Archive for the ‘musings’ Category

Dilemma

Posted on January 8th, 2010 in musings

Dilemmas—bona fide dilemmas—are tough. They present difficult decisions with less than ideal alternative choices to be made. Thinking about a potential dilemma in the making earlier today, I went back to a text I had written a few years ago for a Think Tank project that addressed another perceived dilemma. “The Insurmountable Dilemma of a Rooted Practice” was written and then read as part of a performance that I did with four other Directors at Artivistic in Montreal in October 2007. I have not previously made the text available, so I’ve decided to publish it here now. Past writings serve as a marker of a specific frame of mind—spatial, temporal, political, intellectual—and that is evident to me in this example. In some ways my thinking has evolved, but in large part the assertions and questions are still relevant for me.

dilemma

The Insurmountable Dilemma of a Rooted Practice

1.

In early July of 2006, at the invitation of the Director of the Department for the Investigation of the Unmentionable, four individuals gathered at the corner of Coral and Hagert Streets in the Kensington section of Philadelphia—on the sidewalk, with lawn chairs, looking professional. I was there because I was one of them. I am one of them. They, or we—really, I and you—are the Think Tank that has yet to be named. I am the Director of the Department for the Investigation of Meaning. On the sidewalk in lawn chairs looking professional, we held the first Publicly Held Private Meeting.

As a matter of origins and motivations and ontological inquiries—as a provisional history of things that probably are not, nor never will be, historical—we might ask ourselves a few fundamental questions: Where were we? Why were we there? What did we see? What did we do? Or, rather, as a dialectical tactic, we might ask ourselves: Where were we not, and why were we not somewhere else? What did we not see, and what did we not do? We might ask ourselves. Just as likely, though, I might ask you, or you might ask me. (And, to be prudent, let’s not get caught up in the past tense—although we might get caught up in the past, in the memory, and in the remembering.)

Thomas burst out of the Puerto Rican bar across the street sipping on a large bottle of beer that he was carrying in a brown paper bag. We were on the sidewalk in lawn chairs looking professional and he approached us without reservation, curious, amicable. He asked us what we were doing and wanted to know what kind of meeting we were having. We told him about the Think Tank that has yet to be named. We told him about how each of us was the Director of our own departments, and how that allowed us to reveal each of our own biases and positions. We told him about the Publicly Held Private Meeting, how we wanted to be out in the world and talk about the places we occupy and talk with others about these places too. We told him we were artists and that we were concerned about how our presence in the neighborhood might be doing harm to that place. Thomas immediately sat down and stretched out on the sidewalk. Animated, he listened intently and then told us about himself. I don’t remember many details about what he told us, but the exchange was profound, nonetheless. I remember the overwhelming sense of being in the right place at the right time and for the right reason. Thomas had sat down and stretched out on the sidewalk with us (albeit looking somewhat less professional and less peculiar) and he listened to us and looked us in the eye and we looked him back in the eye and listened to him.

Thomas got it. We were close to getting it ourselves.

2.

“You had to be there.” None of this is new or particularly interesting. “You had to be there.” Lest my account devolve into mystification: “You had to be there.” You weren’t there, so you don’t know. She [point to Meredith] and he [point to Jethro] were there—they know. As for you, you just weren’t there. None of you are from there. Where are you from? How do you decide where “from” is?

How do we decide where “from” is? As travelers, we ask and are asked: “where are you from”? I answer: I’m from the United States. I’m from Philadelphia. I’m from Fishtown. I’m from Palmer Street. I name a place. But it’s also about identity. Before we travel, we pack our bags: socks, shirts, pants, toothbrush, nail clippers… and identity. Our identity is in part localized in a place (places), in being “from” somewhere. This is turf, the ‘hood, the ‘burbs, the streets, ownership and agency, boundaries, roots, nomadism, isolationism, colonialism, cosmopolitanism, provincialism, us versus them, outsider/insider, trespassers and interlopers, homeboys and homegirls, hicks and city-slickers.

As an aside: Does my arrival in Montreal herald a sort of homecoming? My ancestors came through French Canada—one in particular, a minister name Beaudry, perhaps passed through this city in the early 19th century. Did you notice the Rue Beaudry, or the Beaudry metro stop?

Regardless of where we’re from, we’re all here now.

3.

“Ich bin ein Berliner!” I am a pancake! I am a jelly donut! Well, not exactly. On June 23, 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy delivers a speech in West Berlin to an anxious yet enthusiastic crowd of West Berliners. Two years after the Wall was completed, they are still reeling from the fact that the waters of Soviet-style communism have risen up around them. Expressing solidarity with the West Berliners, Kennedy descends on the island, stakes the ideological flag of western democracy, and proudly declares himself a citizen of West Berlin: “Ich bin ein Berliner.” Funny thing, though: in other parts of West Germany, a Berliner is a kind of fruit-filled pancake, a jelly doughnut. No big deal—Berlin, the world, knew what he meant. Still, it might not ever be enough to simply say for oneself: “I am from this or that place”—even if it’s only meant as a rhetorical gesture. There’s a whole host of other people who have a stake in where you’re from as well. So often, being from somewhere depends upon the consensual acceptance of a larger group of people who also claim to be from there.

The place where I now live: the neighborhood of Fishtown, in Philadelphia, on Palmer Street. I’m not really from there. I mean, I’m from there in that I was there before I was here and I’ll go back to there when I leave here—but I am not from there. You know what I mean? It’s not that I misspoke earlier when I said I was from Fishtown, but it’s complicated. Many of the families in my neighborhood have lived there for generations; homes are passed down from grandparents to parents to children; kids grow up on one block and buy houses on the next one over. I am not from there. I’m a newbie, the ones who are from there say. I am a jelly doughnut.

How do we decide where “from” is? Take a longer view, and maybe my neighbors are not really from there either. Previous waves of Europeans settled long before them—English, Scots, German, Polish. Plenty of streets are still named after those forgotten colonials. And, of course, before them were the native peoples, the Lenape, the Delaware, the Shawnee. Down where Shackamaxon Street dead-ends at the Delaware River, you might wonder in vain about how these indigenous tribes answered the question of where “from” is when they signed the treaty with the renegade Quaker, Billy Penn, Pennsylvania’s namesake and Philadelphia’s founder. It is a truism that the native American world view did not share in the European preoccupation with dominion over the land, with a totalizing ow nership per se. Who exactly is from Fishtown anyway?

Being both from and not from my neighborhood is difficult: Although I’ve only lived there a short while, I and many others have expended much energy and time organizing the community in advance of sustainable planning and development. We’ve advocated for open and transparent public processes and responsible and accountable governance. This activism has specifically focused on organizing community opposition to two Las Vegas-sized casinos that are planned to be built across the street from residential homes along the waterfront. It has been highlighted that many of us organizers are new to the neighborhood, new to Philadelphia in general—that is, not from Philadelphia—which is noted as a source of our irreverence for political authority and our “naive” belief in citizens’ rights to self-determination. Our allies are quick to embrace us, to laud our efforts. Our opponents, on the other hand, are quick to point out that we newbies are not from the neighborhood and have little stake in its future. From-ness is measured in longevity, and I’m holding on to the shortest straw.

How do you decide where “from” is? Furthermore, who, besides you, decides where your “from” is?

4.

Regardless of where we’re from, we’re all here now. Gathered together in this place we are a kind of occupying force, an assembly of emissaries—although, perhaps positioned at the more benign end of the spectrum of all possible connotations of the idea of occupation. It’s occupying nonetheless. It’s temporary, provisional, flexible, with purpose. At this moment, most of us are occupying the space between “from” and “not from”, between this collective “here” and our respective “there’s”. You and I—we—the Think Tank that has yet to be named—draw upon the places where we are from in order to interrogate, understand, engage, and activate the places where we are not from: this space right here, for example.

In the space between “from” and “not from”, we have these questions: What does it mean to export the local and site-specific? How can a practice rooted in a rich, nuanced interrogation of an intimately known place be relocated effectively to another, unfamiliar place? To what extent does such a localized art / activist practice rely on internalized assumptions about the valorization of indigenousness and the privileging of “authentic” spatial occupation? And what is “authentic” spatial occupation anyway? How can we even precisely locate indigenous? We worry over these problems, these difficulties. We have described this nagging feeling of failure in our work as the Insurmountable Dilemma of a Rooted Practice.

We go on anyway. Or not. Maybe we stop and start over somewhere else, or just stop altogether, leaving the traces of a question, a thought, a practice, for others to take up. If there is an intellectual—hell, even spiritual—model of praxis that we Directors embrace and perhaps ultimately corrupt, then it might the TAZ, the Temporary Autonomous Zone. The mystical theorist Hakim Bey cobbled together an account of the TAZ from stolen fragments: pirate utopias, Nietzche’s last mad musings, pagan carnivales, cybernetics, repurposed sufism, Situationism, etc etc etc. The TAZ is both singular and multifarious. It exists as a particular instance, but also describes a network of relations, an “occupation”, a rift, the tearing of space and its mending. The Temporary Autonomous Zone: Throw a party. Come together provisionally. Eke out a space of your own. Appear and then disappear. Embody radical, perpetual becoming. Terrorize the world with poetry. Transgress everything. Know that it will not last. Negate. Destroy to create. Escape to Croatan. Go away and never come back.

Hakim Bey tells us that the TAZ is like an uprising. It is a festival, a revelry that has been unloosed or forced to vanish from its traditional moment in time and space. The TAZ may appear freely and then dissolve itself to reform elsewhere and elsewhen. It possesses “a nose for the ripeness of events, and an affinity for the genius loci.” Attuned to the psychotopology of a place—the “flows of forces” and “spots of power”—the TAZ is rooted spatio-temporally, if only for a moment.

So let’s call this a minor uprising, stop for now, and see you again in the next place.

Philadelphia, 2007

A Berlin Chronicle

Posted on March 2nd, 2009 in musings, project news

This video presents one potential, incomplete interpretation of my past as it is extracted and compiled from an archive of inconsequential digital “memories” of a past time in Berlin. A fragmented reading of Walter Benjamin’s short essay and urban memoir, “A Berlin Chronicle,” serves as the contextual foundation for this exploration of the digital detritus that increasingly augments and exteriorizes one’s memories.

Loggias, Benjamin and Me

Posted on November 29th, 2008 in musings

I recently discovered a remarkable (to me, anyway) connection between my past and the past of Walter Benjamin — or rather, my past as reconstructed in images drawn out of memory and Benjamin’s as recounted in a memoir (of images) of his childhood in Berlin. What we share is a vivid, vital, shadowy architectural space, one which looms somewhat significantly in my intellectual and creative evolution as it seems to anchor both a sense of loss and an aboriginal permanence in the early life of Benjamin the expatriate. Thinking back to his youth in the city of his birth, he writes in “Berlin Childhood around 1900″ (excerpt available) of the loggia, that classically modeled transitional space wavering in between interior and exterior depending upon the relative push and pull of light and dark, warmth and coolness. Here, he remarks on the loggia as memory space:

In the years since I was a child, the loggias have changed less than other places. This is not the only reason they stay with me. It is much more on account of the solace that lies in their uninhabitability for one who himself no longer has a proper abode. They mark the outer limit of the Berliner’s lodging. Berlin — the city god itself — begins in them. The god remains such a presence there that nothing transitory can hold its ground beside him. In his safekeeping, space and time come into their own and find each other. Both of them lie at his feet here. The child who was once their confederate, however, dwells in his loggia, encompassed by this group, as in a mausoleum long intended just for him.

My explicit engagement with architecture and memory began with the above image of a loggia, sketched shortly after returning from a year abroad in Rome as an undergraduate. The loggia held a similar fascination for me as a very particular container of memory, a representation capable of describing the relationship between memory and architecture. (Albeit often suffused with nostalgia and romanticism; it became my task later to problematize such notions and investigate the politics of memory, both personal and collective.) This image led to the construction of other images of architecture — half-remembered, half-invented, part literary, part autobiographical, part who-knows-what — and then provoked me to enter grad school to actually study architecture and understand the role of memory in the practice and theory of architecture. In the preface to my master’s thesis — ostensibly about 20th century Italian architect Aldo Rossi — I recalled this potent remembered architectural image in order to begin an exploration of how we make meaning in the buildings and spaces we inhabit:

Later, there was a time when architecture happened to me and I became conscious of its happening.  I remember it.  I remembered it.  Meaning, I first became conscious of architecture happening to me as it happened to me in my memory.  Meaning, the architecture was just an image, but an image of such profound significance that it single-handedly provoked me to embark on what can only be called my “life’s work” — meaning architecture.  Meaning meaning.  Meaning building.  Meaning building.  Building meaning.  Making meaning out of the memory of architecture.

Curiously, I first noticed architecture as it appeared to me in an image, as a brief flash in my memory.  I was a painter; I quickly drew it on paper.  Where did it come from?  It was familiar yet vague; it was the place I had never been but revisited everyday for the past year.  Some ancient loggia in Italy — in Cinque Terre, by the sea? or in Rome, on the bank of the Tiber?  (The previous year, I had lived in Rome and studied art and art history.)  I became obsessed with the image.  I made paintings about it, returning to it, exploring it (at this time I was working in a dingy studio in the midst of a very cold and gray Philadelphia winter).

It’s satisfying to me to unexpectedly share the loggia with Benjamin in this way. Like most young art students, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” was one of my earliest introductions to art theory in general and critical theory in particular (I serve it up to my undergraduate students as well). I’ve found solace and inspiration in the richness of his multivalent reveries; I’ve wandered the streets of Berlin with his words and ideas supporting my own thoughts; I’ve imagined the stalls of Les Halles while thumbing the pages of his Arcades Project; I’ve wrestled with his political philosophy. This latest reengagement with Benjamin is borne of a current video project dealing with the structure of memory and a summer spent in Berlin and small recorded fragments of everyday life, and I find that his words say more effectively the things that I am thinking:

Language shows clearly that memory in not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. [...] (from “A Berlin Chronicle”)

Berlin Shorts (draft)

Posted on November 17th, 2008 in musings

November 4, 2008

Posted on November 9th, 2008 in musings

Since last Tuesday night I have been trying to steal a few moments to ruminate on the election of Barack Obama as the next president of the United States. Of course, the post-election commentary is voluminous, insightful, nuanced, maybe ignominious, even hateful, and apparently emitting from a range of perspectives that spans the globe. What could one add to this sea of voices? In doing so, I merely document the event with a few brief impressions and as likely many questions. I am provoked by other missives from out there in the digital ether (actually, a couple of Chicagoans: Dan Wang and Heath Schultz, and some chatter on Nettime) whose thoughtfulness and perspectives are appreciated and helpful.

The image of Obama on that stage in Grant Park before tens of thousands, standing before them as the first black man to be elected president, was powerful (and hyper-constructed, as his political representation has so skillfully been). Even more touching was the moment when his family joined him and darted about with warm smiles and vigorous embraces — how wonderful, how momentous to see all of those black faces on that stage in commemoration of his victory! His oratory was characteristically intelligent, adept, and affecting, full of rhetorical flourishes and a vernacular cadence that channeled the great black orators of those generations that struggled before to prepare his way. Yet, his words and demeanor were also somber (as many have already pointed out) and nuanced as he sought to prepare us for the truly daunting challenges this country faces. Absorbing that media event, I felt genuinely moved by the result of this election, momentarily drunk on the optimistic rhetoric (and images) of “hope” and “change” and reveling in its historic grandiosity.

Apparently, I sober up pretty quick, because, while Obama’s achievement is impressive, it must be understood within the context of a demonstrably corrupt and increasingly militarized and corporatized neoliberal political system. Yes, Obama won — and I may take pleasure at that because I support the winning side this time — but he won in no small part because of his superior gamesmanship, by playing the game better than his opponents. The rules of this political and electoral game have absolutely not changed. A more productive “hope” we might have now is that under this new leadership there might arise the possibility to change the nature of the American political system. Will Obama work to change the rules of the game now that he has been elected? Will the Clintonites with whom he is apparently surrounding himself change the rules? Will they change the rules (as Bush did) to consolidate and secure power, or to distribute power? Emerging from the hazy warmth of the election, I ask: With this incredibly significant democratic event, how do we leverage this slight shift towards the Center-Left to do the work that needs to be done in order to (re)build a civil society where economic and social justice extend to all of our fellow citizens? How can we work to open up authentic spaces for participation, discourse, and difference?

For example: I was interested to hear Glenn Loury speaking with Bill Moyers on his Journal program last week about all of the issues that have not been thoughtfully discussed during the course of the campaign. Loury says: “We draw lines and boundaries about what is legitimate and illegitimate to be said. And then we conduct our political conversations mindful of those boundaries. And often times profoundly important, substantive matters get left by the wayside.” He then offers as an example of an often ignored issue the epidemic of incarceration in the US and how a disproportionate percentage of those in prison are black men and other minorities. Underlying the monolithic vagaries of “the economy” and “energy innovation” and “health care,” there are the complexities of such issues like incarceration which demand sustained and systemic attention in order to change deep structural inequities in our society. Thinking back over the last two years (gasp!) of this campaign, I find it difficult to identify anything resembling substantive discourse that occurred within the narrow confines of the campaign scripts.

While reading among the pages of Group Material’s Democracy project, I came across a reprinted Letter to the Editor written 20 years ago in the New York Times by Mark P. Petracca (an Asst. Professor of Politics and Soceity at UC-Irvine at the time). He responds to an article which apparently lambastes the American electorate for its huge failure to vote in recent elections. He writes:

Electoral politics is the politics of inclusion; elections incorporate and co-opt the citizenry in a stable and nondisruptive form of political participation. Definitions of democracy and good governance that focus on electoral participation are a potent instrument for social control. Elections offer the illusion of participation in exchange for political quiesence. In sum, they limit and constrain our interactions with our government — substituting subordination for the promised liberation of participatory democracy. Electoral involvement does not necessarily empower its participants; rather it tends to create power over them.

Millions of citizens donated small amounts of money and greater amounts of volunteer time toward Obama’s campaign and his ultimate victory. (I am not included among them.) While I am inclined to agree with Petracca’s assessment of electoral politics, there does seem to be an amazing amount of potential energy located within the masses of Obama volunteers (some veteran activists, some political newbies), and this energy may be productively applied towards true grass-roots social and political change. Whether or not President Obama aggressively pursues a more open, democratic, and just society (through both policy and tone), we must pursue it. We, as an engaged citizenry, must hold his administration accountable and apply the necessary critical perspective. We must participate locally (and globally), not only for the narrow goals of getting our guy elected but more importantly for the building of a just society and a progressive democracy.

Postscript: I must finally recommend Rebecca Solnit’s reaction to the election as well (which I’ve just read after writing most of the above). Her thoughts are pragmatic and measured, and for me present circumspect call to action that lands somewhere between the ecstasy of the current Obamamania and the cantankerousness of some of the radical Left’s extreme skepticism.

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Hello

I live and work in Philadelphia, USA where I am an Assistant Professor in Multimedia in the College of Media and Communication at the University of the Arts. I am the Director of the Department for the Investigation of Meaning in The Think Tank that has yet to be named and a senior designer with The Action Mill.

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Through the beginning of 2011, I will be working with Bassam El Baroni of Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum as 1 of 3 curatorial teams curating Manifesta 8, the European biennial of contemporary art. Manifesta 8 opens October 2, 2010 and is hosted by the Region of Murcia, Spain.

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