The Organ from Portland, Oregon. It was remarkable how clearly the physical differences between these two essentially similar objects distinguished them from each other and communicated very different messages.

Fillip’s formal clarity, spaciousness, whiteness, circumspect typeface, and regular, even columns announced modernity, transnational legibility, the art gallery, money, intellect and irony. The Organ’s almost-literal “heart on its sleeve” (the logo is an enormous, detailed heart), its various hand-drawn illustrations, gossip-column layout, and dense patchwork of newspaper-style design suggested the local, immediate, populist, anti-intellectual frontier mentality, masking a deep sense of irony. The design of both papers is misleading. Neither paper has any money; their globalism (as for most) is contained in a Rolodex; they are painfully sincere. The Organ is refined, and intellectual just as Fillip is devotedly local and populist. In both cases these virtues are obscured not out of deceit but as a kind of pleasurable masquerade for promenading in the public eye.

Discussion of the “global focus” of Fillip led me to present Phil Elverum’s home-made pamphlet, “Headwaters.” Hand-lettered and Xeroxed in Anacortes, WA, this product of DIY pop music is distributed and understood across a far greater portion of the globe than any of the glossy global art magazines, such as Frieze, Artforum, or Parkett. Elverum (a musician who performs as Mount Eerie or The Microphones) has confounded the prevailing dichotomy of global/local by making a kind of cottage industry of recording, writing, and printing at home with a small group of friends, and then carrying this work by hand as he travels the globe to play concerts. He organizes his tours person-to-person by announcing, on his internet site, where he’d like to go and waiting for suggestions. Thus, without any overarching global infrastructure, Elverum, and his products, irrigate a global economy and conversation. Yet the objects, especially the hand-lettered and printed ones, announce a kind of modest, limited local focus that belies their reach.

Hadley and Maxwell admired Michel’s well-made book, and pleaded with us to help them decide how to spend a publishing budget they’d been granted along with their show at the Bethanien (scheduled to open on September 27, 2007). They have 7000 euros for “publication” and are reluctant to spend it on the usual catalog, even a handsome one like Michel’s, because they have seen the hidden stacks of thousands of leftover copies that fill the attic of the Bethanien. We recoiled in horror at this image of ghostly infestation: every arts center across the globe creaking under the growing weight of stacks and stacks of obligatory publications that are printed and then stored. Hadley and Maxwell are loath to add to this burden.

Their plea focused our attention on distribution. How does printed matter end up in the hands of a reader ready for meanings? If the purpose of these objects and their motion through the world is to enact a conversation, what can be done to support that, to make them really reach across those distances and connect? Michael shares their dilemma in his gallery based work, where a great deal of printed matter is made with no particular place to go after it performs as “installation” in the gallery. We discussed some of the options, both for ephemera (like unbound newsprint or comics) and for bound books.

In both cases, there are established “umbrella” distributors whose function is to take in a great range of similarly designed objects and distribute them over a broad geographic area (usually a continent) to vendors accustomed to selling specifically that type of object (a book or magazine or what-have-you). These distributors (they include Ingram, Baker and Taylor, PGW, and Partners West, in North America) typically charge around 50% of the sale price for every item they handle. The remaining 50% is split between the vendor and the publisher (who then splits their take with the author). To fill orders from vendors promptly, these umbrella distributors keep large warehouses of books stocked by orders from publishers. An online service, such as Amazon, is identical in its operations, except that individual customers can order from them without a bookstore intervening. Amazon charges about 55% of the list price.

Because this method is both expensive and inefficient, several variations have developed. One is an umbrella distributor that is selective about its products and functions as a kind of publicity arm, advocate, or sales force for the publishers it represents. In the U.S. there are several, including Consortium, which is focused on literature, and D.A.P., which has its own imprint and distributes related art presses. Almost any smaller-scale umbrella distributor will function more as an advocate or sales force (or at least as a kind of brand or imprimatur) because it is smaller.

There are also rhizomatic networks, similar to Phil Elverum’s, that are formed by individuals moving through the world to meet fellow travelers in other cities. When an author tours, he or she often makes friends who then act as a network for distributing future, or related, objects. These networks are mostly informal and accessed through friendships, but some of them (such as McSweeneys’ list of 200 independent book vendors in North America) have been turned into publicly available resources. Given the expense of shipping and storing printed matter, these person-to-person, friendship-based networks make a great deal of sense. A guiding principal might be that after you’ve printed all your copies, only send one out to a reader or someone you trust to shepherd it to a reader. Copies sent into an anonymous system are liable to go unread.

Following this principal, many publishers have turned to pre-sales, or subscriptions, to generate a market/community for the object in advance of making it. These networks are also best constructed, initially, through personal relationships, and can expand outward through ring by ring of extended personal relationships. Since sales of, say, 500 or 600 copies of a softbound book are usually enough to pay the cost of printing and distributing, this method is a very viable one.

This overview of some common methods was relevant to Michael’s situation, but it still left Hadley and Maxwell without a good solution. They are making just one publication, not founding a distribution network. We wondered what printed matter already circulates and is read widely. Maybe they could use their money to be visible in such an object, and therefore actually have their work reach a public. I suggested buying a page in Artforum and using it as their publication. Michael pointed out that there is a history of this, citing Dan Graham in particular. If Hadley and Maxwell do it, their publication will be seen and understood in the light of that history. The context was not entirely unwelcome. Also, the context of commercial ads (which this would be) seemed to interest Hadley and Maxwell enough to keep the idea alive. I’ll be curious to see what they do.

Throughout, we discussed the expectations that these normative models of publication (such as the catalog and the art quarterly) impose on artists, especially the obligation to account for one’s self and one’s biography in relation to the art. Michel’s catalog, as is typical, has a resume of his life. Also, he told us, a website called Artfacts.net has produced a rank for him (and others) which accompanies a page of statistics about his work in the market. Another online site requested that he answer ten questions so they can post his answers on their page.

Apropos of this dilemma, I described my use of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to generate a “personal weblog.” In brief, the AMT is a bulletin board of menial tasks anyone can do online for money. The money is small (usually 1 – 5 cents per task) and the tasks are mostly to make simple judgment calls that a computer can’t do on its own (such as, say if a picture is of a dog or a cat). Amazon created the Mechanical Turk as a way to embed human judgment inside their automated help systems. The bulletin board fields thousands of tasks required by the automated help system, but the user never sees the human element. (Thus the Mechanical Turk.)

Once a week I post a task: “write an entry for my blog.” Some anonymous someone, somewhere, then writes an entry for my blog, as me, and sends it back, and I pay them $10 and post it on my “personal weblog.” Michel was charmed by this solution and immediately wanted to use it for his online questions. We spent the rest of the afternoon online, harvesting five different sets of answers that Michel could use. While we worked, dark storm clouds gathered outside. In a day or two I will post the report of our barbecue that transpired that night amidst rainbows and lightning.

The second session of our Berlin workshop took place at the big table in Hadley and Maxwell’s studio where we had spent the day talking about interpersonal media. We cleared away the papers and set places for eleven, setting out the tea candles we’d bought that morning from the Turkish store on Mariannenplatz. Dinner was a Thai yellow curry with vegetables and rice that had been a staple of previous workshops. Hadley made a big salad and the fridge was packed with German beer and Italian proseco.

Prior commitments took Antonia Hirsch and Michel de Broin away, but in their stead came Vanessa Ohlraun, liaison for artists at the Canadian consulate in Berlin. Vanessa had signed on as a member of the workshop but other obligations kept her from attending the day time sessions. To my delight, Vanessa enjoys sparkling wines, which she said are an uncommon provision at dinners in Berlin.

I recall welcoming everyone with a toast, though it is unclear whether that actually happened. Let’s say it did. The toast was a way to formally convene the table without beckoning the sobriety and obligations of a seminar or study group. I hoped that we would continue our discussion together, but now let the subject of interpersonal media blossom differently, in this libertine hot house of food and drink and conviviality. A toast was a handy way to suggest it.

Hard to say if it worked. Certainly I felt different. In part because I had heard so much during the day, I now felt familiar with a group who had been strangers to me before. It was easy to reply and joke and exercise the full amplitude of my subjective responses without worrying that the terms of our exchange might be violated by my indiscretions. Indeed, the table was generally lively, even as we maintained a single conversation with most of the group (Hadley and Christian had a tête-à-tête). And, as a pleasant surprise, we discussed the assigned reading.

Christiané dismissed Harry Kessler as a self-important fabricator who managed to see the whole sweep of German history through the narrow lens of his own attendance at dinner parties and midnight assignations that may or may not have really played the central roles Kessler enjoyed crediting them with. I asked if she thought his Berlin diaries (published in English as Berlin In Lights) were factually incorrect, or just self-aggrandizing. Christiané seemed to think it was the latter (and I recall Ralf agreeing), that Kessler, whose arts patronage she applauded, had a big ego but was not a liar. As such, I still regard Kessler’s account as a useful window onto the real social dynamics of power. Including, I guess, the power to write and circulate one’s own record of events. (A power I am enjoying even now.)

Turning to another of our assigned texts, James Lord’s Picasso and Dora, Michael expressed distaste for Lord’s sycophantic adoration of Picasso, who he felt suffered from the detestable accolade “genius.” I pointed out that Lord was not just a celebrity chaser, but truly admired what he knew of Picasso and his work. His desire to meet this towering figure — burdened or not by questionable categories, such as “genius” — made sense to me. I confessed that the same desire had overwhelmed me, when I was 20, and led to my following (some would say “stalking”) and meeting Jonathan Richman, the pop musician. As with Lord and Picasso, it was not fame that drew me, but a powerful attraction to be near the body that produced such transforming works of art as “Roadrunner,” “Hospital,” “I’m Nature’s Mosquito,” and “Modern World.” There was something magnetic about the body of the artist, the source of the work, and I asked if Michael perhaps felt the same way about the major figures he admired, for example Michel Foucault. Wouldn’t he have wanted to meet Foucault?

He insisted he would not have wanted to meet Foucault, and denied there was any link between the work and the body of the artist (or writer). Maxwell further clouded the waters by saying that the person he would love to be near was Paris Hilton, because her existence was so unlikely and so abstract. To witness the actual body would, he felt, be a transforming experience, offering him a kind of proximity to pure meaning, or maybe to abstraction, that seemed impossible. She — her meanings — exist so robustly, yet so far apart from the realm of the physical, that to be near her body would blow Maxwell’s mind.

I felt this detracted from the clarity of my discussion with Michael, but the group was so much more interested in Paris Hilton than in Jonathan Richman or Michel Foucault that, for a spell, we explored Maxwell’s perverse desire. He was broadly, willfully, misunderstood, I felt, by those who preferred thinking of him as a celebrity-chaser or a letch, and the subtlety of his argument was lost. Trying to wrest attention away from the sexy narrative of Maxwell and Paris, I boldly accused Michael of lying, and suggested that he would have been very excited to meet Michel Foucault. Again, he denied it. Ralf, agreeing with Michael, pointed out that the work (particularly the written ideas of a philosopher) exists apart from the body of the author, and that there’s no reason to conflate the two. I find this an especially interesting position in regard to Foucault, who, in life plunged his body so aggressively into the dark, mute space of anonymous sex, as if to fill any gaps that might have opened between thinking and brute physical presence.

The discussion of Paris Hilton, Michel Foucault, and Jonathan Richman evolved into a consideration of the social dynamics of power. To what does one draw near, when one draws near to the body of an admired figure? Is it simply a fascination with power, or is there some other communication that is possible only through physical proximity? Does nearness cloud or clarify whatever has been communicated through books, works, or the objects that first intrigued us? I was reminded of power’s nocturnal operations, how the real decisions and exchanges of power happen at 3 AM. As in Kessler’s world (or the world as he saw it) there is a lot of pomp and circumstance all day and all evening long, and then whomever remains standing, whomever goes to the after party, the cabaret, the pre-dawn club, the aimless drunken stroll at the very end of the night, is given access to real power. We discussed this possibility, but I don’t recall reaching any consensus or conclusions.

I am very curious to learn what Hadley and Christian discussed, for their conversation was just as lively and continuous as ours; we all enjoyed the delicious chocolate dessert sticks Christian brought. Others brought provisions, bread and cheese during the day, a bottle of this, a bottle of that, and when the dinner adjourned we agreed that the next night’s would be a barbecue out on the lawn featuring some remarkable sausages Ralf and Christiané would bring with them. In the meanwhile, I asked everyone who planned to attend the second daytime session to bring along an object or printed piece — some kind of material media — that was especially interesting or important to them. My report on that session will come in the next day or two.

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.