“Art + Time = Econ. Growth” Graffiti in the Fortune Teller Bar bathroom, St. Louis, MO

“One wants to be an artist. One is an artist. One wants to be an artist in control of one’s environment. One is an artist in control of one’s environment. One thinks one is. One thinks one is not. One wants to be one thinking one is in control of one’s environment. One is. One is not.”
AA Bronson, The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat

“In the future, everyone will be a LLC”
Kyle Chayka via Twitter
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We are in a neutral room. We are in a conference room. We are at a conference. We are at a professional development seminar. We are reading a blog. We are building our brand. We receive our degree. Our second degree. We are starting our career. We are learning how to make it. We are learning how to make a living. We hear that we are all entrepreneurs. We are small businesses. We are cultural workers. We are owed a living wage. We can’t sell our work. We aren’t sure we want to. We want to sustain it. But is it work?

In a recent article, The Excel Depression, Paul Krugman describes a spreadsheet error two Harvard economists propagated that led to widespread assumptions on austerity and the costs of economic recovery, bluntly stating, “In this age of information, math errors can lead to disaster.” Seems like an apt enough metaphor. The spreadsheet we use to deduce art’s value is built around assumptions, laced with inherent errors. There is an x in our equations, redefining the productive function of art – the ineffable outcomes of artistic action reduced to statistics. Errors can lead to disaster, but perhaps our danger is in the act of doing math in the first place. Art and economics, the shared death grip of both the art market and post-occupy action; the ground we all stand on.

A brief glance through any contemporary art publication, this one included, will read like a primer on Post-Fordist labor, with an added anxiety of art’s existential irrelevance in contemporary society. Perhaps it is this acute anxiety that seduces us to the corporeal language economics lends. Even if we critique, lament and loathe neoliberalism, it is the room we move in, the world we assume to be true. Art’s economic function is one of its few measurable traits. It is demonstrable, so we depend on it for relevance. Framing art as tangential to business allows us a place at the table with civic leaders and entrepreneurs, not to mention granters, galleries and collectors.

Entering a discussion with almost any of these entities, however, typically guarantees that artists are asked to act like small businesses and cottage industries. We must contribute to recovery and growth, tourism and redevelopment. Our output must be marketable and hold its value over time. Social practice bleeds into social work, minus the hourly salary; placemaking and the creative class become blunt tools used by city halls and chambers of commerce. We are being lost to these definitions, allowing the ineffable act of art to be reduced to output, economic indicators, market, measurement. There is comfort in numbers. It is some meaning, at least.

This trend has been decried, of course. The post-Occupy environment is charged with oppositional energy, from the Free Cooper Union actions currently underway and the flyers scattered at Frieze criticizing the fair for avoiding unionized labor, to numerous other micro-movements and local actions around the globe. However, even these groups and other high-profile efforts such as W.A.G.E and Precarious Workers Brigade, foreground art’s relationship to labor and payment rather than its revolutionary or emancipatory potential. If the demands of these actions succeed, then artists are guaranteed more standardized payment as a labor force, fairer hiring policies, and affordable tuition. Is that really what is at issue? Art as an investigation into ideas and experimentation with the forms in and of the world does not correlate with payment. Have artists been seeking proper payment for their work throughout history or is this undermining the very nature of our attempts at creating a new world, alternate spheres of action, and creative thought? Again, is art work?

Our revolutionary ideals haven’t panned out, so in AA Bronson’s phrasing, we’ve become bureaucrats. We are placemakers, grant writers, civic consultants, Kickstarter accountants. As a group, we’ve become a brand — willing participants in systems we neither like nor understand. Of all possible options, entrepreneurial models have dominated the last decade of contemporary art. So far, the primary protest has been to unionize as a group for fairer wages and less debt, with diminishing returns.

Artists understand the dangers of the commercial art market, but at present seem to have a blind spot in regard to the subtle influence of the language of economics on how and why they work. A quick look through any artist survey, course curriculum or training seminar will quickly reveal a pervasive interest in “professional development,” a phrase functionally defined as “how the act of making art can be a career.” Debt has crept into the studio through the educational industry, creating a psychic burden on thousands of artists per year. This simple act of taking on debt for one’s art implicitly inscribes how an artist could even conceive other possibilities. In a recent exhibition I was involved in, someone commented on the statement, “Artists can do many things themselves, but who helps support artists?” with the question of “What do artists need, other than money to support themselves and their work?” It was an earnest question and one that perhaps many artists can’t answer. Does it return, finally, to money? If art’s value is primarily economic, and all that artists need is money, then it is simply an industry among others.

Village Voice art critic Christian Viveros-Faune offers an odd summation of artist Theaster Gates’s characteristic channeling of commercial art success into community-based projects in Chicago, St. Louis and Omaha, stating, “But what strikes me about his art is that he doesn’t turn his back on money. What Theaster understands is that the best kind of art is business art—that is a defining triumph—because he can put it back into the community.” Gates, for his part, recognizes that “the stakes are very high” – both for the communities involved and his own career.

This tight-wire balance is at play throughout the art world, as contemporary art advances further into the fields of entertainment and fashion, while attempting to maintain distance in its supposed intentions. In her recent review of the Frieze New York Art Fair for e-flux offshoot Art Agenda, Karen Archey concludes with a remarkable statement in both its perceptiveness and honesty:

“It could be argued that Frieze (and not entirely unlike this publication) is built on a highly commercial yet alternative, self-sustaining funding system. This well-oiled machine accrues cultural capital from Frieze’s exceptionally edited magazine, which in turn creates an attractive brand, fueling the pay-to-play desire to show in the fair. While this structure isn’t especially pernicious, it explicitly represents a new model of power: just to be rich or cool isn’t enough to claim your place at the front of the rat race. Today, you have to be both.”

This is, in a cruel turn, correct. It is indicative of the explosive stasis of the moment. The world of contemporary art is vital and volatile, speculative and speculated. It is frothing, yet seemingly going nowhere. Is this the defining characteristic of our moment? Highly commercial, yet alternative self-sustaining funding systems – not just Frieze, or e-flux, but Theaster Gates’s unique ecosystem; the online auction industry spearheaded by Paddle8 and Artsy; the CSA’s, subscriptions services and editions; the artist-as-small-business; the academic-adjunct MFA pyramid scheme; the day-to-day ways we all work to sustain a meaningful practice.

But, of course, these are not all equal. Some circulate in a rarefied sphere that never return value to the creators – economic or otherwise. Some attempt the delicate procedure of using commerce to create a viable alternative. This is what we really seek: a full-throated, bodily alternative based on the free creative exchange inherent in art. The question is whether it is created through or outside of neoliberal economics. Art plus time may equal economic growth, but the market grows without us. We know very well by now that economic growth no longer correlates to a real shift in our lived experience. Art as a means of business, as an economic tool, will always dissipate its power into a spreadsheet error. Perhaps our best hope is to provide the spectral glitch new speculations are based on, the unfounded x in our undefined calculus.

Facebook post by “Gagosian Gallery” April 2013

Barbara Rose’s, “Thanks for the Memory,” in the December issue of The Brooklyn Rail bemoans the “the devolution of the role of art criticism.” Yet, Rose’s definition of art criticism as the act of “defining the artists’ intentions, then judging if they are fulfilled, and ultimately judging the worth or importance, emotionally or aesthetically, of these intentions,” seems as relevant to me as Columbia Records must be to musicians in the age of Soundcloud. Her point of contention begins, “When Donald Judd announced in the ’60s that art no longer needed to be good but only to be ‘interesting.’” I would argue that art no longer even needs to be “interesting” as long as the discussion surrounding it is – for good and bad. Take for example, her insistence in the remainder of the article to discuss the “tawdry subject of the art market because the market gets prime space in newspapers, magazines, and the art press, along with news about forgeries and art thefts,” as yet another case in which the pot describes at length the ways in which the kettle is black.

If the critical art discussion in the 90s centered around installation-based/interdisciplinary/M/E/A/N/I/N/G and the 00s extended that discussion to include post-colonial/studio/relational/social practice, then what might characterized as happening now along this trajectory might unfortunately be called something like ‘post-artists.’ Yes, in what Rose describes as, “today’s multidisciplinary, multimedia, multicultural, and corporate global culture,” individual artistic mediums and dogmas have long since lost their singular appeal. [I am reminded here of the LCD Soundsystem song, “Losing My Edge,” except instead of guitars and turntables; I hear that you sold your paint and bought cameras. I hear that you sold your cameras and bought a computer. I hear you’re throwing your computer out the window because you want to make something real.] Therefore, the primary realization that we are facing in this 10s decade is that the ‘post-artist’ artist is not just an artist. That an artist, ‘alone’ in their studio, also happens to be an artist as bookkeeper, artist as website designer, and the all-to-often artist as applicant. This is not too mention the increasingly common cases where that artist is also an artist as curator, artist as activist, artist as ethonographer, artist as citizen, and even artist as brand – increasingly, being marketed as artist as entrepreneur.
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2013 Carnegie International: Artist Announcement from Carnegie Museum of Art on Vimeo.
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Just as this expanded notion of what it means to be an artist, in recognition of all the activities they are involved in beyond any ‘artworks’ that they make, art and artists continue to be even more commodifiable, perhaps in the most direct instance as the pawns in Richard Florida-style gentrification. My favorite current example of this conflation can be seen in the recent exhibition announcement for “Black Code: 30 Years of Shopping” an exhibition at Frac Haute-Normandie in France, which explicitly “sets out…to experience the increasingly close ties that are being developed today between stores and exhibition spaces, and between the fashion and art worlds.” An art exhibition about exhibitions that are like stores that are like exhibitions. How fashionable!

So artists feel stuck: under-recognized for all the activities they are actually doing and over-commodified as the great force behind “hipsterism” (as literally quoted from Wikipedia). Resistance seems futile. As Jacob Wren writes in “Resistance as Paradox,” a recent “unfinished” blog post: “Art is the corner in which transgression and questioning are allowed, at times even encouraged, and making art is like being told to go stand in that corner.” If this is case, then ones starts to feel the only ‘radical’ position is to stop positioning what they do as art. This might be in direct reaction against relational aesthetics (which instead tries to justify every kind of activity as art and has unfortunately instead led to artists-as-social workers/community activists), or might even have something to do with the increasingly number of otherwise famous people (James Franco, Tilda Swinton and George W. Bush just to name a few) who are attempting to positions themselves as artists (What would Warhol do?!). But, at least if as an artist one recognizes the many activities that one does that are important, relevant and valuable – even those that are not the direct act of making art – then calling oneself an artist either becomes increasingly beside the point, or entirely the point. Artists may or may not actually start to shun the title of ‘artist’ but there is no doubt that a discussion around how relevant the divisions between an artist’s various activities really are have already begun.

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Take as an example, this excellent infographic recently posted by Christine Wong Yap, to consider not just what artists make, but What Artists Make Happen. The implications of this chart could be discussed at length, but consider now the idea put forth that “what artists make happen are opportunities for shared aesthetic, intellectual, emotional, and communicative engagement and action. The engagement is shared, as there is mutual investment of attention and space for cooperative action.” To bring this all back to the role of art criticism, Yap succinctly ends with a sort of postscript by saying:

This week, articles in the Village Voice and the NY Times bemoaned the vast influx of money in art. Art auctions, art fairs, and mega-galleries that show works collected by the 1% are part of the art world, but equating them with the art world (as the Voice writer did) or only reviewing those exhibitions and fairs (as some NYT writers tend) are mistakes.

As Csikszentmihalyi points out, our most valuable currency is not money, but psychic energy—in other words, our attentions.

There are multiple art worlds. In mine, art auctions, secondary markets, and multi-million dollar transactions are on the periphery. I focus my attention on the center, which is abundant with artists, especially those who make things happen.

As Yap points out again more recently, critics like Jerry Saltz with long-standing NY-centricism are just now realizing there are multiple artworlds. But, if like Yap, you instead hold this artist-“center”ed-way of thinking, the role of critic should be entirely focused on conveying “what artists make happen” (and to jab Rose again – I am not just talking here about “vivid descriptions”). If “what artists make happen” are opportunities for shared experiences, the most important point of discussion is not the artist’s intention but to convey those experiences and the entire (socio-political, historical, aesthetic, intellectual, emotional) context in which these shared experiences happen – which, by definition, changes over time. In this case, critical discussions surrounding art could not be any more relevant…if you believe that is where the ‘interesting’ part exists anyway.

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"A Willing Transfer of Belief" Installation view. Johansson Projects, Oakland, CA.

Michelle Blade. The Obvious Illusion, 2012. Mylar, acrylic, wood. 110 x 155 inches.

Michelle Blade. The Marriage Between Necessity and Curiosity, 2013. Acrylic on Dura-lar. 24 x 43 inches.

Hillary Wiedemann. Possessing the Visible (video still), 2013. Digital video projection, 8 mins. 59 secs. looped, dimensions variable.

Hillary Wiedemann. Improbable Sunset (video still); 2013, digital video projection, 4 minutes looped, dimensions variable.

With an engaging ambiguity, Blade’s The Obvious Illusion (2012) depicts either a figure shrouded in a white sheet with its hands held up in a ghoulish gesture or a cloaked three-headed monstrosity. The acrylic on mylar piece hangs on a wooden dowel and floats in the gallery just as a ghost might. Through her title, Blade keenly addresses the illusions she pursues as a painter and the goofy futility of the ghost fashioned out of a bed sheet. Coyly, Blade suggests a number of possible “illusions” to which she may be alluding to as The Obvious Illusion.

Complimenting The Obvious Illusion, in Blade’s The Marriage Between Necessity and Curiosity (2013) she depicts two pairs of folded hands inside black eye-like voids that resemble holes cut from a bed sheet ghost costume. Like stereoscopy, which uses the parallax error between our two eyes to establish depth perception, Blade’s duplicate pairs of hands are painted from a slightly shifted perspective. However, because stereoscopy is a neurological function and ghosts presumably lack brains, in Blade’s image from the ghost’s perspective there is no three-dimensional synthesis. Blade continues her absurdist line of reasoning in The Marriage Between Necessity and Curiosity by positing the mother of invention with the father of creativity as a familial unit in the title. Beneath Blade’s playful sensibility, she alludes to cognitive activity, be it invention or creativity, as an internal phenomenon.

In contrast, Wiedemann uses media to address the ephemeral and captivating qualities of sunlight. For Possessing the Visible (2013), Wiedemann aimed her video camera directly into the sun during the equinox to record the brightest light on the shortest day of the year. The extreme sunlight interrupts the video camera’s ability to calibrate light, causing it to repeatedly refocus. The resulting video fluctuates between being haloed and blown out to being a more convention representation of the sun. Additionally, Wiedemann’s video features moments when the lens’ bulging circular frame and reflections are clearly visible, which reasserts her camera as a mediated vantage point.

As an additional level of reproduction, for Improbable Sunset (2013) Wiedemann projected and re-videotaped Possessing the Visible in her studio. In this second version fluctuating red, green, and blue (RGB) horizontal bands streak across the image of the sun. Because these interfacing technologies have opposing functions—digital projectors project RGB channels to be seen by the human eye while cameras capture and encode RBG information for digital storage—they interrupt the camera’s automatic color calibration. The horizontal bands are a result of the video camera attempting to sort out the artificially projected video, as opposed to the physical world which it was designed to capture. By exploiting the way that technology is designed to deal with specific parameters (like color and light), Wiedemann’s redundancy moves the copy further away from the original.

With two very different approaches, Blade and Wiedemann smartly explore the limitations and attributes of their own mediums. While Blade employs the imaginative possibilities that painting allows for, she also acknowledge the illusions she construct. Contrasting, Wiedemann’s explores the indexical quality of digital video, but creates situations that cause it to run afoul. Blade and Wiedemann’s word play and re-purposing of technology create internal systems of fuzzy logic to explore the shifting boundaries of reality as an internal psychological state of mediated experience.

Michelle Blade and Hillary Wiedemann: A Willing Transfer of Belief is on view at Johansson Projects in San Francisco, CA until May 18, 2013.

Images courtesy of the artists and Johansson Projects.

The city body of St. Louis has suffered through our practices. Collectively we cannot be immediately absolved from the often-cataclysmic remainders of the programs devised and wrought by the disciplines of urban planners, social workers, developers, architects and artists. We cannot expect those same disciplines to be able to reconcile their own tragic histories with a utopian future in which “creative placemaking” atones for the spatial segregation created through destructive racist real estate practices, “historic preservation” redresses the mass depletion of historic building fabric and the crazy-making constant relocation of the city’s poorest citizens, and “urbanism” somehow guarantees the right of assembly in public space. The intersection of identity and space requires a step outside of our lenses, if we are to truly resolve any social contradictions through practice.

Perhaps the ideologies of practitioners of urban change could be excused or even sublimated in other eras. Today we even reconcile problematic earlier practices to contemporary values by aestheticizing modernism, making it safe. We valorize monuments to the disintegration of communities instead of commemorating the sites of potent and useful social struggle. Yet we might not focus widely and notice that all of the placemaking activities of the past century have left us a St. Louis that is stratified, divided and decadent in many ways. From that tired, conflicted space comes the opportunity for each of us to seize historical agency and redirect the forces we can see.

Our gazes are thus very important. We choose whether we see the city and its population for what it has become by critically examining how it has become this place, or whether we simply let our eyes study the facts that justify our own practices. This choice determines whether the contemporary list of buzzwords will lead us toward social equity and a healed city, or simply perpetuate and repurpose the ideological weight of the past. The deliberation of this distinction, by the way, is largely our problem. The communities in which we work really are not waiting for the answer. People most likely are asking what historical forces we might deliver.

As a practitioner of architectural history and historic preservation (although perhaps no longer a “preservationist”), my work is caught in the choice. Preservation is the choice to validate certain parts of our collective memory. Neighborhood improvement can simply reflect trending rises in property values. Architectural history, like art history, often seems like a mechanism for justifying its subject discipline. On the other hand, critical engagement of current events through the lens of architectural history can reveal how mistakes of the past are being repeated. Public architectural history in service to community decision-making is a wonderful practice.

My work is tied to the underdefined but overstated agenda of “urbanism.” Urbanism in St. Louis has come to capture an alignment of critical voices that support increased housing density, improvement of public and bicycle transportation and gentrification (literally, increased property values) in certain neighborhoods. “Urbanists” lately criticized the fact that a rehabilitated grocery store on South Jefferson Avenue near Lafayette Avenue will reopen as a Save A Lot instead of as some more urbanistically correct store. The “urbanist” faction continues to talk up the supposed arrival of Ikea in St. Louis, which will reside in a big anti-urban box, that somehow can be accepted while Save A  Lot cannot (class seems a subtle element). Yet much of urbanist discourse is devoid of consideration of social needs or the fact that vanguards in urban design historically have overtly or covertly had the impact of dislocating impoverished or African-American communities. Economics seem lacking too – the larger economics of full employment and benefits to whole classes of people.

Urbanism isolates social problems to the terms of architecture, which overlooks root causes and thus becomes incapable of providing social solutions. That lack of awareness rears its head in other disciplines too. Discussion of the “Delmar Divide” by artists and architects has tended to simplify what is a dire state of spatial segregation in the region. The need to publicly roost the tensions of race in the region requires care and listening. So far, moves in this direction are well-intentioned but have initiated (without sustaining) a fractured and unclear discussion that reduces a complex historical crisis to a single phrase.

Similarly, in historic preservation, practitioners often ignore the urban buildings associated with the working class, racial and gender struggle and postwar depletion. Buildings in distressed neighborhoods disproportionately disappear, with little fuss, despite the fact that systematic loss of housing stock not only destroys buildings but also communities. Preservation of disciplinarily-marginal buildings and sites does happen a lot, but usually not through any initiation of the official movement that will fight arduously for high-style Modernism and idyllic farm houses. Preservation may well be “creative place-saving” because its interpretive nature can skew our identity as it can be detected in our architecture. Through silence, preservationists actually can aid the erasure of more contested or simply marginal parts of our history.

The location of art practice also relates to how we inscribe our values on the city body. My practice has intersected with the idea of “community art,” a loaded term that is also useful. I think that the term’s best effect has been reminding artists of the larger role that they play in society, and the need to engage broad constituencies. However, practices that state that they are “community” based led by practitioners who live and work isolated from spaces in which they work raise questions. Are not such artists already members of place-based communities in which they live? Does funding determine which communities are “community” enough to be legitimate places for “community art” to occur? Of course artists should be regionally conscious and active, but the choice to locate practice and appropriate sociological language builds expectations.

Community art’s cohort includes “creative placemaking,” a term highly relevant to contemporary art and planning discourse that remains highly subjective. “Placemaking” itself carries a problematic arrogance when employed to describe projects in neighborhoods where people have already “made” the place. Here is where art parallels the track of real estate development; the assumption of a “frontier” to be invented through practice links art projects to disastrous development plans like Northside Regeneration today and St. Louis’ 1916 zoning ordinance passed to curtail open housing. These projects involve wide views that are not very deep, and a fervor to “make sense” of space without really learning it. Situation of the “placemaker” is crucial – is that place within and among community residents?  And the most basic question really becomes: is this project for or with those residents? Authorship (publication, exhibition, recognition) can drive us askance of our intent subliminally.

Yet surely most of us don’t arrive actually deluded that we are “making” a “place.” So why don’t we call what we do by its real name? Art, architecture, planning, building, rehabbing, developing, owning – these are all precise and valuable practices that offer transparency to all involved in our pursuits. The term of art suggests that we as practitioners cannot negotiate direct relationships and that we fear our work may be less relevant if not packaged a certain way. Funders, of course, spur on the vocabulary.

Without enumerating endlessly the problems of this moment, I think it is crucial for each of us who practice our arts in St. Louis to develop direct and informed relationships with the other people who live here. Disciplinary formation and refinement – talking amongst ourselves – provides useful critique, but ultimately our work is beholden to a mass of people that may not speak our languages. We stand among our neighbors with tremendous potential to bring some practice to our city’s places that no one else could offer. We must name our practices and be humble enough to serve. In most of our fields, service is challenging because of this grindstone called authorship.

We encourage ourselves to be the makers when sometimes our neighbors want us to be stewards and assistants. Ideology may compel us otherwise, without our knowing it. When an artist reaches for another word to describe a studio practice that in itself already offers value to a community, the question should be why? When we gaze at our city, we should be forming such questions to elevate our consciousness, and not seeking places to which our answers will descend. Historical forces tell us that many more questions about work are being – and should be — asked right back.

A Room Without a View? was originally published in the Whole City St. Louis newspaper accompanying Works Progress at The Luminary. Photos courtesy of Michael R. Allen.

left to right: Shannon Buggs, Nick Anderson, Linda Lorelle, Lizette Garcia photos: Patrick Bresnan

Liz Magic Laser‘s Diverseworks commission Tell Me What You Want to Hear began by enlisting professional empathy conjurers to cull, perform, and refine their methods of influencing public opinion. Directed to play heightened versions of themselves, participants were asked to narrate a moment of performance when they were entirely authentic, spectacularly engaging, and not at all manipulative.

Panel reviews of participant’s on camera interviews took place during media training workshops at Houston Media Source in February. left to right: Mustafa Tameez, Nick Anderson, Shannon Buggs, Liz Magic Laser

The Media Training 

To this elusive end, media training was conducted at Houston Media Source in February. The storytellers were interviewed on camera and live feed went into to a conference room for screening by panelists Nick Anderson, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist; Shannon Buggs, journalist and Director of Communications for the University of Houston’s College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences; Felipe Campos, artist, producer, and educator; Maurice Duhon, realtor, former political candidate, musician, and reality TV personality; Lizette Garcia, Broadcast Journalism major at the University of Houston; Linda Lorelle, Emmy Award-winning journalist and former KPRC-TV news anchor; Sue Lovell, former Houston City Council member; and Mustafa Tameez, founder and managing director of Outreach Strategies, one of Texas’ leading public affairs firms. Once interviewed, each participant was seated in front of their muted footage to receive criticism according to the amalgamated tricks of the charismatic communication trades.

In addition to attention span considerations: keep it direct, on task, brief, energetic, and assertive, the main point is that the audience cannot digest you unless you are refined. The key to success is refusing to exhibit natural responses of the human body to its environment– scratching, sipping, shifting eyes or shifting in your seat– that could make you appear unattractively like a person in front of the persona capturing camera.

The disavowal of maintenance is not new, but it was eerie to hear the body’s need for rest and support flatly deemed unacceptable. And although disturbed by these rules, I nonetheless later found myself irked at Lorrelle for wearing a pair of distractingly bobbly earrings on camera– she should hold her head still!

Shannon Bugg’s hosts a talk show style screening before a live audience at Diverseworks. The audience watched and responded to a projected live broadcast of the participants performing across town at UH’s School of Communications news studio.

The Screening and Recording Before a Live Audience

In keeping with Laser’s compelling investigations of potentially democratic forms gone awry (majority rule in focus testing, voting in political polling, and authority leveling in the interview) Tell Me What You Want to Hear used the multi-vocal judicial panel and the audience-input inclusive talk show.

For last Wednesday night’s screening before a live audience at Diverseworks, Shannon Buggs played a talk show host whose emphatic “We are all so comfortable here with one another!” manner (of a focus group leader or a fish camp counselor) waned over the course of the show. Her scripted questions “Do you respond to this? Would you like to have media training? Is performing a skill that every person should have? Is there a difference between trying to influence and manipulating?” were asked politely and elicited polite responses from a hesitant audience, able to see themselves on camera and adjusting accordingly.

Participants perform at UH’s School of Communications for a live broadcast to a studio audience at Diverseworks.

The Studio Performance

The participant’s performances at an offsite studio, UH’s Valenti School of Communications news studio, were also projected in front of the audience at Diverseworks. Relentlessly on-camera, the preened personalities looked like animatronics after the lights ignite but before the electricity flows. Each was activated to deliver highly refined, empathy-inspiring sound bites, intercut with footage from their pre-media training interview and previous TV appearances. To my ear, their stories had the bizarre quality of Toastmaster speeches, so smoothed over by abstract principles that they lose their spark and credibility. The art crowd audience seemed to agree, asserting that mistakes and vulnerability make it seem more real.

Back at the media training in February, in an on-the-spot moment, the award winning, show stopping Linda Lorrelle shared her experience reporting on a competing anchor and eventual friend’s struggle with cancer. The room was emotionally saturated and we were all cancer-awareness champions, when, in an emotion-barring voice, Laser offered incriminating and inconsistent feedback. At times she echoed grooming tips on posture, gesture, and inflection, and at times she seemed to be working against it to deliberately pale the evocative.[1]

The same week of this media training, Laser’s own delivery during her artist talk at Rice University was long and drawn out. As her voice slid into a grating and disaffected monotone, it seemed curious that someone so steeped in methods of effective communication would not deploy any of them. Maybe it’s a deliberate modulation to avoid spectacle or celebrity, but it is also recognizable as the designated artist affect.[2]

Alongside a requisite cynicism, the wry reveal has risen to prominence as the most recognizable artistic gesture of our times. This was exactly the case in Laser’s Armory Show contribution, crowd sourced from art consumers in focus groups. As in Push Poll, Laser looked at the feedback loop, how behavior is generated based on response, and on and on and on. In this case, Laser’s approach of asking the consumer what they want to consume produced something novel, but pre-digested.[3]

Photo of Laser’s Armory Show swag from Kareem Estefan’s post.

The Armory Show all too easily swallowed Laser ‘s critical stab at its “lend your artist identity to the fair” demands, so instead of causing a rift in the system, Laser’s process generated swag that brands its bearers as self-aware and its profit driven fair as avant-garde.

Sometimes, overestimating the institution’s intention to take advantage, the artist gives support a preemptive thrashing that the harshest neoliberal would applaud. Sometimes, underestimating the institution’s ability to take advantage, the artist as a whistle blower merely creates on-demand disruptions too reliant on support to effectively address issues or implicate the host.

Considering this minefield, kudos to Laser and to Diverseworks. She let down some of her well justified guard to conduct a less predetermined examination of authenticity in performance. They continued to support dynamic work in its unruly but rich experimental stage.[4]

Degrees of Consumability

Earlier this March, Laser answered an interview invitation with an insightful investigation of the interview as a form. She mentioned resentment at having to stand outside her work and reveal its truth, and having to perform her authentic self.

This is understandable, especially with lifestyle questions asking, “What bar do you like? What books do you read? What art do you buy?” that seem designed for fans to consume like her in addition to consuming her. Like others in the spotlight, artists can’t afford to drop a rich thought just once or slow down the personal divulging- getting off the conveyor belt means becoming obsolete.

If Laser has figured out that resistance’s next turn will, in fact, be a very purposeful invisibility, she has a given us a head start on how to tactically disappear behind performed affectations.

At a time when the public is not only media literate but increasingly fluent, from entertainment (reality TV) to political spectacle (Mission Accomplished) Laser is hung up on why performances are still effective even when we know how they are constructed.[5]

Liz Magic Laser, “Tell Me What You Want to Hear” 3 channel videos projected at Diverseworks.
left to right: the control room at the news studio, the studio feed, the audience at Diverseworks.

The Art Show

Tell Me What You Want to Hear is represented for subsequent audiences as three channels of synced video: from the control room of Laser and the production team, from the studio of the participants as they performed (intercut with previous media training and TV appearance footage), and from Diverseworks of Buggs and the live audience.

As you enter the space, perpendicular to the posted script, shiny and smiley photographs of each participant greet you. In these photographs as well as in the video, the participants appear stacked into frames with their previous appearances, pinpointing degrees of refinement throughout the media training process, and forcing a collapse between personality and performance.

photos: Patrick Bresnan of Lizette Garcia

photos: Patrick Bresnan of Maurice Duhon

photos: Patrick Bresnan of Linda Lorelle

The Participants

In projects such as In Camera, The Digital Face, and I Feel Your Pain, Laser used actors to play media professionals and politicians. In Tell Me What You Want to Hear, she seems in pursuit of a less removed representation. She used people, who have actually performed these roles, to perform heightened versions of themselves. This is where things may have gotten interestingly off-kilter for Laser. Not only could she not control the non-actors, but she had to contend with their expertise.

Although Laser “see[s] camera and camera operators as playing constitutive roles in the scenarios [she] create[s],”[6] the project’s lack of clear intention was a point of frustration for some participants. ”This is what we do,” asserted one of the media production students who did the camera, sound, and editing for work Tell Me What You Want to Hear. Although appreciative of the unique, hands on experience, they wanted to be respected for and directed in their craft.

At times, I wondered if Tell Me What You Want to Hear was another absorption of a non-art field into the art world to be observed, examined, and teased – not necessarily with anything being teased out. Critical distance has such cache that artists who operate at a remove can be valued more than artists who work near enough to perceive the essential.

Without acknowledging Lorrelle, Buggs, and Anderson’s motivations for getting their message across with as much impact as possible, Tell Me What You Want to Hear could stop at faulting them for their method.

UH School of Communications Media Production students did the camera, sound,
and editing work for “Tell Me What You Want to Hear.”

When Does Media Become Mass

But, what at first seemed like antagonism directed at the wrong people (not having access to the president’s coaches or the news media giants and picking on local professionals who volunteered for her project instead) turned out to be a question of “When does media become mass?”

This inquiry hung in the air most starkly during young, aspiring broadcast journalist Lizette Garcia’s moments on camera. She earnestly described how she wants to influence people’s opinions and amplify the Latino perspective, but she couldn’t help mechanically repeating the questions and agreeing that she must straighten her hair to be camera ready.

When the artist’s deconstructive unraveling lacks a simultaneous additive process to create new meaning, the gotcha! impulse makes for art that is paranoid as well as predictable. Where Tell Me What You Want to Hear raises crucial questions is in Laser’s own use of the feedback loop and in the participants’ contributions- pivotal elements of a show that, in the end, echoes its own multilayered process.

In the case of Lorrelle, the virtuosity of her performance disarmed the examination of it. Those tense moments between Lorrelle and Laser created some of the weirdest disconnects between the art worker’s propensity for deconstruction and the media worker’s aim to perfectly refine.

Something generative came from the clashing between the current art world formula: irony + opacity = sophisticated art and the media standard: easily consumable entertainment = successful journalism.

Surplus Value

The fact that artists can take extant but untapped parts of life; garbage collecting, walking, luchadors, shrimping, focus groups, and reconfigure them in an art context to generate cultural value[7] is one example of what experts artists are at manufacturing meaning–or in Marxist terminology – surplus value. The charismatic talking head that makes the news seem real is not all that different from the brand that makes a product twice as expensive is not all that different from the extra white space around a print that takes itself more seriously and so fetches a higher price.

2 “In a bid to be ‘fit’ for philosophical, as well as political discourse, artist have learned to cultivate detachment, distrust, and doubt…” the normalized status of disenchantment within the new spirit of contemporary capitalism… disenchantment itself has become a normalized aesthetic strategy fully integrated into a contemporary art market…So too the cultivation of disenchantment and various ‘ugly’ feelings within the critical humanities risks becoming an ‘operational requirement.’” Jackson, 207.

3 See also Komar and Melamid’s Most Wanted Paintings.

4 Far too many arts institutions have become media masters in their own right, shooting the photos and writing the copy that portrays any event as a raving success regardless of how substantial or interesting it actually was. Documentation that makes the stuff look good after the fact is, after all, what is required by the funders, so it is sometimes what takes precedence. Glimpsing all that went into it, I can vouch that how Tell Me What You Want to Hearis represented by Diverseworks is just the tip of the iceberg.

5 “I’m dissatisfied with the relationship we, the public, have to mass media. This is precisely the relationship I would like to see dismantled and re-assembled…The avant-garde distrusted catharsis because it rendered viewers passive and unable to think critically…The same performance methods used to conjure audience empathy are being applied in tandem with market research to engineer public opinion. In my work I am trying to reckon with the fact that our awareness does not break the spell performance can have on us.” “Liz Magic Laser, Commissioned artist, The Armory Show Focus Group, 2013″ by Katy Diamond Hamer, Flash Art Online, March 5, 2013. 

6 ibid.

7 Though perhaps only in an abstract, isolated sense, insofar as I’m not sure how much good social practice has done for social work, etc.
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Images courtesy of Diverseworks.
This essay was first published on The Great God Pan is Dead.

This is not a new question but it is a timely one as these well known stylists can attest:

April 24, 2013: AFC/Paddy Johnson proclaims, “Don’t Move to New York”

March 29, 2013: Dave Hickey calls on us to, “give up our institutions, relinquish our vain pursuit of accreditation, and summoned us to become artists again.”

March 7, 2013: Patti Smith to Artists: Don’t Come to New York

February 6, 2013: Christian Viveros-Faune in The Village Voice says, “Uptown Money Kills Downtown Art”

Or, even The Onion’s almost true satire: “8.4 Million New Yorkers Suddenly Realize New York City A Horrible Place To Live.”

In an industry that is tied together by one universally connective variable – the absolute need for external validation – can art continue to flourish and even alternatively adapt on the margins? Has it being doing this all along and the same cyclical visit to conversations of money and art has come around… again? Does pointing out inequities also reinforce categorization and ultimately commodification? Will the margins remain such and become whatever tier they eventually are slotted into no matter how much they care or not?

The following is an sampling of my ongoing collection (under the title “Margins or New Multiple Centers”) of thoughts, first hand accounts, and speculations from transplants, locals, newbies, townies, old hats, and hangers-on in some left of center art locales. Some are further left than others but all house a unique energy that sustains creative enterprise on the fringe.

ALYSSA TAYLOR WENDT
Austin, TX

“Maybe it is a sense that it is the writing of laws and not the breaking of them, that is the most significant and characteristic artistic act in modernity.” ~Jeff Wall

“He’d told me once that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way. The air was full of rage and complaint. People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.” ~ Don DeLillo, White Noise

Last month marked a year that I have lived in Austin, Texas so I feel barely qualified to give my fervent share of views. However, my process and work will truly never be the same. As a New York ex-pat, I came to Texas originally to “get my sanity back” during an “experimental leave of absence” that was supposed to last five months, but….Yep, I’m still here. All I seemed to be doing in NYC was what I like to call the Survive N Hustle and man, was I tired. A spiritual exhaustion deep in my bones. So I flew South and set up shop.

The first thing I realized was that I had no idea How To Enjoy Life. I set about listening to people be genuinely nice and helpful with shock and suspicion. When I reported back, my New York crew scoffed, “What the F*$^ does that mean?” While I feared that I had abandoned the true center of the universe, what I have found here is a quiet cauldron of creative time and space that I never had in the big cities I have spent the majority of my life: NYC, San Francisco, Phoenix. I literally spend most of my time here….making art. Isn’t this what was supposed to happen all along? Being an artist should mean that I make or think about art, not bartend until predawn or build window displays for fancy department stores in under-heated warehouses in Queens.

Austin has been really good to me. The creative undercurrent in the people here is loose and free and flowing, but without the dark curse of say, Memphis, as much as I love that town. Here in Austin, there are some art institutions and ever fewer commercial galleries, but this is compensated for by the incredible and constant efforts of small artist-run independent endeavors too numerous to name: Co-Lab Projects, MASS Gallery, Monofonus Press, Tiny Park, OK Mountain, Grayduck Gallery, The Museum of Human Achievement, Fusebox Festival, Big Medium, Pump Project, EAST and WEST studio tours and the list goes on. The city shells out to curate and fill City Hall with a year long juried show annually. A new organization curates artists each year to put on roving billboards throughout the city. The people are honestly supportive and curious. I have never had so many people genuinely ask me questions about my ideas and my work. While the art markets in Dallas and Houston remain more profitable, they are close by and we are left with a liberal town that encourages and rewards ambition and ideas. If I sound like a medicated spokesperson, that only testifies to my incredible enlightenment being the small town, slower, peripheral version of me. For now, at least.

This is a town of endless festivals that tends to overshadow attention to the arts, but I am relishing being under the radar. Always having to be “on” in a city like New York leaves no room to fuck up or fail or experiment or even do something outside, for Crissakes! The wide skies, the dry prairie winds, the cheap(er) rents. Ingredients for new routes, new possibilities. In a bigger art scene, I constantly feel like I’m in conversation with every show and every other artist, whereas here, the lack of constant overstimulation or manic activity actually gives me room for dips into new rooms and lucid pockets. I answer to my own lines drawn in the sand and look forward to the unknown outcome of cut tethers and the freeing of form. Some call Austin the Velvet Coffin and at times, I have to admit, it does feel good enough to lie here forever.

You can see more of Alyssa Taylor Wendt’s work here: www.alyssataylorwendt.com

JOSHUA JON MILLER
San Diego, CA

First of all I have to give Mike credit. This project is prompting some serious soul searching, and I imagine, the other contributors, and hopefully, the readers. We fret over this sort of question daily, but we rarely have to put it in writing.

I don’t feel there are any easy answers to why I’m in San Diego. I did most of my growing up here, but moved to Los Angeles for a BFA. Although L.A. would have been a good place for connections, career building, etc, when I graduated, it didn’t feel like a good place for me. I was working 30 hours a week and making art in a narrow garage. I didn’t feel attached to what I was making and in that setting, I knew it would take a long time for me to figure anything out. I was also too immature to cope with the social jockeying that comes with a big art city. There was a very clear sense that I needed to be alone.
An opportunity arose to live on my grandparent’s farm in Colorado. What was intended to be a six month get away turned into three years of living in a farm town. Three prime, youthful years in L.A. were traded for PK’s, middle-America good’ol boys, and Grandpa’s breakfast club. Actually, it was a good routine. Breakfast and garage sailing with grandpa and the rest of the day fucking around with art. I had plenty of time, space, and equipment. My cross stitching, shabby chic-ing grandma played the art critic.

The isolation was good for me. With enough distance from peers and steady reading, I was able to build a strong internal logic, slowly molding and trimming my art, values, and routine into something cohesive. That kind of isolation is potent; you can get a bit too eccentric, or too detached from the contemporary. The contemporary starts to matter less. But I also looked to John Baldessari’s stories of making art in National City (coincidentally, four miles south where I am now). He described how the proliferation of contemporary art publications allowed him to stay abreast of contemporary issues without having to live in a major city. If that were true in the 70′s, it is exponentially more true today. The range of digital media have conspired to decentralize the economy of ideas and news. It feels like information technology has also made art better. The difficulty we’ve had in applying “isms” to the last quarter-century of art feels more like a product of diversity than a lack of vision. Mike describes ‘Multiple New [geographic] Centers’ and I think that could be extended to multiple new ideological centers from which art is made and defended.

However, websites and tertiary museums don’t replace brave exhibition spaces and sharp-eyed peers. As unique and irreplaceable as the country charms were, I always maintained an eye toward Los Angeles, looking for a way to afford an ambitious sculptor/painter’s practice there. When the recession hit, an opportunity became available in San Diego. It wasn’t L.A., but it was Southern California, well-paying, part-time work, big studio, surfing, and the chance to vanquish some familial guilt that had been haunting me since I left for Los Angeles. So I took it. I guess that reveals my loyalties. Thus far, at the cost of the best chances for a career break, I’ve always gone to where I have the best chances of a large studio and significant time to make work. (I’ve also stuck by family, which is the trend I’m less comfortable with.) Regardless, most of my life I’ve been into making big, physical, things and have never been comfortable with trusting the art economy to afford that kind of luxury on a consistent, long-term basis. I’m as worried about the art I will make this year as the paintings I want to be playing with in my 60′s and 70′s.

So, here I am. In San Diego. While it fails to provide a mechanism to reliably move deserving artists up the ranks, it does have a sense of consequence. In comparison with rural Colorado, this environment has made my work sharper and more ambitious. Between the universities, museums, artists working here, and proximity to Tijuana and Los Angeles, I feel accountable for what I make in ways that I didn’t on the farm. I also hold stubbornly to the belief that the work should lead, that a thing should be crafted such that the audience finds it undeniable. Aside from making work, I’ve also joined in the efforts to make San Diego a more serious scene. For the last three years I’ve been curating at an artist-run project space, working to build exhibition opportunities in our community and help integrate it with neighboring cities. More recently I’ve been developing an arts journal with Julian Rogers called Dodo Editions. It’s a multi-pronged effort aimed at improving the documentation, criticism, and exposure of art made in this region. I’m also hoping it will unlock some of the latent potential that exists between San Diego, TJ and LA.

In a place like San Diego you have to dream things up; there’s little established order, and less willing machinery. I often wonder why I got so entangled in these things when I just want to make work. Project spaces, reviews…now grad school? I guess it’s because it’s fun; problems make life interesting. Like my Great Grandma Lind said, “Do something. Even if you have to do it wrong.”

You can see more of Joshua Miller’s work here: www.joshuajonmiller.com

MELODY OWEN
Portland, OR

Finding an art scene in a small city in a rain forest…Yes, there is one. I have been lucky enough to watch it grow like a cluster of mushrooms at the base of an old growth pine. In my experience, it began with a conglomeration of creative types of many fields. Music was first (for me) with Elliott Smith and all those 90s bands, and then the independent film people creating festivals. Then visual artists, previously few and scattered, started coming together in groups and putting on shows. Core Sample and the Modern Zoo being two examples of pretty stellar community organized events. The 1990s and 2000s were time of breaking out of a long time of isolation, from craft and more traditional art which has been around forever. People moved from other places and work emerged that was contemporary and conceptual. It is still a “do it yourself” culture and and still small but with a growing population and art infrastructure. The Portland Art Museum added a wing for contemporary art and the local art school, PNCA, is going to move into a gigantic old building in the Park Blocks. The galleries who show contemporary art; PDX, Elizabeth Leach, PICA, Blue Sky Gallery, Disjecta and others are being joined by newcomers who will provide more venues and opportunities. It is a difficult prospect for an artist to survive as an artist in Portland. Art collectors are few and far between and the funding organizations are stretched thin. But there is clean air and room to breathe, giant trees and volcanoes, and other people who like stuff like that.

You can see more of Melody Owen’s work here: www.thistlepress.net

KEN NURENBERG
Columbus, OH

I was born and raised in South Bend, Indiana, and completed my BFA in Indianapolis. Afterwards I ran off to a semester post-bac residency in rural France, and then moved here to Columbus, Ohio for graduate school at Ohio State. I’ve never lived or worked anywhere that would be considered a cultural center (unless one is interested in football as a cultural phenomenon) so working on the margins of the larger art community is all I really know. I hardly knew anyone living or closely connected to major art center until I had the opportunity to attend the Skowhegan residency in 2011, which was packed full of artists from Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and other major centers. Since then I’ve felt myself drifting back to the routine disconnection of living in the Midwest. Some upsides to this are a slower pace of life and low cost of living, which grant me time and energy to devote to my own work that I’m not sure I would have somewhere like New York. One major downside is the awareness that I inhabit a marginalized role in a conservative community largely indifferent to visual art, with a shortage of galleries and exhibition spaces for both showing and seeing work.

As much as I am frustrated by the conservatism and short-term thinking of this region, I also feel some sense of responsibility towards trying to change this situation for the better. There is a perpetual conflict between wanting to push the city’s art forward while also being desperately impatient to be somewhere that will push my own work forward. There are some hopeful signs. For instance the Canzani Center Gallery, at the otherwise commercial design oriented Columbus College of Art and Design (full disclosure: I install art there), has recently been bringing in some of the most ambitious shows seen in the area, under the direction of former James Cohan exhibition head Michael Goodson. Through the Canzani artists like Trenton Doyle Hancock, Nari Ward, Byron Kim, and Donald Moffett are streaming through Columbus pretty regularly. Hell, I just got to help out with executing a Sol Lewitt for the current exhibition, “Wall.” Smaller initiatives are also popping up. Melissa Vogley Woods’ project Rooms to Let is creating challenging opportunities for artists to produce work based around and installed in local housing slated for demolition. Ry Wharton’s Center for Ongoing Research and Projects (COR&P), housed in a tiny building I think was previously used as a parking attendant’s office, recently brought Shana Lutker to town to show work based on fistfights between the surrealists. [See Melissa Vogley Woods’ interview with Ryland Wharton on COR&P] Ann Hamilton lives and works here, and the studio she shares with her partner Michael Mercil acts as site for dinners and lecture nights with visiting artists and critics, in connection with Ohio State’s MFA program. [See Nancy Zastudil’s interview with Michael Mercil] And then there’s the Wexner Center, which has Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” on view right now. So, there are engaging things to be found here. However, there still isn’t that much, meaning one runs out of new things to look at pretty quick. There is nothing here that approaches a gallery district for randomly hopping around and seeing new work when one needs a quick art fix.

At the moment, though, I feel pretty good about being here. I work several freelance jobs as an exhibition installer, which generally keeps me just barely financially solvent but also leaves me with time between jobs that I can use to focus in the studio. I also feel lucky in that I am at a point in which time and some isolation are what I want as I set out to build a new body of work after grad school. But I know this might not last, and I am also aware that the small community of artist friends I have here will probably drift apart over time, with some finding teaching positions or other opportunities in elsewhere. So I keep a part of one eye out for the next step, while trying to concentrate on the most important thing, making work.

You can see more of Ken’s work here: www.kennurenberg.com, kennurenberg.tumblr.com

Amelia-Colette Jones: Jenny, you had the idea for Perennial when you were an undergrad at Washington University in St. Louis, what is the rough timeline of events from “Perennial the idea” to where you are now as a realized organization with a brick and mortar space?

Jenny Murphy: I had the idea in 2008 when I developed a creative re-purpose public art project for the City of University City. I was still thinking about it at the end of 2008-2009 after I graduated from Wash U. I started trying out different reuse arts programming with different organizations. I worked on the Urban Renewal program with the Pulitzer in 2010. The same year the board came together and Perennial became incorporated. In 2011 Perennial received 501c3 status, competed and won in the Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies YSEIC Competition and in 2012 we moved into our current space. Its been FUn FunFUn since then.

AJ: Brie, at what point did you come in? Can you talk about coming back to St. Louis after going to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, why did you choose to move back to St. Louis?

Brie Cella: I started volunteering with Perennial about 2.5 years ago. Coming back to St. Louis after having lived in Chicago for three years was really refreshing. Chicago is a really vibrant city and I am really grateful for that experience, but I had a nagging urge to move back to my hometown. I still had lifelong friends living in St. Louis and I couldn’t see myself really making a home in Chicago. Plus, it seemed Chicago was already established. St. Louis has so much potential and is such an awesome small city, that you have greater access to tapping into all the neat projects/businesses popping up. Plus, rent is about 40% cheaper here. All in all, St. Louis is highly accessible in a multitude of ways.

AJ: Would you both maybe talk about St. Louis a little and why you guys wanted to stick around and start something like this here vs. another city…like Chicago or Austin or…I feel like any bravery I have or confidence to create now is linked to living in this city – there’s a feeling of necessity that I don’t really feel other places.

JM: I love St. Louis. By the time I was thinking seriously about starting Perennial, I had made a lot of connections and drummed up some interest for the idea here, so it was just the next step to start the organization here. I also think I had opportunities here that I would not have had in other cities. You also feel a lot of support for new ideas from the community here. Folks are really excited you are doing something in St. Louis, because there are these gaps that need to be filled with innovative and creative ideas!

BC: Thin crust pizza. Enough said. (I’m joking, but serious. I think I answered this in the previous question)

AJ: Jenny, did some of the initial mixed feedback you received on your project while you were still in school inform how you frame Perennial today?

JM: I think it helped me learn to take criticism and also believe in crazy ideas.

We still struggle with the “is this art?” question. Our organization is so seeped in the arts, it’s the basis of everything we do, but it is a conversation/convincing we have to continually have/do with folks. I think my experience in academia help me understand that it’s important for me to not take it personally if someone doesn’t see Perennial the way I or our supporters do. I just see those conversations as an opportunity to expand people’s idea of ‘what is art?’ and if we walk away still in separate camps I know it’s not that big of a deal.

I’m sure they will at least understand the fact that we’re diverting waste from landfills. The environmental side is much easier to absorb. Creativity is one of our main values as an organization, but different people are drawn to our organization and mission for different reasons.

AJ: Perennial is a non-profit – what are the pros and cons of being a non-profit art organization?

JM: For Perennial, we have a strong social mission. We want to create a social shift in which we transform consumer culture into creative culture. So for us, all our activities help us work toward that mission. That is the base line of why we became a non-profit. I also think the non-profit structure (in terms of community accountability (board), community support (donors)) are important aspects to create meaningful change. It’s much more difficult to get non-profit status then to start a business (applications, fees, etc.), but it really depends on what your end goal is: individual benefit ($) or community benefit.

AJ: How does having an art background (Jenny: BFA from Washington University, Brie: BFA from Art Institute of Chicago) inform your approach to Perennial?

JM: It helps me solve problems creatively, know there’s not a ‘right’ way to do a lot of things, and also listen to suggestions/ideas and incorporate them into my work (after so many critiques, you get good at this!).

BC: I consider Perennial as much of an arts organization as I do a social organization. Looking at a bunch of junk and being able to not only transform it, but to push beyond its original function, is a highly intellectual and creative process. You have to see beyond the standardization of objects. For me, the creative process has always been something more transcendent than the final piece. Having spent my college years making things, rethinking things, transforming things, and experimenting with things, I see Perennial as an alleyway to finding creative solutions to economic, consumer and environmental challenges. It’s art that makes sense.

AJ: How do you see Perennial growing in the future?

BC: From the moment I found out about what Jenny was doing, I knew this project had major potential. The organization addresses so many issues and so elegantly finds a common solution. Perennial isn’t just about taking alley finds and giving it a new coat of paint; It challenges society’s current lifestyle. I envision Perennial as a community resource. A resource of not only knowledge, but objects/items you might use in your everyday life. When your mop breaks, do you go to Target to pick up a new one? No. You go to Perennial where you either learn how to fix it yourself or you let us fix it for you. Perennial is creating a paradigm shift towards a more conscious consumer. It’s the modern mom and pop store, but just a bit more hip. You’ll know us by name and trust us. Perennial will be a part of the community. You’ll stop by just to say hi. And yes, we’ll need more hands in the shop to get there.

JM: We definitely want to expand our staff as we expand our reach. We want to become a go-to spot for creative, sustainable, fun, and arts-based programming in St. Louis and ideally begin to share our programming nationally as well. We also hope to grow our retail to generate more sustainable income for our programs and operations. Maybe a centrally located St. Louis retail shop? Maybe selling all over the USA? We’re working towards those kinds of goals.

On the final day of the sympoisum, the participants began to diagram the results of their discussions. Each of the four diagrams are represented below with related audio and follow-up descriptions by the organizers and four panelists.

Diagram 1: The Linear Model

Adelheid Mers: This is the cliché – and the traditional idea still presented by gate keepers – we are no longer interested in supporting.

It goes like this: Coming from anywhere, the artist (genius, solitary worker, in need of a studio if a visual artist) needs to move to an urban center at some point, accepting initial hardship, to find inspiration and be discovered for a market (and for the attendant discourse) by a gate keeper.

Sarrita Hunn: This first diagram shows a straight line from “JC” aka Johnson City, where East Tennessee State University is located, to “NY” or New York City. This represents what is the assumed linear path for artistic success. It is the thought that you have not really “made it” until you have an exhibition in New York City or that in order to have the chance to be a successful artist you must live in the five boroughs.

This is not only a limited but incredibly problematic view of artistic opportunity and success. Through developing new diagrams and ways of thinking about artistic possibilities we hoped to explode this limited model.

Joey Orr: I was interested in this very linear and sort of impoverished model due to a clarification that happened on the first day. When speaking about social media and digital platforms, there is a sense in which this can be read as “leveling the playing field.” Not only is this not true in the literal sense of art market realities, but it underscores a kind of false goal. One of the things our gathering was invested in was that it’s not always best (or possible) for any of us for a myriad of reasons (economic, artistic, personal, even political) to inhabit particular geographies. The point of the discussion was to tend to the complicated and overlapping networks that we can explore and begin to map in a way that creates a greater spectrum of variance and engagement.

Diagram 2: Mindset

Adelheid Mers: The first idea to be exploded was what it might mean to be creative in various environments. Taking recourse to Flusser’s “Exile and Creativity,” modes of perceptivity were explored that evolve under different circumstances.

Sarrita Hunn: We found it helpful to use this diagram to think about the effect of new experiences and places on a person’s “aesthetic” state. In one example, the first few months of an MFA program may make one feel as though they are in ‘exile’ – in an over stimulated “hyperesthetic” state – that makes it difficult to focus and make work. However, if one is able to continue through that experience and become comfortable enough in the situation to be productive, they may harbour the “creative’”state of a migrant, or at least the “aesthetic” state of the “immigrant” who is at once comfortable with their environment but never completely “at home.”

As we were generally referring to people and specific situations in relation to this diagram, we chose to change the first state “native” to “origin,” as a less confusing term in regards to anyone person’s ‘state’ more than their literal ‘statehood’ or nationality. Also, the “origin” of any one ‘travel’ can re-occur for people multiple times. In fact, it may be that people can even inhabit various states at the same time depending on the situation at hand. This complexity was further explored in our next diagram.

Joey Orr: The most important point of this early diagram, for me, was that it enabled us to use Flusser’s ideas as an actual “working” theory. In other words, the drawing enabled us to conceive our discourse spatially, and thus mutually.

Diagram 3: Complex Model

Adelheid Mers: On day 1, our discussion had explored three main axes: Practice, Place and Movement.

The endpoints of the Practice axis were marked by the market on one end and by site on the other.

Place moved from real to virtual.

Movement was flanked by mobility (having means) and motility (being ready).

Sarrita Hunn: If Diagram 2 can be thought of as the path of one’s “mindset” and represents the User/Immigrant (as represented in the right side of this image) then this Diagram might be thought of the field of possibility/potential through which the person/”mindset” may inhabit.

We began with 3 axes in which to plot our Diagram of possibilities (meant as a clear expansion of the first diagram). The first axis was “Practice” which ran from a “Commodity/Market” model to a “Sited/Service” model. The second axis was “Movement” which ran from “Mobility”, or actual movement, to “Motility” or the potential for movement. The final axis was “Place” which ran from “actual” (geo, real, root, archive, deep) to the “virtual” (web, float, simultaneity, surface, broad).

Our initial observation was that once these axes were organized they could easily be split between left side, which characterized “individual” activities and the right side, which characterized “collective” activities. We next began to hypothesize what phenomenon might exist between each of these axis. Between the “commodity/market” and “mobility” axis, for example, you may see the results of globalisation in form of homogenization. However, “mobility” may also create a greater need for “actual/real” action…that may eventually (move far away from the virtual) effecting a very specific place.

If one can imagine now the “Immigrant/User”/diagram oscillating through this field of possibility then it becomes possibility to start to discuss one’s artistic experience outside of a linear model (JC<>NYC). This was especially helpful when trying to summarize the thematic discussions held at each of the four roundtables that included: WWW (the world wide web), Local Production, Altered Institutions and Radical Habits.

Also see: Adelheid Mers’ follow-up on this and other diagrams using a 3-line Matrix.

Diagram 4: Complex Model veering towards 3D (side view?)

Adelheid Mers: As we were fleshing out Diagram 3, it became apparent that the degree of complexity it allowed us to tackle required spatial thinking beyond the two dimensional plane. Modes of movement through the space were imagined, too.

Sarrita Hunn: Even as the complexity of Diagram 3 increased it began to have limitations in terms of how each of the areas might interact and/or be related. After some discussion, a final diagram was created which imagines the 3 axes in 3D space. Here the PLACE and PRACTICE axes are seen on top and bottom with each potential 3rd axis illustrated with its own plane.

Joey Orr: The best thing about having different people posit different models was to think the same challenge by way of different spatial relationships. This was the implicit challenge of the entire conference, actually. How might occupying different positions along an expanded spectrum enable us to practice our part in discourse.

PROJEXx Studio and Gallery. Johnson City, TN

Here we present the third in our series reports from the “Outer Regions: Roundtables and Public Panel Discussion,” a two-day event held at Eastern Tennessee State University, March 1-3, 2013. The symposium was organized by Vanessa Mayoraz and Andrew Ross to explore the ramifications, and potential benefits, of artistic practice outside of major metropolitan art centers. The roundtable participants included: Emma Balazs (Columbia University), Sarrita Hunn (Temporary Art Review), Adelheid Mers (The School of the Art Institute of Chicago), Joey Orr (Emory University) and ETSU faculty and students.

This audio essay focuses on the third roundtable discussion titled, “Altered Institutions.” In this discussion, the regular participants were joined by Nikki Hamblin, founder of PROJEXx Studio and Gallery in Johnson City, TN, which will hold its final closing event this Saturday, April 27th.

Projexx closing party – 5 visual artists, 6 performance artists and 7 bands

Stay tuned for our final essay in this series to be published shortly.

Over the series of four roundtable discussions, the group continually found it helpful to reference a diagram that Adelheid Mers introduced and had developed (pictured below) in response to Vilém Flusser’s essay “Exile and Creativity” which, for use in our discussions, plots an individual’s path through aesthetic transformation as it happens in response to new experiences. The text, as first published here, is Adelheid’s original essay (first written in 2009) that discusses the Flusser diagram and addresses the general “onus to make oneself.”

Self-made
In “Exile and Creativity” (1984)[1], Flusser maps out potentially consecutive circumstances that shape immersion in and responses to nationality. With each stage, a state of perceptivity is connected. First up is a native, any native, who embraces life within given frames. A native is anesthetic, lives under a protective blanket of familiar myths, relatively blind to circumstance. As a traveler – someone who expects to return home – the native may become a stranger who encounters other natives and has occasion to sample the unusual. Travelers are aesthetic; they vividly perceive their temporary environments. If the traveler is barred from return, the exile comes to the fore. The exile is lost. An exile is hyper-aesthetic, overwhelmed by too much unfamiliar data in a state of homelessness. As the exile mobilizes to make sense, the migrant may materialize, sustaining a shifting balance of environmental perception and personal stability. This is the condition that most favors creativity. This migrant – never ceasing to be strange – poses a challenge to the natives by reminding them of the contingency of their truths, and by witnessing realities that may counter circulating rhetorics.

At the outset of the essay and as a backdrop for this discussion of creativity as both necessitated and enabled by having to make sense of what is foreign, Flusser requests the reader to keep in mind “the Christian story of man’s expulsion from Paradise and his entrance into the world, the Jewish mystic’s story of the exile of divine spirit in the world, and the existentialist story of man as a stranger in the world.”[2] This backdrop suggests that a notion he only briefly touches on may be posited as the existential premise for creativity: more than simply “the freedom to change oneself and others,”[3] but also the onus to make oneself.

In 2008, an arts policy platform[4] was published by the Obama National Arts Policy Committee, a body of initially almost 100 and later of 33 members. Along with four other statements that address arts education, funding, health care and taxation, it includes the headings “Promote Cultural Diplomacy” and “Attract Foreign Talent.” The policy platform is appended with a statement by novelist Michael Chabon, an Obama National Arts Policy Committee member: “Art increases the sense of our common humanity. The imagination of the artist is, therefore, a profoundly moral imagination: the easier it is for you to imagine walking in someone else’s shoes, the more difficult it then becomes to do that person harm. If you want to make a torturer, first kill his imagination. If you want to create a nation that will stand by and allow torture to be practiced in its name, then go ahead and kill its imagination, too. You could start by cutting school funding for art, music, creative writing and the performing arts.” The common humanity Chabon evokes may well be rooted in the capacity to witness that Flusser sees as a central contribution the exile makes to a host society.

Titled “Barack Obama: A Champion for the Arts”, the policy platform is prefaced by an unattributed, 3 sentence statement that starts grandiose and ends with valuation by popular success. “Our nation’s creativity has filled the world’s libraries, museums, recital halls, movie houses, and marketplaces with works of genius. The arts embody the American spirit of self-definition (my italics). As the author of two bestselling books – Dreams from My Father and The Audacity of Hope – Barack Obama uniquely appreciates the role and value of creative expression.” The central sentence, though, echoes the subtext Flusser evokes in Exile and Creativity – the onus to make oneself. This is here claimed as something that founds the American experience. Can the vulnerability of a migrant that Flusser claims as strength and that the arts – according to Chabon – safeguard and also rely on, also turn into a cult of the migrant that founds a new, anesthetic nationality, particularly when conditions for creativity are neglected? If so, acknowledgment of and support for real creativity brought into play by the migrant, the witness, the artist, can be construed by some as a direct challenge to the mythical creativity at the core of a key US narrative.

Do-it-yourself
“Nach der Post-moderne?” (After the Post-modern?), was published in “Nachgeschichte” (Posthistory)[5] in the second section of the book, “Eine korrigierte Geschichtsschreibung” (A Corrected Historiography). Writing in 1991, Flusser claims that we “are just beginning to become cognizant of what ‘modern’ means.”[6] The essay completes two consecutive movements. Allowing as an initial premise the notion that we are indeed emerging out of the postmodern, as the title indicates, it opens with a discussion of fractures in existing belief systems that arose in the 15th century[7] and only later joined forces to create the new modes of thought and action – science and technology – that define modernity. Flusser then seeks to detect fractures in current, potentially postmodern belief systems, which are characterized by unhappiness with the existing uses of science and technology – including a feeling of emptiness in regard to science and a loss of meaning through over-saturation with media – that might foreshadow the emergence of what it is that follows the postmodern.

The second move seeks to define anthropologies (in the theological sense of the term, determining the relation of humankind to the divine) and opens with the description of a medieval structure, Roman in origin, that conceives of an “author (the creator, the founder, the unmoved mover), and this author nominated (called) authorities, through whose mediation he contained and ordered (systematized) all of creation. The ‘human’ creature had to stay connected with the author through authorities to avoid losing itself (getting lost).”[8] Rooted in Flusser’s reinterpretation of the Copernican Revolution as “an explosion of spatial and temporal dimensions,”[9] a modern anthropology is then juxtaposed. “The fundamental anthropological experience was no longer the immeasurability of the author, but the immeasurability of the human environment.”[10] Initially, enthusiastically experienced as an opportunity to discover measure in nature instead of having to measure up, the shift has now fully asserted itself as a move into a rootlessness unearthed by the realization of having not found, but indeed imposed measure. The essay’s second move has proven the title question (After the Post-modern?) to be moot. In a nutshell, to be modern means to have migrated from the role of the created accountable to an author to that of a creator accountable to the environment. It means to be creative. Do-it-yourself. DIY. And thus, “[a]fterpostmodern means regrettably-still-Modern.”[11]

There are two streams of DIY movements out there. The older one is an upshot of the myth of the self-made man alluded to under A above. An entire industry caters to the handy man, who is presented with expert advice in many TV shows, with opportunities to share or show off, for example in the “Did-it-myself” section[12] on home improvement sites like doityourself.com[13], and with goods to purchase in the ubiquitous oversized home improvement warehouses. In his exhaustively researched paper “Do-It-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity”, Steven M. Gelber[14] traces the development of this movement from the 1870s to today, revealing its many affirmative functions that reach from giving the suburban organization man room for unsupervised, non-competitive activity to providing the comfort of working with known variables that are rooted in traditions of craftsmanship, noting that “fixed values of this sort are a tremendous consolation in a world where the most fundamental concepts are subject to change without notice.”[15] This is not in any way the domain of modern man the author, as another quote asserts: “Any fool can write a book but it takes a man to dovetail a door.”[16]

The other, much more recent movement that also uses DIY as a signifier is not quite about writing books, but still significantly different from its older cousin. It unequivocally returns expertise to the makers who churn out instruction sets, sharing findings generated largely by self-described amateurs. One representative of this is Make Magazine[17], since February 2005 both in print and online. It describes itself as “[t]he first magazine devoted entirely to DIY technology projects, MAKE Magazine unites, inspires and informs a growing community of resourceful people who undertake amazing projects in their backyards, basements, and garages.”[18] As in the older DIY movement, a suburban setting complete with home ownership is implied in this mission statement, evoking a continuity with the affirmative version of DIY that one might not expect to be appropriate to the current, edgier proponents. But more importantly, “MAKE Magazine brings the do-it-yourself mindset to all the technology in your life. [...] We celebrate your right to tweak, hack, and bend any technology to your own will.”[19] The website offers a blog, selections of projects, a community forum, a store, videos and podcasts. Posts reach from instructions on how to make heart shaped cupcakes to workshops on building wind power generators. Hobby and small-scale entrepreneurship, art, craft and technology interests, gadget hacking and expressions of social consciousness peacefully coexist, no hierarchies appear to be in place. A mode of taking stock of what is available seems to permeate the whole, and instead of offering solace for the strained individual, a cheerful and rather optimistic spirit of doing-it-together is prevalent. Are we seeing the human maker becoming comfortable with technology, filling it with meaning, and more importantly, embracing the challenge to respond, responsibly and without regret, to any man-made system, be it a muffin, a gadget or global warming? Are we becoming truly modern through DIY?

Doing-it-together
Flusser envisioned a consolidated whole in “Ins Universum der Technischen Bilder” (Into the Universe of Technical Images), published in German in 1985. “Humans are not creators, but players with antecedent information.”[20] This is the “telematic society as the cosmic super brain.”[21] Here, the shift from the human as product of a sole creator to the human as co-operating player needs an intermediate step, that of the removal of the notion of individual, human authorship. “The myth of the author presupposes that the pertinent messages are “originals”, created by “great men” who conducted “inner dialogues.” The mythical author creates in solitude. The myth of the author (and of the original) distorts the fact that the fabrication of information is a dialogue. And this fact can no longer be denied where copies are concerned.”[22] Dialogic production allows for fragmentation and partial contributions. “When writing without a substrate the objective is no longer to create complete, “perfect” information (works), but to lead one’s own creativity on a long leash, in dialog with others. The goal is no longer to make something, but to create a free space for the gesture of creativity itself.”[23] Liberated from attributions of ownership, the creative gesture has playful, erotic and spiritual dimensions. Flusser invites the reader to use the material he offers: “These Utopian thoughts were carried along in the excitement of play. Thus, they hope to be received in the same ludic spirit, to be handed off again in modified form by the receiver.”[24] Play with images, doing-it- together, may lead the super brain to produce “[a]n uninterrupted cerebral orgasm: that is the form by which images will direct the telematic society.”[25] The virtual reaches into the real as its organizing principle. Pleasure is then transcended by solemnity. The ‘other program,’[26] a term Flusser coined to emphasize a state in which ownership has been relinquished, is also a prayer. “Dialogically synthesized telematic images are the “media” from one human to another through which I see the face of the other. And through this face, I see God once more.”[27] The expectation of radically diminishing needs for human labor supports the vision above.

The GNU manifesto[28] was initially published by, then MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory programmer, Richard Stallman, in March 1985, and has been updated a few times since. It is a living document. He states that “GNU, which stands for Gnu’s Not Unix, is the name for the complete Unix-compatible software system which I am writing so that I can give it away free to everyone who can use it.” Framed at the dawn of the Creative Industries era we find ourselves in, Stallman presents his strong conviction that software, which he compares to the air we breathe, needs to be free (“solidarity with other users”) as well as freely co-created. (“The fundamental act of friendship among programmers is the sharing of programs.”) In this way, the highest quality software can be produced to create the maximum benefit for society. He addresses questions of licensing (“a person who enforces a copyright is harming society as a whole both materially and spiritually”) and pay for creative labor (“introduce a software tax”), and proposes solutions to the need to make a living (“sell teaching and hand-holding services”). The GNU Public License[29] is in wide use today. Under the term ‘copyleft,’ “software is copyrighted, but instead of using those rights to restrict users like proprietary software does, we use them to ensure that every user has freedom.”[30] Stallman’s achievements in the realm of software squarely match Flusser’s proposals for the creation of ‘other programs.’ Like Flusser, he also envisions a future leisure society: “In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the post-scarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on required tasks such as legislation, family counseling, robot repair and asteroid prospecting.”[31]

Stevan Harnad welcomes a diminished proprietorship in academia in exchange for greater productivity, but is concerned about the quality of prepublication dialogue in the on-line continuum. In “Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry”[32], he foresees that “[s]cholarly inquiry in this new medium will proceed much more quickly, interactively, and globally; and it is likely to become a lot more participatory, though perhaps also more depersonalized, with ideas propagating and permuting on the net in directions over which their originators would be unable (and indeed perhaps unwilling) to claim proprietorship. An individual’s compensation for the diminished proprietorship, however, would be the possibility of much greater intellectual productivity in one lifetime, and this is perhaps scholarly skywriting’s greatest reward.”[33] Academia is looking for accelerated productivity “at the speed of thought”[34] without relinquishing authority, and to that end Harnad proposes “to have a vertical (peer expertise) and a horizontal (temporal-archival) dimension of quality control.”[35]

Released under the creative commons license “Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 Netherlands”[36], the “MyCreativity Reader”[37] is subtitled ‘a critique of creative industries.’ The main thrust of the contributions is to model the organization of creative work, potentially in web-supported peer networks that are housed neither within academic institutions perceived as oppressive, nor operate fully autonomously and thus wanting for funds. This quest is framed in the context of neo-liberal appropriations of creative work (both IT and arts/humanities/social sciences related) as precarious entrepreneurship that plays into the global recombination of resources in the post-industrial corporate quest for cheap, value added products. Andrew Ross sums it up: “The truth of the matter is we are living through the formative stages of a mode of production marked by a quasi-convergence of the academy and the knowledge corporation.”[38] The leisure society has not come to pass, and without that foundation, the vision has to remain fractured. If not protected by the appropriate license, other programs may become proprietary again, and while humans may have assumed the role of creators, the ability to create ex nihilo was indeed not part of the deal.
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NOTES

1 Vilém Flusser, “Exile and Creativity”(1984), in: Ströhl, Andreas, ed.; Writings, University of Minnesota Press, 2002
2 ibid p. 104
3 ibid p. p.108
4 www.artsactionfund.org/pdf/artsvote/ObamaStatement3b.pdf, accessed 2/1/09
5 Vilém Flusser, “Nach der Post-moderne?” (1991), p. 303 – 325, in: Flusser, Vilém; Nachgeschichte – eine korrigierte Geschichtsschreibung. Frankfurt am Main, 1997; all translations from German in this text by A.M. 6 “Demnach erleben wir nicht das Ende der Neuzeit, sondern wir beginnen überhaupt erst, uns dessen bewußt zu werden, was <> bedeutet.” (ibid p. 315)
7 Those fractures are exemplified by Nicolaus of Cusa’s (1401-64) questioning the authority of the church by claiming that “divine knowledge is only quantitatively different from human knowledge” (ibid, p 304), and Henry the Seafarer’s (1394-1460) “challenge to a traditional worldview” (ibid p. 305) by demanding empirical verification of assumptions about the nature of the world.
8 “Es gab einen Autor (den Schöpfer, den Gründer, den unbewegten Beweger), und dieser Autor ernannte (berief) Autoritäten, durch deren Vermittlung hindurch er die Schöpfung zusammenhielt und in Ordnung brachte (systematisierte). Das Geschöpf < mußte durch Autoritäten hindurch mit dem Autor in Verbindung bleiben, wenn es sich nicht verlieren (verloren gehen) wollte.” (ibid p. 311)
9 “Mit anderen Worten, die kopernikaische Revolution ist nicht so sehr eine Veränderung der Stellenwerte von Erde, Sonne und anderen Himmelskörpern, sondern vielmehr eine Explosion der zeitlichen und räumlichen Dimensionen, und darin besteht das gemeinsame aller Anthropologien der Neuzeit.” (ibid p. 313)
10 Das anthropolgische Grunderlebnis war nicht mehr das der Unermeßlichkeit des Autors, sondern das der Unermeßlichkeit der menschlichen Umwelt. (ibid p. 314)
11 “Nachpostmoderne heißt leider-noch-immer-Moderne.” (ibid p. 316)
12 http://www.doityourself.com/did-it-myself, accessed 2/14 2009
13 http://www.doityourself.com/, accessed 2/14 2009
14 Steven M. Gelber , “Do-It-Yourself: Constructing, Repairing and Maintaining Domestic Masculinity”, American Quarterly 49.1 (1997) 66-112
15 ibid, p. 153, quoting Julian Starr, Jr., Fifty Things to Make for the Home (New York, 1941), 3-5.
16 ibid, p. 73, quoting Charles F. Lummis, a writer, civic reformer, and romantic primitivist, from Eileen Boris, “‘Dreams of Brotherhood and Beauty’: The Social Ideas of the Arts and Crafts Movement,” in “The Art that is Life,” The Arts and Crafts Movement in America, 1875-1920, ed. Wendy Kaplan (New York, 1987)
17 http://makezine.com/
18 http://makezine.com/magazine/
19 http://makezine.com/about/
20 Chapter 11. “Spielen” (Playing), p.98, in Flusser, Vilém, Ins Universum der Technischen Bilder, European Photography, Göttingen, (1985) 6th edition 1999 “Menschen sind nicht Schöpfer, sondern Spieler mit vorangegangenen Informationen”
21 ibid, p. 99, “Die Telematische Gesellschaft als Kosmisches Übergehirn.”
22 ibid, Chapter 12. “Schaffen” (Creating), p.107,“Der Mythos des Autors setzt voraus, daß es bei den entscheidenden Botschaften um “Originale” geht, die von “großen Männern” dank “inneren” Dialogen hergestellt wurden. Der mythische Autor schafft in der Einsamkeit. Der Mythos des Autors (und des Originals) verzerrt die Tatsache, daß Informationserzeugung ein Dialog ist. Und diese Tatsache ist eben bei kopierbaren Botschaften nicht mehr zu leugnen.”
23 Flusser, Vilém, Medienkultur, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1997 p.65 “Beim unterlagenlosen Schreiben geht es nicht mehr darum, in sich geschlossene, ‘perfekte’ Informationen (Werke) herzustellen, sondern darum, seine eigene Kreativität im Zwiegespräch mit anderen am langen Zügel zu führen. Das Ziel ist nicht mehr, irgend etwas herzustellen, sondern der Geste des Herstellens selbst freien Raum zu schaffen.”
24 “Schaffen”, p.113, in Flusser, Vilém, Ins Universum der Technischen Bilder, European Photography, Göttingen, (1985) 6th edition 1999
“Diese utopischen Überlegungen sind selbst vom Rausch des Spiels mitgerissen worden. Sie hoffen daher, in dem gleichen spielerischen Geist empfangen und vom Empfänger verändert weitergegeben zu werden.”
25 ibid, Chapter 15.“Herrschen” (Ruling), p.141, “Ein ununterbrochener zerebraler Orgasmus: das ist die Form, in der die Bilder die telematische Gesellschaft steuern werden.”
26 “Celebrating”, in: Ströhl, Andreas, ed.; Writings, University of Minnesota Press, 2002 (chapter 18 of “Ins Universum der Technischen Bilder”)
27 ibid, p. 171
28 http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html
29 http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html
30 Ibid
31 http://www.gnu.org/gnu/manifesto.html
32 Harnad, S. (1990) Scholarly Skywriting and the Prepublication Continuum of Scientific Inquiry. Psychological Science 1: 342 – 343 (reprinted in Current Contents 45: 9-13, November 11 1991). http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Papers/Harnad/harnad90.skywriting.html, accessed December 26, 08 (no pagination)
33 Ibid
34 Ibid
35 Ibid
36 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/nl/deed.en
37 Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter, Eds.; MyCreativity Reader: A Critique of Creative Industries. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam 2007, http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/portal/publications/inc- readers/mycreativity/ (download pdf)