Notes from Chicago

Note: This blog posting is LONG overdue. My desire to keep a daily blog report during the Janaury 9-11th Art and Activism retreat was more than a little overly ambitious. Not only was the retreat incredibly intense and full, but it took me a good couple of weeks just to let all of what happened sift through in my brain...so here is a condensed version of the report back.

A telling moment: the last morning of the We Want More retreat one of the members of the Just Seeds Radical Print Collective announced to the group, “We keep talking about how to open this group to others, but I have no idea how to invite people to join us when we can’t even define what this is.” And really, what was this? A gathering of 80 plus artist-activists interconnected by one or two-degrees of separation? A retreat to reflect on the ways in which our shared and divergent practices are or are not making a difference in the social movements with which we align ourselves? An opportunity to connect around our commonalities, support one another’s efforts, and strategize for how to get more from ourselves?

Yes, We Want More. But exactly who are we, and what is the more that we claim to want? After three days of on-site investigation and two weeks of post-retreat reflection, these questions continue to bounce around my brain, delightfully unanswerable.

Filled with a burning urgency to figure something out, a small subset of the group spent the final hours of the retreat attempting to lay out some possible guiding principles.
We believe in:
- Arts* as open-ended experiments in imaginary, libratory, future possibilities of being;
- The orientation of arts’ work within social movements;
- Arts as forms of visual and performative languages in opposition to commodity form;
- Aesthetic cultural work against ALL hegemonies;
- Arts against oppression;
- Art that articulates possibilities for an unwritten future.

* The group presented these principles with the caveat that the words “art” or “arts” were both equally problematic. Ditto “value”. (Words are so hard!)
We agree to uphold these principles in our creative practice and acknowledge that, in many cases, IT IS ALREADY HAPPENING!

While the seven people in our small group enjoyed the mental and linguistic experiment, after presenting to the larger group, we chose to abandon any further efforts to carry these principles beyond the walls of the Co-Prosperity Sphere. Whether the result of our discomfort around setting out definitions for the larger group or our resistance to speaking for those who did not choose or could not attend. Poof! (Thus I am recording them here as a reminder of our hard work, despite the utterly inconclusive outcome).

There were plenty of other undeterminables and moments of organizational meltdown – much of which focused around the question of who we were and who we were not. How to address the lack of diversity in the group became one of the hot spots of the retreat—looking around the room, the we represented was overwhelmingly white artists in their mid 20s to late 40s (it was curious that the brown people in the room didn’t seem to quite meet the group’s desire for diversity, as if somehow we were equating diversity with the presence of black people) The 80 one minute presentations reflected overlapping interests in performance, installation, occupation, food, street spectacle, mapping and creative discourse. Tune an ear to the conversation and the language floating to the top was that of university-educated, middle to upper class, anti-capitalist rhetoric.

It wasn’t until after the retreat that we (by which I mean the Providence representation of me, Andrew Oesch, Jori Ketten, and Micah Salking) asked our selves the question, “What if these elusive others that kept being evoked chose not to attend because they were just NOT interested in having this kind of conversation, participating in this academic, activist discourse?” It is important to remember that the same language that inspired many of us to respond to the initial invitation may have been a detraction to others who may be joined in similar struggles. I don't want to say that the language we use is good, or bad, but simply to point out that the ways we communicate matter to how our events/projects/etc. are perceived by others.

Beyond the fascinating meta-experience of trying to identify “what happened”, there were also direct take-aways that, yes, are even MORE questions. Here are a few that I sent to Steve Lambert (see earlier blog posting) the day after I returned to Providence.

- We talked a lot about imperfect models of slow burn strategies that offer resilience for groups that are in it (ie social change, mutual aid) for the long haul. People really responded to the model of the church (or temple, or mosque … lots of discomfort there too from a largely areligious crowd) as a model for building support systems that are intergenerational, ritualistic, with multiple points of entry.

- Conversely, what are other ways of talking about spectacle that do not carry the same, potentially vacuous, connotations? Celebrations? Radical sites of participation? I haven’t come up with anything yet, but I am wondering how to reframe spectacle versus the concept of slow-burn tactics that came out of the conference.

- People talked a lot about art being embedded in activist movements, which reminded me of your [Steve and Steve] How To Win presentation in which you talked about thinking of art as only one part of a larger strategy. My question then is whether artists are ready to step out of their leadership roles to both show up and in effect “be of service” to larger social movements. At the same time, I don’t like the uni-directional relationship implicit in “service”. Basically, can artists be humble?

- I keep coming back to the question that was raised at the How to Win talk about whether there are subversive art practices that do not need to employ the masters tools. Smaller, less sensational acts - what role do they play? Especially given that when you look at the ways in which social change is often a process of small incremental shifts in patterns and habits based on relationship building with these larger flash point moments. So the small is important, as is the intimate, but in what ways?

****

I am still waiting to hear back from Steve on his response. But in the meanwhile, the We Want More group has continued to move its thinking beyond the retreat and towards two upcoming events. The first is the radical urbanism The City from Below conference to be held in Baltimore March 27th-29th. Its organizers position the conference as follows:

"In cities everywhere, new social movements are coming into being, hidden histories and herstories are being uncovered, and unanticipated futures are being imagined and built - but so much of this knowledge remains, so to speak, at street-level. We need a space to gather and share our stories, our ideas and analysis, a space to come together and rethink the city from below."

The other flashpoint will be the US Social Forum in the summer of 2010. A number of people at the conference were excited about building solidarity between the arts and cultural producers and the amazing groups activating for this national event. And so, onward with all the desire and ambiguity that can be conjured.

Critical Response at RISD

What makes for a positive critique? Students were asked this question by the facilitators of the Liz Lerman Critical Response Workshop, which was held yesterday in RISD's Tap Room, hosted by the Office of Student Life. The responses from the 30 students at the afternoon workshop were illuminating:

Critiques work when:
- the people critiquing have an idea of the original intent
- the criticism is specific but not given as an attack
- the critic can be open minded from beginning to end / free from their personal bias
- the person's comments open up a discussion or dialogue with the artist
- the feedback is honest
- the resulting discussion is high-energy
- the critic offers a fresh viewpoint (often times this comes when the person is from outside the artist's own discipline, but sometimes the artist just wants to hear from someone who can speak his or her own language, knows the references...the end point being that both opportunities are valuable)
- the critic offers set of knowledge that can inform the project
- there is an expression of paternal/maternal support versus the competitive sibling syndrome

After being walked through the four-step process that is at the heart of the Critical Response theory - see the Roadmap for Meaningful Dialogue - someone asked about students' immediate responses to the process. These two were especially interesting in the context of RISD learning:

1. I wish faculty were here to hear this! Right now is one of the first times I've ever heard about this different model of critique; it just makes sense.
2. I feel like this could be useful for how critique is modelled in Freshmen Foundation - faculty often just let us flounder.

Put into practice in a model critique by volunteer students from the Construction/Deconstruction Wintersession class, I was surprised by willingly students engaged in the Critical Response practice. What felt to me like a pretty warm and fuzzy process of neutral questions and opinions by permission that might turn off the typical RISD student, actually seemed to open up the space for people to feel more empathy for the artist's process and offer opinions that were coming from a more informed place.

The question that naturally came up at the end of the workshop was: how does this kind of process get applied at RISD? It is not as though faculty are just going to make the automatic switch. The presenters offered one suggestion around how to rephrase a negatively generated opinion to ask yourself neutral questions rather than just retreat to a defensive position. Because when defensiveness starts, learning stops.

Fall Course: Investigating Water

The first time I had been exposed to a liberal arts professor who directly asked us to produce studio work instead of writing a final paper was this fall with Nicole Merola in "Investigating Water: Connecting to Narragansett Bay."  While always being assumed by students and faculty alike, the thought of responding to liberal arts courses with studio work had never been directly initiated by a RISD professor.  Being a witness to the process, I can say that it was an extremely effective learning tool.  

The process to the final project was unique.   Nicole created a multidisciplinary environment, drawing from field trips, readings, class discussions, and journaling.  With so many different informing mediums, we discovered our personal relationship and passion in regards to the subject of water and the environment.   A sense of freedom allowed us to cultivate our growing interests, culminating in the studio with a final project.   In John Maeda’s surprise critique, all responses were geared towards how positively the multidisciplinary style can work for art and design students.   The style applies to how we would work in the real world, by gathering source material from several different places and using it directly in our work, which happened in this course.  

The course was unusual in the way it addressed the invisible boundaries that are rarely crossed by the professor or student in the normal flow of life at RISD. Our class was required to engage with local organizations through field trips and also create final projects in our studios, instead of in the usual Word or PowerPoint. While our professor, Nicole Merola, seemed to think it the natural path to incorporate studio practice with liberal arts, it had never been done quite in this way. On the night of the gallery opening, it was clear that there was fascination with the atypical nature of the course. We experienced John Maeda initiating a video recorded critique and response from students in the class and others who were attending the opening.

It was also great to see how other people, from different departments, worked along side myself. The design majors’ processes aren’t so different from our painting processes. The only difference is the source material we normally look at. Overall, it unified different material and different people through a final exhibit, where none of these have been integrated before.

How To Win by Steve & Steve

Sometimes there are those moments. When the questions you are grappling with at work blend seamlessly into the questions you are asking of your art and your life-as-art.

Wednesday was one such day. After working for a chunk of the afternoon on a workshop/ interventionist proposal for a conference on civic engagement and social justice, I schlepped up to Harvard for a presentation by Steve Lampert and Steve Duncombe on their project How to Win. More tag-team talk than presentation and more investigation than project, How to Win boils down to a very simple concept: what happens when you ask 20 self-described political artists:

How can you know when you’ve been successful?

The people they interviewed for the project, including Hans Haake, Emilie Clark, Dread Scott, took this seemingly straightforward question into all kinds of interlaced territories. When asked to define success in their artmaking, themes emerged such as:

Media Coverage

One-on-One Conversation

Making It Real

Opening Up New Spaces

Provoking Discussion

Recalibration of Reality

Laying the Groundwork for the Unimaginable

(Click through to see links to projects that might fall under these categories)

All of these are workable definitions...depending on your goals. And though the idea caused a great deal of discomfort for some people in the room, when making self-proclaimed political art, having an end goal is not only appropriate but necessary if any change is to happen.

For some artists then, the next question is "...and then what?" If my latest project gets a flood media coverage, how do I leverage that press? Or do I just pat myself on the back and move on to the next project?

If my artwork raises awareness about a particular issue but includes no subsequent action on the part of the viewer, can I still call it a success?

These are questions that keep me up at night in terms of why I have chose art & music as my way of making meaning in the world. Thinking of art as just one piece of a larger strategy towards making change doesn't mean that it shouldn't be taken seriously (and at the same time, having fun with it!)

However, coming back into the office on Thursday, I started to explore how these ideas can be applied to the work our office does here at RISD. We are a young program, barely a year and a half out of the gates. As such, our definition of success is shifting and all over the map. Is this perhaps part of the problem? When you declare specific goals you suddenly open up clear way to evaluate (and be evaluated) as to whether you are making progress. Being so new, is it even appropriate to be pushing an Office agenda, when we are just two amongst a much larger RISD.

Still, if I were to hazard definitions of success chosing from those listed above, I would string several of them together: opening up new spaces between RISD and the city of Providence by provoking discussion by creating platforms for group and one-on-one conversations. This definition is nonetheless incredibly vague...what would happen if instead we set up specific benchmarks such as:

Increasing public engagement course offerings on campus from 12 to 20...
Creating a network of Teaching Assistants who meet regularly to discuss the interconnections between their course work...
To have 1/2 of the freshmen from our Leadership Institute Orientation group taking on leadership roles by the time they are sophomores...
Increasing the number of off-site federal work study students by 10%...
Two new collaborative projects between classes and local non-profits, with appropriate orientation to the ethics of community-engaged art practices...

Specificity in this context is complicated. In order to move many of these initiatives ahead, there needs to be institutional buy-in that RISD is, and should be, a civically-minded community of learners and educators and administrators. In the meanwhile we will continue to push the conversations where we can and leverage the strength of our relationships here on campus and out in the community to propose more concrete definitions.

There is more to be done.

They came, they played...and then they ate

On Wednesday night last week, the Graduate Studies program hosted the Non-Orientation Non-Luncheon Grad School dinner in the CIT Building. The office was invited to create an intervention into the evening, which also included screening of James Bond films and a sitar-tabla performance by local Indian musicians.

One of the things our office has been thinking about lately is the insular nature of the various departments on campus, especially within the grad school. The rigor with which students are expected to approach their studio and class work often precludes some of the risk-taking inherent in working across disciplines and/or collaboratively.

And at the same time, we recognized that this event was going to be held during one of the busiest times of the year for students, so any intervention that took itself too seriously would probably not get too far off the ground.

As such, I proposed that the Office work with students from the various departments to collect unused or discarded materials from the various studios and invite students to play with these materials to build a collaborative, interdisciplinary installation on the 2nd floor of CIT. We chose the 2nd floor in part because it is where our Office is located, but also because the installation would be strategically placed near the bar and desserts!

The collection of detritus was greatly aided by the help of Grad Student Liaisons; one of the side perks of this project was our Office making connections with students and departments with whom we do not normally have much cause for interaction. All in all we gathered materials from all but three of the departments, arranging them by department on tables outside the play room (aka the conference room!)


The only instructions that the students were given were to select an object with the label indicating their department and that as they built into the installation, their object had to interact with objects from a department other than their own. They were given tools reminiscent of elementary school art classes with which to build; the rest was up to their imagination.


And build they did!


At least until the upstairs got so crowded that a group of students coopted the playroom as their dining room, essentially stalling the project in its tracks.

On the plus side, the installation served as a launching pad for many great conversations overheard and instigated over the course of the night around any number of relevant topics including:


* What does the Office of Public Engagement actually do?
* What scares people about working collaboratively? Especially in the context of a project-based curriculum?
* What kind of framework is necessary in order for collaboration to be embraced?
* How can different departments share what they are working on with others in different buildings and sides of campus?
* What classes already exist that ask students to make interdisciplinary artwork?

Earlier this week, I was sent a link to a parallel project that j. morgan puett is orchestrating in Chicago: http://www.deptstore.blogspot.com/ I was particularly struck by the expansiveness of the physical space available for this project. It set my thoughts to spinning...

AmeriCan Preserves

In the process of putting together the website for the collaborative public art project that I have been working on for the RISD/Brown Public Art: History, Theory, and Practice class.

Sarah, age 21, Wenham, MA

For the project we made 50 jars of homemade applesauce and are distributing them to friends and family and unfamiliars around the country in exchange for their recorded responses to the question: "What American values would you like to be preserved for the next 106 years?"

These recordings and photos of people holding their applesauce are being posted on the website: www.americanpreserves.tumblr.com

The Incomplete Manifesto

photo: Massive Change, MCA

Came across this "design mimics life" manifesto by the Bruce Mau Design group, one of the main organizers behind the Massive Change exhibition (also a worthy read/look). It is short, concise and full of relevant inquiries into how and why we make:

http://www.brucemaudesign.com/incomplete_manifesto.html