"...community declared itself a medium..."

“...community declared itself a medium...”

CONTENTS 04 Kristan Kennedy— “Itself a medium, community-declared!”

12 ”Love and Community: A roundtable discussion with Jean-Luc Nancy, Avital Ronell and Wolfgang Schirmacher” 18 Anna Craycroft 22 Alex Mackin Dolan 24 Abstract Games, Summer 2001: Interview between Kerry Handscomb and Kris Brum 28 Krystal South 29 Jamie Isenstein, in conversation with Stephanie Snyder 32 Emily Roysdon 34 Lucy Raven & Rebecca Gates 34 Alvin Lucier speaks with Stephen Vitiello, transcribed from The Relay Project 37 Sue Tompkins 38 A.L. Steiner 40 Andrew Ritchey 44 Colophon 45 Intentional Communities in Oregon, Forming and Formed,1856–2013 46 Contributors

ALEX MACKIN DOLAN LUCY RAVEN AND REBECCA GATES ANDREW RITCHEY EMILY ROYSDON Sept 12–22, 2013 Con-Way Sept 12, 10:00 p.m.–late Sept 13–22, 25–29, Every day, 12–6:30 p.m LUCY RAVEN AND REBECCA GATES Room Tone: Variation Sept 12–22, Daily 1:00 p.m.

Nightly 10:30pm Sept 25–27, Daily 5:00 p.m.

Sept 28, 1:00 p.m.

Sept 29, 4:00 p.m ANDREW RITCHEY The Secret Society Sept 25–27, nightly at 6:00 p.m.

Sept 28, 2:00 p.m.

Sept 29, 12:30 p.m.

EMILY ROYSDON Minor Theatres (wrkshp 1) Workshops and activities with the artist and her collaborators from Sept 13–Sept 17 September 13, 2:00 p.m. & 3:00 p.m.

September 14, 6:00 p.m. & 7:00 p.m.

September 15, 2:00 p.m.

September 16, 10:00 a.m. & 3:00 p.m.

September 17, 6:00 p.m.

ANNA CRAYCROFT C’mon Language Jun 3–Sept 29, 2013 PICA Jun 3–Sept 6, Tue–Fri, 12–6:00 p.m.

Sept 10–22, Every day, 12–6:00 p.m.

Sept 24–29, Tue–Sun, 12–6:00 p.m.

KRYSTAL SOUTH Identify Yourself Online at idyrself.com TBA Conversation: Away from Keyboard Mon, Sept 16, 12:30 p.m.

PICA

A.L. STEINER Feelings and How to Destroy Them Sept 5–Oct 26, 2013 Philip Feldman Gallery at PNCA Every day, 10:00 a.m.–7:00 p.m.

SUE TOMPKINS Organized by Chris Johanson, Libby Werbel of PMoMA, and PICA Sept 5–Oct 5, 2013 Portland Museum of Modern Art Every day, 12–7:00 p.m.

JAMIE ISENSTEIN Will Return Curated by Stephanie Snyder Aug 27–Oct 20, 2013 Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College Tue-Sun, 12–5:00 p.m.

Reception: Thu, Sept 19, 6–8:00 p.m.

TBA Conversation: The Artist is Present: Jamie Isenstein in conversation with Stephanie Snyder Tue, Sept 17, 12:30 p.m.

PICA

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“The community and the kiss are fragile and dependent upon writing for their meaning.�i

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Itself a medium, community-declared!

Kristan Kennedy

In the middle of an unintentional, nonspecific, find-our-way-down-the-road-and-see-where-it-takes-us kind of daytrip, my friend and I found ourselves in Aurora, Oregon. In front of us was a half moon of simple buildings and yet it had this feeling that we were coming upon a mirage. Aurora looked older than I knew this part of the country to be, primarily due to the style of architecture, which was reminiscent of earlier-settled Northeastern towns, and not the ramshackle pioneer villages I had grown accustomed to since moving out west.ii Each building in Aurora had been repurposed into well-appointed antique stores; their rooms were filled to the rafters with spinning wheels, flowered jugs, hand-carved spoons, old brass instruments, well-worn tools, and sheet music.iii Aurora’s settlers left behind enough stuff to tell a certain story, but as I moved from house to house, shop to shop, I sensed there were important bits missing. I won’t go into the ghosts that I felt there, although I mention them because the haunting that tiny town gave me sent me into a black hole of midnight Internet research. What I found piqued my interest in Oregon’s long history of attracting autocrats, “new pioneers,” gurus, and the many who follow them.

In 1855 Dr. William Kiel, the German mysticiv and charismatic founder of one of the country’s first Christian communes, Bethel Colony, started his journey out west from Missouri. He was in search of a new “Eden.” He brought along his family (including his oldest son Willie who had recently died of malaria and was laid in a coffin filled with Bethel distillery whiskey!v) and about one hundred and fifty colony members.

They traveled in a long train of thirty-eight covered wagons over a period of about five months. Despite reports of inhospitable and dangerous Native American tribes blocking the passage, Keil and his dutiful followers made their way peacefully across the plains and sent word back to Bethel that reports of foul play had been unfounded and inflammatory. After landing in Willapa Bay, burying Willie’s body, setting up temporary residences for his flock in Portland and surrounding townships, and living through a challenging winter so wet he thought they might all rot, Keil finally identified three hundred and twenty acres along the Pudding River in the Willamette Valley between Oregon City and Salem and started building his new Utopia.

In Aurora Colony, Keil ruled supreme and his plain-living followers lived by a hybrid philosophy rooted in the Golden Rule,vi along with some teachings of the German utopianist George Rapp and his Harmonists, and combined with the more flexible and modern model Keil himself had established (Bethel and Aurora colony members could smoke tobacco, take wives, fraternize with non-Christians and entertain).

Some people were known to call their “benevolent” leader “King Keil” leaving us to wonder how good the good man was. And some historical romance novels based on equal parts conjecture and research have suggested Keil was sexually flexible and practiced a sort of sanctioned wife swapping.vii By most accounts it was a peaceful and functioning communal society.

The people of Aurora Colony lived to support each other, although this kind of living was still considered a human experiment. Historical accounts tell a tepid tale of collaboration, purity, good works and unity. However, we know human nature to be much more complex and a community’s history to be subjective, influenced, coded, and sometimes protected by those who have the greatest investment in it. If there is no real truth in history, what do we have?viii We have clues. Clues left behind in letters and ledgers, personal accounts, back-of-Bible family records, quilts and photogravures, artifacts and art.

Let me fast forward a bit: after loosing six of his nine children to disease, establishing a financially sustaining community fueled by the production and distribution of whiskey, textiles, produce, and the colonists’ knack for entertainment and hospitality, Keil grew the colony’s holdings to 8,000 acres, which was shared by six hundred inhabitants. At the colony’s peak in 1877, ”Kiel died suddenly… leaving a power vacuum that lead to the dissolution of the colony in 1883.” At that time all of its holdings were redistributed to colonists in Bethel and Aurora equally.ix The Community got what they put into it; their leader was not there to inspire them to share, and so in the end it was every man woman and child for themselves.

Aurora was the first, but not the last Intentional community to make their home on Oregon soil. A pamphlet from an exhibition at the Aubrey R. Watzek Library entitled From Aurora to Rajneeshpuam: Oregon’s Communal History, the exhibitions organizer, James J. Koppx states that Oregon has been home to nearly three hundred communal groups and says that, “In the 20th Century, Oregon became a magnet for ‘new pioneers’ of the 1960s….” The pamphlet and Kopp’s corresponding book touches on the evolution of a community of communities here in Oregon, including the Holy Rollers in Corvallis who banded together in the early 1900s around a man named Franz Edmund Creffield. Calling himself “the new Joshua” he was feverishly worshiped as the second coming of Christ mostly by a dedicated group of women. “His following was called the Brides of Christ Church, also known as the Holy Rollers for their ritual of rolling on the floor,xi often after disrobing. Stewart Holbrook labeled Creffield, “the sex-crazed

i.Kellmer, Tracy, Love is at the Heart of Jean-Luc Nancy’s Inoperative Community, Bryn Mawr College. ii.The houses and buildings from the Aurora Colony represent one of the largest concentrations of structures built by German craftsmen in the Pacific Northwest.

(Aurora Colony Historical Museum

iii. From 1856 to well into the 1920s, members of the Aurora Colony Pioneer Band and their immediate descendants enriched the cultural lives of their fellow Oregonians as Oregon’s premier brass band of that era.

The colony members supported the lifestyle through agricultural production and the application of their manufacturing skills. They made most of their own products including spinning wheels, textiles and liquor. (Aurora Colony Historical Museum)

iv.“Not a real doctor, Keil was a mystic. He was interested in mysteries and revelations that he thought were beyond the understanding of ordinary men. One revelation came from a gypsy (a woman of the Roma), who shared her mysterious botanical remedies with him upon one condition: He could not practice medicine in Prussia.

Keil emigrated to the States in the 1830’s. He set up a small drug store in Pittsburgh and continued “experiments” in search of a formula to ensure eternal life. He had been interested in necromancy and mesmerism as a youth, and, so it was claimed later, kept a book of his secrets, symbols and formulas, written in human blood. In Pittsburgh, “Doctor” William Keil received another “called from above.” He burned his secret book in a symbolic ceremony and began to study the practices of the Rappites–followers of George Rapp, another German mystic, a religious prophet who had set up a Utopian colony in Economy, Pennsylvania. The Rappite colony was one of the early experiments in communism in America.”

(McDermott, Hillary, The Pickled Pioneer, http://www. tommanoff.com/articles/2150/the-pickled-pioneer) v. Willie Keil, was 18 at the time of the planned departure from Bethel Colony, Missouri. He begged his father not to leave him behind even though he was suffering from Malaria. One of the wagons was converted into an ambulance to accommodate the sick boy, but Willie died soon after. Determined to keep his solemn vow to his son, Keil placed Willie’s body in a tin lined coffin filled with Golden Rule whiskey from the Bethel Distillery. Willie’s coffin wagon led the way to Oregon during the party’s five-month journey out West. (Snyder, Eugene Edmund, Aurora, Their Last Utopia: Oregon’s Christian Commune, 1856-1883, Binford & Mort, 1993, pg. 53)

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prophet” and the group “Oregon’s secret love cult.” Other writers have called Creffield a “naked reformer” and the “nudist high priest.” Creffield’s reign ended with murder and intrigue, standoffs and shootouts.

Kopp also highlights the history of women-run, women-centric communities, which began dotting the Oregon landscape in the sixties and seventies as part of the countries larger “Back to the Land” movement.xii “These communities are envisioned as places where women can live and work together, safely and respectfully, creating art and ritual that consciously rejects some of the trappings of a male-dominated society. Many are separatist, open only to women.” It may be important to mention that none of the many women-led communes ended in murder, flames, or legal prosecution, but rather disbanded after attempts at a truly shared life with few resources became too difficult to sustain.

vi. The term “Golden Rule” was first coined in 1670, but the concept of reciprocity finds its origins in a wide range of ancient cultures, from Ancient Babylon’s Code of Hammurabi (1780 BC), through all of the major philosophies of Ancient China (“Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.” —Confucius) to Ancient Rome and Greece (“Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.” Thales, 624546 BC) to the Mahabarata, the ancient epic of India, in its description of Dharma. Reciprocity is a major tenant of many of the world’s religions, Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Scientology, Wicca, and Christianity “Therefore all things whatsoever would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them” (Matthew 7:12). (Source. http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Rule) vii. In James J. Kopp’s article, Novel Views of the Aurora Colony, he makes the case that the historical novels of Cobie de Lespinasse and Jane Kirpatrick may be getting closer to the truth about the Aurora Colony with subjects “largely untouched by other writings… specifically the sexual exploits of its charismatic leader, William Keil”. In de Lespinasse’s book Second Eden, the author fictionalizes Keil as the character Karl who in one of his discussions with his inner circle, a school teacher expounds upon the concept of “community goods” and extends it to sharing wives by paraphrasing Greece philosophy “Plato wanted not only all things in common but even wives.” While Keil’s character Karl does not sanction this practice, he does admit to it being titillating and the book goes on to describe Karl’s powerful role as one that also extended to his prowess and flexibility in regards to the boundaries of marriage and gender roles. Kopp goes on to describe that while the de Lespinasse took certain liberties and used creative license in writing her stories, that it is not out of the question to think that Keil was experiencing and advocating for a sexual revolution as he was influenced by the “spirit of millenniumism evident in the 1840s” whose leaders were denouncing monogamy and encouraging sexual freedom as a way to achieve “heaven on earth”. (Source, Novel Views of Aurora Colony: Literary Interpretations of Cobie de Lepinasse and Jane Kirpatrick) viii. Just last night at a lecture by A.L. Steiner, the artist

talked about how history is often devoid of the eroticization of human interactions, and that it is in this missing information that real history is made. That it is not about the battles won or lost but about the relationships between people. ix. (Sources: Binus, Joshua, View of the Aurora Colony, Oregon Historical Society, 2006; Snyder, Eugene Edmund, Aurora, Their Last Utopia: Oregon’s Christian Commune, 1856-1883, Binford & Mort, 1993; Kopp, James L., Eden Within Eden: Oregon’s Utopian Heritage, OSU Press, 2006.) x. From Aurora to Rajneeshpuram: Oregon’s Communal History, An Exhibition at the Aubrey R. Watzek Library, August 27- December 18, 2009, Curated by James J. Kopp, Library Director, Aubrey R. Watzek Library, Lewis & Clark College, Oregon. Published in conjunction with the release of Kopp’s publication Eden Within Eden, Oregon’s Utopian Heritage (Oregon State University Press, 2009) and the annual conference of the Communal Studies Association held in Aurora, Oregon October, 2009. xi. I want to reclaim the name Holy Rollers for Anat BenDavid, Kathi Glas, Douglas Gordon, Melissa Logan, Alex

Then we move into the 1980s when our country’s most parodied, studied, and debated community— the Rajneeshipuram—made its home in Central Oregon. Here, a commune of upwards of three thousand members or sannyasins followed an Indian guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. Rajneesh purchased a 64,000-acre ranch in Central Oregon and along with Chief of Staff Ma Annand Sheela waged a war of fear, intimidation, and massive corruption against the neighboring town of Antelope, Oregon, and its surrounding area in the name of their unique brand of spirituality. Followers poisoned the townspeople of Dalles, Oregon, by infecting a salad bar with salmonella in an effort to sweep a local election, plotted to kill public officials who stood in their way, bussed in homeless men and women from Portland and registered them to vote, tried to cultivate the AIDS virus and threatened to infect a broader public, and mounted the largest illegal wiretapping operation that the United States had ever seen. And yet the Rajneeshee genuinely inspired his followers to give up their personal wealth and embrace his intoxicating blend of eastern philosophy, sexual liberation, and some radical trappingsxiii swiped from the Human Potential Movement.xiv It is here that I might switch courses a bit and fling us from the valleys and hills of Oregon out into the rest of the broader world of thought. In Jean Luc Nancy’s book The Inoperable Community, the French philosopher dissects what it means to truly be with one another in society: “The community that becomes a single thing (body, mind, fatherland, Leader...) ...necessarily loses the in of being-in-common. Or, it loses the with or the together that defines it. It yields its being-together to a being of togetherness. The truth of community, on the contrary, resides in the retreat of such a being.”xv It is this notion that gets at the heart of something. Community is not une œuvre, a “work of art.”

Community is conceptual. It is abstract. It cannot be formed; it is always instead forming! We should abandon our desire to build community and just let community build itself. Making community often results in political terror, fascism, sameness (same thing), pandering... When I titled this group of artist projects “…community declared itself a medium… “xvi (a fragment of a sentence, ripped off, taken out of context, and divorced from its beginning and ending. ). It was because I was fixated on the art world’s desire to USE community, to prove its value and measure its impact in foundation reporting statistics, to buy and sell and trade it, to devour it. I also loved the sound of the phrase “declared itself” … so awkward! What is “itself”?xvii A collection of beings, an energy source, a group of projects, a collection of ideas? What community is this exhibition (or non-exhibition, as it were)?

It is about this community and that one. “That one” = the one you belong to, the one you don’t belong to, the one you hope to belong to, the one that does not yet exist but is forming or might yet emerge. It is my hope that over the course of this year’s Time-Based Art Festival, community makes itself known, heard and seen. That means a community will have to get itself into the room, into the Internet, into the sound piece, into the Secret Society, into the classroom, into the conversation, into it. For, there is no “show” this year. There is only showing up.

Early on in our organization’s history, our founder Kristy Edmunds wrote: “The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art is about the activity generated by a community using its energy.” What a curious way to describe what wexviii are. Then again, what a perfect way to describe what we are.xviii This energy exchange could just as easily apply to this festival and this exhibition. The artists included in this year’s program will certainly be using our energy. This might make us feel uncomfortable, and it might uplift us.

“Community. Ugh.” “Community, yeah!” Their projects will live in several different locations and they will expand over time. They will take the form of classrooms, workshops, publications, essays, performances, scraps of paper, games, sounds, flickering films, public residencies, and discrete unannounced activities. Sometimes they will be all of these things at once. Like a “community,” their activity will occasionally bring us together; at other times it will send us to opposite ends of the room or city. We can use the artists’ energy, too. In fact, we must. It is crucial. “Community” is exhausting.

For the sake of this engagement, it feels important to keep “community” in quotes. It helps preserve its mutable and debatable meaning.xix “Community”xx is fragile, dangerous, galvanizing, ineffective, affective. It is inoperable. Let’s think of the quotation marks as a little suit of armor. It is not yet clear whether we are protecting ourselves from “community” or it from us. Can “community” be dangerous? Absolutely.

Maybe. Really? I don’t know yet. Let’s talk about it? Let’s try and figure it out. Together? We must. It is crucial. For we are sharing this world.xxi

7 Murray-Leslie & A.L. Steiner for their 2007 video piece Yves Klein, Extended Paint Brush (featured in Steiner’s exhibition Your Feelings Are Your Fault as part of “… community declared itself a medium…”) in which the artists enter the MAK in Vienna before it opens, disrobe, and move freely through an exhibition of Klein’s body paintings in a unconscious/conscious choreography of naked pile-ups. What happens when art “happens” in the space of a museum, unsanctioned, unexpected. and in response too a patriarchal perspective of painting?

A holy rolling of a different kind! And what about Klein— where is he in this equation? Here, the artists shift a power dynamic perpetuated by the confined space of art history and of the painting Klein created for his “living brushes.”

In an entry on the Walker Art Center’s “Untitled” Blog, Kristin Russell writes about her research as an intern responding to the show “Yves Klein : With the Void, Full Powers” , “Klein’s idea for the Anthropométries stemmed in part from his practice in judo, as he became fascinated by the markings left on the mat as a judo fighter fell. His initial experiment with using the human figure as a me dium dates back to June 1958 at a friend’s apartment. It was here that he first applied blue paint to a nude model and guided her in rolling across a sheet of paper that had been placed on the floor. Surprisingly, this initial work troubled Klein. To him, the heavily-coated paint traces left by the body on the paper were too much about the workings of chance and spontaneity. However, he continued to be intrigued with the idea of using “living brushes” and in February 1960 staged a live public premiere at his own apartment utilizing his new medium. Klein gave a signal to his model Jacqueline to first undress and then to cover her breasts, stomach, and thighs in blue paint.

Under his supervision and direction, she pressed herself against a sheet of paper fixed to the wall. The torso and thighs of the female body had been reduced to pure essentials; to Klein, it was an anthropometric symbol that served as the pure canon of human proportion, and he called it “the most concentrated expression of vital energy imaginable.” He believed that the model’s impressions represent the “health that brings humans into being,” and that their presence in the work “transcends personal presence.”

My library research brought me to an article from Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, in a special 2006 issue, “New Feminist Theories of Visual Culture.”

In “Behind Enemy Lines: Toxic Titties Infiltrate,” the collection of writers/feminist art collective known “Toxic Titties” compares a Vanessa Beecroft performance at the Gagosian Gallery with Klein’s Anthropométries, and they are quick to judge Klein’s artistic process. The collective’s Julia Steinmetz views Klein’s usage of nude females as “live brushes” as the artist distancing himself from his subject matter and thus his artistic process. As Klein attempts to create art in this detached state, directing his models to smear themselves with paint and roll on the floor or press against a wall, inevitably the artist-to-model relationship develops into a power dynamic.

Criticizing Klein for this “authoritative power struggle,” the article questions whether Klein considered the notion that those with power or authority often have the ability to remove or distance themselves from a dirty, uncomfortable environment. By “conducting” the motions of beautiful nude models, Klein has ultimate control over his female subjects, thus limiting the female body not only as an object for the male gaze, but also as a tool for representing, expressing, and enforcing patriarchal values.” – Feminism and Yves Klein’s Anthropométries, Kristin Russell, Walker Art Center’s Untitled (BLOG), Jan 19, 2011

xii. WomanShare, a womyn’s community established in southern Oregon in 1974. Title: Lake of the Woods Gathering, 1974. Photo: Ruth Mountaingrove (mcadenver. blogspot.com/2011/11/feminist-collectives-womynslands-of.html, January 2013) “The Land Movement resulted in feminist communities across the USA and Canada. Initially, the movement was especially significant in Oregon during the late 1960s and early 1970s because land was cheap and building codes lenient. Many communities were founded by women who pooled their money to purchase small parcels of land and built a basic cabin (single room, without amenities) for each woman. Individuals came together in shared spaces, including kitchens and barns. The communities tended to be collective, with a decentralized governing system. A major source of inspiration for the movement came from Country Women magazine (established in 1973) and from the publication of Country Lesbians: The Story of the WomanShare Collective (1976). Journals and books such as Maize: A Lesbian Country Magazine (1982) and Lesbian Land (1985) followed. In an essay entitled “Losing Home,” Elizabeth Clare writes about the challenges faced by the communities that come with setting up in rural areas: “The problems highlighted by the intersection of queer identity, working-class and poor identity, and rural identity demand long-lasting, systemic changes.” Most of the southern Oregon land communities could not be self-sustaining, requiring infusions of money, energy, and new residents from the outside.

Women were drawn to the land movement by the leveling of class distinctions as well as finding like-minded women. But many were unable to assist the communities financially, and had to learn the skills needed to live so close to the land. As women arrived with needs that communities lacked the skills to address — often recovery from trauma or psychological illness — some groups began to revisit governance policies. OWL (Oregon Women’s Land) Farm moved to a visitors-welcome, residents-must-apply approach, and others followed suit.” (http://www.qualiafolk.com/2011/12/08/womens-

land-movement/) xiii. Dynamic Meditation exercise or Encounter Group, Rajneeshpuram Oregon (Photo: http://www.prem-rawatbio.org/gurus/rajneesh.htm) xiv. (Sources” From Aurora to Rajneeshpuram: Oregon’s Communal History An Exhibit at the Aubrey R. Watzek Library , August 27 - December 18, 2009, by James J. Kopp, Library Director, Published by the Aubrey Watzek Library, Lewis & Clark College; McCormack, Wim, The Rajneesh Chronicles : The True Story of the Cult that Unleashed the First Act of Bioterrorism on U.S. Soil, Tin House Books, 1987) xv. The Inoperable Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991

xvi. “For most artists today, the laptop and phone have already supplanted the studio as primary sites of production. Early signs of this shift were evident in what became known as relational aesthetics, which, in retrospect, seems wrongly defined as a practice in which communal experience became the medium. It is more properly understood, rather, as a capitalist-realist adaptation of art to the experience economy, obviously, but also to the new productive imperative to go mobile, as a body and a practice. In other words, community declared itself a medium at the very moment that it was laying itself open to displacements it could never survive. Meanwhile, exhibitions were planned on laptops, then dragged and dropped into institutions. Work took a discursive turn, meaning it was now efficiently distributable on a global scale.” – excerpted from “Next Level Spleen,” John Kelsey, Artforum, September 2012 xvii.“The essence of Being is the shock of an instant [le coup]. Each time, “Being” is always an instance [un coup] of Being (a lash, blow, beating, shock, knock, an encounter, an access). As a result, it is also always an instance “with”: singulars singularly together, where the togetherness is neither the sum, nor the incorporation [englobant], nor the “society,” nor the “community” (where these words only give rise to problems). The togetherness of singulars is singularity “itself.” It “assembles” them insofar as it spaces them; they are “linked” insofar as they are not unified.” (33) Being Singular Plural, Jean Luc Nancy, Stanford University Press, 2000 xviii. “There is no meaning if meaning is not shared, and not because there would be an ultimate or first signification that all beings have in common, but because meaning is itself the sharing of Being.” (29) Being Singular Plural, Jean Luc Nancy, Stanford University Press, 2000

8 xix. “The word “community” is very loosely defined.

According to Webster’s, “community” can be a shared interest, a common location, common characteristic, common policy, common economic interest, or some other kind of perceived similarity between parts.

This set of definitions speaks to “community” as a kind of grouping of individuals based on “likeness” (in this way one could call a grouping of triangles a community on the basis that they are the same shape...even if they are different colors, have different histories and are made of different materials). This kind of definition is what we use to identify a “black community,” a “native community,” a “queer community,” or a “feminist community.”

Through this lens a “community” can be seen as a kind of categorization of people. The “Visual Arts Community” is people who are interested in “Visual Arts.” The “Dance Community” is people who are into dance. There may be infinite ways that the individuals in the community differ but the fact that they share one or more characteristic makes them “same” enough to classify within a group.

This understanding of “community” places the emphasis on static identities of individuals and does not account for the fluidity and multiplicity of individual identities, the constant flux of relationship or the continually shifting dynamics of community life.

It seems appropriate to visualize community as a physical network, as in a series of connections between people (a web of entities). A network, as a model of community, can take on many shapes and form many different kinds of relationships. Networks such as ecosystems and nervous systems illustrate the importance of diversity and dynamic change in the perpetuation of a living process.

The transfer of nutrients and information from one area to another is useless if the elements of the system are the same. This is a fundamental principle of biodiversity.

Another way that Webster defines “community” is as a group of people oriented around a common goal. For example, everyone who wants better public education forms a community (regardless of the ways that they think it should happen) or everyone who thinks that the United States should not go to war forms a “community” (regardless of their reasoning or their personal connection to the issue).

In these terms the shared “goal” or end result of the “community” creates the means by which people within the “community” relate. In this understanding the “community” would have no reason to exist if the goal were ever to be reached. Certain values may arise out of this grouping of people in the process of their shared experience, helping to maintain a kind of shared sense of purpose (a reason to work together, to support each other). In this definition the relationships are a byproduct of a common goal.”

Both definitions of “community” (one based on likeness and the other based on an end product) place the importance on fixed points (a static identity or a final goal) rather than the distance between (the dynamic relationships or shared process). I would like to propose a definition of “community” that is not defined solely by the existence of connections between entities, but rather by the quality of connection between the parts. This shift in definition acknowledges a spectrum of likenesses and differences within a “community” as well as the malleable and resilient process of interpersonal connection.

If “art” is, in its purest form, a means of communication, then artists act very much like synapses between nerves in a nervous system. The passing of information from one person to another plays a critical role in the formation and perpetuation of social networks. As I am considering the relevance of the word “community” in the world of “art,” I have become particularly interested in the ways that “art” can facilitate and mediate this connection between perceived “parts” (individuals, social realms, ideas, identities). When the connections are fluid and responsive the organism (community) is able to continue a dynamic living process because of the complex interweaving of systems, not despite it.

– Johanna Gilje, Curatorial Intern, in an email dated 8/9/13 12:11pm, addressed to myself, Heather Donahue, Curatorial Assistant, Gallery Director and Spencer Byrne-Seres, Curatorial Intern”

9 xx. “that which exists, whatever this might be, coexists because it exists. The co-implication of existing (l’exister) is the sharing of the world. ” (29) Being Singular Plural, Jean Luc Nancy, Stanford University Press, 2000

xxi. “Is Community A Postmodern Masterpiece?” Idea Channel, PBS Idea Channel, 2013 : In defense of the sitcom Community, created by Dan Harmon for NBC, the Idea Channel host Mike Rugnetta talks about the meta-narratives built into every nook and cranny of Community’s script, he says “Roland Barthes says ...we know that text is not line of words releasing a single theological meaning but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture.” This could be said of my essay and of the non-exhition it expands upon. He goes on to say, “… there is no such thing as a shared truth, so why give it such a high “Dean”stinction? Many post-modern works are built on reference, pastiche, genre agnosticism and not so much the betrayal of expectations, as the question if expectations are important to begin with.”

N.B. A final note. At the start of organizing this group of artists projects under the banner “…community declared itself a medium…”, I was interested in making space for artist-directed experiences. I was reflecting on the artist as benevolent autocrat and about the role of a community in helping the artists realize their processes, production, and eventual displays or performances. Now that the projects have opened, I have been a witness to artists leading audiences to inquiry, to putting a fine point on difference, and to establishing a place for listening and for testing. They do set up the parameters—instructions—but they are often not standing at the front of the class. They hope that we take over, make it our own. In a public conversation with Emily Roysdon, astronomer Jan Dabrowski illustrated how there is little of consequence between us and the universe. That seems related to the space between audience and artist. We have a responsibility to fill that space, or to wade through it and contemplate its potential, its vastness. He also mentioned that he thought we were all born artists, we were all born scientists, and that somewhere in our public/ private education we start to memorize facts and think they are truth. Dabrowski said “Facts are not science, they are not art, it is the experiment that counts and not the result.” That is truth.

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LOVE AND COMMUNITY: A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION WITH JEAN-LUC NANCY, AVITAL RONELL AND WOLFGANG SCHIRMACHER AUGUST 2001

Schirmacher: It’s a rare opportunity to have one of the most important and most intriguing European philosophers among us. He has agreed instead of giving a lecture to participate in an open round table, which is intended for questions and answers and for open discussion. We are asking him questions and he will tell us how wrong our questions are. To the students in his class he said so much about the body that we are kind of fed up with it. So the body will not be the main topic, in the beginning at least. He wants to be asked questions about politics, art and community. I don’t know whether you want to start, Avital, or if we should see whether somebody already has a question for asking.

Ronell: I would be happy to start unless someone wishes to have the floor as we say in English.

Only to break the ice, in case there is some ice.

This a very simple question, it’s not what you are used to as an intervention, which would have involved a very elaborate recapitulation of some of your work. I don’t know if you recall one of the texts that you wrote that is the most startling, and in a good sense, destructive for people — in other words it has a transformative quality, and some people are blown away by it — it’s precisely the text called “Shattered Love”. It has changed lives, it has devastated, it has created ecstatic recognitions and dis-identifications, break-ups, new fusions and so on, multiplied the whole notion of a possible couple and given different modalities of loving and love. Now I wanted to ask you about your love, but I also read somewhere where you had something to say to displace the Lacanian insistence on lack, and now you are teaching Christianity to us. I wonder whether this created an interference with the kind of ecstatic love that seemed possible in “Shattered Love”.

This text is particularly powerful not only because it is an amazing text, but also because I remember working on its translation. It somehow inscribed itself inside me somewhere.

Nancy: I can demonstrate that your question is false because it is not a question, but a demand.

Of course as every demand is a demand of love, everybody sees that everyday. This text has something to do with what I am working

now — as you mentioned, I am also working on what I have called a deconstruction of Christianity, which asks what can we grasp from Christianity, or what is it that remains after its self–deconstruction. I believe without a doubt that Christianity has already deconstructed itself, that it has opened up a space to let us see something which was always present in it but unseen and unseeable until now. Among those things that perhaps remain from Christianity, belonging to it as a precondition that Christianity itself doesn’t know but at the same time is recovered by the repressive power of religion, is, of course, love. This is the famous Christian love, which is nothing but impossible love. Because, first and foremost Christian love is a command, a command to love everybody, which is obviously impossible. I simply ask myself about that — would not precisely the impossibility of this love be the very thing that produces the very concept, content and reality of this love? As every construction deconstructs itself in a certain way, so the command of love as impossible is one of those things on which Western thinking as Christianis structured, organized, and derived from. This is for me a reflection which started a long time ago, when reading “Civilization and its Discontents”. There Freud writes about how civilization is sick, and how to cure it, because of course psychoanalysis can’t be used to cure the collective. In one place he writes that of course the anwer of Christian love seems to be the best answer, but I’m afraid, he writes with irony, that it is not practiceable. I thought that precisely this is the point: The fact that it is impossible is why it is the answer. Now if you think about it, this is precisely the definition of love that Lacan gives. Lacan’s definition is that love consists in giving what one does not have. Of course this is a definition by impossibility, because how can you give what you don’t have? We don’t need to be Christian or to have a Christian face to agree that Lacan’s definition is a Christian one. To give what I don’t have is precisely not to give something I would have, so it must mean not to give anything of the order of anything that could be given. No, to give something that doesn’t belong to the realm of give–able things, neither that nor to give myself, because one could be seduced by the idea “yes this means to give myself.” If myself is once again something I could give, then this myself is only the myself which I have. Then this definition means that love consists in giving something which is nothing. Nothing has to do with what is not a thing, not at all a thing — then what is not a thing, what is not an object? If you want, this is a subject. But this doesn’t really mean to give the subject, as the subject would be once again some thing that I would be. Love consists in my giving from me what is not mine in any sense of a possible possession of mine, not even my person. So to love means to give what is behind or beyond any subject, any self. It is precisely a giving of nothing, a giving of the fact that I cannot possess myself. This is to abandon, because in that case I would say that to give is the same as to abandon. In French I would say donner is the same as abandonner. Because to give in French is donner…

Schirmacher: To give up.

Nancy: Ah, that is wonderful. To give is to give up. So, yes, perhaps that could be meaning of “shattered”, and thus of the title to this ancient text you refer to – that is that to love means in one way to give the self as possession, the self as present to itself, and in another way to give and to abandon to the other something that the other himself has, to say that it is in the same way for himself because he is as well a self. In other words, love is to share the impossibility of being a self. I think that in that way this is perhaps a means to understand Christian love with all its impossibility, with all its absurdities, contradictions and denials, within the context of the church but outside of the church as well. So with all that has been done against this idea of love, this idea still did organize something in Western thinking and it is the point where we are today. I think that we all share something of this idea, even if we share nothing else with Christianity, and then I could say that for me it gives two further possibilities. One is to think of the community not as a totality in which the people would have to share a common being, that is, a common possession, a common body if you want, “body” taken in the sense of an organized whole, organized entity. We think the body of political thought not as an organicity, but of community as the living to share precisely an impossibility of being–in–common. I would say the community of love is a community living to share the absence of common being. Not the absence of being–in–common, but the absence of common being. There is no common property, and that is what we have to share. That’s the first extension of this idea of love. The second is that there is then a way from this idea to understand what Christianity meant by “loving one’s neighbor”.

Ronell: “Love our neighbor” — it’s a big problem.

Nancy: You know the place in the gospel where the meaning of the neighbor is explained — some Pharisian asks Jesus: “Who is my nearest, or my neighbor?”, and Jesus answers with the parable of the good Samaritan. A man was wounded and lying on the side of the road and a priest, a Jewish priest of course, passes and does nothing, and there is no one, finally comes a Samaritan who stops and heals the poor man’s wounds and pays for a place for him to stay. Then Jesus asks, “who was the neighbour of this poor man?”

That is the core of the Christian story, that the neighbour is everybody, without any distinction.

That is something that is also at the core of the whole structure of Western thinking, a thinking of equality and perhaps, to a certain extent, of the fraternity of all men. Then what does that mean?

Precisely, if you think about how difficult it is to love your neighbor. I don’t know in Manhattan perhaps, but I think that the “nearest” is absolutely not the nearest in any sense of neighborhood, nor the nearest by place, nor the nearest by taste, nor the nearest according to my desire, etc. The nearest is everybody, to the extent that everybody shares with me the same impossibility of being or becoming the fixed enunciation of a certain position. Of course everyone is different, the woman, the man,

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the blond, this one is brown, is tall, is small, is… I don’t know, is French, is American, is intelligent, is stupid, is strong, is weak, etc. However, all those properties are precisely only properties, and if love consists in giving what is not a property, then it consists precisely in this common unproperty.

Which means then that this love doesn’t say anything against love in the ordinary sense, but perhaps we should refer to ordinary love as predilection. One could say that the ordinary love of lovers is a predilection, a preference, which is based on distinction. This is this one I love and not the other one — but then we could analyse how even in this predilection the love as impossible is present. Or how predilection very quickly becomes a kind of possession. For now I would say that it makes understandable how impossible love consists in loving without any predilection, and that explains how it can become the idea “to love one’s enemy”, which is the top of absurdity.

To love my enemy does not mean that I should have a predilection for my enemy — as he is my enemy I hate him and I fight him. Instead, I should think of the enemy as my enemy but also as a subject who has no more or less properties than me, because he or she has no properties. I would just perhaps add a footnote regarding Lacan.

Everywhere in Lacan’s system you have this haunting nothingness, which here gives perhaps a certain pessimistic or ironic sound to his definition of love, “to give what you don’t have”, but perhaps this is not the only side of Lacan’s thinking here.

Although there is so much in Lacan about an originary lack and so on, I just want to insist that I would underline that the impossibility of love should not be interpreted as a lack, as a originary lack, because every lack is to be filled if possible.

Love means precisely to fill the emptiness with emptiness, and thus to share it.

Schirmacher: Thank you for your open lecture.

I knew I only had to make Avital ask a question to give us the lecture. Let me just to make a small remark — as you know this guy was not invited to tell you some truth. He is here to introduce you to a certain way of approaching things. As you see he gives with one hand and takes away with the other. If you know Derrida, you know then that one of his teachers made him do it. But what he does better than Derrida is that something very fluid, very imperceptible appears in this discussion of the possibility of impossible love. The possibility starts as an opening in which something appears, which cannot be grasped, but can only be lived in a certain way. So he gives to us by taking away.

Forget Derrida, he just gives more, more than I can take… OK so in this respect I invited him, my idea was to get any political thinker nowadays who I could respect, because normally I have total distaste for politics. In this respect anything political as such relies on an outdated, misused concept going back to Aristotle — you should throw it away and never talk about it, because they are using it to make you to do things, to bring you together to fight or to kill, whatever. So, is there anybody whose approach gives us a new idea of politics? I am pretty sure that it is somebody who is not talking about politics as such, but who is talking about Christian love and the body instead

of war. Hannah Arendt talks about natality and not about politics and institutions and democratic processes and all this stuff. We learned to hate it because it doesn’t work, it’s only for crooks. So this is a very strange way of approaching it and here we have a politics which does not have this name but might be a kind of practise of it. You share the impossibility of community and in this sharing there is your chance of community. It is the community which cannot send you to death. You might have a voluntary death, that is a possibility, but there is no expectation except this sharing which is not a word or an abstract concept. You can only share because as a community it is impossible to do so. This sounds very vague, it sounds like nothing compared to all these big promises we have about what will happen if we have community, but this vagueness is, I think, worthwhile to explore.

Audience: But isn’t Derrida’s idea of the gift what you are implying with the idea of giving what you don’t have?

Nancy: Yes, yes, this is somewhere almost the same, but I don’t think that he says this in relation to love. What Derrida adds is around the same point, his main thought is “to give” cannot succeed if the giver knows about his gift, so “to give” needs to be imperceptible. Now concerning the “imperceptible”, we can comment about how I can give myself my gift, if I return my gift to myself, to say that psychologically when I think I make a gift. I think that is very Christian, you know. This is also in the gospel, that you are quite unsure, not knowing what your left hand is doing. In addition, the task of love is demanded so strongly that I will answer its call even if I shall not receive any gratification in return from the love. This we could say makes this love absolutely unpresentable, and even in the feeling in which this love is not a feeling and nevertheless should be a way of feeling, this is where we might feel the nothingness of predilections. I return intentionally to the “nothingness” to say to Wolfgang that with the nothing, one has always to think that “nothing” is not nothing. Nothing is something, it is a something of no thing.

In English you can do that, this is “no-thing”. In French I can do that with the word rien. You know in French rien means nothing, but what is very interesting is that rien comes from the accusative form rem, from the word res, which means thing.

Res comes reality, reality is from res. Now I don’t know the entire etymological derivation, but rien became nothing by the way of meaning a thing, a small thing, a very small thing, the smallest possible thing and then not even rien…

Audience: Could you say that, if you say that nothing is like not really nothing, could you say that nothing is not neo-nihilism?

Nancy: Exactly, thank you very much for introducing this very important word. Precisely, nothing is nothing nihilist. All these questions are somehow about what we should do with nihilism. That is sure, that we are in the middle of nihilism. That means we have no longer have a heaven of value, or a tradition, or a nature.This is precisely the reason for what we have, in so different a manner, to do with the nothingness, which precisely is not

nihilistic. If we go a step further with nothing, we say that nothing is no-thing. What is no-thing?

This is I would say is everything which is not a thing. You and me, for example. Who here would accept to be a thing? So, perhaps this is a very, very important point. It is told that Archimedes said “give me the right point and I will move the world” that the mechanics of it, if you have the right point, you can move a very heavy mass with a short stick. Now, this is perhaps the academic point for us, exactly the point where we can sublate the nihilismus and turn nihilismus is something. This is very important because to the nihilismus, as Nietzsche said, there are only two issues. One is to try to replace the nihil as the emptiness of heaven, the absence of Gods, of sense of value etc. by taking all Gods, all values, all sense and again and again trying to fill the holes, which is already done all day. Perhaps I would say the whole story of the twentieth century will one day appear as a story of a civilization desperately seeking to fill the hole; value, value and something more - this is what we were talking about in class, speaking of what Bergson calls the supplementary soul. Bergson says that this world needs a supplementary soul.

A soul, however, cannot be supplementary.

Then either there is a way which is desperate, or of course there is the nihilistic way in which we destroy. The people who call themselves destroyers were literally the nihilismus. Lastly, the third and quite different way is perhaps precisely to understand how nothing is not a thing.

Ronell: This will allow us to talk about the difference, in a certain way, between community and politics, if we briefly consider the so–called “hippie movement” in America, which was at one point a movement under the signifier of love which we are talking about.

Nancy: Yes, precisely this is a way of speaking about community and politics. Today I think there cannot be a politics of love, because if love is what I tried to say, it excludes a certain fulfillment that politics implies. The space of politics shall be a fulfillment totally organized, although this doesn’t mean totalitarianism. It has to be the law, and here we could say that the law is that what I call here fulfillment, or a closed space. Precisely with what I said about love can be said in another way by saying the “law of love.” This is a very Christian expression, the law of love, which is only a law to the extent that there is precisely no law, or that there is no closure of the law, or, that in love we find the achievement of law.

Love is the achievement of law, which means that love is beyond law, or that the law of love is a law commanding and indicating something beyond law. That is for me the reason to think that community is one thing and politics another. Of course politics belongs to community, but politics is not everything. If politics is taken as equally coextensive and homogeneous to community, we are very quickly in totalitarianism. This is because we say everything is political, and if everything is directly, ontologically political, that means very simply that everything belongs to law. So I can make law about anything, about food, about art, about love as predilection. There is a very ancient

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and not by chance quasi–originary model for that in Plato. You know it is often said that the politics of Plato is quite totalitarian, because Plato says that the law can and must say which man has to be married to which woman, which child has to be saved, how you have to educate, etc. Why? Because the politics of Plato is a politics which conceives of thought as founded on something, namely on ontology, theology, etc. The politics of Aristotle is quite contrary. For some reason it is only the way of Plato which determines a certain thinking of politics. This is the way of thinking that Karl Schmidt named political theology. I think when we are in a world where there is no meaning to provide this kind of foundation as a transcendent foundation, when we are in the world without God, precisely the world of nihilism, it is absolutely normal and natural to succumb to the temptation to ontologize the community as such, to proclaim that the totality of the community and of mankind should be the foundation of politics. This is Rousseau. To a certain extent this is a extraordinary ambiguity in Rousseau, in the “Social Contract” — this book is at the same time a book not about foundation, but about creation, the self–creation of mankind as such. Man comes from the contract and not the reverse, because if it was the reverse it would be quite different thing from the contract which was already by Hobbes or Spinoza for example. After that when Rousseau tries to found a politics on this ontological self-production of mankind, he describes his politics and then he writes “But such a constitution would be good only for a people of Gods.” So, this is a reason for why there is such an ambiguity in Rousseau, and for why some people still now explain how Rousseau is the roots of totalitarianism. I think that for us now it is very important to learn about the distinction of a community as such, for example to think of it as, among other ways, a way of love, and to think of politics as a special order where of course the community has to establish a law to guarantee management as a management of justice, equality, the rule, etc. I was smiling when I say management, because while I should be ashamed to speak of politics in terms of management, I think this is precisely today a serious question to know in what extent there is not something.

I don’t speak of the politics of the managers, but in Europe today there is always, always the leftist critique which goes “Those socialists are only managers. They do nothing but manage the capital.” This is precisely a very important point, of course there are different ways of managing, but if such a sentence can be a total, radical critique, that presupposes first that we know what other than the capital we could right now propose.

Secondly, that implies that we have an idea of politics which immediately goes far beyond any management, which is not only the law but the total being of community. That is exactly what we have learned in about the middle of the twentieth century.

Schirmacher: OK, now I have to bring some order here, because I see that…

Nancy: You are the law, the state, everything you hate. So now we can make a revolution.

Schirmacher: Now I want to collect your questions and let Jean–Luc answer them altogether.

Audience: Your concept of community and of Being-With reminded me very much about the way Wittgenstein talks about concepts. He says that a type of bird isn’t defined by a specific characteristic, but by a group of characteristics that the birds, say nightingales, have. They don’t each have the same characteristic but instead each one has a characteristic in common with another one. I also wondered, although you can use your concept to define community, how can you use it to define different communities?

Audience: George Bataille say that we communicate across our common psychological lacerations, cuts. You describe it as touching, can you elaborate on what the difference might be, for example in either a restricted or a general economy?

Audience: You’ve stated that if communication communicates anything, it’s intensities, forces, and effects, and hardly concepts. Why exclude concepts, aren’t they a valid way of sensing the world? Can a concept or a general abstraction be something that is sensual?

Audience: When you speak of love and sharing of nothingness, how does that apply to the body?

Not explicitly in an erotic sense, but in the body as a presence, and how that also extends into community.

Audience: I would like you to elaborate more on to what extent we can speak about politics as an aesthetic project. We could speak about it in relation to the individual, because in the social field it could be dangerous.

Audience: In your concept of community, does that necessitate enemies as well as friends?

Audience: I would want to know about your conception of Christian love in relation to anarchism.

Ulmer: The room here is full of critics, learners, beginning scholars, people who have to face Wolfgang with their dissertation ideas, I wonder if you could in your response provide some metacommentary on your thinking process, how you can start talking about the love the way you do, it can seem perhaps magical or mysterious for those who aren’t intimately aware of the philosophical tradition.

Nancy: Until Greg’s question almost all the questions made it possible to give one answer to all of them. There were many questions about a community as specific structure of being–with.

And to say first, regarding the Wittgensteinian nightingale, I would say what interests me is that is the different are together. The question is, what is “to be with”, which as you know is a question that Wittgenstein did address. Wittgenstein is aware of and very attentive to the singularity as such and to what makes it possible to share something singular. First it is a question which comes to me through Heidegger, because he is the first to introduce a very simple, almost self–evident concept of Being–With. There is, however, a very

strange thing in “Sein und Zeit”, that besides so many precise, long and complicated analyses, he makes no analysis of the “With” as such and that seems to be very important, perhaps because the “With” is a quasi–empty category for all philosophy.

The whole scheme of our culture knows very well what is to be in or out, to be and to identify with something or to be totally exterior to it, to be homogeneous or heterogeneous. But to Be–With, this is the same thing to say that the glass is with the pen on the table and “be on” is a way to “be with”, or I am with Wolfgang and Avital on this side of the table, you are each with the other. What is that? In a certain way this is nothing, because “I and Wolfgang” to a certain extent are like “the glass and the pen”, we have nothing to do with the other. Then you’ve got a lot more to do. First, because he is the director, I am the teacher, etc, and perhaps if we go a little further we find that we are two human beings, so we share something biologically, etc… So the “with” has very interesting property in that it shows a proximity, it implies a proximity, and so once again we have the “nearest”. But it is proximity without recovering one through the other. If the pen is hidden behind the glass, you can’t say that they are “with”. Or if I hide myself behind Wolfgang there is no longer Jean–Luc with Wolfgang. So, “With” implies proximity and distance, precisely the distance of the impossibility to come together in a common being. That is for me the core of the question of community; community doesn’t have a common being, a common substance, but consists in being–in–common, from the starting point it’s a sharing, but sharing what? Sharing nothing, sharing the space between. “With” is in a certain way always between, or implies an in–between, and so from there we can go to the question which Victor asks. Yes, I would say that what I take here from Bataille is of course this central meaning that communication implies a gap between the one and the other, and that communication is not a continuous transmission, because the continuous transmission is a transmission of a information.

Information is a concept. What I don’t share absolutely with Bataille is the way he goes from that gap to the cut and then slowly to the sacrifice, which implies that there is still another realm, a sacred realm to which I could transfer something.

In the end however Bataille did himself write “what I call the sacred is nothing else than the communication of passions”, and from there we could return to love, etc, regarding passion, and once again for you the man with the concept, in the communication, it shall still be a communication of passion, even if it is through or by the means of concept. This is in a certain way like Kant who wrote “I cannot read Rousseau without being too much troubled and so I have to read Rousseau twice, because the first time I could not sustain my emotion.” It is perhaps a very good example of communication between men of concepts. I think that touching seems to me to indicate the same thing. That is the distance in the approach, but it avoids all questions of cutting, sacrifice etc. I disagree as well with Bataille who is always presenting the sex of the woman as a wound, because it implies that there is some penetration into

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the flesh. Sex doesn’t cut the body any more than the mouth or the anus, or any bodily orifice cuts the body. It is an opening, which is something different. This is why, regarding eroticism, I like to say there is no penetration, that penetration in a certain way has no proper meaning. To penetrate is to enter into the internal structure of the matter, but in physical love as well as in spiritual, it is the same — there is no penetration into, there is everywhere only a touching.

Schirmacher: But excuse me, are you saying that there is no penetration, because I can still remember this act, you know it was long time ago…

Nancy: But penetration where?

Schirmacher: The penis in the vagina. Your parents haven’t told you about that?

Ronell: I remember that once you said that there is a prejudice, an assumption that the vaginal structure is an interiority.

Nancy: This is exactly what I mean. It’s a topological issue — for me the body is first a hole, a tube if you want, and around the tube is a skin.

The first character of this topology is that it is a resounding thing. The air can go through the tube and you have the skin over it and you produce music. The body is first a certain sound, and that sound is the voice. And yes, with a little more time I would claim that to make love is to produce a sound — sometimes a real sound, even with words, but even in the silence there is a certain sound that is a certain resonance, resounding or vibration. The only place where the two lovers can really penetrate themselves into each other and become one thing is in the grave, like it is in the story of Tristan and Isolde . There is one flower, the rose grows from the grave of Tristan and goes into that of Isolde. I would argue that the community is always a community of Being–With, that the With is characterised by the touch, and that the touch is characterised both by proximity and by distance, but by proximity as distance. In the touch you still need to have both. This is the impossibility of penetration. The conclusion then is that a community is a community of bodies and nothing else. This doesn’t mean that it is a community like the glass and the pen — It means that to be “in common” we need the exteriority of the bodies, contrary to the very old model where the community should become a pure community of spirits becoming One Spirit. Now to return just for one moment to Christianity: in this very point there is an enormous ambiguity within Christianity, which gives the model of one body for all.

This model is called the mystical body of Christ.

Normally the mystical body of Christ was understood as a unique body of all men, but a couple of theologians even understood it as a totality of the universe. At the same time, however, in a way which for Christianity is quite contradictory, the singularity of each man, not only of each man but of each creature of God, each being, is impossible to suppress. And that is the meaning of the resurrection. The resurrection is a resurrection of the body. The resurrected body is not precisely a

spirit, but a body to be touched or not touched.

You know the story about Jesus and Magdalene: “Don’t touch me!” All this means that a community as a community of bodies means a community of mutual presentation of the common absence of common substance. Which is another way to say what Lacan says, with the father as being “because of” the mother as a common substance. However, to become an individual means precisely to go out of the common substance, and then even the brother and the sister are separated from the substance. The father, then, is a common law suppressed as death, the father is a dead father as it is said by Lacan. The only thing that I disagree with there is precisely that Lacan needs once again a figure of lack, of castration, and so the figure of the center of signification is an empty center, a zero point. I prefer to take that in the way of the no–thing, as I did before. So then, you are asking about the community’s relation to its enemies. What I said about love did already answer to the question of the enemy – I answer that the meaning of “to love even the enemy” is the meaning of love understood as having nothing to do with predilection such as friendship, or what is the contrary, hostility.

Schirmacher: The question was about the community and not about love. There is still a difference between love and community.

Nancy: Yes, but first I wanted to say that love gives the rule of community in general, but now we should add that the predilection is not simply something other, and that the difficulty of absolute love, of impossible love, is that it has to deal with possible love as predilection. This is because possible love is not only the possible, it is necessary.

It is necessary that there are certain links, certain proximities between groups of people, etc, and the fact that there are friendships and hostilities has to be taken as such. The question is only to know if a positive community or a community of predilection has to totally exclude the other communities or not. Now, without the general rule of the impossible love, why would community not exclude the other, that is, to kill it? Once again this is a question of substance, identity and subjectivity, and if the community of predilection thinks of itself as being natural, as being a substance, as a race given by nature such as Ayrian, or Serbian, or Croatian, or Macedonian, or the Hutu or the Tutsi, this community has an absolute right in a certain way to kill all the others, because it is the only community and has no ground for the existence of other communities. Then the question is simply not only the structure of the community of predilection, but to understand how the communities have to be related to each other. Then we can begin to examine the relations between community, art and politics. So I agree with you, but my answer would be that politics can be an aesthetic project only in relationship to the individual, not as a social project. This is what I formulate by saying politics is not everything, and then I think it is better to think that politics doesn’t have to become an aesthetic project, if politics is a general and closed law. The law has nothing to say about beauty. And as it is known the Nazism

can be interpreted, as Lacoue-Labarthe did, as a national aestheticism.

Schirmacher: Ah, bravo!

Nancy: No, I could not disagree but anyway there’s no need to. No, no I did not answer to Greg – his question is so different, so original that I am a little paralysed by it, but I understand very well why you pose it. Do I have a method? I don’t know. But simply, I think I was educated and more than educated, I was brainwashed, and touched by a certain number of persons because it was the first time that I heard somebody teaching about Hegel in a certain way. That touched me, even if I did not understand very much at the time.

I was also affected by all those people, people like Ricoeur, Derrida, Canguilhem, and other people who are not known and I would say came from outside. This is perhaps now why I am always thinking by the outside. Of course I speak of living people, because when I am speaking of touching, first I think through those who are living.

What I mean is that they all gave me a quantity of imposed ideas and then I tried to work with that. This is why I don’t think I have so much in proper philosophy with me, and that is why I have difficulty answering when I am asked about my concept of something. But I think that I have no one concept. What is present in contemporary thinking is all of our common problem. You are exposed to that, you take one part, another and so this is a little bricolage there. But in accordance with Levi–Strauss, bricolage is as rational as the scientific method.

Schirmacher: Thank you very much. It is very hard for the artist to think about his own method, because we do it for him and he doesn’t do it any more.

This transcript from Love and Community : A RoundTable Discussion with Jean-Luc Nancy, Avital Ronell and Wolfgang Schirmacher is reprinted with permission from Wolfgang Scirmacher of The European Graduate School

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Kristan Kennedy: Classroom, exhibition, participant, teacher, intern, author, expert, event, workshop, documentation, inspired (as in Reggio-inspired), budget, artist, student, kid, child, collective, research, project, correspondence, engagement, drawing, bench, floor, wall, library, residency... all of these words and more were at times problematic or lacking in their ability to describe the various components of, or the total artwork that is C’mon Language. How is it that we can make people understand this living lab sculpture/experiment? Now that we are near the end of the project’s three-month engagement do you have a sentence strung together that makes sense to you to describe it?

Anna Craycroft: I began C’mon Language with the aim to understand how to best frame my working process. Normally I spend a long time working out an idea privately until it is dynamic enough to build objects and exhibitions worthy of sharing. It takes years to get clear with my thinking so that I can summarize or consolidate the various parts into a single thing, or series of gestures, or comprehensive exhibition.

C’mon Language was about opening up that messy working process to the public. There was a risk of being inconclusive in that, but it was sort of the point. I began with a question—a series of questions really—and I admittedly had a secret desire to find answers. But at the same time finding any single answer could have undone the process of opening it all up.

According to Reggio philosophy there are “a hundred languages…a hundred and a hundred more” that their students use to explore and explain the world as that they are growing into. These languages include all the different processes, mediums, and techniques through which we can communicate with or understand one another, so no one understanding is privileged. If I strung a sentence together for you now I would inherently isolate one “language” from the rest and force a singularity of vision, which this project does not have. As confounding as it might be to have an artwork we cannot summarily describe, I do love the defiance of it. We really shouldn’t be able to do so with any work of art. All descriptions should be prefaced by, and celebrated for, their limitations.

I’m into your string of words. I like that you say the words are problematic and lacking. Let’s add to that list, throw an ellipsis or two in there, maybe some emoticons, and I think we got it.

KK: In Judith Rugg and Michele Sedwick’s book Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance, contributor Jane Rendell writes, “In demanding that we exchange what we know for what we don’t know, and give up the safety of competence for the dances of potential incompetence, the transformational experience of interdisciplinary work produces a potentially destabilizing engagement with dominant power structures allowing the emergence of new and often uncertain forms of knowledge.” Somehow this seems to explain the most generative and generous moments of C’mon workshops. There was often a certain destabilization (or power dynamic collapse/compression of space, time, experience, age, understanding) between the visiting artists/experts and workshop participants. Can you talk about this particular dynamic and about the chaotic flexing of the C’mon group in action?

AC: I’m not sure that there was a full “exchange of what we know for what we don’t know.” Certainly most of the visiting contributors maintained a level of expertise and competence in their knowledge when they were presenting. And although myself and all other participants in the events may have been both experts and fools in a.) our familiarity with the space and b.) our ignorance of the material presented, each event was, for the most part, a fairly standard classroom set up of a leader who holds the knowledge and an audience who may (or may not) absorb it.

Originally I had wanted to break this mold by creating a space that was active and forced a physicality through hands-on activity and the self awareness of documentation. By supplying art horse drawing benches in lieu of chairs, by hanging notes taken during events on the walls and by using Jon Kessler’s The Web app to immediately display documentation on a running slide loop, I wanted participants to witness our actions as we made them. But the privacy and familiarity of passive learning, and of lecturing is also important and many people advocated for or defaulted to that. I was still open to this though, as it was interesting to see how it worked or failed within the installation.

There were times that the power dynamic was upended—most frequently when the class of six year olds was present—and that began even in the planning stages. Almost all of the contributors were really challenged by the prospect of taking a complex idea and translating it to a form that would hold the attention of young children. Some refused to find a way for kids to understand. Seems fair enough. It’s a lot of work and can easily digress into a parody that misses the real intellectual substance of the lesson.

And sometimes when contributors did figure out how to make their workshops accessible to children, it

Anna Craycroft C’mon Language

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still digressed. But whether they failed or succeeded, translating complicated ideas is a big part of what I think art is, so I loved the efforts and their inherent chaos.

In addition, because the group of kids were Reggio students, they were used to being very self-directed in their school, and this was a pretty fascinating energy to work with. And in this way they brought more than just the predictable playfulness of childhood. It was a challenging social dynamism with the agency of individuals within a group exploring the ideas and activities at hand.

The most unwieldy destabilization I experienced came from the lack of continuity in the week-to-week content. Making connections between the vocabularies of copyright law, basket weaving, stop-frame animation, and wordless song requires surrendering to an idiosyncratic logic. There is just no right answer. Because of this it was disquieting to be back in the same space week to week with an entirely new set of information. You would have hardly processed one complex set of ideas before being hit with another. But I also liked this, it did allow “uncertain forms of knowledge” to emerge. Lots of run-on unfinished sentences that I’m only just starting to see take shape.

KK: Did a community form around C’mon Language? If so what kind of community? If not, why not?

AC: If by community you mean a single organism with multiple hearts and minds and lungs working together in pursuit of a shared interest, I would say not. There were regulars of course, people engaged in the exhibition to different degrees who became more familiar over time. There was a core group of participants who came to the events every week, helped maintain and expand the show through a variety of logistical responsibilities and creative input, and also lead their own workshops. There were a number of repeating audience members. And there was the class of six year olds and their teachers from the Helen Gordon Center for Early Childhood Development who also came weekly. As I said we all became better acquainted over the course of the summer, but I would not describe that as a community. However, building a community was not my goal.

As beautiful of a concept that community can be, it can also be a little overblown and give false pretense, much like the word “collaboration.” It can create a deafness to the individual voice for the sake of a greater harmony, when in fact what actually results is either a cacophony with no clear tonality or the dominant bellowing of the loudest nearest voice.

During the first weeks of the show, I made clear to the participants that C’mon Language was not a collaboration; it was a collective experience to which we all would contribute. The distinction for me was about giving equal weight to each subjective perspective. To do so you can’t hear every voice at once.

This was part of my inquiry into language, in that how communicating is a negotiation between private experience and public sharing. I think it would have been hypocritical for me to claim interest in community. My design of the show was about my own questions and agendas. Building a “community” around that would have felt tyrannical. Of course I hoped to talk to others about shared interests, which is why I was exploring these personal questions publicly. But the show is structured so that people could take what they wanted from it, and to a certain degree contribute what they want.

I don’t know whether true community can be pre-meditated. Seems like real community evolves as a byproduct of something else. I think an exhibition like this would have to exist over a much longer period—allowing the time and space for each member’s voice to be heard by all other members, and their collective agency with the project to morph as time passed—in order for there to be a real sense of community within it. It would be a very different show, but I would love to see that happen.

KK: It was important to you and me both that C’mon be a directed experience, for you to construct a space that was linked to your own aesthetic concerns and to retain artistic control over the project. In what ways did you exercise that control? In what ways did you hand it over to others? Were you surprised by your own engagement in the socially engaged construct/construction you designed?

AC: Ha! Yeah. I can hear you repeating a sentence over and over again when we were making decisions during the planning of the show: “Anna, You are the architect of this project!” It was an insistent reminder that I use the visual design to articulate how the show is first and foremost my personal inquiry.

There is a kind of built in order and control to the installation because it is composed of clean and rigid geometry. Plus it looks like a classroom as seen through rose-colored glasses...what did you call it?

“The Church of School”...the kind of nostalgic haze that purifies and preserves a memory, makes it holy and untouchable. And in being a reminder of the organization of school there is an inherent sense of control to that too. When consulting with each contributor on their event, I suggested that they utilize the furniture and tools available, working with the space as it is. So there is an orchestration of the people and activities in the space that comes out of that. In addition there was no continuity from one event to another. Each workshop happened independently. So there was never more than a couple hours at a time for anything to be made or any real alteration of the space to happen. In turn, what was made in each event was shortly thereafter whisked neatly to the display area and represented on a shelf or vitrine.

Plus I was constantly present, tweaking the installation week to week and documenting like a maniac to help build out the archive, so my hand and eye were really dominant.

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It is somewhat of a disappointment for me that things never got chaotic enough to make even the re-ordering that challenging. I suppose I was surprised by how much I was simultaneously present and removed. But I think it would have required a much larger rupture in order for my behavior to have been otherwise: stronger agency on the part of the participants, more continuity from week to week, and being more consistently absent from the project to let it take shape without my hand. However, I realized at a certain point that I was in residency at PICA to learn from the show, and if this meant I kept my finger in the pot the whole time, then that’s what I would do.

KK: Will C’mon Language end on September 29, 2013, or do you think your question “How do we make ourselves understood?” has been answered by the exhibition?

AC: The question “How do we make ourselves understood” is both open-ended and rhetorical. My focus in that question is on the words “we make ourselves”. It’s a continual process, as is understanding. The exhibition will close on September 29, but the question remains open, as it should.

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Kristan Kennedy: In Jean- Luc Nancy’s book Etre singulier pluriel (Being Singular Plural) he asserts that there is no “being” without “being with” and, moreover, that there is no meaning if it is not shared. In mining the stuff of abstract strategy games and its community what are your thoughts on the systems that people devise to be with one another in thought and play? Or perhaps I can expand this a little and ask what is interesting to you about observing how people act with each other while also being in their own mind? How do these systems/puzzles relate to your work? Is your work a puzzle?

Alex Dolan: I think abstract strategy games are beautiful. I also find the desire to produce a system of rules for a complex form of exchange a beautiful one. If you think about all games and not just abstracts, you find that there are games themed around nearly everything. All those games are built upon dynamics similar to those in the systems they simulate. With abstracts you get just those dynamics and no theme; the game’s content is only the rules and the patterns those rules create. I don’t think it is too much of a stretch then to liken this to everyday life and start to think about the rules of life. The motion of a step, the amount of water to drink to stay healthy, the hours in a day.

Also I don’t think I would say my work is a puzzle, only because a puzzle has a solution. I don’t necessarily think abstract games are puzzles either. When you play a game against someone you don’t really solve anything; instead you produce a series of moves. In some games, that series of moves is more interesting than others. So games are not really about solutions, or even winning, but much more about the experience of a certain series of decisions. And this is sort of like life. So maybe my work is like a puzzle, but in the way that life is like a puzzle. Like a game, the series of decisions can either be boring or exciting, happy or sad. And where you wake up each day, try to budget your time, maybe go on a walk to the grocery store, distract yourself with solitaire, or sudoku, or whatever you prefer...

KK: We spoke in your studio about this show being a collection of thoughts that would come together when organized on tables or the wall or floor as objects and images. Furthermore, you spoke about how you are often pulling things from images which have a diminished physical presence, and then giving them life again in the form of a pattern, fabric, glass, digital painting, book, game (all of them now “artworks”). Now that you have assembled your work into one space what do you hope to reveal? What new life has been given to these things?

AD: I like to make artwork for galleries because I think when I notice something particularly interesting in the world it only becomes more interesting in a gallery. The use of tables only enhances that for me.

Tables are egalitarian and they also unite whatever objects are on them. But still, after uniting everything in a gallery on tables the result is more of a feeling than an idea. Galleries feel a lot like the comedown from MDMA, where everything is super sharp and crisp, and all the elements of an object are evenly presenting themselves.

With this work I am going for the tension in a particular double bind: that on one hand you can feel limited by the mechanics of everyday life, of being trapped in a prison of time, distraction and tedium, and then on the other hand sort of acknowledging that these structures are necessary and productive—fluid needs solid, water needs its glass.

KK: We started by talking about games, but the show wound up being much more about fundamental systems. Can you talk about what role time plays in the work and also about observing things accumulate, or flat out observing, say the water glasses on a nightstand?

AD: I think watching time pass would be similar to staring at a water glass and finding it beautiful. They are both ambient things in life, things that we never really give our full attention to. Time is too boring to watch, and water glasses are typically just used. Still, the show isn’t about “noticing the little things,” but instead to use time and glasses as media in themselves. These little things structure our experience of the world and so it makes more sense to me to receive a message from a glass than from a painting.

Alex Mackin Dolan Cycle, Sun, Limit.

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Summer 2001

This interview between Kerry Handscomb and Kris Burm appeared in Issue 6 of Abstract Games, a magazine completely focused on Abstract Games.

In Abstract Games 1 we reviewed GIPF, and in Abstract Games 4 we reviewed TAMSK and ZERTZ and explained a little of the concept behind Project GIPF. In the following interview the Project’s Belgian creator, Kris Burm, explains his views on his games and how he expects the Project to develop.

How do you expect the Project to develop?

Kris Burm: I don’t know. The fact that Schmidt Spiele [publisher of GIPF, TAMSK and ZERTZ] and I separated at the end of last year makes a big difference. All I can say is that the continuation of Project GIPF is still uncertain. I, personally, am still very committed, but I have no idea whether that will be sufficient to realize the complete series.

Can you tell a bit more about the split, or is that an indiscrete question?

Kris Burm: It is not indiscreet, but rather too complex to answer in a few words. As an individual, I can engage myself emotionally; a company cannot do that. My fuel is conviction and belief in quality; a company works with statistics. That went okay for a while, but in the end it always comes back to one question: what are the expectations?

In other words, Schmidt Spiele was not happy with the sales.

Kris Burm: Right. That was the main factor from Schmidt’s point of view. From my side there were other reasons. After ZERTZ was released, Schmidt wanted to postpone the fourth game.

I thought that was not a good idea. GIPF was a stand-alone game that announced the Project.

TAMSK was the second game and the first to reveal something substantial about the Project, but TAMSK alone was not enough to make things clear. With the third game, ZERTZ, I thought that the Project finally had enough weight to take off.

So, my opinion was that we had to stick to the rhythm of one game per year. It came down to another meeting with Schmidt, and we found a solution: I could go on with the fourth game. But when everything was ready for production to start, there was a disagreement about the game itself.

Do you think the games of Project GIPF can survive, if not as a Project, then as a series of games or even as separate games?

Kris Burm: If I did not believe that, I would already have given up. It is clear that abstract games are going through difficult times. In Germany a journalist deduced from the divorce between Schmidt and me that abstract games could well be over and done with. This kind of nonsense is typical of the problems abstract games are confronted with. Most people who write about games prefer games with a theme. That is a fact!

Abstract games don’t fit their interest; they are not their specialty. I wish some writers would be just a bit more careful when they feel the urge to note down their opinion. If there could be a bit more information available about abstract games, and above all better information, it could make quite a real difference. On the other hand, the games of the Project were in general well received and got good reviews. In addition, I get more and more emails from people telling me how much they like the games. Some even call the Project one of the best things that has happened in their lives. GIPF and the related games have an excellent and growing reputation, and that is why I believe that there is at least a chance that they’ll survive.

My view is that in a hundred years the popular theme games of today will be long forgotten, whereas many of the great modern abstracts will still be played. Anyway, how do you feel about the review of TAMSK in Abstract Games 4?

Kris Burm: I had no problems understanding your point. TAMSK got extreme reactions; some called it a highlight, and others considered it more of a gimmick than an abstract strategy game. That aside, the use of hour-glasses as playing pieces was not just to make the game fit in with the Project, as you suggested in your review. The aim was to develop a game with time as an element in the game, not just as a limitation.

I, myself, also prefer GIPF and ZERTZ, but not because TAMSK is not as good. I’m very proud of TAMSK. I live with the idea that I have already reached my peak with GIPF. But, on the other hand, there’s also a little voice in me that keeps whispering that not GIPF but TAMSK is the best thing I did so far. People who don’t like time pressure, will never like the game, that is a sure thing.

That aside, TAMSK is not a game about time but about territory. The fact that each piece carries its own time around the board and will be lost when it runs out of time is nothing but a restriction just like all the other restrictions that are more commonly accepted. The limitation of a board with 64 spaces is also a restriction that could be considered to be “putting the players under pressure” as there’s no escape out of the 8 x 8 frame.

A limited number of pieces is also a restriction.

In fact, every rule is a restriction. TAMSK adds a restriction that is not commonly accepted yet: time as a factor that must be considered in all the potential movements on the board, just like limitations concerning spaces and pieces must be considered, too. In certain situations you can make your opponent lose an hour glass if your piece carries more time. On the other hand, you can let an hourglass deliberately run out of time to block a passage. Even still the time pressure makes it difficult to plan future moves. Ultimately its beauty is therefore in its similarity to life itself. You have to make decisions about what to do with your time and those decisions are made complicated by the pressure of time itself. As such, more than any of my other games, TAMSK introduces something which I would dare to describe as novel. But, I know, all this is just theory; eventually it is not the brain but the stomach that tells whether a game

is good or not, even when it is an abstract game that is at issue.

Why were you so eager to construct the Project around GIPF? Kris Burm: Oh well, there were several reasons.

The first one goes back to my youth. I used to play a lot with my younger brother, and we worked out several systems to combine games.

One of these systems was a race around the carpet. We both started with three cars or soldiers or whatever. We would play a game and the winner got a roll with six dice, of which he could use the best three results to move his three cars; the loser could roll only five dice. Then we would play another game, and the winner would again have a roll with better odds, and so on. It sometimes took two or three days to finish a race. Now, soon after I started designing games, I made my first attempt to find a mechanism that would make it possible to combine games. Many more attempts would follow, all without success, until I found GIPF. I had never felt such a thrill before. It is a little embarrassing to explain how beautiful I thought the game was. I played it on my own night after night, fascinated with what was happening on the board. The rules could be worked out in so many different directions, introducing different pieces, functions, and goals, and so. The game almost presented itself as the mechanism I had been looking for.

The many options I had as a designer is the second reason why the game had to become a project. Never would I have succeeded in finding a publisher for what I thought was going to be the strongest version of GIPF. Not only that, I knew enough of the game scene to understand that not more than a handful of players would give the game a try if I proposed the completed version from the outset. Through the Project, with each new game introducing one new piece, players could step into the full game bit by bit. I’m not talking about the possibility of combining games now, but just about GIPF with the additional potentials.

And that was yet another reason for making GIPF a project: I needed a lot of time to find out systematically what could be added to GIPF. And I still need time. So, the search still goes on.

You are clearly a very talented game designer. Do you think maybe your talents, for their full expression, have to move beyond the Project?

Kris Burm: Beyond the Project? That is a strange question.... Quite a few people have let me know that they consider Project GIPF to be the work of a megalomaniac, too ambitious, too whatever.

Any way, for the time being I can’t think of a better use of my talent than to finish the Project and try to hold onto about the same quality as the first three games. I don’t think I can ask for more. I say that because at times I fear not to be able to match the standard set by the games introduced so far. What I told you about GIPF as a game also counts for GIPF as a Project: I -- and I’m really honest about this -- can’t imagine that I will ever do better. For the time being, and speaking about my talents, I simply can’t imagine that there’s

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something beyond the Project. So, anything that would go beyond it, would come to me as a complete surprise.

Well, life is full of surprises.... Thank you very much, Kris, for your candid and enlightening responses. However you do it, I hope you get the next game to us quickly. Good luck! ©2001, Kerry Handscomb TAMSK was removed from the GIPF series in 2007 and replaced with TZAAR. All games in the GIPF Project incorporate expansion pieces called Potentials. TZAAR uses the TAMSK-Potential, in memory of TAMSK. GIPF, TAMSK, ZÈRTZ, DVONN, YINSH, and PÜNCT ® & © Don & Co NV. Content © Kris Burm. All rights reserved.

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Kristan Kennedy: Your essay Identify Yourself is an artwork and your artwork is an essay. It lives in a file on your computer, it lives on paper, it will live in your lecture, it will live in the people who read it, it will LIVE on the Internet. When I invited you to make this work we both knew it was a proposition to answer a leading question, a notion we both believe in: that there is humanity “in” the Internet, there is a community. Can you talk about what it means to “live” on the internet?

Krystal South: Living on the Internet is about a new sort of control. I have a truly dispersed network of people to communicate with who share my interests. I have access to information, whether fact or opinion, that is completely removed from my physical access. I can choose to learn as much or as little as I wish.

We as a human race have the ability to augment our brains and environments, to extend ourselves outwards and inwards, in a system that is so new and disruptive that we cannot help but throw ourselves into it. I have put so much of myself into the Internet, and I feel so much more has come back out. My online experiences and how they have bled completely into my “real life” have proven that the Internet is just as human as all of us,both beauty and flaws intact. My artwork just feeds back into the very system that inspired it.

KK: Sharing values, material, knowledge, ethics, space, time. and interests are all core components of forming a community. Sharing is also a word used to describe the transmission of information via computers and the web. Could this have something to do with an existing Internet art community?

KS: I’ve always felt that the very core of the creative act lay in sharing. We speak to try and communicate our particular view. The whole idea of the self is deeply embedded in the Cartesian point of view, and anything occurring outside of that—objects, language—is an effort towards sharing. With immediate access to the point of view of endless artists, bloggers, and online diarists, we can now see the world with such multiplicity. Seeing the same image remixed and edited by Internet people—variations on a meme—is just one example in which the Internet cultivates this sort of dialogue and exchange. The speed of online social transactions, and the feedback system that exists around this content sharing, creates at the very least a feeling of community, and at its deepest a truly meaningful cultural transmission that changes both the self and the group.

KK: Was there anything that happened or came to light in making Identify Yourself that helped you identify yourself as an artist, as a member of a community?

KS: When I originally started thinking about this project, I wanted to involve all of the artists that I had developed relationships with following Internet art and talk to them about their sense of self in relationship to their work with computers and the Internet. But as I worked through my original ideas, it became clear to me that I had been shaped by these artists, and that I wanted to find clarity in how my place in this system had shaped my identity. Artwork and computers have been a constant, continual learning process for me since I was a kid, and I’ve begun to realize that these two things, and the discoveries they have led me to, are core components of my sense of self. I now see how deeply this system of content generation and sharing have impacted my artwork and my idea of a “community.” This essay and project are about trying to place myself, and my trajectory, within an incredibly vast and complicated virtual space. The insertion of artworks by this community are injections of ideas that helped to shape who I am and how I think today. The two sides of the essay speak to my parallel development to this technology.

Krystal South Identify Yourself

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Jamie Isenstein

In Conversation with Stephanie Snyder

Stephanie Snyder: Jamie, what fascinates you about magic, vaudeville, theatricality, the imaginary, optical illusions, and the like?

Jamie Isenstein: I do love the showy hokiness of the world of magic, the outmoded imagery, the mystery, the specificity of the props. I’m particularly intrigued by the way the props work – how they disguise a body, for example, or the way they look like one thing but are really another. For my purposes, I find deception through illusion an interesting perspective to think about the nature of representation (or misrepresentation) in life, and in art in particular. Maybe it’s generational, but I am not interested in making art in which the mechanics of how the work was made must always be transparent (i.e., “the meaning is in the making”). Truthfulness in art is something I think about, but I would rather make art that acknowledges its own artifice and illusion than deconstruct it from the outside.

In my work I have often focused on theatrical themes such as vaudeville or magic to think about what performance is exactly; what does it mean to do something live in general, in front of an audience or not, and specifically in the context of art? Because conventional theater, or anything on a stage really, tends to have a clear beginning and end, I have also found theatrical themes to be useful metaphors for temporality, and by extension, mortality. Being on a stage, after all, is the ultimate act of being present, and so I often use these themes to think about presence and, conversely, absence.

I used these themes in my first solo show Infinite Invisible Soft-shoe at the artist-run gallery Guild and Greyshkul in 2004. The centerpiece of the show was a set of large, red curtains like those on a theater stage. I hid within the folds of the curtains and operated them as the rigger to make them dance to a ragtime version of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” (arranged by my now-husband, composer Paul Damian Hogan). The song was performed live in the gallery by a player piano. Also in the show was Infinite Disco Soft-shoe, a video of me and my animatronic skeleton wearing top hats, coattails, and canes while attempting a synchronized dance. Because of the animatronic skeleton and the player piano, it was almost impossible to discern whether the curtains were automated or if their movement was a live performance, raising questions about what is animate and inanimate. The installation also played with traditional expectations of what is supposed to be visible on a stage; you would have expected to see a performance in front of the curtains, but instead, the performance was the curtains.

It’s not just typical stage theater that interests me though. I try to play with the conventions of the stage, but I also love other nontraditional, yet time-honored varieties of performance. I love circus clowns for example, because they come and go unexpectedly, so that the beginning and end of the performance is rarely evident. Sideshows and dime-museum performances appeal to me as well for their presentations of living beings in contexts of display rather than as theater. In 2007 I showed a project based on this model of performance at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles entitled This Way to the Egress.

The project was based on a hoax attraction (the Egress) created by P. T. Barnum in order to trick an over-abundance of visitors into leaving his museum. For my installation I made a few suggestions of what the Egress could be, including a half-artist/half-bird hybrid called The Egress, which I played by wearing a ridiculous costume in the museum. Some of the other suggestions in the show for the Egress were based on doors, including Eyehole, a doorknob and key plate with a mirror behind the keyhole. When a visitor looked in the keyhole they saw an eye staring back at them. By presenting the Egress, I felt I was finally making good on what Barnum promised but never delivered. Since I wasn’t always in my spot at the museum, there was a lot of coming and going, literally and figuratively, in that exhibition.

Stephanie: The “Will Return” sign is such an iconic element in your work. It’s a humble and enigmatic object – poetic, even, in its promise of return and renewal.

Jamie: I use the “Will Return” sign as a kind of place-saver for me. My assertion is that the sign turns a performance into a sculpture. And of course I like it because it speaks to both presence and absence,

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immortality and mortality. But I also like to use the sign because it draws from the language of commerce.

It suggests that my presence in the art is work. When I am lending my body to an artwork, I do see it as a kind of job. The inside of a sculpture is not a sacred space for me, or a place where I meditate and think about having been transformed into an artwork. Rather I spend my time distracting myself by reading or listening to audiobooks. There are many other references to the world of commerce in my work (including the act of offering performative sculptures for sale as a subtle critique of consumerism, for one), but the “Will Return” sign is the most unmistakable, I think. also like the “Will Return” sign because it is so graphic and so beautiful in its simplicity. I like that it’s from the everyday world but suggests so much more. In 2005 I made a version of the “Will Return” sign that had an operating clock in the back. I removed the second hand so the hour and minute hand moved imperceptibly. I had been asked to do something performative in The Wrong Gallery in New York City, which was about a foot deep and the width of a doorway – too small to do anything in there! I put the “Will Return” sign in the door and set the clock ten minutes ahead, so that if people came to the door expecting a performance they would assume they needed to come back in ten minutes. By then the clock would have advanced ten minutes and I would never have to return! So the sign does suggest work, but it can also provide time for leisure too!

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Kristan Kennedy: Here we are on the cusp of working together. You and I, as artist and curator.

You and PICA, as artist and institution. You and the community of Portland, as audience and material and research and place. You and your potential collaborators Miguel Gutierrez and Bouchara Ouizguen.

You and the space of the TBA Festival—the theaters, the interstitial spaces in between performances and exhibits. You and your core group of contributors made up of an astrologer, a poet, a playwright, a lighting designer, an eco feminist, and others. What do you hope to gain from using the site of the TBA Festival as a lab and, furthermore, what is your interest in opening your project up to others to influence and contribute to?

Emily Roysdon: It's personal, practical, political. I've been interested in an alchemy of time in all realms; let's list body, work, memory, work, process, lives, work, living, now and then, over and over, when, history, tired, alchemy. Thinking this through personally, in my life as an artist, conceptually, metaphorically, and daily. PICA's TBA is an excellent vehicle for these questions because its ‘festivalness' is a petri dish of intensities, rehearsals, travelers, networks, and proximities that can be counterpoints and experiences to draw into these questions.

I very much work in language, and so this 'workshop within festivalness is driven by a real desire to hear the words other people use to talk about these things. To try to re-organize, un-articulate, and discompose time into something that I can put back together in another way. To find more space in time.

KK: You have asked your core group to enter into daily conversations with you and the occasional public. Each person will be talking about notions of “time” from their unique perspective and experience.

Through this exchange and with the "data" gathered through these talks you hope to create a calendar.

In concert with your project we have made a large sundial on the outside wall of the WORKS, PICA's temporary club, exhibition space, and theater venue. Can you talk about your interest in working or creating tools/artworks that help us measure or record time? In what way do these tools/artworks correspond with the greater notions of your project.

ER: Project-ness, projecting horizons of work, everyone in this festival will have been challenged by this contemporary mode of living and working and I think most, as artists, will have developed strategies and philosophies about how to think about it. I want to pull forward and up what is usually a background question. And, of course, it’s all about performance. Time. And these questions about the elements in theater, dance, performance art, etc… so they all come to bear through these related compositions.

KK: What is the role of abstraction in your work?

ER: Poetics, transitions, connections, pulling down strings from the sky, boiling fruit, thinking a web, and seeing what sticks.

KK: Your project this year is a way of researching for a larger and perhaps more formal performance/ installation for the Festival in 2014. Can you talk about your interest in making works for "the stage?”

ER: I have both a desire and a resistance to making formally staged works. When I do do it, I can't fully follow the conventions of rehearsals, scripts, and a silent seated slated audience. I use the stage as a foil, as a structure to which I'll never fully comply. A horizon, a space to keep at an ideal distance, something to work against, and sometimes in.

That's as a maker. As a viewer, I love the experience of the world-making that happens on stage.

KK: How do you define community? Or do you?

ER: I don't. I think of this work more within a realm of intensities and relations and vocabularies.

Emily Roysdon Minor Theatres (wrkshp 1)

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Lucy Raven & Rebecca Gates Room Tone: Variation Kristan Kennedy: Lucy, Room Tone was originally conceived as an instructional piece, commissioned by 12 Rooms and the Ruhrtrienniale and performed live at the Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany, a little over a year ago. How do you imagine this piece will differ? What are your thoughts on introducing variations through voice, location, and collaboration with Rebecca? Since you will not be in the room you are truly making a work for those people who show up to the performances. How is your voice as an artist present? Is it important that it is?

Lucy Raven: Room Tone is a performance that foregrounds a particular voice reading and recording a prepared text. Through a series of recordings and playbacks of that text in the room it’s spoken into, the original performance recedes as the natural resonant frequencies of the room take over. There’s a term in filmmaking and sound recording of “room tone,” also called “presence.” It’s the recorded “silence” of a particular space, which can be used as background between edits when cutting dialogue. I liked the idea that in this work a spoken performance would subsume itself into the background, eventually becoming unintelligible, while the individual rhythms and cadences of the speaker’s voice would be pulled forward to articulate the room’s tone.

The original invitation from Hans Ulrich Obrist and Klaus Biesenbach, co-curators of the 12 Rooms show in Essen, asked artists to create an instruction-based work for somebody other than the artist to perform. Each performance would take place (in shifts, with rotating cast of non-curated performers) for the duration of the museum’s hours each day, for the duration of the show. For the iteration I’m presenting at TBA, I’m working with musician and sound artist and good friend Rebecca Gates to create a new variation of the work. Notably, there will be just two performances of the piece a day, and rather than rotating through a small cast, as in the case of the 12 Rooms version, a different performer will be featured during each event. We’re staging the work in PICA’s temporary galleries at the Con-Way Warehouse so the feeling will be quite different than it was in the white cube at the Folkwang Museum. We hope people will lounge comfortably, stay for the full cycle of the work (about 20-30 minutes), and come back for different experiences of the performance as new voices interpret the piece.

Rebecca and I worked together on an audiomagazine called The Relay Project, and also (with Regine Basha) on a sound art show in Marfa called The Marfa Sessions. Having her involvement in the design of the space, the casting of performers, and as a performer herself has been a wonderful experience that broadens and complicates the work, and suggests further ideas for future variations.

KK: Rebecca and Lucy, in conversation with Lucy at a recent site visit, she brought up an interview between Alvin Lucier and Stephen Vitiello you conducted for The Relay Project. Lucy brought it up because it spurred the thinking behind Room Tone, extending Lucier’s seminal work into a performative and collective action with many voices, the room, and a looping back on the history of the gesture. Can you talk a bit about the sections of that interview we have republished here? What are you hearing them say to each other? How does this relate to Room Tone and the project you both are about to set on Portland audiences?

LR: On a very basic level, Room Tone is an homage to Alvin Lucier’s seminal 1969 recording, I am Sitting in a Room. I started with Lucier’s own instructions and equipment, and took a cue from the text he wrote and which he read himself, which explains the process of what he’s doing. I’ve always understood one of the key motivations behind Lucier’s quite beautiful, and as Vitiello puts it, singular, work as smoothing out the stutter in his own voice. The reiterative process he used eventually resolves into a sine wave. The work is heartbreaking, and it’s hypnotic straight through to the end. I remember Lucier talking about I am Sitting in a Room with Stephen Vitiello in the interview, and saying that he’d never continued with the reiterative idea after that work. “I probably should have,” he says at some point.

Alvin Lucier Speaks with Stephen Vitiello Transcribed from The Relay Project eds.

Rebecca Gates, Lucy Raven Alvin Lucier: …I’ve got a double kind of a life. I make works for players and then I make work that can be installed in galleries and so forth…

Does that answer your questions?

Stephen Vitiello: That does, yes. I ask partly because it’s something I wrestle with. There’s a real movement at the moment, there’s something like five exhibitions coming up in New York this spring [2004] which are being classified as sound art but they are also being tied to a legacy of experimental music. Here at The Kitchen we are doing the 25th anniversary of New Music New York, which we are celebrating with both artists who came out of that actual festival in 1979, but also [considering] where we see that tradition and whether the concert stage is still…

AL: It’s great because if you do so-called sound art, you shouldn’t be concerned about it. You shouldn’t be concerned whether it is or is not music……I have a few pieces for piano which LOOK like installed pieces….. However, it is a performance piece and it’s usually done on a stage. But I have a version of that piece where the snare drums are just positioned in space and sine waves are spinning around and exciting them. So, I’m not concerned about that problem. I just do whatever it needs to be done….

SV: You were telling me about the [Sospeso Ensemble] Engine 27 piece before we started recording. Maybe you could talk about it a little bit?

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AL: Well, the ensemble asked me to do something… And for some reason they connected it with Engine 27. I’m not sure why, but those were the things that were offered me. So I said, “Sure.”

So, I didn’t know what to do and I remembered, I taught a little course at Brown last year and I met an engineer there and he did an impulse response experiment, reiterating it like in I’m Sitting in a Room, which was very interesting to me. It sounded wonderful. And I thought, “you know, I’m Sitting in a Room I did about thirty years ago, and I never continued with that idea.” I suppose I should have, perhaps. But I went on to other things. So right away I thought, “Well I could revisit that idea but in this new way.” So I thought, “Well, that’s what I’ll do.” And I was in the Czech Republic last summer, at the institute there, and two or three days before I left I borrowed a DAT machine, and a microphone, and a bunch of balloons; and I just roamed around the city and I popped the balloons... [laughs] ...in doorways, outside, in my closet, in my bathtub -well, you know, my sink, classrooms, I went underground into a coal mine, and I came home with twenty-one impulse responses in twenty-one separate spaces.

So then I thought, “well, I could have these players play and they would play into these various spaces, and I could reiterate the generations causing it to do what the I’m Sitting in a Room process does.” And then I was at a loss. Now this is where sound art enters, I think, and as distinct from composition. I didn’t know what to tell the players to play, and I don’t have a technique just to write notes for the players... I write pieces for players, but they’re usually in conjunction with sweeping sine waves. So I have the notation and… the choice of pitches is offered to me by where the sine waves are at any given moment…

I wanted something rich and complicated with some noise in it. As in I’m Sitting in a Room, your speech has all of those things: the S’s, and the P’s, and the T’s, and the vowels, and so forth.

In Lucier’s work, each iteration of the recorded text is spliced together, and the series plays straight through. When the process is performed live, as in Room Tone, there is a pause when the performer rewinds the tape that’s just been recorded to play it back into the room. This creates a stop in the performance and playback cycle, what I thought of as a different sort of stutter to introduce into the work.

Also, in a public scenario where people are walking in and out of the room, ambient sounds and voices are also implicated in the successive recordings and re-recordings, creating a sort of forensic imprint upon the room’s presence.

Rebecca, you thought of interviewing Alvin for The Relay Project. When we were mastering the interview, I heard or understood new things from him each time we listened to it. What struck you most about that interview? Also, I know we both think a lot about site and sound. How do you think the site and the design of the room the work is performed in might have an impact on it? For Lucier it was such an interior piece in some ways, but here it feels more outward looking, part of this yearly festival, embedded, in a way, in Portland. What do you think about the idea of “voice(s)” in Portland in relation to the work?

Rebecca Gates: One of the pleasures of asking Stephen and Alvin to speak with each other was to hear their voices, their gentle timbres, pacing, and accents in concert with each other. At that point, in 2004, there weren’t many opportunities to hear sound artists speak about sound, those conversations and interviews were mostly confined to text. Now, with podcasts, online video, and the expansion of the sound and avant music culture, the experience is easier to access, though still somewhat rare. I think, though both of them are obviously expert and thoroughly engaged with their art, they each possess the strength of whimsy. Re-listening to the interview recently, I was, again, struck by the musing quality they bring to their art practices and the discussion of their processes and intents.

Setting Room Tone in the context of the Time-Based Art Festival and inside of Kristan’s exhibition “... community declared itself a medium…” offers a sort of next-concentric-circle exposition of I Am Sitting In A Room. The initial reframing of the concept in Essen maintained the documentary aspect of the work, while shifting the foundation of the piece to performance. I am guessing that the 12 Rooms version, while informed absolutely by the readers, was as much about that initial shift into a group exercise of Lucier’s impulse, a response to the “instruction” requirement from the curators. Introducing the element of casting and bringing a consideration of specific voice, bodies and the geography of a city or place as defined by those voices is right in line with one of our initial intents in making The Relay Project. It’s interesting to ruminate on this area of the piece as it is a chance to feed ideas of site-specific sound and performers Lucier explored in later works back into the objects of the room and reel-to-reel.

Regarding invitations to participate, I’m considering quality of voice, but one doesn’t want to lazily cast based on extremes, or lean on cued response and associations. By asking a varied group to perform the simple action of reading the text and the not quite as simple action of recording and playing back what they’ve read, we can offer a faceted townline and constellation definition of Portland via voice, body, and citizen. I think including a few performers who are only in the city for a short duration (which is an important part of Portland’s identity) might also be interesting. Framing the piece in the temporary space of THE WORKS, as the site transitions from a warehouse facility to a stage for artists and arts supporters to a local grocery outlet, offers another, unspoken, implied layer of resonance and the mutability of sound in the city.

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A.L. Steiner Feelings and How to Destroy Them

Kristan Kennedy: With the larger constellation of individual artist installations, exhibitions, performances, and projects that I have put together for TBA:13, I am hoping to reveal all of the complications and potential in using community as a word, a material, a source. How do you define community? When you make work with, in, or about a group labeled a community—the queer community, the feminist community, the art community, the LA community, the NY community—who do you aim to reach? Have you ever successfully defined a community through your work, for yourself or others?

A.L. Steiner: Identity and community are terms which notate pluralism and flux. What’s central in regards to these terms is an understanding of the ‘self’ through this lens of multiplicity and the ensuing dynamics. Identity and community frame the potentiality of visibility and invisibility. As Lucy Lippard wrote in her 1999 essay “Scattering Selves”: “The most basic questions about being human involve and sometimes confuse body, [...] self, and identity [...]. However theorized and/or objectively perused, the body remains inherently vulnerable as the most private and intimate ‘thing’ we ‘have.’ It is also the most public: The body, face included, is that part of us that is physically projected into the world. It precedes the self. It precedes us, as women, into every social and political situation...the self is constituted of change, defined by change, subject to change, open to change, a vehicle for transformation. The relationship between self and body varies within any single life. Body first determines self. Then self determines the body’s posture and adornments, and to some extent its physical characteristics...Identity, on the other hand, is more often imposed or arrived at collectively, compressed between internal and external needs and demands. Aside from a ‘proper’ name, identity (class, race, gender, vocation, sexual, geographic, and religious preference) is both predetermined and an ideological choice. Projected identities are a group phenomenon.”

Many, including myself, are interested in challenging these boundaries between body, self, and identity through vehicles of transformation that materialize change. Equality, tolerance, and empathy are socialized responses to propositions of visibility, new ways of being seen which, ultimately, can lead to new ways of seeing.

KK: This show was born out of a simple instinct, to pursue working together “on something” or rather it started at the very moment when you talked to me about wanting to hold an anger workshop. At the time I did not know what that meant, but it felt right and I understood why the world needed it. In the process of figuring out our “something” we tabled the workshop until the right moment and right collaborators were available and moved ahead with a survey of your collaborative video works. And yet, I feel like our conversation about anger floats in the air. We are angry after all. About what though? Your work seems to harnesses anger, collective rage, questioning, and frustration and releases them through sound/image/body collages that illustrate freedom or freedom in collective action. Can you talk about what role anger may or may not play in this undulating body of work?

AS: Exploring a range of emotions feels important. Anger is certainly one of them. Emotions are so accessible, but maybe more importantly flexible. One emotion inevitably transforms into another. Ultimately language is the way we learn/know how to understand. Sensory-based and visual languages are more universal than coded text-based languages, which require an intervention of translation. I attempt to solidify visual understanding by speaking to forms of othering in consort with the viewer. Lewis Baltz noted, acutely, that imagery is “political technology of the gaze”.

I feel unable to to leave unquestioned the systems we’re participating in together, drawn into conversations regarding intent, content, resources, privilege and power. If you’re not angry you’re either willfully ignorant or economically privileged. But anger is co-opted and subverted into an economic system, which is driving us to unfathomable self-destruction. Fury is a motivating force; potentially productive and destructive, but always transformative. The Furies. Always inspiring.

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Mack McFarland: I am wondering what, if any, rules govern your use of what would be defined as profane or abject language (visual, verbal, performative) in your work?

AS:I don’t exactly know the rules. I can paraphrase Žižek’s loving comments to [Julian] Assange regarding Wikileaks: its power lies not in the violation of the rules, but rather changing how violate the rules.

MM: At the end of Bifo Berardi’s The Soul At Work he implores us to not view the process of autonomy as something with an end, but rather as an ongoing therapy, which he implies is interminable. Do you feel your individual works, and involvement with W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) connect to this goal, as Bifo writes, “to escape from paranoia, to create zones of human resistance, to experiment with autonomous forms of production based on high tech/low-energy models, to interpolate the people with a language that is more therapeutic than political?”

AS: W.A.G.E. began as I became more involved in the world of art-making, exhibiting, and what ends up being forced as commodity-trading, i.e. the public realm and the ensuing forms of cultural and capital production. Hakim Bey’s T.A.Z. (The Temporary Autonomous Zone) also speak to these ideas. I very much like Bifo’s writings on the erotic as power in The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance which seems to me very much inspired by Audre Lord’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power.” I’m seduced by Bifo’s ideas regarding the “conscious mobilization of the erotic body” and the “poetic revitalization of language.” He writes in The Uprising, “Social solidarity is not an ethical or ideological value: it depends on the continuousness of the relation between individuals in time and in space. The material foundation of solidarity is the perception of the continuity of body in the body, and the immediate understanding of the consistency of my interest in your interest.” That’s really beautiful and powerful. Lately I’ve tended to think that autonomy is a misguided utopic fantasy. I’d rather stay here and keep working on the heterotopic.

It’s gonna take eons of reprogramming.

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Andrew Ritchey THE SECRET SOCIETY Kristan Kennedy: Can you talk about this notion of “cinema as esoterica” and how it relates to your project The Secret Society. How does it fit into the broader (or abstracted) idea of special interest clubs, intentionally obscure groups, cults, and communes, operating as “society” even as they exist apart from larger culture/humanity?

Andrew Ritchey: The link between cinema and occult or esoteric knowledge is as old as the medium itself. Many early twentieth century commentators—especially but not exclusively avant-garde artists and filmmakers—conceived of cinema as a tool for exploring the unseen spiritual “essence” within appearances. Cinema, like photography or the X-ray or the Klangfiguren of E.F.F. Chladni, had the power to make what was invisible to the naked eye suddenly and compellingly visible. By extending (but also supplanting) the visual faculty, the cinema seemed to provide mediated access to a spiritual beyond (or within). Seen in this light (as a sort of pneumatic device not unlike a divining rod, or a “medium” in the occult rather than artistic sense), the cinema and all its associated artifacts (e.g., individual films, components of the apparatus, etc.) could be understood as a kind of “esoterica.”

It is clear that for avant-garde filmmakers and artists, in particular, the primordial link between cinema and spirituality was not severed with the rise of the culture industry (i.e., “Hollywood”) in the 1930s. Kenneth Anger, Jordan Belson, Stan Brakhage, Maya Deren, Storm de Hirsch, Curtis Harrington, Larry Jordan: these are only a few of the very spiritual dudes interested in “cinema as esoterica.” (Some, though sadly far from all, are featured in the Secret Society program). It’s also interesting to note, in this context, that the institutions exhibiting avant-garde films throughout the 20th century often called themselves “film societies.” Though it’s a stretch to link the history of the film society to that of secret societies, there is, at least conceptually, some connection. In the 1920s and 30s, film societies formed to effectively circumvent state control of movie exhibition. They were membership-only clubs and you had to pay for a subscription to an entire season of programming up front. It is important to remember that at this time the government actually cared what films were shown where, for both economic and political reasons.

You couldn’t show Soviet films in London, for example, and films in most countries had to be submitted to a board of censors before they could be publicly screened. There were also limits on how many foreign films could be shown, in order to protect the financial interests of indigenous film producers. By making the screenings “members-only,” the film societies could work around these restrictions.

But many of these film societies also saw themselves as engaged in a broader social mission. They wanted to change society! They wanted to transform the art of film! They wanted to transform society by way of film! The good old modernist avant-garde credo (“art into life”) was a part of their mission statement. So, in a way, these film societies were also modeling and embodying an ideal society in microcosm--somewhat like the secret societies, intentional communities, cults and communes that interest you.

KK: We originally set out to score my larger exhibition “...community declared itself a medium...” with a selection of historical films, but the effort has morphed into what appears to be a specific statement about the history (or historical nature) of 16mm film. Why do you insist that 16mm is a “historical” medium? What does that mean for you? And how is the historical specificity of 16mm related to not only the exhibition’s questions about definitions of community, but also perhaps to your own questions about the film community, or the historical role of film to certain communities?

AR: I should start by saying that my claim about the historical nature of 16mm film is meant to be objective, not personal. It just is a fact that 16mm film is a dead medium. That’s not a value judgment, it’s a fact. And it doesn’t mean that 16mm film should no longer be used. Of course there are many artists still making work in this medium, and that is also a fact. When we say that Latin is a dead language, we’re not saying that it’s worthless, or that nobody should learn it anymore—just that it’s no longer evolving or changing through use. If you look at where 16mm film is at right now, the primary uses are for archiving (i.e., preservation) and for TV shows and small-budget independent films. This contrasts with the situation in postwar America, when 16mm was really the standard for educational and institutional films, home movies, and, importantly, military reconnaissance. As far as I know, the main reason that 16mm film continues to be produced is for TV and independent film producers, who want a cheap production alternative to 35mm. Ironically, 16mm can be used in this case because digital intermediate processes have become so advanced that you really can’t tell the difference between something shot on Super 16 and something shot on 35mm (which has long been the industry standard). So, thinking broadly

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about 16mm as a medium, it’s clear that, at the present time, one use of the technology is as a storage medium and the other has nothing to do with the specific materiality of 16mm.

Because there has been a flourishing community of experimental filmmakers working in 16mm since World War II, many artists, critics, and curators rightly feel that they have a stake in the medium and its history. Experimental filmmakers more than anyone else have attended to the specific materiality of 16mm, especially in work produced in the 1960s and 1970s. I love this work, and I think we should continue to show it (that’s why I’m showing all 16mm), but I would nevertheless maintain that the history of the medium is not ours to control; it has been and will continue to be determined by the interests of capital. In fact, that’s what makes cinema as a medium interesting! Unlike the traditional fine arts, which all have histories that pre-date capitalist modernity, the cinema is inextricably tied to the “progress” of industrial societies. Instead of petitioning Kodak or Fuji to keep producing 16mm film stock so that artists can continue to use it, or expecting educational institutions to keep all of their 16mm film equipment long after they’ve dumped their 16mm educational film collections, we ought to accept that the future of 16mm is not in our hands. Thinking historically about 16mm as a medium means acknowledging that it was never designed to serve our specific interests. 16mm was developed in the 1920s to create a market for home movies, educational and institutional films, advertising, and, importantly (as I said before), military reconnaissance. Artists came along and parasitically grafted their agenda onto this medium designed for other purposes. Because the medium is not (was not ever) “ours,” we really cannot decide its future.

Part of what makes experimental work in 16mm interesting, especially from a historical perspective, is the way that this work “worked” on the dominant uses of 16mm in society. So, for example, it’s possible to think of some experimental films as working within (or without) the “home movie” tradition. Some 16mm films are aggressively didactic, like educational films that end up confusing rather than enlightening us.

Other 16mm films make use of actual educational, industrial or reconnaissance films through re-printing and re-editing.

I’m digressing, but I hope I’m clarifying what I mean by saying that 16mm film is historical. I think that the community that has grown up around 16mm film exhibition has not always viewed itself as positioned within history, particularly within the history of institutions (like universities, for example, which were able to sustain the market for 16mm film prints throughout the 1960s and 70s in part because they had invested in 16mm equipment and facilities for the purposes of “audio-visual education”). Because film artists are so legitimately interesting as people, and they make such challenging work, it’s easy to slip into treating 16mm cinema as an autonomous “tradition” subject to no restraints other than its own internally coherent evolution. By this logic, the culture of 16mm filmmaking and exhibition is outside history, and thus should continue to operate just as it always has. But from our contemporary vantage point, it is becoming increasingly clear that the flourishing of 16mm filmmaking in the 1960s and 70s was itself motivated by historical rather than aesthetic factors, and this dawning historical awareness should, in my view, inform how we frame the exhibition of 16mm work, both conceptually and discursively.

KK: In an email to me you wrote “In a sense, every community of film spectators is like a Secret Society, sharing a privileged experience in sound and image.” Can you expand on this?

AR:There’s nothing quite like the Film Experience! It seems like this mode of experience is passing, too (not just the technological base, or “film as film”). How often do we meet at a particular time and place, sit in the dark, and focus our collective attention on a single rectangle of projected light? Nowadays we are perpetually distracted by a proliferation of screens and sounds, and in an art world context we walk into and out of rooms on our own, catching a glimpse of this or that in the process. We are so atomized as spectators, that we rarely engage in anything like a collective experience outside the cinema.

It’s possible to be nostalgic about the loss of the Film Experience. But then there’s also something really creepy about it. Hence the notion of film spectators as members of a Secret Society. More than one commentator has linked the cinema with religion. And it’s also not simply historical coincidence that the protocols of film spectatorship were solidified at the same time as the international rise of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. It would be critically irresponsible to overplay this connection. I only bring it up to suggest that the “privileged experience” I described in my previous email also has its nefarious aspects.

The cinema is, perhaps eminently, the medium in which irrationality can be practiced rationally, by way of a technologically mediated representation of the world offered up for collective consumption. The Film Experience is a gamble, which could lead us to a new and better social form, or maybe just to fascism, irrationality, regression, etc. In the 20th century, film spectators, critics, artists, et al. took that gamble.

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Today, I’m not so sure. Both the notion of a “film society” and the notion of a “secret society” seem to me to be thoroughly historical. By which I mean simply that they are not of this time. Over the course of the twentieth century, the label “film society” gave way to the “workshop,” and more recently the “microcinema.” The latter term emphasizes the smallness of the endeavor rather than its social mission, implicitly jettisoning the aim of a wholesale transformation of society. A “microcinema” is like a film society sans idealism. Of course, there are lots of problems with idealism, as with ideology in general, so I’m not passing judgment on the microcinemas. It just is the case that times have changed. The notion of changing life through small-gauge filmmaking is less prevalent than it once was, which perhaps makes a historical approach to 16mm more relevant than it ever was.

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“…community declared itself a medium…”

Curated by Kristan Kennedy Heather Donahue / Curatorial Assistant, Gallery Director Kent Richardson / Principal Preparator, Exhibition Design Val Dean Hardy Jr., Daniel Glendening, Danridge Greiger, Tim Stigliano, Rene Allen / Preparators Spencer Byrne-Seres/ Curatorial Intern Johanna Gilje / Research Assistant / Curatorial Intern Celia Schaefer, Kayla Spencer / C’mon Language Intern Allegra Jongeward / Resource Room Annex Coordinator Will Elder, Morgan Ritter, Mark Martinez/ Resource Room Interns Bill Bose / Lighting Design Patrick Leonard / Publication Editor, Curatorial Advisor Jamie Edwards / Publication Design Exhibition Artists Anna Craycroft, Alex Mackin Dolan, Jamie Isenstein, Lucy Raven & Rebecca Gates, Andrew Ritchey, Emily Roysdon, Krystal South, A.L. Steiner, and Sue Tompkins C’mon Langage Artists, Contributors and Participants Anna Craycroft, Hannon Welch, Thomas Zummer, Anne-Marie Oliver, Kate Graham, Satya Byock, Peter Falanga, Daniel Granias, Grace Hwang, Heather Donahue, Amber Gayle, Sammy Loper, Margaret Matthewson, CT+CR Collective, Kohel Haver, Gregory Anderson, Jon Kesslet, Matt Keegan, Isla LeaverYap, Mark Handelman, Claire Barliant, Lucy Raven, Nick Hallett, A.L. Steiner, Ohad Meromi, Barry Sanders, Dean Daderko, Carlotta Ribas, Richard Taylor, Justine Larson, and the Butterfly Adventurers who travel into time and get what they need from the Helen Gordon Center for Early Childhood Development Minor Theatres (Wrkshp 1) Participants Jan Dabrowski, Jacqueline Davis, Itai Erdal, Miguel Gutierrez, Keith Hennessy, Sara Jaffe, Bouchra Ouizguen, Andrea Stolowitz, Rhea Wolf.

Room Tone: Variation Participants Rebecca Cole, Alyssa Morhardt Goldstein, Julie Krasniak, Tony Perez, Andrew and Kimberley Distefano, Gary Jarman, Nick Hallett, Todd Tubutis, Mami Takahashi, Cary Clarke, Roland Wu, Elizabeth Venable, Radcliffe Dacanay, Tracey Cockrell, Ryan White, Darrell Grant, Adam Haight, Ryan Noon, Glenda Goldwater, Mic Crenshaw, Kyle von Hoetzendorff, Peter Ksander.

PICA Visual Art Program, Sponsors & Supporters The Andy Warhol Foundation for Visual Arts; Calligram Fund for New Work, Allie Furlotti; National Performance Network’s Visual Art Network; Foundation for Contemporary Arts; Stephanie & Jonathan Snyder; Luisa & Leigh Guyer; MK Guth and Greg Landry; Sarah Miller Meigs & Andrew Meigs; Prints for PICA artists; Ademar Matinian, WK Studio; Gallagher Designs; Stephanie Kjar; Poster Garden; Beth Willis, PVS; Con-Way; C.E. John; Michael McManus, Mia Ferm, Heather Lane,Cinema Project; The Modern Institute/ Toby Webster Ltd; Shane Campbell; Tracey Williams Fine Art; Mack McFarland, Philip Feldman Gallery/ PNCA; Linda Kliewer, Pacific Northwest College of Art; Video Data Bank; lumber room; Justine Larson and Ellie Justice, Helen Gordon Center for Early Childhood Education; Stephanie Snyder, Colleen Gotze, Greg MacNaughton, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Gallery, Reed College; Jeanine Jablonski, Fourteen30 Contemporary; Libby Werbel, Portland Museum of Modern Art; M.M. Sera, The Film-Makers Cooperative; Yale Film Studies Program; Chris Johanson; Crystal Baxley Special Thanks Mack McFarland, Morgan Ritter, Michael Cooper, Dick and Lori Singer, James Marlow, The PICA Board, The PICA Founders and Alum, John Motley, Simon Vansintjan, Kyle Raquispo, Luke Murray, Gabe Paez, Mark Keppinger, Gregory McNaughton, Heather Watkins, Mami Takahashi, European Grad School, Wolfgang Schirmacher, Jean-Luc Nancy and Avital Ronell, Harrell Fletcher, Beth Hutchins, Oregon College of Arts and Crafts, Maryann Deffenbaugh, Denise Mullen, Ellen Fortin, Jeff Stuhr, Leslie B. Durst, Rosine Evans, Briar Levitt, Natalie Wolff, Reuben Roqueñi, Opal School, Susan Harris McKay, Matt Karlsen, Evan La Londe, Pat Boas, Patrick Rock, My Students past and present at Portland State University.

PICA Staff & Interns Angela Mattox, Erin Boberg Doughton, Victoria Frey, Jane Wood, Patrick Leonard, Jamie Edwards, Kate Merrill, Beth Hutchins, Roya Amirsoleymani, Ester Park, Jackie Davis, Robin Boedecker, Sarah Turner, Jane Selivanova, Coco Kapfer, Amy Fredericks, Hannah Bulkley, Amber Buker TBA:13 Staff & Crew Chris Rousseau, T.C. Smith, Bill Bose, Chris Balo, Elizabeth Spavento, Claire Priester Papas, Liz Calderon, Jake Sheffield, Team Delicious, Will Elder, Mark Martinez, Casey Szot My Love and Gratitude To: Those who show up. To The Visual Art Program staff and interns, To Patrick Leonard, for everything. To my family and friends and to those artists whom continue to inspire me, Tom & Winnie Kennedy, Kate Kennedy, Brendan Kennedy & Kenny Mellman, David Kennedy, Rob Halverson, Liz Calderon, Topher Sinkinson, Philip Iosca, Jon Hart & Patrick Long, Storm Tharp, Arnold J. Kemp, Derek Franklin, Michi Kosuge, Ned Colclough, Adam Sorenson, Alex Felton, Owen Hutchinson, Keith Crowe & Brent Johnson, Sara Greenberg-Rafferty, Ramsey McPhillips, Stephanie Snyder, Sarah Miller Meigs, Jeanine Jablonski, Matthew Day Jackson, Rachel Peddersen, Sam Korman and as always, Kristy Edmunds. To my community here in Portland, Oregon, and there in Brooklyn, NY, and Bovina, NY. Published on the occasion of “…community declared itself a medium…”, a series of installations and happenings curated by Kristan Kennedy for PICA’s 2013 Time-Based Art Festival.

Projects were on view from September 5–29 at PICA, THE WORKS at Con-Way, Philip Feldman Gallery at PNCA, Portland Museum of Modern Art, Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery at Reed College, and the World Wide Web. Typeset in Helvetica Neue Printed by Oregon Lithoprint in McMinnville, Oregon. © Portland Institute for Contemporary Art 415 SW 10th Avenue , Third Floor Portland, Oregon 97205 www.pica.org

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Intentional Communities in Oregon, Forming and Formed, 1856–2013 Abba’s Way, Adventurer’s Guild, Aerious, Agape Inn, Agate Acres, Alpha Farm, Alta, Alternative Relationship Center, Aprovecho Ascending Spirit/ Oak Park Cohousing, Aquarius, Art House, Ashland Cohousing Community, Aurora Colony. Bag End Community, Bear Grass Village, Beaver Lodge, Bee Farm, Beit Shlomo , Bellamy Colony, Beth El, Bethlehem Covenant Community, Between Two Cities, Bienvenida House, Blocks Farm, Blue Star, Blueberry, Boggs’ Homestead, Breitenbush Hot Springs , Brides of Christ (Holy Rollers), Brush Brook Family, A Bun Dance Farm , Butler Hill, Butternut Farm, Cabbage Lane, Camerata Community 55 , Cape Foulweather Religious Community, Camp Potiswowtome , CampOma , Canby House, Caring Rapid Healing Center, Cascadia Commons, Cat’s Cradle, CaveCampKids Commune, Cedar Moon , CedarSanctum , Center for Well Being, Cerro Gordo Community , Children of the Valley of Life, Christ Brotherhood, Christian Farm, Church of the Creative, Circle of Children Village School, Citizens Micro Economy, Coagulators, CoHo Ecovillage , Columbia Cooperative Colony, Columbia Ecovillage , Common Treasury Farm, The Community in Ashland, Community Association, Conscious Life Community, Co-operative Christian Federation, Cooperative Farm, Cooperative Substisnence Colony, Copperland, Cornucopia, Corvalis Co-Housing, Cougar Mountain Land Coop, Crabapple, Crack of Dawn, Creekland, Crook’s Creek, CRO(W) Research Organization / CRO(W) Farm, Cully Grove, Daybreak Cohousing , Dragon Spirit, Du-Má, Earth Home, Earth’s Rising Coop, EarthSky tribe, East Blair Housing Co-op, East Portland Cohousing, The Eater Family, ECOS, Eduen, The 80 Acres, Eighteenth Ave Peace House , Eloin , Emerald Grove Intentional Community, End of the Road Ranch, Essene Cooperative, Eugene Downtown Cohousing, Evenstar, Fairview Cooperative, Family of the Living Arts, Family of the Mystic Arts, The Fanatic Family, The Farm, Farming in Willamette Valley, Ferry Sisters, Fish Pond, Fly Away Home, Folly Farm, Footbridge Fran, Fordyce Street Cohousing, Forgotten Words, Fort Mudge, 40th Avenue Cohousing, Four Winds Farm, Free Ashland, Friends and Neighbors, Friendly Glen, Full Circle Family , Galilee, The Gardenhouse, Gathering Light, Goat Farm, Golden, Golden Heart Village, Good Earth Commune, Good Roots Intentional Community, Gospel Outreach, Great Pumpkin Commune, Groundworks, Green Earth City, Greensoul, Growing Home, Gypsy Cafe , Haney, Harmony Heart Community, Heart on Farm, Heart and Spoon Community House, Heart-Culture Farm Community , Hearthhome Northwest, Heartsong, Heartwind Community, High Rise Farm, High Ridge Farm, Higher Ground Cohousing, Highway Missionary Society, Hoedads, Hog Farm, Hopeland, Hosanna House, House Alive Homestead, House of Eight, House of Joy, House of the Risen Sun, The Human Dancing Company, Hungry Hill, Indian Creek, Indigo, International Puppydogs Movement, Iona Colony, IRVINGTON GREEN , Ithilien, Jawbone, Jeshua Ben Josef School of the Heart, Jesuit Volunteer Corps Northwest, Jubilee House, Jump Off Joe, Kailash Ecovillage , , Kiya Alternative Relationship Center, Landlovers, Lane County Catholic Worker, L’Arche Nehalem, LeisureLand, Liberty Cluster, Lichen, Lighthouse Intentional Community, Lilac Ridge, Little Funky Egg Company, Live Wood Farm, Living Love Community, Living Springs, Lorien, Lost Valley Education Center, Lunasa, Lynx Hollow Farm, Madison Street House, Maggie’s Farm, Magic Farm, Magic Mountain Farm / Magic Forest Farm, Main Street Gathering, Maitreya Ecovillage, Mama Keefer’s Boarding House, Manifest Sons, Maranatha Church, The Meadows, Mens Vision House, Merry Pranksters, Mills Community House , The Mining Claim, Mirage Garage, Mirkwood, Mist Mountain Farm, Mizpah, Moon Garden, The Motherlode, mothership sanctuary, Mountain Grove, Mountain Homestead, Mountainlight, Mu Farm, Mud Farm, Mulliensong, MyHood, Nanish Shontie, Nature Retreat, Nehalem Valley Cooperative Colony, Network for a New Culture, Network for Peace Multicultural Cohousing Resource Neighborhood, Newberry House, New Era, New Jamestown, New Land, New Odessa, Nomenus Radical Faerie Sancutary, Northern Lights, Oahspe Foundation, Older Women Network (OWN), One by One, Ongoing Concerns Cohousing Community, Oakleigh, Onion Farm, Open Forum Network, Open Gate, Orchard Street Church, Oreogon Extension, Oregon Family, Oregon Woman’s ( Womon’s) Land (OWL) Trust, Oregon Working Group 2006, Oregon Mud Farm, Osho Ansu Meditation Center, OWL Farm (Open Womyn’s) Woman Land, Meadow Cohousing , Oregon Outdoor School Partnership ,The Orion House , Pahana Town Forum, Peninsula Park Commons , Perma Organic Farm, Poppyseed, Portable Village (PVR), Portand Eastside Co-Housing, Portland Group, Possum Place, Prince of Peace, Rainbow Family, Rainbow Farm, Rainbow Mist, Rainbow’s End, Rainbow’s Other End, Rajneeshpuram, Rat Creek, Repose, RDF Collective, Rivendell (Rivendale), Riverland, Rock Creek, Rootworks, Sabin Green, Sacred Oak Community, Saddle Ridge Farm, Second Growth, Seed Company, Secular-humanist collapse preparedness group, Seven C’s, Seven Springs Commmunity, Seven Waves, Shekinah, Shiloh Youth Revival Centers, Single Christians Welcome on the Farm, Students’ Cooperative Association , Southern Oregon Women’s Network, Spirit Journey, Steppingwoods, Stillmeadow Farm, Stillstone, Student’s Cooperative Association, Sunny Ridge, Sunny Valley, Sunrise Cohousing, Sunstar, Tadpole Manor , Takilma, Talsalsan Farm, Talsen, Temple Tribe, Terra Firma, Terra Nova, Terrasquirma, This is it! Cohousing, Threshold, Thunder River, Thunderhawk, Tiara Intentional Neighborhood, Tipi Village, Titanic Lifeboat Academy, Touching Earth Sangha , Town Forum, Tree House Community, Trillium Farm Community , Trillium Hollow , Trillium Trout Farm, Try/On Life Community, 21st Family. Two Rivers Family, Union Mill Company, Universing Center, Varsity House , Vison Foundation, Vonu Life, WAHOO!, Walnut Street Co-op, We’Moon, We’Moon Healing Ground, We’Moon Land, West Hills Cohousing, whispering Oaks, White Oak Farm, WHO Farm, Wholesome House, Wicca, Wilsonville Cohousing, Wolf Creek Sanctuary, Wolf Creek Radical Faerie Sanctuary, WomanShare Feminist Land Trust, Woolsey Corner, Yellow Submarine, Yew Healing Center, The Zoo Sources: Kopp, James J., Eden Within Eden: Oregon’s Utopian Heritage, Oregon State University Press, 2009, pp. 187–306. http://directory.ic.org/intentional_communities_in_Oregon

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Jean-Luc Nancy, Ph.D., Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Chair at the European Graduate School EGS, was born on the 26th of July, 1940 in Caudéran, near Bordeaux in France.

His first philosophical interests were formed during his youth in the Catholic environment of Bergerac. Shortly after he graduated in 1962 with a degree in philosophy, Nancy began to publish. From the beginning his work is marked by diverse influences, from Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot to René Descartes, G.W.F. Hegel, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger.

The book that brought Nancy notoriety is La communauté désoeuvrée (The Inoperable Community, 1982), at the same time a work on the question of community and a comment on the work of Georges Bataille. He is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Strasbourg and a member of the faculty at the European Graduate School EGS.

Anna Craycroft has had solo shows at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Tracy Williams, Ltd. in New York, and Le Case del Arte in Milan, and her work has been exhibited at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and PS1’s Greater New York. Craycroft has received commissions for public sculpture from Socrates Sculpture Park in New York, Lower Manhattan Cultural Center, and Den Haag Sculptuur in the Hague, Netherlands. She curated the 2011 and 2012 first-year exhibition for Columbia University School of Arts, from which she received her MFA in 2004. Craycroft is represented by Tracy Williams, Ltd. in New York.

Wolfgang Schirmacher, Ph.D., is a continental philosopher, professor of philosophy and founder of the pioneering Media and Communications Division at the European Graduate School (EGS). As conceived by Professor Schirmacher, the Division brings together master’s and doctoral students to work with some of the most prominent visionaries and philosophers of the world today. An enigmatic and inspirational professor, Wolfgang Schirmacher believes in the potential of every new philosopher to alter the course of philosophy and history. An internationally renowned Arthur Schopenhauer scholar, he is the President of the International Schopenhauer Association.

Not surprisingly, Dr. Schirmacher is also the Arthur Schopenhauer Chair at EGS. Schirmacher was born in 1944 in Germany.

Alex Mackin Dolan is an artist who lives and works in Portland, Oregon, where he is a co-curator of Appendix Project Space. Recent exhibitions include Infinite Cell at Autzen Gallery (Portland), Cherry Picking at Karma International (Zurich), ZERTZ Player with Koch Snowflake at West Lane South (London), and Deep Freeze at Generation Works (Tacoma).

Dolan is a 2013 artist-in-residence with the Park Avenue Armory in conjunction with 89plus, an ongoing research project conducted by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Simon Castets.

Avital Ronell, Ph.D., is a Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School (EGS). She studied at the Hermeneutics Institute in Berlin with Jacob Taubes, ultimately earned her doctorate at Princeton University, and then worked with Jacques Derrida and Hélène Cixous in Paris. She was professor of comparative literature and theory at the University of California at Berkeley for several years before eventually returning to New York, where she currently is chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature and teaches German and comparative literature and theory – in addition to her yearly Fall semester seminar about Derrida – and where she continues to churn out a breathtaking range of deconstructive re-readings of everything from technology, the Gulf War, and AIDS, to opera, addiction, and stupidity. As one of the first translators of Jacques Derrida’s work into English, she in effect introduced his work to the American academy.

Craycroft’s evolving installation C’Mon Language at PICA hosted a summer-long series of workshops and lectures by artists, scholars, and educators, contributing to the development of a common language and an intelligible work of art.

For his exhibition, Sun, Cycle, Limit, Dolan presented a new series of sculptural works that investigate various structural components of everyday life. These mechanics are contrasted with those of games and puzzles, which plainly present their rules. Dolan’s exhibition was made possible through funding from the Calligram Fund for New Work.

A.L. Steiner is a collective member of Chicks on Speed, co-curator of the project Ridykeulous, and founding member of Working Artists and the Greater Economy (W.A.G.E.). Her works have been featured internationally at such venues as MoMA PS1, Tate Modern, The New Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art/ Boston, Centre Pompidou, The Kitchen, REDCAT, and Zacheta National Gallery of Art, among others. Steiner is currently based in Los Angeles and is faculty at the University of Southern California.

Steiner’s exhibition Feelings and How to Destroy Them, video- based survey spanned the artists solo and group projects, channeled through the sensibility of an activated skeptical queer ecofeminist androgyne. This exhibition was presented at and supported in part by the Philip Feldman Gallery at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Emily Roysdon is a New York–and Stockholm-based artist and writer. She is editor and co-founder of the queer feminist journal and collective LTTR and has written lyrics for The Knife and JD Samson & MEN. Roysdon’s work has been shown at the 2010 Whitney Biennial, MoMA PS1, Manifesta 8, Participant, Inc., Museo Tamayo in Mexico City, and Power Plant in Toronto. She has received recent commissions from Performance Room, Tate Modern, Art in General, The Kitchen, and Konsthall C in Stockholm.

For Minor Theatres (wrkshp 1) Roysdon “discomposes” the form of a theater company, taking the traditional structure as a starting point to engage in public skill-based workshops, role switching, and questions of time that will influence the development of a new vocabulary around performance. Her collab- orative, episodic, year-long project will culminate at next year’s TBA Festival.

Commissioned through PICA’s Calligram Fund for New Work, If I Can’t Dance Amsterdam, STUK/Museum M (Playground) Leuven, and with the Stedleijk Museum Amsterdam, with additional support from Corpus, European Network For Performance Art, funded through the European Union.

Andrew Ritchey has specially composed a totally unique narrative-form biography of no more than 150 words. This personal biography provides context for the 16mm programs he has organized. At each of the screenings, Mr. Ritchey’s exclusive, narrative-form biography will be distributed as an addendum to the program notes. This biography totaling less than 150 words will be an important and unrepeatable part of the unique experience of each individual program, as well as the exhibition as a whole.

Ritchey’s exhibition The Secret Society, presents a survey of 16mm film esoterica in four parts: Rebus, Number, Chronicles, and Erotic Miscellany, culled from the secret society of artists working in the historical medium of “Film Art.” This project and consequent screenings were made possible through the support of the Calligram Fund for New Work.

Krystal South is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, and writer from Portland, Oregon, who has been online every day since she was 12.

South has been included in group exhibitions at Recess, Carhole, and Portland Art Museum in Portland, R&R Gallery in Los Angeles, and the ALL CAPS Festival in Toronto. Her writings have been featured in Bear Deluxe Magazine, YA5, and September, a project of artists Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen at the 2011 TBA Festival.

Identify Yourself (idyrself.com) was commissioned especially for “…community declared itself a medium…”. The project is an essay as website and a digital question IRL and was made possible through the Calligram Fund for New Work.

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Sue Tompkins lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland, where she is represented by The Modern Institute. She has had solo exhibitions at The Modern Institute; Inverleith House, Edinburgh; and Contemporary Art Musuem, St. Louis; and she has presented in shows at Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; the 29th São Paolo Biennale; the British Art Show 7 at the Hayward Gallery, London; Tate Modern, London; and Artists Space, New York. Tompkins was shortlisted for the Beck’s Futures Prize in 2006 and received the Paul Hamlyn Award in 2011. She was formerly a member of the Glasgow-based art collective Elizabeth Go, and the band Life Without Buildings.

For Tompkins exhibition at the Portland Museum of Modern Art (PMOMA), Sue Tompkins presented fragments of language gathered from everyday encounters and experiences, in the form of works on paper, silk and audio recording. Tompkins exhibition was organized

by Kristan Kennedy with the support of Chris Johansen and Libby Werbel or PMOMA Lucy Raven was born in Tucson, Arizona, and lives in New York City and Oakland, California. Her work has been included in exhibitions and screenings internationally at Berlinale, Berlin (2013); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2012); Whitney Biennial, New York (2012); MoMA, New York (2010); and MoMa PS1, New York (2010). Raven is a contributing editor to BOMB magazine, and her writing has appeared in Artforum, BOMB, and October.

She has curated projects for the Goethe Institute, New York (2010), and Ballroom Marfa, Texas (2008); and she was the co-creator of Bump City, a series of online documentaries for the Oakland Museum of California (2012).

Rebecca Gates is an Oregon based musician, artist, curator, and activist. She has toured and released albums internationally, and appeared on recordings by a range of artists including Willie Nelson, Akito Katayose and The Decemberists. Her programs and work relating to issues of sound and space, listening, and artist’s roles in their communities have been hosted by PS1, Mass MOCA, WFMU’s Radiovision Festival, PICA Symposium, The Museum of Contemporary Craft, New York University and galleries in the United States and Europe. Gates co-curated Ballroom Marfa’s sonic exploration of land arts, The Marfa Sessions, co-founded The Relay Project audiomagazine, and is chief wrangler at The Agency League of Musicians, a musician centered think tank and action network.

Lucy Raven and Rebecca Gate’s project Room Tone: Variation was performed twice a day over the course of the 2013, TimeBased Art Festival. Inspired by composer Alvin Lucier’s 1969 recording I am Sitting in a Room, Room Tone: Variation was a instruction piece for voice and electromagnetic tape performed live by one or more people for

visitors who may come and go throughout the work. The projects first iteration, Room Tone was Originally Commissioned by Manchester International Festival, Manchester Art Gallery, and the International Arts Festival RUHRTRIENNALE 2012-2014.

Alvin Lucier (born May 14, 1931) is an American composer of experimental music and sound installations that explore acoustic phenomena and auditory perception. A long-time music professor at Wesleyan University, Lucier was a member of the influential Sonic Arts Union, which included Robert Ashley, David Behrman, and Gordon Mumma. Much of his work is influenced by science and explores the physical properties of sound itself: resonance of spaces, phase interference between closely tuned pitches, and the transmission of sound through physical media.

Will Return, a survey of Jamie Isenstein’s work was curated by Stephanie Snyder for the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Gallery. For the exhibition Snyder and the artist presented objects, drawings, mixed-media sculptures, and installations that engage Isenstein’s body as an artistic medium—a subject of humor, theatricality, and historical representation. In keep- ing with the tragicomic slapstick of turnof-the-century Vaudeville, Isenstein’s work explores the subjectivity of the marginalized individual—the bit-player, the human prop, the butt of the joke, the wisenheimer who gets the last laugh. Like all good magicians, Isenstein keeps her secrets close, so don’t ask.

Kristan Kennedy is an artist and the Visual Art Curator for PICA. She is represented by Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, OR.

Stephen Vitiello is a visual and sound artist.

Originally a punk guitarist he is influenced by video artist Nam June Paik who he worked with after meeting in 1991. He has composed music for independent films, experimental video projects and art installations, collaborating with such artists as Tony Oursler and Dara Birnbaum. In 1999 he was awarded a studio for six months on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center’s Tower One, where he recorded the cracking noises of the building swaying under the stress of the winds after Hurricane Floyd. As an installation artist, he is particularly interested in the physical aspect of sound and its potential to define the form and atmosphere of a spatial environment.

Jamie Isenstein was born in Portland, Oregon and lives and works in New York.

She has exhibited her work in museums and galleries including the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; A Palazzo Gallery, Brescia, Italy; the Tate Liverpool, UK; The Kitchen, New York; The Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles; and MoMA PS1, New York. Her work is represented by Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York and Meyer Riegger in Berlin/Karlsruhe, Germany.

Stephanie Snyder is the Anne and John Hauberg Director and Curator of the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, a position she has held since 2003. A graduate of Reed College and Columbia University, Snyder is the curator of numerous exhibitions, including: Kara Walker, More & Less (2012); Bruce Nauman, Basements (2012); Terry Winters: Linking Graphics (2010); David Reed, Lives of Paintings (2008); and Sutapa Biswas: Birdsong (2006). In 2007, Snyder received a Curatorial Research Fellowship from the Getty Foundation, and in 2013 she received a commission award from the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and the CUE Foundation, New York. She is a regular contributor to Artforum.com. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband Jonathan and son Theo.

IMAGE LIST Page 10/11: “Recording equipment sits in a hollowed out book written by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, used as part of Ma Anand Sheela’s elaborate eavesdropping operation at Rancho Rajneesh”. OregonLive.com, Stephanie Yao Long, The Oregonian, April 01, 2011 5:29PM Page 16/17: C’Mon Language, Anna Craycroft, Participant Documentation, 18x24, Newsprint, 2013 Page 20: C’Mon Language: Daniel Granias, Emergent Curriculum: Time and Sequence, Hands and Clay. Detail from C’Mon Language Participant, Lili Oberlander’s work board.

Page 21: T.Y.1.4.3.W.Z.K.T.K.K.K.B.K.K.M.B.K.L.Y.N.T .U.B.V.N.A. Page 23: Alex Mackin Dolan, Reminder Glass, Etched Water Glass 2013 Page 25: Alex Mackin Dolan, Earth Table (Detail), Tamsk 3 Minute Glass, 2013 Page 26/27: Krystal South, IDYRSELF.com, Screenshot Page 31: Jamie Isenstein. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Page 33: Oldest example of an Egyptian sundial, dating to the 13th Century B.C. Page 36: Email Correspondence between C.Johanson, C.Baxley, K.Kennedy re: S.Tompkins Page 37: Letherin through the grille (Detail),2013, 20 Sheets of A4 text on paper, Courtesy of the Artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow Page 39: A.L. Steiner, Swift Path To Glory (gloryholes), 2007, PVC vinyl, 120x144.5” Page 43: Giant iron padlock & key