"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.

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.

___________________________________________________
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.

___________________________________________________
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

___________________________________________________
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)

Cornered (Black Light)

What it would take
To name ourselves
Into unblind threat
To maintain this threat
And through it call
‘Self’ into being

Black light, black light
Of the light-skinned
Face cornered
In the room any
Place by your camera

Any name by the name
We would assume
How it would
Accuse an angle
And without alibi
Unworld.

Paul Chan and Tim Griffith in Conversation

Nonsite Collective summer events calendar

Elliot Anderson will present his project, The Monuments of Silicon Valley, David Wolach about Commoning and the Body, and I will present about Commoning and Aesthetic Practice.

http://www.nonsitecollective.org/

Thanks to Michael Cross and Taylor Brady for calendar design.

Who are called upon to leak
All barriers of the same
And what we are and when
We are not reconciled

The way the ground rose up
Spills our guts makes us, um,
Come clean—spreads the
Shittiness around at least

Endless streams of stars
Crossed by song unweaved
Recall what won’t be sung
Because no one is dreaming

It seems I can almost touch
The plume they cannot plug
Me up with currency and currents
Touch everything we’ll never be

Copulas of cant
Evacuate what’s left of place
Signify while real eyes watch
A wreck of belief.

Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior video now at Apexart

For those who missed the Project for an Archive of the Future Anterior at Apexart here is a link to a video download of interviews between myself and Matthew Buckingham, Sreshta Rit Premnath and Svetlana Boym:

http://apexart.org/events/bas_museo.htm

For Leslie Scalapino

Not even time to mourn it seems
The loss of me as you
The event and the time this event
Takes place within without name
Because you were moving with it
Interrupted by the social
Interrupted by how language
Mediates the social
There is still a horizon here
A rose rim for the real.