When We Breathe

"It's holy work and it's dangerous not to know that 'cause you could die like an animal down here."
--Abbey Lincoln

Longing prolongs it
That jazz at the core
The beats that did not make us one
Fret totality

Syncopate beneath the breath
What we would not
Be called into being
Or see ourselves

In the screen test dreaming
The work that is being
Done just to meet you
Undoes this with a kiss

With no greater aim do I insist
A waste burn up the sun
From whichever one
Of our distances sites

A music of those shades
What they discuss nothing like us
No resemblance to
The things we will have been.


If belief were true
What is left would be a visible
Show of emotion
A sign therefore standing in
For how the music feels
Or birds within a chorus
Something or other improvisation
Of our being not adding up.


Difference makes us super thin
Built worlds make us strong
Being would make us speak
A million greetings not ours

A feeling for the things gone out
The shores the skin without
End we may have been
A feeling fading to grief

When our figures won’t begin
To tell their work of mourning here
No future is foreclosed
Or ring of rosy squared

Profaning the future’s beauty
The past from where it leaks
Like stars leak this light
Delayed by all they’ve been.


Because one breathes
A politics to come
Withers administered worlds
Mutes them with its song

The roof is on fire
But so is your head
The roof is on fire
So why don’t we blow

No message in this
Except what we believe enough to say it
The spirit you blow
The bodies which blow it

Blow me down, go deep down
A deep down thing
Arrives in the bloodline
Breaks my heart

Like the heart was a line
Was a frame a speech to break
A kind of intervention before
The score was made

Or everything could be written down
Totally administered worlds
Poetry becomes a score
It becomes a music that heard justly
Is never just heard.

That house
carved up
is movement again

an action all around us
is movement
seen thru the walls

of that house a
holography
what becomes it
beckons

what falls outside
its edges
braves the light
makes it other than
all it is

a carpentry in reverse
crowning all
notions of property

so being inside it
one is not one
though the walls
do not fall either.

(circa summer 2008)

Commoning, Somatics, and Aesthetic Practices (Notes/Workshop)

The following are two approaches I took in the form of "notes" and workshop prompts before my talk this past Sunday with Nonsite Collective. I am posting them for the record in hopes that I might eventually also find the time to collate some reflections upon the meeting, which I found tremendously convivial and productive. Thanks to all who attended and to those instrumental in organizing: Tanya Hollis, Taylor Brady, Michael Cross, and Rob Halpern.


I. Somatic Commons and the Poetics of Political Form

The following are some notes which I would like to consider towards a conversation about aesthetic practices and what myself and others around the Nonsite Collective have been calling the “commons.”

First of all, what is the commons? Historically speaking, the commons is a concept deriving from early English law, which designates that property should be held in common for the use and benefit of all. As such, the commons contains an early articulation of later day communisms in the 19th and 20th centuries.

If the commons has ever existed, it has done so tentatively, and with a good deal of antagonism. The formalization of the legal concept of the commons occurs around 1215 with the signing of the Magna Carta—the English constitution—and its accompanying charter, the Charter of the Forest, which founds agreement about land use. Even though precedent exists for the Magna Carta and Charter of the Forest, these documents only come into existence through the need for a check of powers, namely the powers of King John who at the time found himself at war with his barons. Much of this is documented in Peter Linebaugh’s invaluable book, The Magna Carta Manifesto, which makes a case for the charters as crucial legal documents for the protection of individual and collective liberties from expropriation.

Why is it important to return to the founding moment when the commons was set into law? Discovering the history of the commons has become important for my own thinking because it sheds light on global processes which amplify those of the early 15th century onwards, namely “primitive accumulation”—what Marx calls “the expropriation of a free people” in the 27th chapter of Capital Vol 1. If the 15th -18th centuries constitute a frenzied grab for resources—a grab for commodities in the form of the bodies of an erstwhile European peasantry and native Africans; a grab also for lands which would yield enormous natural resources coupled with industrial farming practices, manufacture, and hegemonic maritime power—we are still in the throes of such a process. What, barring a total revolution against Western economic forces, could lead to a re/instatement of the commons as one of the few precedents within Western law for usufruct—the common use and enjoyment of shared properties by all?

Recently, I was quite moved by two talks given by Fred Ho and Sylvia Federici at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Counsel on Governor’s Island as part of Robert Kocik’s and Daria Fain’s “space residency,” The Commons. Fred Ho discussed his choice for a lifestyle “off the grid,” which precludes (or at least drastically limits) the use of technologies such as automobiles, cell phones, lap tops, and the consumption of foods not produced through small scaling farming by his own hands or obtained through barter. Ho, who is the survivor of a cancer whom he was given a 1 in 30,000 shot of beating, attributes his health challenges to a lifestyle that through stress, toxic deregulation, and electro-magnetic contact cultivates cancer. In order to reverse the escalation of cancer in tandem with processes of primitive accumulation and expropriation (i.e., the staples of neoliberal development) one should seek to embrace a ludditism—life practices directly against the speedy, toxic lifestyles necessitated by capitalist competition.

Sylvia Federici, whose book Caliban and the Witch is a must read for understanding the ways that early capitalism emerges through the repression of women’s reproductive powers and relationships to land use, addressed ways that dance and movement research can explore somatic practices counter to those cultivated by neoliberalism. If capitalist economies tend to mechanize the body, disciplining the body to maximalize its labor power, than how can dance/movement research discover movements counter to this maximalization? Through dance, movement exercise, somatics (the experiential, non-medical discovery of bodily health and well-being), affects and movements emerge unpermitted by currently dominant economic forces. What would it mean for a larger part of the population to engage the body in such a way; from the ground up through meditation, feedback, and self-reflection on bodily working? Federici’s talk, as such, lines up in interesting ways with the discourse at Nonsite Collective taking place around “somatic practices” and disability. If we are all literally disabled by capitalism (unfacilitated, immiserated, dis-eased) than how can a renewed attention to the soma (that which issues from the body) result in a movement immanently counter to the movement promoted and induced by capital?

Recently, I expressed to Daria Fain feeling “stressed-out,” to which she replied: “You should take better care of yourself, because we all need you.” Fain’s words touched me because they express a logic of commoning—the verb form of commons, which signals an active process by which we may make our selves in common. On the one hand, one is uniquely their own person, and must take care for the self; on the other, this self is not one’s property—neither appropriate or expropriable—or is at least dramatically limited by the ways it can be appropriate for others within an economy not merely economic, but affective, social, and spiritual. What if part of our moral-social education was to think in such terms about the “self”: the self as being for common use and enjoyment; the self as that which may “raise up” others—make light or graceful?

For the past few weeks, I have been trying to define what a somatic “poetics” might look like. Or what it does look like based on a broad range of practices: CAConrad, Eleni Stecopoulos, Rob Halpern, Amber DiPietra, Bhanu Kapil, Robert Kocik, David Buuck, and many others. I think that “commoning” and “somatics” are intimately linked through a shared sense that the body is a commonwealth, and not merely a thing isolated from its ecology—the others who surround it and nourish it. Health is a common goal of commoning and somatics; so is wealth, wealth which is able to establish well-being between as many human beings as possible. A somatic poetics, for me, would then be an active making (poesis) of the body in relation to the social which promotes health, healing, awareness, knowledge, and well being. I would extend somatics to the various practices which would access and make active lyrical valuables—the qualities of a lyric prosody—in the interest of a critical project directed at forms of biopower—the way that the state administers the body in the interest of labor, reproduction, warfare, and governance.

To promote a commoning (and not just a commons), which is to say, an active process by which the commons is continually reconstituted—translated, transvalued, transformed—I think that an attention to somatics across the arts is necessary. Aesthetic practices, if they can do nothing else, have the power to empower the body and activate potential. These potential reside in movement, visuality, language, and phonic (which is to say, sound-based) substance. To create out of conditions of movement, vision, language, and sound would found a commons—it would create common sense by retuning the senses in relation to central nervous system/brain. For language arts, prosody is essential for establishing a somatic relation to commons. Prosody as the mainline to the mind-body singularity; prosody as that which is beyond meaning, yet remains deeply involved with the senses, feelings, and is essential to conveying information. Prosody, which forms a thin line between communication and the non-communicable—the non-communicable as topoi or index for where the commonwealth is also produced. The ineffable as an extension of wealth/health.

A short outline of what somatics can do to enact commoning:

--provide tools for bodily awareness, knowledge, feedback, processing in order to effect structural (bones, muscles), neural, and chemical changes in the body;

--call attention to relation. The way, for instance, certain language usages or movements extend ill of good health in relation to other bodies, sites, legal and social practices.

--enframe certain sites as they contribute to the ill or good health of the commons.

The Gulf right now offers a tragic site. How can sites, a la Earthwork “remediations,” become places where the body overcomes and challenges toxic deregulation/the wholesale destruction of ecologies?

Extend this list indefinitely!

If the problem with communisms historically have been that they have projected a new state—that they have dealt, at least in the West, with large systems (totalities) rather than local relations and particulars, why not start with the body as host to the commons? Couldn’t that possibly prevent the tendency towards both systematization and bureaucracy that worked against communisms in the 20th century? Would it also be a way of eschewing spectacular forms of violence that we have encountered in both capitalist and socialist systems alike? Following Martin Luther King, Jr., what would it mean to make our bodies “the case” for strategies of non-violent social transformation? Somatics in performance and practice might seek alternative modes of violence and non-violence at the level of bodily processes—the body as first ethics, where ethics and aesthetics are synonymous categories of human endeavor; embodiment as a pure means. The soma as first politics—self-government extending to self-organization among all. Anti-hierarchy; emergent democracy. What Fred Moten calls the "poetics of political form" would extend somatics by establishing an active relationship between “making” and the forms of a politics to come.

To the question of modeling or what, elsewhere, I have called “allegory” or “enactment,” I want to address Moten’s work in particular, anticipating it as a point of departure for thinking about commoning in relation to somatics.

Moten’s work, after that of both white European and Black avant gardes in the 20th century, presents a radical discourse of the senses where, to paraphrase Marx, the senses become theoreticians.

But Moten tells Marx slant in his book Hughson’s Tavern, appropriately named after the rebellion by African slaves, Irish, West Indians and other “others” in colonial New York City, 1741. A direct expression of the commons, if we take the commons to be an expression of a democratized multitude; a direct expression of what Moten also calls the “Black Radical” aesthetic tradition—a tradition irreducible (yet historically particular) to skin color, that at once engages productive antagonisms for collective democratic expression and performs resistance to the reduction of human beings to commodity forms (i.e., slavery).


where the theoreticians will become senses in their practice

where the theoreticians will not be seeing, hearing

where the theoreticians will sear, the theoretician is a seer

where the theoreticians will be seen and heard in their practice

where the theoreticians will touch themselves

where the theoreticians will become sensual in their practice

where the reverse will always be in excess

where the sequence is for nono and maxine

where reading and recite this scene to John Gwin, my daddy

where they go plot paradise, blue bolivar, boll and marvel

where mask and boll and cut and fry and groove

where the senses will become theoreticians in their practice

--from Fred Moten’s “where the blues began,” in Hughson’s Tavern

Moten’s work, to my mind, embodies the problem of (the) theoreticians becoming sensual in their practice (and vice versa)—Moten’s poem in fact enacting a kind of chiasmus of “theory” (which is to say, conscious self-reflexivity) with “sensuality” (the sensual experience of an objective surrounding). The original site of this chiasmus is the revolutionary environment around John Hughson’s tavern, where people of various racial and cultural backgrounds worked collectively to achieve their freedom, and where, consequently, the Blues was “born” by John Gwin, the revolutionary Black leader instrumental in leading the rebellion around the tavern.

The discourse of the senses—and the doubling and redoubling of the senses in synaesthesia—attract me as a prosody for commoning, where aesthetic practice may touch a thinking about what we are doing, and where sense and nonsense, communication and the ineffable, legibility and obscurity found an immanent (common) sense of being in common. The Blues, therefore, as an extension of African-American arts does philosophy where theory and practice cannot be extricated—where, that is, they form a revolutionary chiasmus. Polysemy and paranomasia play to the tune of revolutionary excess.


II. The Law as Aesthetic Material

Writing prompts:

1. What is the commons if you had to define it? (7 minutes)

2. In what ways do art practices with which you participate or are familiar help to nourish and maintain commons after your definition of the term? Give examples if you can. (7 minutes)

3. To what extent does art form a dialogue with the law and vice versa? Do you believe art to impact legal practices—why or why not? How? (7 minutes)

Bracket a word, sentence, or longer passage from your writing. Prepare to read aloud to the group. Follow up with conversation, questions, dialogue.

________________________


Aesthetic responses have been produced all along in response to the erosion/non-instatement of commons. In the form of poetry, music, popular songs, architecture, dance.

I am particularly interested in art movements deriving from the 60s/70s that may impact how we think about the reclaiming/creation of commons. Namely, live art as it intersects with practices of civil disobedience; Land Art and Ecological Art; Maintenance Art (i.e., art which explores labor practices and social services); Institutional Critique (art works concerned to show how a particular institutional dynamic functions, especially within art contexts); lastly, Digital Art and New Media, much of which pushes boundaries of copyright, ownership, and appropriation strategies.

A lot of work has been done on how the above art forms and discourses impact civic and public space. I will touch on just a few now, acknowledging there are many many more just as interesting and important, and that the aesthetic practices which I cite partake of broader cultural movements, social struggles, etc.:

1. Robert Smithson’s engagement with Central Park; also his insistence on intervening with various forms of industry. Smithson would talk to landscape designers, industrialists, was hired by an airport for two years. In his “Frederick Law Olmstead and the Dialectic Landscape” Smithson provides an explicit link between Earthworks and the maintenance of public, common space, arguing for a dialectic after Olmstead of “entropy” and “maintenance.” Smithson’s essay interestingly is a response to a Whitney exhibition of Olmstead’s notebooks for the planning of Central Park, and treats Central Park through a documentary history (not unlike many conceptual artists of the time).

2. Agnes Denes’s “Wheatfield” and other “remediation” projects (e.g., “Tree Mountain”).

3. Vito Acconci’s move to architecture from performances conflating private and public information, cybernetics and actual spaces. Acconci’s work, like Denes’s, is part of a moment in the 70s and 80s of public art commissions, and artists turning their hands increasingly to architecture and more civic, public art forms.

4. Art Workers' Coalition: a group of artists who in the late 60s and early 70s were able to close down museums and galleries (albeit briefly) in solidarity with struggles in Vietnam and other social causes.

5. Mierle Ukeles: who successfully makes visible the various public works and services that underpin social life (i.e., street cleaners, trash collectors, recycling facilities).

Given their remarkable investigations of public vs. private space, civic and socio-political responsibility, and challenges to the reification of art works, amazingly few of the aesthetic practices of the 70s until our present make visible the working of law as the law regards land use. While subjection by legal authority forms the bases of much art rooted in identity politics, I wonder why there is not more art deliberately aimed at drawing out the legal issues around land use and real estate.

Two remarkable exceptions:

1. Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates”

2. Amy Balkin’s “Public Domain” and “Public Smog”

Talk about these examples.

Two-fold project:

1. What would it mean to explore the implications of breaking/testing the law or occupying impossible legal positions ("indiscernible points," as Giorgio Agamben refers to them in his work about “bare life” and sovereignty)? For many people, like those stateless, immigrating, or experiencing unlawful legal detention, legal anomaly and impossible legal status is of course all too real. Where were the responses to Gitmo/Abu Ghraib and other extra-legal detentions in the 2000s by live and conceptual artists? Who is taking up work by groups like IRWIN who during the Yugoslavian conflicts of the 90s issued passports and made much of their work in regards to border crossing, the obtaining of visas, etc.?

2. Why, with few exceptions, do more artists not work with legal teams to strategize their work in relation to political and civil rights struggles? As Martin Luther King, Jr. tells us, a human made law that is unjust should always be broken in preference for a higher moral law of universal human rights. While activists are constantly having to contend with law in relation to their actions, why hasn’t an avant garde taken more of an interest in engaging the law? If art is what enframes, makes visible, models, mediates, points at possible worlds (worlds which may only exist atopically or metaphorically) and socio-political incommensurability/anomaly, then why isn’t the law a terrain in which artists have made more of their work?

Given that the commons has never truly existed, that it may have been a dream of the Teutonic people still unmanifest in our current world, how to explore the legal possibilities for a commons (or the lack thereof)? If commons is European and Western in its legal frameworks, what legal frameworks from other cultural traditions may allow us to foreground the commons as a possible behavior/world?

Given the hyper-litigious nature of our current (US/globalized) society, perhaps the future avant garde will be one more invested in legal problematics, what Rob Halpern refers to as the use of the law as “material.”

Writing Prompts:

1. What sites for legal performance/(non-)site specific works rooted in legal investigation can you imagine?

2. How can art generate a legal precedent for understanding ways that the commons could exist in our present? If the commons is a place designated in society for universal use and enjoyment, how to cultivate these spaces through your own aesthetic practice or other forms of work?

A gathering alternative? (Note)

Taking the academic conference model as a foil, I would work deliberately against this model to provide a forum that not only offered possibilities for rethinking poetics, but for rethinking the ways through which poets gather and model their relationship to other sites of cultural production. Such a conference, while part of it may take place at academic halls and classrooms, I am hoping could just as much take place through an “open house” style format a la late-60s experiments in group process and community-based art exhibition. The conferences would allow participants and presenters to explore the following questions, among others: What would it mean to gather at an academic hall in tandem with someone’s work or living space, community gardens, and public libraries? Would poets behave differently, which is to say make different kinds of work, if they were provided with different conditions under which to work? How could rethinking architecture or somatics (the bodily interaction with built environments) also contribute to the making of a different kind of poem, a more lived form of poetic practice? If poetics does not begin or end with the poem per se—since poetics literally refers to an active making—how can we think about gathering as a type of poetics and community as a living body for which various forms of gathering provide care?

PDFs of Our Insalvageable and Tears Are These Veils

Thanks to Michael Cross there are now PDFs of my books Our Insalvageable and Tears Are These Veils (w/ Abby Walton) online at Cross's blog, The Disinhibitor. Thanks Michael!

"Commoning and Art Practice" @ Nonsite Collective

Here are some preliminary reflections before my talk at Nonsite Collective, a week from this Sunday.

How can the Nonsite Collective, in coalition with sister organizations such as The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Center for Urban Pedagogy, Ocean Earth, and 16 Beaver be a think tank for rethinking strategies for practical resistance and aesthetic inquiry towards an emergent commons? If the commons is utopian (of no place) or polytopia (of many places) and has historically tended to emerge at critical points of struggle and antagonism, how can art contribute to and critically reflect conditions of commoning? How can art model the commons — which is to say, how might it provide experiments in the practical organization against anti-democratic social hierarchies and the expropriation of labor, land, and natural resources?

I have many questions, and they all filter into my approach to the topic of commoning: how can we reach out to lawyers/legal advisors to test the law through art/performance/co-motion? How can we channel resources to practical projects whether in the form of private or public funding? How can institutions and apparatuses of education become better sites for resistance to expropriation and social hierarchies which prevent democratic behaviors? To what extent can commoning counteract behaviors both toxic to democratic practices as well as ecologically sustainable existences? To what extent should the body—or bodies in common—become a site where, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., we may once more “make our bodies the case” before the conscience of local, national, and global authorities? If the body is a frontier for expropriation of our rights to exist, what are the consequences of once more making the body a site of vulnerability and contestation, a visible wound by which emergent social formations or subjects may express their common will and concern?

A notebook page at The Disinhibitor

A page from my current notebook has been lovingly archived at Michael Cross's The Disinhibitor, a draft of "Mic Checks--after Sharon Hayes."

http://disinhibitor.blogspot.com/2010/07/notebook-fridays-thom-donovan.html

The Burning

"...setting fire to the unjust state of things instead of burning the things themselves."
--Gilles Deluze, from Cinema 1

If we were ignited
The things themselves would not burn
The world would touch me not
It would touch me with a wound

Making visible the appearance
Of the we the semblance assembling us
Who lay their bodies down like
They was a case for every one

Hollering for the fire
As it carried them down
Hollering a reverse phoenix a kind
Of homage to sundown

To a black sun the shafts of which
Cannot arrive nor hold
Us up to any other remaining thing
The ash in reverse the slipping still

Arranged like witness singing
Rupture into innocence
Writing codes switched just as suddenly
As dark as they are ideal.

Poems & Pictures Opens Tomorrow!

Poems & Pictures: A Renaissance in the Art of the Book (1946 - 1981)
July 7, 2010 - September 11, 2010


Organized by Kyle Schlesinger

Image above:
Negative, 1973
Phillip Guston & Bill Berkson
Poems & Pictures examines relationships between visual and language art. The exhibit features over 60 books produced between 1946 and 1981, as well as paintings, collages, periodicals, and ephemera. Poets, artists and collaborators include Wallace Berman, Joe Brainard, Robert Creeley, Jim Dine, Johanna Drucker, Philip Guston, Joanne Kyger, Emily McVarish, Karen Randall, Larry Rivers, George Schneeman, and many more.

Up in the Club

Up in the club with you
Places we meet when we can't
Or material conditions
Won't seem to allow us to

The rhythms which release
The rhythms which
A music will release
Effervesce somewhere
Just not here

Here I hear the bright
Lights of wish-fulfillment
The drinking songs of our
Souls at work

Here I hear our common
Bodies glittering in the strobe
Called to be themselves
To once more be a wreck.

Announcing WIG 2

WIG 2
edited by Kristen Gallagher and Tim Shaner

Contributors: Steve Benson, Laynie Browne, Del Ray Cross, Thom Donovan, Patrick Durgin, William Fuller, Kristen Gallagher, Judith Goldman, Brandon Holmquest, Rodney Koeneke, Richard Kostelanetz, Bill Marsh, Tim Shaner, Sigmund Shen, and Carol Szymanski.

Wig is a low-budget magazine devoted to poetry and art that appropriates the job for its own artistic purposes. Not always “about” work, the wig-artist may employ his or her labor for poetic or artistic ends that implicitly critique the virtue of productivity through the act of poaching company time and/or materials. The wig-artist often “writes work” (Spahr) in relation to a “laboring society” (Arendt) that has little or no appreciation for the work of making art. The form of the work will often reflect compromised time and/or attention. The title of the magazine alludes to Michel de Certeau’s discussion of la perruque: “the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employers.”

“It was a typical entry level job. I tried during my job to do my other work, that without an economy, only to realize there was little hope. This was my attempt to get around the problem and write work. [...] I collected notes from my boss’s memos, things I had seen [or] over-heard. I collected them into one long stream of day/text and barely edited them.”
–Juliana Spahr, Live

“The limits imposed by work represent not simply an obstacle but an opportunity for writing—not least because the workplace is the site of common activity and therefore enables us to bear witness to our common experience.”
–Kit Robinson, “Time and Materials”

“There is no use being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning—that event which I may not have found, but on whose path I seek myself—is not earned by work.”
–André Breton, Nadja

To order a copy contact Tim Shaner @ twshaner [at] comcast [dot] net

And seeming
And a semblance
They flee
From us

The products leak
What one has been
Will be

Like a hole
In the transmissible
Air the sea
Is anarchy

Deregulating
Birds wings
Landing
Whole worlds

In imploding
Debt
Who gives
Their word?

Somatics mapped

She who has gift in common

“I am the kind of poet who rescinds
“these sheets of paper
“Just by being

“A place where the Me is dissociated
“a volume perpetually crumbling away

Reading "Paul Thek, Our Contemporary" at Kelly Writers House

Blood Noise*

Intestines in eyelids while still living
—Leslie Scalapino

Tears and excrement of wax scratched
By substance a distant idea of this

What's that in your mouth the failed
Absolute bird string or song like a field

We can't enter my heart can't hold
All this blood my hands are a mould

For no one distance is where we begin from
Mastering your ridinghood

Wounds the animus we are foregone
Stamps of simulacrum and death masks

All the animals started dying all we
Could do was continue plugged

With blood my heart can't hold
So far steeped in what’s left to fill.


*composed spring 2007-spring 2010, a version of the above was published in War and Peace 4 Vision and Text, ed. Judith Goldman and Leslie Scalapino. The title derives from a drawing by Kiki Smith, exhibited in Smith's 2006-2007 Whitney retrospective. "Intestines in eyelids while still living" is taken from a reading Scalapino gave at St. Mark's church around the same time.

Embodiment

"vessel soma slave fantasy the enfolding of sensation into a body schema boundary (s/m) mastery of temporal and spatial coordinates kinesthetic sphere that extends into universal desire an erotics of tissues lips speak opening tender touch phantasmatic identification with wholeness hole practices of emptying and filling language tracings on the inside of skins word clothes projections the agency of surface blood pulse grating bones a huddling in darkness, at night Open"
--Petra Kuppers at Nonsite Collective

For BB

My friend the future's not what it used to be
The survival of memory depends on speaking
Of trees jettisoned to space bunnies spills
In our prematurely dug graves not without futuristic
Corporate logos almost don't see the difference
Between sci fi and real life what with the people all "busy"
On Facebook over-connected not conjuncted
Is that how you would put it? Or is my luddite
Streak just sour grapes (space junk?) I want our
Present to be sweeter (more scrappy?) so soak
In the virtul past the ones we can't seem to be
Bring it up on this fantasy screen from you to me
Return from it like we were having a moment.

Mini Tour in July

In July I will be reading and presenting in LA, San Francisco, Oakland, and Boston at the following events:

LA
Poetic Research Bureau
July 11th, 4:30PM
w/ Steven Farmer
hosted by Joseph Mosconi

San Francisco
Commons and Art Practice (a discussion with Nonsite Collective)
Nicole Hollis Studios
935 Natoma St. SF
July 18th, 2PM
hosted by Michael Cross and Nonsite Collective

Oakland
The (New) Reading Series @ 21 Grand
July 18th
w/ Catherine Meng
hosted by Alli Warren, Michael Nicoloff, & Erika Staiti

Cambridge
A Boston Poet Tea Party poetry marathon
Pierre Menard Gallery
July 30th, 7PM
hosted by Jim Behrle, Michael Carr, David Kirschenbaum, John Mulrooney, and Aaron Tieger

Art, Criticism, and Its Markets (@ 16 Beaver)

Wednesday 06.16.10 -- Art, Criticism, and Its Markets

CONTENTS:
1. About this Wednesday
2. More on Isabelle Graw
3. Readings
4. Upcoming Readings

___________________________________________________
1. About this Wednesday

What: Reading Discussion
Where: 16Beaver Street, 4th Floor
When: Wednesday 06.16.10 at 7:15 pm
Who: Free and open to all

Over the last 20 or 30 years, there has been an increasing amount of criticism written which is directed at the economy or market of art. This growing interest on the part of critics has mirrored the burgeoning market around art. And even today, in the midst of a financial depression in many parts of the world, art is increasingly seen as an integral part of 'investment portfolios' and considered a 'safe haven' for nervous investors. Even 'well intentioned' efforts which attempt to protect the interests of artists, through funds or pension trusts, only seem to reinforce the ever increasing pace of the financialization or
securitization of art.

This Wednesday, we would like to invite those who might be interested in exploring the interrelations between art, money, and criticism to attend what will be the first meeting of a focused reading group on the subject.

The reading group is being organized by Anastasiya Osipova and Zac Dempster and they will use Isabelle Graw's book "High Price: Art Between the Market and Celebrity Culture" as a point of reference and departure.

The book investigates what an art market does in relation to the artists who strategize within it. Graw begins by narrating through Gustave Courbert's exploits in prison and his heroic exclusion from Salon de Paris into collectors homes. Could this serve as precedent for contemporary artist in their criticisms of the institution while fortifying their cultural value? Some contemporary cases are those of the New York American Fine Arts, Co gallery, Andrea Fraser and Merlin Carpenter, Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Julien Schnabel, Jeff Koons, Richard Prince, Yves Klein…

Among key questions that will be addressed through these discussions is a position of criticism vis-à-vis art, which is already seen as both an epistemological object and an indexical expression of market value (not unlike money). Does this status of art reify critical texts as well?

If the so-called art-market is not to be described as a reservoir of phantasms, if the story we could tell of it is not to be a ghost mystery story, what genre would be appropriate?

It is our hope to meet the limitations of this self-reflexive text by an exegesis that will include artist press releases, gallery websites, Facebook pages, photographs, blog posts, art magazine and journal reviews, art auction details, etc. As though following on Twitter the question "to what degree can contemporary writers profit off the vocabulary this text offers? In what fields and by the use of what empty signifiers?"

Anastasiya and Zac will begin the evening by introducing how they arrived at the idea for this reading group, and then we will begin what will be the first of several sessions of readings and discussions.

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2. More on Isabelle Graw

Isabelle Graw is Professor for Art Theory and Art History at Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste (Städelschule) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, where she co-founded the Institute of Art Criticism.

She is an art critic and co-founder of Texte zur Kunst in Berlin -- Sternberg Press's website. Graw now lives in Berlin, but was associated with a Cologne group of artists that circled around Martin Kippenberger.

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3. Readings

For the introductory meeting we will look at the following texts:
Isabelle Graw, foreword to High Price
http://sduk.us/beaver/PDF/graw_innen_pt1.pdf

Michel Foucault “What is Critique?”
http://sduk.us/beaver/PDF/foucault_what_is_critique.pdf

Dietrich Dietrichson “On (Surplus) Value in Art”
http://sduk.us/beaver/PDF/dietrichson.pdf

Barbara Rose "The Auction is the Action"
http://sduk.us/beaver/PDF/rose_auction.pdf

and view a promotional video from Artprice, a French company that
serves as the largest database of the art sales records.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCyKRTX5bdg

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4. Upcoming Readings

2nd meeting reading list:
Isabelle Graw, Chapter One of High Price

Jean-Joseph Goux “Figurative Standards: Gold and the Phallus” from
Symbolic Economies

Georges Bataille & numismatics (abstracts from Denis Hollier Against
Architecture: Writings of Georges Bataille)

“Art and its markets: a roundtable discussion” , Artforum, April 2008
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_8_46/ai_n31487375/

Seth Price “Dispersion”
http://www.distributedhistory.com/Dispersion2008.pdf

Pierre Bourdieu, abstracts from The Rules of Art.

“The History of Money” videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0IJCGuNtqk

(possibly: Georg Simmel The Philosophy of Money)