Logbook

The Universe

HomeShop opened its library to the public this summer. Although its collection comprises “not-yet 10,000 items,” the moment had already arrived for questions about the content, triggering a conversation that I joined the other day in HomeShop’s front space, on the issues of inclusion and exclusion.

As the library grows mostly through donations from friends and neighbors, certain patterns gradually emerge: all the books someone couldn’t take with them, some flea market novelties, something that “might come in handy.” To host anything, or hypothetically everything, would mean all the “bad” as well. Bad in the case of a library means the superfluous, the unhelpful, maybe the hateful; from another perspective, one never knows who will value what in a public library, and cutting away the inessential means cutting away part of a potential public. The central ambiguity of any archive lies on these fissures between values. This is also dependent on the reality of passing time, by which bad qualities are outlasted as a generation shifts and becomes other to itself; however, this process is most apparent in archives proper as opposed to libraries (who, in the future, will honestly cherish all of the pulp novels as books, as opposed to documents? Or do they, even at present?). One can then imagine, as did Jorge Luis Borges, a Babylonian library comprising all that was and is, in effect re-constructing the universe in type, a disorienting and endless universe in which we all dwell.

But of course other hard realities emerge to rebut this imaginary, unlimited possibility: space and order. HomeShop’s shelves are small, but not yet full. The intention of our conversation to edit the inventory—resulting, ironically, in only one or two withdrawals—therefore compromised on a discussion of what inclusion and exclusion mean. As an independent project initiated by individuals (namely, Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga and Elaine W. Ho), whose nurturing is guided by particular investments rather than indifference, the HomeShop Library recalls Walter Benjamin’s words: “But one thing should be noted: the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner. Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter.”(1) But with its simple principle of acquisition and circulation based on personal relations, the HomeShop collection becomes a living and metabolic portrait of a community, complicating the possessive fondness of Benjamin’s ideal bourgeois collector.

The ordering methodology can be recognized as not as rigid or as rigorous as that of Beijing’s National Library of China, though it shares the Chinese Library Classification system’s categorizations (starting, of course, with Marx & Mao, passing next through religion and philosophy, proceeding to the hard sciences at the bottom/base). But where the State institution speaks the language of publicness with its vast architectural spaces and purportedly unparalleled collection, the State’s very ordering protocols eliminate even the imaginary possibility of housing the universe on its shelves, where this could at least be a fantasy in HomeShop’s case. (A review of the oddities in the not unimpressive foreign languages section at the National Library is enough to wonder what is the basis for their acquisitions; recommendations are not invited, I was told.) The universe, after all, is composed of many, many small and particular things, not just the mapped planets and giant balls of gas. Even without space, attentiveness and affect define an alternative order of ordering. As the Indian archival project Pad.ma points out: “To not wait for the archive is often a practical response to the absence of archives or organized collections in many parts of the world. It also suggests that to wait for the state archive, or to otherwise wait to be archived, may not be a healthy option.”(2)

One pertinent irony of our contemporary media-saturated world is the State’s inability to accommodate the histories that make up the most intimate (ie. unofficial) parts of people’s lives, which actually make up the majority of all stories. But is the ambition of the (art) project to recover all lost histories, to pursue the exhaustion of this chaotic universe on its shelves? And do we hope that the State eventually takes up the pursuit of accounting for this breadth of experience? But isn’t it true that they already do to some extent, through the surveillance of all of our movements and stockpiling of all of our utterances? The gap exposed is therefore not the abyss of quantities, but the ground on which qualities are encouraged to develop. HomeShop’s library, emphasizing the knowledge and feeling that flow from individuals and can be borrowed—social exchanges, that is to say—hosts a potential to reflect the library as a universe despite or rather because of its modesty, its ethics-under-development. That said, at the end of our afternoon crusade of book-purging, we finally had to put off the decision of what to cut, until some other moment in the future.

(originally posted on the HomeShop blog, 14/09/2011. A Chinese version of this text appeared in an issue of Yishu Shijie Magazine / 中国版的这段文字会出现在“艺术世界”杂志。)—
1. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking my library” in Illuminations
2. From Pad.ma’s “10 Theses on the Archive.” Visit Pad.ma’s alternative video archive: http://pad.ma/

Gentrification Disco, vol. 4

Hi Grandpa,

How are you doing?
Far too long since we have spoken.
I just got your new email address by Nina forwarding a message with some nice old pictures you had taken.

I am still over here in Beijing, China. I have lived here almost 3 years, once fall arrives.

Just yesterday, I had a very funny experience. I went to a fake “Jackson Hole” north of Beijing, past the Great Wall. Supposedly, the developers copied the master plans directly from the Wyoming town, and just plotted the whole thing down onto some hilly countryside on the border of Hebei Province (the province surrounding Beijing). As a development including more than 1000 new homes, it’s not finished yet but there are already a few weekend “cowboys” living there.

We were there because of some interest the developers had shown in supporting our organic farmer’s market—but I found it incredibly difficult to get past the innocent and yet eerie surroundings (innocent, because what do they know about Jackson Hole? and so an innocent delight in surfaces; eerie because of such enthusiasm for surfaces—but I suppose the same could be said about the “real” Jackson Hole!).
Most of the wood was just imitation, made of plastic; although our guides claimed the rocks were real, and kept asking me as we toured a house “Is this how you live in America?

After the tour they gave me a cheaply-made bolo necktie with “Jackson Hole” on it.

They couldn’t tell me which house was a copy of Dick Cheney’s.

I thought you would like to see some of these images.
I hope all is well!

Love Michael


Hi Michael

So good to hear from you. I talked to your father yesterday and he told me who or where you were in that group picture that Nina sent to me. I would never have known you with all those whiskers.  Is that Emi beside you?

I am sending you some pictures of Lupine in the Big Horn Mtns taken on July 9, 2011. We had lots of snow in the Mtns this past year so the wild flowers are flourishing. We also made a trip to Jackson so will have to send you a few of those pictures. The pictures you sent about building a replica of Jackson Hole are interesting. Cheney, I believe, is still in the east. Think he has to be pretty close to medical assistance and he isn’t that popular.

I thought that was fun looking back at pictures when you and Nina were little. I thought she may have been interested.

Arleen and I are doing quite well. We take trips into the mountains quite a lot. She is legally blind with macular degeneration but she does very well. She has had quite as few sick days since you and Emi were here.

Lets keep in touch Michael, it’s so good to hear from you.

Love, Grandpa Eddy

(Note: Grandpa Robert Eddy lives in a town called Cody, Wyoming, named for the 19th century showman “Buffalo” Bill Cody, and situated at the eastern gate of Yellowstone National Park. Last time we visited Grandpa Eddy, he took us south to the Grand Teton mountain range and into a valley called Jackson Hole, where the small elite ski town of Jackson was home to ex-US Vice President Dick Cheney and John Walton (son and heir of Wal-Mart founder), and where “nobody looks twice when Sting, Sandra Bullock, or Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston whiz down Dick’s Ditch on snowboards.”)

(originally posted on the HomeShop blog, 07/08/2011; published in Wear journal III (2012) and in the series Piracy Papers by AND publishing)

speaking tour

I have to be honest, leaving Beijing and entering another climate, one with bees, dramatic cloud formations carried on cool breezes, and sunsets, it rather briskly plunges into an abstract idea. Of course, it doesn’t help that the transitions are managed within the privations of air travel and its dreamy borders. Something of the vague shadow of recall remains even after landing elsewhere (and even after returning, in this case to Beijing). We hear back from our friends and collaborators, in those bursts of attention, when they are not engulfed in the gentle rustling of the sprawling pumpkin vine, a lost bank card, jobs, and all immediate and present things, and isn’t it amazing how clothes and cups air-dry? But somehow those things that actually seem to make an idea or sentiment make sense—the lick of moisture, the depth of layers of sounds, synesthesia—fail to reach us. I have for a long time harboured a feeling that appeals to presence magicalize ordinary things, placing sense beyond explanation and language, glossing over and rendering inaccessible the potential, tacit domination of charisma, taste, identity. I wouldn’t be the first to muse on the values of absence, chance and indifference as contributing to a democratic aesthetic (which some might place in a properly Modernist and therefore outmoded tradition). But I have to acknowledge never having been able to fully account for why things fizzle at a distance.

I gave a talk while I was away, in an art centre in Montréal. I tried to present my experiences so far living in China, including projects and jobs I had done, the work of friends, and a general description of what living in Beijing and practicing art here is like. This was a format I had never tried in an artist-talk. My throat became dry because I talked so much, I worried I appeared like some kind of Lonely Planet ambassador, and feared my monotone delivery was driving some people’s eyelids to flutter druggedly. Those may be my paranoid projections on a listenership (and the feedback was positive, seemingly), but there were other creeping feelings behind the performance anxiety. The question a friend had asked a few days prior hovered somewhere in my descriptions, why do you live there? (Well, I ended up there rather *indifferently*…) I remarked on the visceral qualities of the urban makeup that make life exciting and challenging, and the state-in-formation that characterizes the place and people, which I announced might lead any of us to question the unfinished nature of our respective origins and positions. The motivations straddle all divisions, but in the context, I was referring to art. I went on: If there is no existing measure for how to gauge my success, neither based on the intensity of inclusion in the local art world, nor on my entrepreneurial exploits, nor rate of publication, nor institutional power, freedom, stability of life… then the ensuing parallel could surely be drawn that those in Canada who I was addressing, or my peers in Germany, the USA or anywhere, certainly had no such measures either. If success had been globalized, so had irrelevance, so had decadence.
Perhaps I’d better mention other examples before this turns into an analysis session about my particular case of ressentiment (and it’s a thin line whenever a self-reflexive voice is assumed). Meeting with some friends in my hometown Halifax about a project involving portable galleries, I sat back and watched a fascinating discussion unfold among the locals (I no longer the local) on the limits of the Canadian artist-run centre system. It seemed from other such conversations in different towns that this is something of a national hang-up, as particular players position themselves toward international networks and markets, and others solidify institutionalization, and most of them struggle.
We could argue the responsible use of a commercial system and the apparent independence it brings (not only in China) trumps the legalistic-bureaucratic state funding systems, which in any case support and are supported by the galleries; just as we could argue the cleverest position to be in is that of the court eunuch. For a little while this fancy played in my head when visiting old friends from Europe or Canada, as their practices circulated them around the whitish public art spaces, drinking good liquors, getting high marks on risk assessment from facilities management; as all the young poke around the daydream, what’s the best city in which to live? The given provides a host of calculated answers—including perhaps the narrative I seem to be advancing (here and in my Montréal talk—for the sake of the audience, of course): because I am nowhere I am everywhere, I am a representative.
But it is not a matter of a facile choice, and the stinging truth is that it’s not such an interesting debate, still assuming the tone of a report back, to one side or another. So what is interesting? What is particular, beyond our obsessions with conventions, power and our whatever singularity?

These questions connect back to one of those that lingered for me after our Continental Drift, that of practice (conveniently, practice entitles a moody and self-absorbed preamble, or it is sterile, doctorific.) In discussions on the approach for people who were not on it, it was stated that the experiment—or experience, as some emphasized—of Continental Drift would be shared and made public through subsequent works, texts and water-cooler anecdotes, the affects that feed into practice. We all gently contemplated what forms, what connections the latent and the stated alike would develop over time; would there be a future?
But a drift is not only a means to gathering materials for our practices, otherwise it would be a research trip, properly speaking; in its carrying out, it is meant as a practice in itself, one by which we expose our moods and personal dramas to various stimuli (reality) and to each other’s common experience. There are no objectively safe ways to go about it, echoing the ethical dilemmas of art mentioned above: one cannot prove one is not a conventional tourist, but neither should that stop one from going. As a group coming from different backgrounds, with different interests at stake, our interactions ranged from particular to common, from encountering each other, to discussing the massive changes apparent in China, which we are all somehow part of. Regarding this latter issue, given the topical relevance of globalization, even though I live here, I might have expected to take in visions of the forces of manufacture and development that drive global trade. Maybe they did in a way, but not how I anticipated; in Beijing, for instance, we observed the organization of space not according to the establishment of heavy industry, but according to priorities of culturalization: a model for the management of society, as Brian put it to me on our first day of meandering. This could be seen around Wuhan’s East Lake as well, as a natural resource was transformed into a capital-intensive development without passing through a significantly industrialized prior state; the post-industrial imaginary also permeated descriptions of the agrarian-becoming-peach-themed fantasyland in Lijiang. Maybe these correspondences aren’t surprising, as shifts in Chinese culture are feverishly tracked by foreign and domestic marketeers, and this is the face that asks to be seen anyhow. We did catch glimpses of the underside of this narrative, the chaotic, organic and banal, the preferential and the securitized, and the devastated. As empirically subjective as these firsthand experiences are, they are not the motifs that stick with me the most, that would come back most directly to ideas on practice, though the “method” itself is empowering, and must be repeated and improved upon. Rather, the most striking momentum on our Continental Drift was that of recognizing peers, whether they are in Hubei, Yunnan, New York, the Midwest, Beijing, or wherever. The point here was not in finally being acknowledged or something tragic like that, but simply in seeing that others have similar concerns and are there, doing it their way, whether or not the whole enterprise entails a sense of failure, a possibility we floated in our final meetings. Late one night, Claire Pentecost invoked the term “networks of validation,” which in my mind rescues the idea of the network from the hegemonic necessity that compels us all, all of the time. This doesn’t mean an alternative network that we can navigate for success; nor is it even a network for really breaking the distance between us, like a guarantee of a holier, democratic variation of presence. The world will hardly allow that, at least in this way. It is more useful as an ethical construction by which our practice sees itself, sees its potential expansion, as a constellation of knowledge, faculties and passions; sees its faults, its different faces, and that doesn’t romanticize its incongruity with its context or its powerlessness; and by which, perhaps, the idea of a common project is resuscitated. My own investments in such a construction are in figuring out how the paragraph above, on the vicissitudes of art practice at home and abroad, can be turned into something more interesting, as promised; which means not simply reflecting the inside/outside nature of an art world whose ambivalence won’t wash away; which means producing meaning tangled up with a messy world, with the tools I know how to use; which means conferring gravity to abstract ideas and places; which means having a screwdriver thrown at me, told to hot-wire a car, to go on a road trip.
What would you do?

(originally posted on the HomeShop blog, 24/07/2011)

Eschatology on-the-go

Looking around these sterile surroundings at the motley crowd I am part of, I find myself passing judgments in web-like combinations oscillating between curiosity and self-identification; knowing (or thinking) this could be it. My fellow passenger could kill me—but then we’d all die, myself and all the other people in this line (this is beyond profiling, foregoing the preparation for militancy, toward surrender). This means that in such a situation, a kind of bond is formed. An existential family that, like the other kinds of kinship, must be endured and appreciated while in existence and that, when we die together, will live on in one form or another. Group portrait of misfortune and unpredictability.

I can look around and feel something for these people and project narratives onto their expressions, clothes and luggage, onto their futures (which are now linked) and think, I could get to know you for the rest of my short life on this tiny utopian shuttle in the sky. Our common fate, which we approach calmly, eclipses the differences between us and by this turn those judged as our antagonists in this larger superficial society, our competitors, those who arouse or repel us, who make us aware of our lack, become the temporarily unforesakeable members of our family. The feeling of threat from these strangers attenuates and we can imagine a new airplane politics of mutual respect and mutually assured destruction, preferring nobody. Where once was a mask whose grotesque aura of annoyance could only get in the way of my resolving my own annoyance, now is a countenance reflecting its tacit and personal wishes, its relations of tenderness, among which, by the end, I will also count.

Except of course for the regimentation of seating and the issue of classes, service roles and the overwhelming power of the machine itself. To imagine tearing out the seats and sitting on the rumbling carpeted floor in a chaotic gathering clustered of affinities would furthermore suggest the foreknowledge of an exceptional situation, one that the passengers simply would not accept. Alas the bond of misfortune could hardly alter how our solidarity is expressed.

Keegan lumbered in and squeezed in next to the pill-shaped window. He was a big ex-soldier (Afghanistan), and he took up my armrest, and I was bothered by him from the beginning. Groaning about his sweating bottom or the wailing babies who deprived him of sleep, he suffered from a hangover from the Contiki tour he had just finished. A last blast for his brother who had been in 2 car crashes in 3 days back in Canada. I did feel sorry for their misfortunes. I held my elbows in and propped up my thick book, passing over the same page distractedly over several hours, this is a great film he said of the Mark Whalberg image on our little independent screens. Later he showed me some photos on his I-phone of the cities he hated, and the fun he had. Toward the last 2 hours we got into a disagreement over conspiracy theories, look on the Internet he urged, the zionists are spraying poison over the crops in planes just like these. He asked me to smuggle a bottle of vodka through customs for him, which I agreed to; then becoming impatient as I waited at the luggage belt, he took it back and walked out. We both ended up having our bags searched by overzealous small town inspectors, I tried to hide behind a pillar so he wouldn’t look back and roll his eyes. I can now only imagine Keegan complaining as our airplane fell into the North Atlantic.

(originally posted on the HomeShop blog, 25/06/2011)

Atomic Driver

The CD was composed of American commercial rap and r&b sped up and seamlessly mixed into one-hour mp3′s. He used this pulsing and unrelenting rhythm to fuel his wild progress, despite the near opacity of the lyrics to his ears. Young and tidy, with glistening hair and a craggy cheek surface formed of the new sustenance, he was an image of youth, an animation of the performance of youth under pressures. We climbed in and with the door’s closure, an easygoing promise of timely delivery and an immediate u-turn in front of an oncoming bus set a tone for a sequence of negotiations and split-second decisions informed by flowing intuition. This pointed awareness did not count the law chiefly as its limit, working along its approximate guidelines, but hovering in a parallel state where speed and safety are blurry, immeasurable energies constituting pure duration. Looking at the license on the dashboard, one noted an older, pale, balding man gazing back; the spirit and attitude of driving had either rejuvenated an adult, or made an adult of a boy. The maneuvers, which included burst-passing on the narrow 2-lane causeways that elegantly cross-hatch the edges of East Lake, cutting corners early shadowing mini-vans, and swerving around piles of debris, not to mention hurtling past other speeding cars on the new elevated freeways, all made up a language of an urban space that sprang up and lay half-destroyed and half-in-progress. As such, it was not the code of a single person, though he is the atomic driver in an incalculable system of circulation and friction; but he can only be the atom in tension with the particles exploding around him. Even the pedestrian on the rubble margin senses the shifting values and instant momentum transformations, adjusting to this general spatial intelligence with minimal violence; the other drivers play variations on each other’s motions, together developing the chaotic vocabulary that oscillates between efficiency and entropy, creating such tropes as the cautioning head-lamp flicker and the selfish congesting lane-take. Just like the tireless and carnal mp3 soundtrack accompanying the sequence to its end, these signifying gestures don’t accumulate toward a thesis, but in their isolation gradually chip away at time, leaving us dizzy and early, present, in front of the Hankou train station. There are no straight roads, and in Wuhan, the atomic driver must hustle space with the will of an unstable citizen.

(originally posted on the HomeShop blog, 28/05/2011)

Wit of the staircase




Today I had a conversation with a visitor about dissemination and the space:

How is the artwork disseminated? Is there a permanent display of multiples here? 1)

Is this a space for artists or does it reach out to those outside of the community (ie. outreach)? 2)

What possibilities do young artists (in China) produce for themselves, and why might they not be undertaking “artist-initiated projects”? What possibilities do they see in the ways that older artists work? 3)

Is developing a different vocabulary for talking about art different from producing art differently, or creating a different type of system/going beyond the current boundaries? 4)

––––––––––––––––––––––––––

1) This depends on what is considered the art work, and also what is considered dissemination. Books are certainly able to be distributed; art works can also be, but this is also a delicate distinction, because we may not be talking about distribution in the same way (see note 4). Some activities, like the current lunch delivery project, take on distribution and extension as central aspects, but it is of course still limited to a small scale. The Internet must be recognized as a space where not just information and news but real artworks or at least parts of them are distributed. But this form of participation has its drawbacks, namely a surfeit of non-participation: the clicking of a button, the infantile acceptance of friendship, or at best a catty exchange on the comment board. However, I can acknowledge that dissemination, in the sense of re-distribution of power rather than of materials or information, is something to work on, and has a lot to do with note 2.

2) That’s a good question, but we should be cautious in assuming we know what a public is. We can see many examples of situations flush with visitors, “outsiders” or perhaps a community, but we both agree that this is not necessarily a community, not necessarily a context of sustainable engagement. The jobs of education departments of many museums are to produce awareness; larger galleries also have such wings; but then we wonder what the difference is between PR and education. Or perhaps the point is not about producing awareness, but producing a public; I brought up examples I know from the West, a certain understanding of the “pubic good” of culture, which is admittedly of historical origin. In Germany, the Kunstverein system is an example that sticks out in my mind of hybrid funding and support strategies, a mix of state- or city-money, an association composed of membership and private sponsors (in Frankfurt where I lived this was of course the job of the banks), and this scheme comes from a bourgeois tradition and appreciation of new and free culture. In Canada, where I am from, there is a system of artist-run-centres that date to the political activism of artists in the 1960s and 1970s—this is not to say that Canadians inevitably think of these institutions as political, but the origins are in such a context. Both of these are examples of institutions that are officially dedicated to experimental, contemporary culture, backed by at least a certain amount of political will. I am no expert, but I have read theories of others (for example the sociologist Wang Jing) who state that there is no middle-class tradition established here. Does this mean that the situation is “pre-bourgeois,” that we are waiting for such a tradition to develop here, from rapid economic development? Perhaps from an urban planner’s imagination this would be one explanation. But still we haven’t cracked that nut of what the “public” is. One way to consider space is as a form of production, and that the public begins in the interactions between those involved, therefore leaving the reception as a suspended question, like the act of writing. Perhaps waiting for the ‘star friend’ to arrive sounds pretty smug as an institutional protocol, but maybe we also take for granted what we expect from so-called institutions, and the degrees of personal responsibility can be the basis for a judgment (for example, whether it seems like the outcome of an ideosyncratic decision of one in power, or an expression of a necessity, is to be decided case-by-case). That’s the ideology, anyway: if it doesn’t scare them away, then it will inspire them.

3) I don’t know what younger artists see as a possibility within the current structure here, and I assumed that to a certain extent this is from my ignorance of the particularities of what one can aspire to. How I had answered was that many might see that money can be made within this current system, so why would a new one be invented. This may seem like a cynical response, but actually it is not based on a judgmental attitude, but rather “realism”; however I have no proof it is even true. Surely there are some initiatives and individuals that are exceptions to my generalization. But this problem is not locally-bound to the exaggerations of Beijing’s cavernous studio industry. Institutional constraints happen to exist in every system, from the forgetfulness of the reason for production in the case of ample funding, the bureacratization of artistic approaches in public funding situations, or artists being used by projects state-funded to stage expressions of national identity, to the philanthropy of private companies instrumentalizing art for its good image, to the romanticization of the reality of working under repression.

4) My language takes on the slipperiness of uncertainty at times because it seems that I am in unfamiliar territory. Some things have been overcome, like an earlier aversion to the word “creativity”, which carries with it the baggage of today’s quasi-culture of yeah yeah yeah, which rarely attempts to critically pinpoint; but criticism too clearly understood can become such a patently-obvious defender of the public good that it can overlook possibilities of loosening grip—for example loosening the grip and purview of the term creativity to allow things from “outside” to enter (though from a loosened perspective the inside and outside mean less and less). Another example, the word “distribution” can also mean selling a piece, which can confuse our association of distribution in its central concern to, say, conceptual art, and its at-the-time assumption of democratizing art’s reception and participation. In fact this is not a contradiction, though it can seem so when we look at old black and white photographs of conceptual artists (Alexander Alberro has described how marketing entered very early into conceptual art’s self-definition), and this association is probably oriented on a Western set of priorities. But how can distribution continue to be something interesting, part of the work, part of the work’s problem; this may be a more useful way to think about it. A final example, calling a space the shop may seem like a twisting of the vocabulary while maintaining the structural uniformity of art spaces (though I think that if one were to look at the activities of the space, this might not be so self-evident; I think this has a lot to do with note 2 as well). Words can sometimes point to the distance between their own received definitions and the situations in which they are used; it is and it isn’t. On this question of language I feel a certain ambivalence, because on the one hand I want to eliminate the holding of tongues or the idea that one must project positivity or success, but on the other hand the proper language doesn’t exist. Something between a belief in these personal investments and pet-terms, and their confrontation with the widely circulated and comprehended emancipation-speech (the keywords that will unlock one’s position in the field) may be where the meaning occurs. Admittedly, this third-way idea is by now a rhetorical old-chestnut.

Response from the visitor:

1- first of all, this question simply came from the impression of the function of the space i got from the name ‘the shop’. now i understand i shall interpret it on a theoretical level instead of focusing on relating it to the daily activities of the space. however the discussion we had spin off to examine the substance of the function. i think for this question, we are trying to discuss what is being disseminate and what dissemination means in the context of art world. i doubt that we want to go as far as asking for the definition of art work. the action of dissemination only can activate certain aspects of art work. in terms of the activities happening in the space, it can be viewed on two levels. first are the ones contained in the art work itself, for example the lunch project. the space serves the role as a host in this case. second are the activities of the space as a facilitator/programmer in the process of dissemination. i like how you described the dissemination at the end of this note. however i would say it is the re-distribution of power through the distribution of materials or information.
2- it’s kind of sad to face the actuality here as we are trying to identify the common ground of ‘public’ in order to proceed with this discussion. you brought up something very important as the difference between PR and education and the subsequent approach to take to produce the according public. to be specific, the type of outreach i am talking about here is more like creating a space for the exchange of experience. in that sense, the idea of public is a loose definition and the expected outcome is random. if we try to relate the public to certain class of the society, inevitably the line between PR and education blurs.
3) heheheh, i tried to search for any missing scenario of institutional constraints besides the ones you listed here and could not think of any more. i guess the initiative i am talking about here is the mentality of overturning the conventional interpretation of certain situation and come up with a new concept to cope with it. as for what can be built on top of this process of conceptualizing, it depends on the situation. of course in reality it is way more complicated than a simply generalized sentence. i remember you brought up the word ‘cultural blindness’ last time. same word can be applied here i guess, in relation to the way of interpreting a relevant past and applying to the current.
4- i have to admit that the confusion of mine triggered me to ask this question was from the way i posit the priority of the space. once i connect the priority to the nature of the space, i was able to re-examine my question in a more proper context and to shift my focus from the execution to the theoretical level. how can theoretical significance overcome the somewhat mismatch execution and reveal itself with a more balanced assistance? i guess that is something we all want to explore.
(originally posted on the Vitamin Creative Space blog, 17/04/2010)