I ACCUSE, Jean Toche

I ACCUSE
Dedicated to Marcel Broodthaers

Judson Gallery | New York | May 10, 1968

"I am a prostitute,
You are a prostitute,
He is a prostitute,
She is a prostitute,
We are all prostitutes..."
That's what our trivial "Culture" is all about. WE MUST DESTROY THE CULTURE.
This is the time for a total change.
This is the time to be concerned with Man's development, not his exploitation.
This is a LIGHT SIT-IN.
I will throw the light in your face,
I will throw the light in your face,
I will throw the light in your face,
I will throw the light in your face,
I will throw the light in your face!
* * * *
I AM JEAN TOCHE.
I work with aggressive lights,
I work with aggressive sounds,
I work with aggressive situations.
I am against aggression.
* * * *
I HAVE A CONFESSION TO MAKE.
I am subversive, and I am a saboteur. I question the very validity of the Art Establishment. I question the very validity of that language called "ART". Can Art still fulfill our basic human needs, if it continues to compromise with a cultural society which is engaged in the very process of alienation of the masses, and repeatedly ignores, consciously, the very needs of that human race? In the early ages, art was not meant as art, but as a projection of the primitive urges of man, in order to appease the terrifying forces of nature. Did art not lose all its meaning by becomimg a merchandise, starting with the patronizing by the churches and the aristocracy, followed by the process of industrialization and business deals of western middle class man, including today's museums? Has art not become a weapon for the cultural gangs to corrupt people, a new kind of opium for the people?
* * * *
To shout fire, when there is a fire, is not enough. It is not necessary "ART" either. It is how you do it, which makes it art. But has not the very notion of "ART" become obsolete, because of its constant refusal to face the present crises of Humanity? Has real life, King's death, the shooting of Rudy " THE RED ", the destruction of Columbia University, Khe Sanh, made even Destruction in Art inadequate, because of "art" limitations?
* * * *
I HAVE A PROBLEM TO SOLVE.
Has the time come for the artist to make a choice: Either to stay the adulated "creative" toy of an aristocracy engaged in the most atrocious hypocritical games of corruption, domination and violence, and so probably become irrelevant and meaningless, like an old rotten core. Or, to involve himself more directly in human crises, and maybe become something more complete than just an "artist", something which would include today's social problems, and a definite commitment to the development of the human race, as well as a firm stand against Man.s exploitation and manipulation. This might include bringing the arts into the streets, going on the barricades when necessary, and playing an active role - how, this has still to be defined - in this cultural revolution, which is shaking and knocking down, all over the world, and right now, the very foundations of a very decadent western white empire.
* * * *
When all over the world students are revolting against the corrupt carcan of the Establishment, is it right for the artist to stay passive and indifferent? Can art ever evolve in a more mature and human form, or will it disappear in its obsolescence and its corruption?

Can I go on just being an "artist"?

above copied from:http://www.no-art.info/toche/text/1968_accuse-en.html

Book Excerpt - Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between, Sharon Irish

“Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between” by Sharon Irish (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010)

The Community Arts Network is honored to present an excerpt from “Suzanne Lacy: Spaces Between,” a new book by Sharon Irish and the first in-depth look at the work of an artist who has been doing important community-engaged art since the 1970s. Lacy’s artwork has been radically political, urgently demanding and intensely compassionate. As a teacher, she has laid down landmark theories for viewing and evaluating public art, particularly those involving community participation. Lacy’s own book “Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art” is a staple in the curricula of the many new degree programs in community cultural development. In our own history, Lacy was the cover girl in 1978 for Issue #1 of High Performance magazine, the forerunner of CAN, and her new work continues to draw the attention of our readers.

In her introduction to this book, Irish notes that Lacy’s art has been labeled “body art, conceptual art, performance art, feminist art, political art and new genre public art,” and it continually crosses borders laid down by art history and criticism. It’s challenging enough, she says, writing about a painting on the wall, but “when the art involves hundreds of people over months or years … and the subject matter is current and controversial, the mental diagram can become a jumble of ideas bumping crazily against each other and ricocheting off at different angles.”

In order to investigate Lacy’s work, Irish has discovered a “network of nodes” that she calls “the three P’s: positionality, performance and participation.” This network forms the structure of the book. Irish’s introduction of these terms focuses a new lens on the engaged art of today, for which Suzanne Lacy’s work has led the way. We join the introduction halfway through Irish’s approach to “performance,” glancing at the importance of “place” and “coalition building” in Lacy’s new genre public art, and then her approach to “participation.” —Linda Frye Burnham

Place

Another way that Schneider’s “historical weight” of privilege and disprivilege may have bearing is in the spaces in which we act and interact. Geographer Edward Soja noted that “life stories [are] as intrinsically and revealingly spatial as they are temporal and social.” Thus, in addition to gender and racialization, my discussion includes the particular sites of Lacy’s art making. Anne Enke’s 2007 book Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism is exceptionally valuable in that her

analysis focuses on the ways in which women intervened in public landscapes and social geographies already structured around gender, race, class, and sexual exclusions and on the ways that these processes in turn shaped feminism. A focus on contested space, as opposed to a focus on feminist identity, helps explain how feminism replicated exclusions even as feminists developed powerful critiques of social hierarchy.

Examining the actual spaces involved in Lacy’s art making offers insights into how her projects critiqued everyday urban areas, or not. Geographic aspects often join with our behaviors to normalize hierarchies that remain unquestioned by many of us. Thus, when a performance occurs in public, connecting, say, oppression, visual form, and urban site, the impact increases through linkages of these nodes in an imaginary network.

Coalition Building: Traveling Between

Coalition building is hard because it requires finding some common ground on which to come together, creating enough trust to hold that space open, while recognizing simultaneously that substantial differences exist. For Lacy, the subjugated status of women in this patriarchal society provided that common ground. Affirming that personal experiences among women vary widely, Lacy nevertheless has maintained that women can and should join together to address oppressions that affect us all. These joint efforts then are carried out as allies, although “sisterhood” still echoes through her work.

What Lacy has called “[t]he ‘expanding self’ became a metaphor for the process of moving the boundaries of one’s identity outward to encompass other women, groups of women and eventually all people.” Lacy’s curiosity, generosity, and outrage compelled her to explore what life was like beyond her individual body for those different from her in race, ethnicity, age, and life experiences. In a 1993 article, critic Lucy Lippard described Lacy:

An inveterate border-crosser, she has long been almost indecently curious about everyone else’s experiences, charging into new areas where angels fear to tread—a vicarious chameleon, or perhaps a beneficent cultural cannibal, cultivating multiple selves as a way of understanding injustice and survival.

Lacy’s “indecent curiosity” fueled her indefatigable coalition building, a node that links to participation, positionality, and public performance art.

To the extent possible, Lacy placed herself within different human configurations, physically, mentally, spatially, and historically.68 Her art forced her to shift realities, to “travel.” Although, of course, she could never fully reproduce the worlds of others, she “traveled between” these contrasting worlds, exploring a liminal space that philosopher María Lugones defined as “the place where one becomes most fully aware of one’s multiplicity.” Lugones used the term traveling to describe a person’s movements among different social groups or “worlds,” which themselves are no more stable than an individual’s identity.

To make art in coalition, moving beyond unexamined or unified identities, promises an art that forges flexible connections, allowing ongoing dialogue. But without an insistent and continual analysis of power relations, especially one’s own, the art may well serve to reinforce the status quo and trendy, “decorative” multiculturalism. Lacy’s friendship with artist Judy Baca, among other relationships, challenged her to think more deeply about the complexity of race and racist attitudes in the United States. In order to “cross over” into another’s existence, she began to collaborate with others from whom she could learn.

Participation

While Lacy herself usually was the catalyst in a process that culminated in an art project, she often collaborated with others. Lacy thus shared agency for a work of art with participants who joined her in its creation. Curator Lars Bang Larsen wrote in 1999 about the ways in which “social and aesthetic understanding are integrated into each other” as “social aesthetics.” This sort of “osmotic exchange” in Lacy’s work sometimes produced an integrated result but also presented the possibility for unresolved or multiple endings. Just as the creation of her art existed along a continuum, so too did the reception of it, what I call “participatory reception.” In 1995, she wrote, “Of interest is not simply the makeup or identity of the audience but to what degree audience participation forms and informs the work—how it functions as integral to the work’s structure.”

Lacy’s art challenges assessment of it because participants helped create representations of the ideas at the same time they observed those representations. The meanings they perceived during the collaborative process at times altered the imagery, and the meanings evolved. Lacy has written that “[m]any of the forms we have come to assume as part of community-engaged art—its multivocality, for example, its pluralism of styles of presentation and its postscript-like conversations—are aesthetic evolutions developed through confrontation and resolution of confl ict during the making.”

While certainly the imagery in any one of Lacy’s projects has its own merits, intrinsic worth, and interest and can indeed be evaluated aesthetically, “traditional” formal evaluation is not sufficient for new genre public art. The compelling aspect of Lacy’s approach is the degree to which she pushes art into the public so that questions of aesthetics, ethics, audience, reception, and creation are amplified. Once amplified, these issues and people’s responses to them provide feedback into the art process itself, contributing to that reception loop.

Lacy has long worked between theory and practice—writing, teaching, directing, making. Her writings formulated theory for new artistic configurations. She has diagrammed artistic positions on an axis moving from private actions of the artist as experiencer, then reporter and analyst toward public activism. She herself then has been an indispensable participant in meaning making, contributing to public discussions about oppression, privilege, and liberation. Her contribution, in theory and in practice, has been to close the distance between production and reception.

Further, she suggested a model for analyzing the audience “as a series of concentric circles with permeable membranes that allow continual movement back and forth.” The genesis of a work—a circle at the center of this diagram—is encircled by rings of collaborators, volunteers, and performers, those watching the event (“immediate audience”), and the media audience. Lacy labeled the final ring the “audience of myth and memory” (Figure 2). Lacy’s “target” diagram helps distinguish among the various layers of audience; the center—“the creative impetus”—is labeled “origination and responsibility.” While I appreciate that Lacy takes responsibility for her art as well as includes herself in the credit for its genesis and that she states that the circles are “permeable,” I find my nodes-in-networks model more useful. The artist is an essential node, but including her in the network of collaborators, performers, and audience stresses the reciprocal nature of Lacy’s approach to public art. Rebecca Schneider asked, “What can reciprocity look like? How can we do it? … Reciprocity suggests a two-way street but it does not necessarily reconstitute the delimiting binaries which feminists and postcolonial theorists have been fighting to undermine.” Reciprocity and “how to do it” have been fundamental to nearly all of Lacy’s projects.

“The public” in the sense I am using it here includes person-to-person encounters, group dynamics, institutional responses, and social networks. These interactions shift and infl uence the art process on many levels. Artistic practice such as Lacy’s embodied art lends itself to an exploration of the terms of engagement—art arises from an individual artist, is shaped by that artist’s identities and concerns, but also by those who cocreate the piece. Cocreators may include an arts commissioner, a mayor, or people in the art production, for example. Art functions as a tool for reflection: there is a reciprocity between the practice of art making and the theory that informs that practice.

Strategies to communicate effectively with people not ordinarily attentive to the arts have long occupied Lacy. This challenge underlies her involvement in media literacy, press conferences, performances outside of galleries and museums, and collaborations with communities outside of art circles. In 1995, she commented:

[T]here’s also an appropriate contradiction between, on one hand, the way in which artists are trained to express self and to make meaning by drawing on interior sensibilities, and, on the other, the demands of a new public arena for dialogic and collaborative modes. I personally find it a very exciting confl ict because it is essentially the metaphor of self and other.… Consequently, what we have to resolve, spiritually, is the sense of no-self or an encompassing all-self, and, in art, we have to do at least some negotiating between our reality and other realities.

Naming Participation

Grant Kester’s 2004 book Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art discussed what he called “dialogical art,” an “inclination” in art that foregrounds interchange and process. Lacy’s work with teens in the 1990s in Oakland, California, is featured prominently in his book. He labeled Lacy’s work as transitional, meaning, I believe, that her art drew upon both community arts and “the post-Greenbergian diaspora of arts practices,” such as Happenings. She also retained control of the visual image to a degree that some of the younger practitioners he discussed do not.

Kester usefully formulated a philosophical background for dialogical art, discussing discourse ethics and feminist interpretations of specific contexts for interactions. He stressed that this approach to art is “durational rather than immediate.” Conversation Pieces deepened my analysis of Lacy’s art by suggesting that we “need a way to understand how identity might change over time—not through some instantaneous thunderclap of insight but through a more subtle, and no doubt imperfect, process of collectively generated and cumulatively experienced transformation.…” The book enumerated three aspects of a dialogical aesthetic: first, art functions as “a more or less open space within contemporary culture”; second, it involves “a form of spatial rather than temporal imagination”; and third, it aims to achieve “these durational and spatial insights through dialogical and collaborative encounters with others.” The spatial imagination, what Kester described as “the ability to comprehend and represent complex social and environmental systems,” and the creation of artistic structures to facilitate encounters are particularly salient in Lacy’s work and help to link the social dynamics of participation to the place and form of Lacy’s projects. In keeping with my nodal scheme, I will examine both interactions over the longterm and the immediate embodied responses related to Lacy’s art projects.

Kester named other terms similar to dialogical art: Ian Hunter and Celia Larner used the label “littoral art,” a geographical term describing a shoreline and thus evoking a place where two different “bodies” touch. Other critics have discussed “conversational art” (Homi Bhabha) and “dialogue-based public art” (Tom Finkelpearl). Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics focused on art of the 1990s that involved the art audience as a microcommunity; his analysis concerned art’s role as “be[ing] ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist.”

Problems of Participation

In my experience, when an artist engages with politics as Lacy has done, some advocates for social change get their hopes up during the preparatory stages—tackling a social problem—and then experience bitter disappointment when the artist moves on. Some critics claimed that while Lacy’s art challenged the status quo in political arenas locally and nationally, the artist then departed, adding another community to her résumé while leaving local folks to wonder what actions should come next. Yet Lacy’s practice has been a complicated amalgam of arrivals, departures, and returns. As early as 1982, she asked, “What is the artist’s responsibility to her collaborators, performers, and audience after the performance is over?” She then offered several examples of long-term, community-based art but also suggested a larger model, “a network of women across the country who are working together on a single project with local goals as well as a sense of belonging to a nationwide project.” Ever questing, she vowed to continue “to struggle with the problems of sustaining energy within specific communities… ; clarifying the relationship of action-oriented goals to broad-based coalition building;… and generating a sense of participation in a national vision with women in geographic locations.”

Her efforts to recreate “metaphors of community, over and over” involved substantial travel, tightly scheduled with her job and other commitments. Some projects no doubt left some participants feeling they had been given short shrift. I suggest that “in-betweenness” is both the problem and the resolution in her work; she is moving among nodes when others expect her to commit to stasis. In spring 1978, in an interview with artist Richard Newton that was published in High Performance magazine, Lacy tellingly explained her artistic process and how it contrasted with political organizing: “I am trying to represent myself to the feminist community as an artist and not as an organizer: I greedily hold on to the ability to make my own images, and make clear-cut distinctions about how much organizing I’m going to be involved with.” Lacy’s art emerged from the relationships among her, her collaborators, and audience members; in other words, these interactions were not in themselves the art, but they were crucial to her art making.

French curator Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics had a large impact in the Anglophone art world when it was initially translated into English in 2002. Bourriaud’s optimistic and sketchy book attempted to set the terms for an approach to art in the 1990s that created a community with an art audience, such as the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija. Claiming that art “tightens the space of relations” and “produces a specific sociability,” Bourriaud’s arguments have eluded me because I remain puzzled by just how the disparate artists he names—from Vanessa Beecroft to Liam Gillick, from Felix Gonzalez-Torres to Philippe Parreno—either fit into “relational aesthetics” or share aesthetic criteria. The “hands-on utopias” offering a “rich loam for social experiments” that Bourriaud described do indeed share a “coexistence criterion” that “permit [the viewer] to enter into a dialogue,” but the range of issues and options on display by the artists under consideration do not seem to me to cohere into anything but the designation “art.” Furthermore, the relationships that interest Bourriaud seem to be apolitical.

Perhaps the reason that Bourriaud’s work has been cited so widely is because there remains a need for ways to discuss relational art; for me, his contribution has been in framing some questions and generalizations. “[W]hat does a form become when it is plunged into the dimension of dialogue?” “As part of a ‘relationist’ theory of art, intersubjectivity does not only represent the social setting for the reception of art, which is its ‘environment’ its ‘field’ (Bourdieu), but also becomes the quintessence of artistic practice.” Detailing what happens to forms-in-dialogue and trying to be precise about intersubjectivities are what I try to do here in relation to Lacy’s art practice. Bourriaud’s statement—“The nineties saw the emergence of collective forms of intelligence and the ‘network’ mode in the handling of artistic work”—validates my own network schema, although I suggest that Lacy pioneered this “network mode” with others in the 1970s, for political, feminist purposes.

Bourriaud’s interest centered on evaluating the quality of the relationships that unfolded in the work of various artists, but he never fully defined what the artists he considered might mean by “community.” This criticism by Claire Bishop highlights a key problem in relational art: artists and participants coming together do not necessarily a community make, nor does being together in art inherently promote democratic processes. Bishop claimed that for Bourriaud “all relations that permit ‘dialogue’ are automatically assumed to be democratic and therefore good.” Anthony Downey further noted that “relational art practices do not necessarily mirror—although they may replicate—the conditions of the social milieu in which they exist; rather they generate and propagate those very conditions.”

The goals of Lacy’s works are not always as “convivial” as those of the artists that Bourriaud promoted. Instead of fostering a “feel-good” community, Lacy has often aimed to create structures for conversations that name and discuss difficult issues rather than resolve them, fully aware that dissent will be as much a part of those interactions as agreement. In part antagonism is inevitable given the lack of common discursive frameworks among some of the participants. Bodies coming together, however, also introduce nonverbal ways of knowing that complicate performances and life with a range of tacit behaviors.

Lacy’s works invariably involve conflict, some unpredictable and unintentional outcomes, and some heated criticism, in part because of the provocative themes involved and in part because the “spaces between” in her art allow for multiple interpretations, ambiguity, and disagreement. In her large-scale works, Lacy has insisted on providing an aesthetic and social context for many points of view. Lacy’s performances have offended some who have felt that she overstepped, seemingly speaking for those whose voices she intended to amplify. Others have objected that her focus on women as a group has minimized their differences, discounting very real challenges of race and class.

Participation in the Art World

Negotiation between realities—particularly the world of contemporary art in the West and folks usually outside of those art circles—has been at the foundation of Lacy’s artmaking process. Lacy often sought connections among her peers, arts as they are practiced in communities, and the historic avant-garde. Since contemporary experimental art is anathema to many—at best we tend to dismiss it as just weird—accessibility to her art forms has been crucial to Lacy. She noted the difficulty of bridging these two worlds, “audiences outside of the art world” and “our own concerns.” By inviting members of the public into her performances, as cocreators, participants, and observers, she linked other nodes in the network, shaping both the artistic performance and the reception of it by the general public.

The avant-garde as I use it here refers not just to experimental imagery created as an alternative to established forms and media but also to the ways in which the art was produced. Lacy’s generation experimented with avant-garde modes of production that included collective or collaborative methods of creation and presentation or exhibition outside of the usual gallery or museum settings. These approaches challenged the status quo and helped younger artists tackle the star system of authorship more directly. Yet by “avant-garde” I do not mean an unchanging response, because clearly issues both within and outside of the art world have shifted and continue to do so. By placing the emphasis on production, on the social and economic position of art, the forms and media used do not necessarily have to be in the vanguard; they can bridge between different audiences.

This interest in linking disparate groups has been generative throughout Lacy’s career. She has deliberately and consistently sought collaborators beyond the art world. In 1975, while living in Los Angeles, she developed a close working relationship with Evalina Newman, a woman in her midfifties who had been forced to leave her cleaning job due to reactions to the chemicals at work. Ms. Newman, with time on her hands, had filled her apartment with a quilting frame and organized a sewing and crafts circle for other women in the Watts housing complex, the Guy Miller Homes for the Elderly, where she lived. The Miller Homes and the community center had been built on sites that sustained major damage during the 1965 Watts uprising. While the women sewed, they shared their personal histories and their fears about actions of the neighborhood teens. They also crocheted pot holders and covers for tissue boxes, along with stitching quilts. Lacy joined this art-making circle as part of her job with the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA). As a CETA artist, she “wanted to explore with a single community how performance might combine with their self interests and how it might, as well, enable that community to inter face with other communities.” Lacy created a photo-quilt series about her friendship with Ms. Newman.

Over the course of three years, Lacy and the Women of Watts did a series of installations and performances in and around the Guy Miller Homes. For example, they displayed their art in the recreation hall and invited neighbors, politicians, and Los Angeles– area artists to their exhibits in order to alert officials to their concerns about crime. Lacy asked in 1980, “What makes one person’s environment a home, another’s an artwork?” She recognized a shift by a number of her contemporaries toward engagement with extra-artistic concerns, while still drawing on past ideas in the art world. She wanted to assess conceptual art by her peers, like Linda Montano, Jo Hanson, and Martha Rosler, among others, in terms of “the success of their intentions in ‘real life’ as well as in the art milieu.”

In activities with the Women of Watts, as with her other works, Lacy was interested in creating spaces, literally and figuratively, where everyone’s creative output could be valued without placing it in a hierarchy of artistic quality. While she certainly claimed authorship of this work in the art world, she also moved into other, really much larger worlds, where her aesthetic interests coexisted alongside those of others. Lacy’s training in zoology, psychology, dance, visual art, and community organizing provided her with skills and concepts to perform in a rapidly shifting social milieu. She moved between science and art, between ideas and enacted forms, and between adaptive behavior and resisting actions. Hers is a “both/and” approach, in which she attempts to be present in several arenas simultaneously.

Lacy has shown an enduring commitment to using art in public to inform people about issues of common concern and to affect policy. I suggest that the “spaces between” in her art provide openings that might be transformative for selves that are permeable and multiple. Diana Fuss noted in 1991, “The problem, of course, with the inside/outside rhetoric, if it remains undeconstructed, is that such polemics disguise the fact that most of us are both inside and outside at the same time.” We perform, moving between art and life, built space and human flesh. This “betweenness” creates tension, at once dynamic and troubling. To enact these relationships in reality, on the ground so to speak, is especially difficult given the separation from, indeed denial of, our bodies. Lacy’s art has embraced the body, deepened into spirit, and enhanced bodily wisdom with strategic, intelligent analyses of politics. Her international career has demonstrated the power, problems, and possibilities of art between the spaces of our diverse lives, as she has attempted to create structures that might give shape to a nonsexist, multiracial democracy.

The University of Minnesota Press Web site offers a Q&A with author Sharon Irish: http://www.upress.umn.edu/covers/Irish_from_blog.html

Sharon Irish holds a joint appointment in the School of Architecture and the Community Informatics Initiative/Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign. She is the author of Cass Gilbert, Architect: Modern Traditionalist.

Original CAN/API publication: April 2010

Above copied from: http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2010/04/book_excerpt_su.php

TRANSDUCERS: Collective Pedagogies and Spatial Politics in Action, Javier Rodrigo and Antonio Collados

One of the products of western modernity was the progressive ordering of knowledge in separate disciplines, which limited the sphere of action of the educational, the artistic and social movements to independent institutions such as, respectively, the school, the museum or neighbourhood associations, to mention only a few. The crisis of modernity therefore brought into question such institutions, as well as the paradigms on which they were established. The result was that at present we can find forms of cultural production interrelated with educational practices and social movements in long-term projects, corresponding to very specific local needs and setting in motion a broad diversity of work formats.

As a result of this multiple rupture, traditional institutions have expanded to make their spheres of action and practices more permeable. It is therefore very hard to envision the framework of an institution as an isolated space. We rather consider the potential of institutions as a set of relations and practices inserted into and capillarising various disciplines and knowledges, so that they break out of their traditional limits and even reinvent new institutional forms. The school becomes another public sphere and a social agent inside the context; the museum overcomes its limitations through cultural politics of proximity affecting its educational value; finally, social centres in many cases become converted into experimental cultural centres and spaces for production of public knowledge. The breaking and reformulation of these limits allows us to understand how the institutions inheriting our most immediate modernity are rethinking themselves as interconnected spaces in which to experiment new models of citizenship.

The most interesting practices of political action, educational intervention and cultural work occur at present in these areas of interdisciplinary crossroads, in fractures or intermediate zones between disciplines and institutions - spaces that experiment and give rise to alternative ways of building new spheres of action and of learning collaboratively between institutions, organisations, individuals and knowledges that are very different one from the other. It is precisely at these junctures where we locate the collective pedagogies and spatial politics chosen and studied in TRANSDUCERS.

TRANSDUCERS Collective Pedagogies and Spatial Politics is a cultural project aiming to research and activate initiatives in which artistic practices, political intervention and education are flexibly coordinated on the basis of actions by collectives and interdisciplinary groups. These experiences can be assimilated into the model of collective pedagogies, which approach specific social problems (such as, for example, health, recycling, treatment of residues, clean energy, the concept of citizenship or urban regeneration, among others) through sustainable development, citizens’ participation and visual culture. This is achieved through the activities of interdisciplinary work groups, including both educators and students, as well as artists, architects, landscape artists, residents and town planners, thus giving rise to discourses through which a dialogic and collaborative learning process is established.

This approach through pedagogy also considers the work of politics operating on space and the various organisational models of actions in the chosen initiatives. This aspect implies the constant configuration of specific spatial politics, which involve the development of alternative practices that propose a more integrated, participative and interdisciplinary use of spaces through the collaboration of town-planning and architecture with other fields of knowledge, such as, for example, art, pedagogy, sociology, ethnography, ecology or community work. Such collaboration is only feasible in frameworks favouring the exchange of skills and knowledges. Such exchanges facilitate the meeting of various professional people with local experts and other groups involved to set up learning communities in which each contributes their particular knowledge and attitudes. At the same time, they interconnect very different disciplines, institutions and organisational habits, opening up a broad spectrum of collaborations with NGOs, schools, kindergartens, local communities, universities, youth and community centres, trade unions, etc. New forms of praxis thus emerge and, consequently, new politics, at the same time as intervention occurs in the collaborating institutions and their organisational models. Among these experimental practices we can find the creation and management of participative urban gardens, the emergence of self-built spaces for learning among university students, research and participative diagnoses with local communities, or the development by artistic cooperatives of communication campaigns for trade unions and pressure groups.

Finally, in order to understand the coordination of collective pedagogies and spatial politics, we have proposed the conceptual framework of the transducer. A transducer is a device able to transform or convert a certain type of input energy into a different type of output energy, causing complex growth. Transducers are ecological in character, as they are directly involved in the context they change. In this sense, they are devices that translate, mediate and produce new energies, but without marking out their orientation or their value, but waiting for the body affected by the transformation process to adapt and reinvest its capacities and interests in multiplying that energy. Piano keys are transducers inasmuch as they translate physical energy into sound impulses, but it is the piano and the mediation of the musician in a particular context that direct or redirect their sense. Human enzymes produce transducing effects, as do the hormones of the endocrinal glands, because by being ecologically inserted and produced by our system, they produce and mediate in our changes and thus in our reorganisation as an organic system. In nature there are always energy peaks caused by transducers that facilitate the progress of life and its continual adaptation.

This term is also used in the theory of social networks (Villasante, 2006). In this context, transducers act as triggers or catalyzers of social change, opening up new, more integral and sustainable possibilities of transformation that are inserted into the social fabric. They are at the same time multipliers generating exchange of knowledge and new forms of working among the social networks involved. From the viewpoint of social movements, transducer styles mediate and negotiate the political goals of a movement, facilitating the emergence of different energies according to the different aims and modes of action, so that new overspills and unexpected evolutions occur. Transducers work with the synergies of each given social movement and situation, opening up new, more complex and global possibilities for change, creating particular situations or operating as triggers, as well as generating exchange of knowledge and lifestyles among the agents involved. To use the words of Villasante, transducers therefore “want to be subjects that translate and also dynamise, that are involved in reversions, not seeking to close off any particular systematisation, but to open up new, more complex paths” (2006: 42).

The series of practices making up this project act as transducers through their capacity to free energy, to produce jumps between disciplines and institutions that are normally distant from each other. These are practices and experiences that share the capacity to restructure the set of factors acting in each situation, in order to cause alternative situations of public participation, as well as to learn and exchange knowledges with various groups, institutions and disciplines, overflowing the boundaries and conventions set for educational and cultural work and for social action. They also act as transducers through their creative styles, integrating, mediating and translating the social energies of each context, inserting themselves ecologically into them, and causing new, unexpected evolutions.

As coordinators of TRANSDUCERS, we have conceived the project itself, moreover, as an operative device driving a transducer style, i.e., we have attempted to develop a project that could provoke long-term changes and exchanges between the various people and institutions involved – the José Guerrero Art centre, its staff, Aulabierta, ourselves, the university, the students, educational centres and teachers. All of this to be carried out by means of seminars, archives, devices, and programmes. In this fashion we hope that this project will not merely speak of TRANSDUCERS, but will also be able to activate transducer styles.


1. Introduction to the project

Throughout this text we wish to display and share the various elements we have used as coordinators of TRANSDUCERS: collective pedagogies and spatial politics during the stages of planning and development of the project1. Taking this description of concept and process, we can locate the complexities the proposal attempts to articulate.

TRANSDUCERS brings three strands into relation:

1. A pedagogical project based on formative seminars and workshops aimed at different audiences and carried out between March 2009 and February 2010.

2. The construction and exhibition of a correlated archive of international and national experiences with collective pedagogy and spatial politics and the display of this archive at the José Guerrero Centre from December 2009 to February 2010.

3. The multiplication or continuity of the project by means of a web page with information and follow-up; the construction of a mobile archive (a sort of portable library and mediathèque) to collect the material included in the exhibition; the publication the reader now holds; and finally the development of a number of collective pedagogy projects in collaboration with local agents and other work spaces in the province of Granada. This task of multiplication was already begun in the early stages of the project and is intended to continue after the exhibition’s closure.

In order to “cross” the complex structure of TRANSDUCERS, we must consider for a moment the five fields put into play in the project from the viewpoint of transducer styles. We hope that in this manner the diagram below will serve as both an introduction to the project and a defence of the type of politics and pedagogies we have been building up in collaboration with all the institutions, networks and individuals involved.


2. Transductions: collaborative politics between institutions

TRANSDUCERS arose out of the José Guerrero Centre’s invitation to Aulabierta [2] to collaborate on a pedagogical and relational project that took collective pedagogies, spatial politics and local networks as components with which to create a case archive and a programme to help expand the museum’s actions throughout the province of Granada. As coordinators of the project, our challenge was how learn and activate critacally a well-known model of relational and archive curatorship, that we were familiar with through exhibitions such as Democracy by Group Material, Collective Creativity by What, How & For Who (WHW) or Desacuerdos, coproduced by MACBA, Arteleku, UNIA and the José Guerrero Centre, with all the range of actions and social networks involved. With this idea we conceived the archive as an organic, pedagogical element; a living thing that would take root in local affairs and relate with other groups and situations. This challenge meant our moving away from a more formal model of cultural management, or at least one only focussed on compilation of material for projects located within the conceptual framework outlined by the José Guerrero Centre, to advance towards the collective construction and management of that very thing were studying and collecting in the project.

For its part, Aulabierta had already collaborated with the José Guerrero Centre on the MicroTV_ZonaChana Laboratory – a microtelevision experiment carried out in the part of Granada known as La Chana as part of the exhibition by Antoni Muntadas The construction of fear and the loss of the public (2008). In addition, it had made an archive of images of the city of Granada (archivogranada.net) in order to build up locally the concepts of public space, imagery, city and memory, all related to the exhibition Martha Rosler. The House, the Street, the Kitchen (2009). On the basis of themes of contemporary cultural production, the aim of these projects was to extend and make contemporary the themes on exhibition in the museum in diverse contexts of the city, accompanied by collaborative and innovatory educational actions using Aulabierta as a multiplier. The role of multiplication in Aulabierta lead to catalyzing the work of the art centre throughout the various collaborating networks that both the José Guerrero Centre and Aulabierta had already brought together in the city of Granada. The education activated did not attempt to justify the work of artists or their exhibitions, but to pedagogically and experimentally experiment with its contents in other contexts and active networks and, from there, to produce new mediations and cultural productions that are contextual, similar, parallel and differential to the cultural knowledge of exhibitions. This pedagogical framework was of great assistance to us in reconsidering the project in its institutional dimension.

In the light of these experiences, one of the first goals we set ourselves with TRANSDUCERS was to understand the project as an experience located inside a collective learning space, connected to the “tool box” that Aulabierta represented. We therefore used various participative methodologies of contextual work that Aulabierta had already put into practice (university extramural studies, professional encounters, participative seminars and workshops, etc.), which were revised for the purposes of the project. It was necessary not only to archive, but also to dynamize, creating networks and experimenting pedagogically the very thing we were going to exhibit – the national and international practices and projects which, turned into case studies, were to form part of the archive and the project’s exhibition. This aspect involved not only representing transductive and pedagogical practices in an exhibition context, but also activating and discussing them as events, actions, and programmes. This was a work model that many of the groups included in the archive, indeed, displayed in their projects. This step implied an open line of local production that would strengthen the educational facet of the José Guerrero Centre and its management mechanisms as an interface or pedagogical device within network activity, not merely to legitimize or reinforce the contents exhibited, but to problematize them and experiment with them pedagogically. This lead us to place the pedagogical work as a structural, articulating element of the entire project and not only as a complementary, or secondary part, so that the project was organised and articulated according to its capacities to build up networks, collective knowledge and means of distribution for that knowledge.

3. The projects: pedagogical routes

Working with projects developed inside the framework of collective pedagogies and spatial politics was a response to the need to understand a number of practices that we recognised in a certain way as influences references for Aulabierta. It was clear to us that the project we would include in the TRANSDUCERS archive would be understood as case studies, rather than as paradigms of good practice. It was also clear that this was to be an open archive, not restricted to the practices now exhibited, but that should grow and incorporate new case studies and even produce them. This attitude allows us to open up a learning process about the pedagogies and politics brought into play in each case.

Regarding the pedagogical elements that helped us to carry out an initial selection of endeavours, we would first of all highlight the polyvalence and complexity of the collectives, groups and projects represented. All of them consist of well established spaces and organizational structures, that also have very diverse territories of action (Paris, Chicago, London, Istambul, Dublin, Granada, New York, Vienna, Singapore and La Plata). In many cases the practices are established as long-term projects lasting ten years of more and in continual regeneration and reinvention. All these projects combine several dimensions of public intervention, which involves collaboration with a broad range of agents and institutions (designers, neighbourhoods associations, trade unions, ecologist or activist groups, engineers, technicians, artisans, artists, educators, computer technicians, crèches, educational centres, universities, agricultural cooperatives, art centres, museums, etc.). This multitude of dimensions is also present in the fact that many groups adopt different, formal and informal organizational structures: NGOs, associations, cooperatives, independent experimental centres, research or teaching innovation groups, etc. As a result of this multiplicity of action and intervention formats, as well as the diversity of agents involved, these collectives blur the traditional forms of art in cultural production by incorporating more flexible, mixed, polyfunctional profiles into their work teams. Therefore, rather than groups of artists, we are talking about collective or groups of cultural workers that collaborate with other networks or institutions, in this sense acting as transducers in certain social situations.

4. The pedagogical project: a network multiplication of knowledge

Another of the approaches opened up by TRANSDUCERS is the pedagogical project we have been developing on the basis of a number of seminars and formative actions.

Through these actions we intended to construct collaborative learning spaces with a number of local and international groups or professionals. The idea was not to establish a hierarchical order, but to allow spaces of collective knowledge through a structure responding more to an effect of production in series than to a progressive model of knowledge or skills acquisition. This array of formative projects was carried out according to the following time sequence.

1. The university seminar “Cultural Pedagogies. Collaborative practices and network learning” aimed at multidisciplinary groups of university students, where collaboration projects and cultural pedagogies were presented, debated and designed, representing the project’s first contact with other collectives. This seminar resulted in the structuring of 4 possible work projects to be carried out in the province of Granada and which may be implemented in the year 2010, acting as nodes for the continuation of the work of TRANSDUCERS.

2. The formative seminar for teachers and professionals in the field of education, entitled “Work Projects on Visual Culture and Cultural Pedagogy” whose aim was to introduce teachers in primary and secondary education to the teaching methodology of work projects in educational centres. This seminar also involved the development of educational actions and work projects in the participating classrooms and educational centres for them to grow and continue the projects designed in the university seminar when adapted to their own frameworks of activity.

3. The International dialogic seminar “Cultural Negotiations. Articulations of Collective Pedagogies and Spatial Politics,” organised by UNIAarteypensamiento which, through lectures and debates, brought together part of the international practices invited to the archive. The seminar also included a workshop of collective pedagogies in which over twenty Spanish collectives took part and with which there was discussion of experiences, challenges and opportunities for this type of practice in the Spanish context.

In all these actions, the participants were able to follow the various formative models that took place, and to progressively take part in all the events organized. This involvement occurred as a sort of domino effect, with the idea of extending the work into a second phase of the project planned for 2010. In this sense, we wanted to offer a formative itinerary understanding the project as a continuous pedagogical whole, which on the one hand used material and work from the case studies, and on the other invited dialogue with teachers and professionals close to the networks of Aulabierta. The result has a very clear educational policy in collaborative modes of learning, with flexible, participative designs that shun the master-class format. We thus attempt to provide an opportunity to structure lines of in-house training in the project to achieve progressive insertion and collaboration on various educational aspects (university learning, primary and secondary schools, but also national and international encounters among professionals), which implies the possibility of activating several very different participants, such as teachers, primary school teachers, educationalists, artists, students of Fine Art, Sociology, Social Education, Geography and History, etc.

Finally, the exhibition of the relational archive of practices also contains a space known as the “Pedagogical Laboratory” in one of the rooms of the José Guerrero Centre. This laboratory is seen as a place for exchange and dialogue with the participating groups where the results of the various formative actions carried out in the pedagogical project are exhibited. Also on show are the materials produced in the state workshop of collective pedagogies, part of the seminar “Cultural Negotiations. Articulations of Collective Pedagogies and Spatial Politics,” and the various exercises set in motion by the project both in primary and secondary schools and in the school children’s visits to the museum. The laboratory presents all this pedagogical work as exhibition material showing the collective knowledge activated by the various pedagogical devices the project has been producing in its local networks.


5. Multipliers: long-term network activity

Having explained the complexity of the pedagogical project, we shall now describe the continuity of TRANSDUCERS. When building up the relational archive, we took on the challenge of conceiving it as a living, dynamic organism that did not encapsulate the practices it included, but served to activate them and generate new practices in other contexts, especially in the province of Granada. Our interest lay in improving the distribution of the collective knowledge we were constructing and spreading it on other networks, i.e., other cultural and educational centres or work spaces.

The instruments we designed for this task are the web page, the mobile archive, the decentralised projects and the publication of the project. We explain each one of these below in relation to its function within the project.

The TRANSDUCERS web page (www.centroguerrero.org/transductores) was conceived as a useful instrument for presenting and communicating the project and, above all, to be able to record and monitor the various process set in motion. In this sense, we conceived the web space as a permanent tool with which to be able to present the practices and materials forming part of the international projects included in the TRANSDUCERS archive. With the help of the people involve in the different phases of the pedagogical project, this instrument has served to document and represent the practices carried out during the activities and actions and those that can occur in the future, i.e., as a documentary space in the pedagogical project.

The web page likewise represents a conceptual extension of the project, where a resource centre can be consulted with related materials and links, a news blog, essays on the project or its practices, as well as other texts or entries on the interests that have allowed us to build up and locate the diversity of networks and constellations occurring around TRANSDUCERS.

The mobile archive, for its part, is a portable device containing a multitude of materials from the set of practices documented in TRANSDUCERS, both from the projects on exhibition and from the results of the pedagogical project, as well as other complementary material from the collectives and networks involved. It goal is to move the presentation or use of the materials to different contexts, as well as being a pedagogical device for their display in order to generate new practices and mediate with interested local agents in activating the device. Our intention is for the archive to always be accompanied by actions and pedagogical activity, so that it operates as a transductive device in the networks or spaces where it is presented, which is why we define it as a relational archive. Moreover, this leads us to envision it as an archive in progress. Our vision is that of a living, open organism, into which other practices can enter as well as those now on show, thus feeding off the diverse contexts of action.

Finally, in the network of multipliers we present in this part of the text, emphasis should be given to the decentralised projects designed for 2010. These are a number of projects of collective pedagogy and spatial politics that multiply the work of TRANSDUCERS in educational and social centres in the province of Granada. These projects are based on the actions and projects structured throughout the pedagogical project with the aim of generating this type of practices at a local level. The projects are carried out by a collaborative design incorporating the proposals and designs of the first two seminars of the pedagogical project and reactivating them the following year.


6. The publication: notes on a pedagogical device

The last multiplier we shall describe is the publication. This book represents an open document or guide whose aim, in the first part, is to show the theoretical framework of the project’s work, while the second part contains in a summarised form the various projects compiled in the archive.

Regarding the first part of the book, we should first of all like to underline the interrelation of the theoretical texts offered here, due to the complexity of the projects and their multiple dimensions, so that several approaches are possible, whether from artistic and collaborative practice, from political practice or from pedagogy. Grant Kester gives us a general view of collaborative artistic practices, understood outside a mere contrast between reformists or radicals in their manners of political organisation. To this end, his text introduces the distinction between theological and dialogic action, demonstrating how the latter emerges and contributes to contextual collaborations promoting a participative agency. For her part, Aida Sánchez de Serdio presents us with the problematics of specific politics in collaboration projects, based on a redefinition of the political and institutional dimension of culture and art as a specific, complex mode of action, riddle with power relations and operating under several specific forms of organisation and political structures. Finally, Javier Rodrigo’s text attempts to pinpoint the elements making up a possible collective network pedagogy, providing keys and lines of work that can be located in several examples of the projects analysed, that may serve for reconsideration and learning from the practices and the politics of the projects in TRANSDUCERS.

The second part of this publication consists of a number of analytical summaries of the first projects contained in the TRANSDUCERS archive. These summaries were done using each group’s answers to commonly asked questions, to which we later gave structure, unifying the descriptors of each of the projects included. The summaries this show the elements making up the practices and most relevant aspects of the processes carried our (introduction to the group; origin and development of the project; relation with the context and collaborators; methodologies and results; links, networks and dissemination; references and learning; challenges and difficulties). Each summary is also illustrated with a number of photographs showing both the processes, and the contexts and results. At the beginning of each summary, we provide a sociogram, i.e., a map of the social agents brought into play. This diagram also shows the resulting products, the impacts and expansions in each context, attempting to reveal the structural complexity of each practice and, therefore, their collective pedagogies and spatial politics in action.

The series of descriptions of the summaries and diagrams allowed us to distance ourselves from narratives either heroic or too centred on an idea of positive progress of the practices, and to understand the complexities and work methods of the projects. Here we have tried to show the complexity of their institutional frames of action, the networks of collaboration and links they structure, as well as the processes and methodologies developed. We have also attempted to understand their networks of exchange and learning, as well as the viewpoints and difficulties groups discover when starting to work on this type of projects.

Furthermore, concerning the style of the text, we have tried to maintain an accessible descriptive level that did not restrict understanding of the work. In this sense, the challenge of drawing up the summaries for each group was double: first, because we have attempted to keep their singularity as a microuniverse, trying not to lose a degree of description and clarification of the practices that was familiar and easy to communicable. Second, because the summaries themselves are presented as routes or activities in context, never as recipes to be repeated or universal guides for collaborative work. We have rather preferred to emphasize how we can learn from them as a localised pedagogical resources. It was therefore important to locate them in each work context, understanding what might be transferable to others contexts and what we could learn from them. From this viewpoint, more than a textbook or curricular guide, our intention is for this publication to be a working instrument that maintains the complexities of each context and serves to outline possible routes for work inserted in a specific networks.

Finally, we would like to think that this book is a potential pedagogical device that has a significance inasmuch as it promotes a transductive style in its readers or users, proposing reflexions, changes of attitude, leaps from some practices to others, new networks, i.e., that it can be activated as a multiplier. Our aspiration is that other collective and individuals appropriate this book and use it to reflect on pedagogical and political work, as well as finding a common space of interest and practices in their diverse contexts of action. That is where we believe this publication can begin to produce this type of transduction.

References

Villasante, Tomás (2006): Desbordes creativos. Estilos y estrategias para la transformación social. Madrid: Los libros de la catarata.



Footnote

1.The TRANSDUCERS project is coordinated by Javier Rodrigo and FAAQ. FAAQ is a workgroup from Aulabierta that undertakes projects and research in the field of cultural management and production. It is made up of José Daniel Campos, Antonio Collados, María García, Carlos Gor and Pablo Pérez.

2.AULABIERTA is a learning platform located in the University of Granada and managed by the students themselves. AULABIERTA does not consist of a specific collective of people, but of several coordinating groups and associated individuals (as is the case of FAAQ and Javier Rodrigo, the coordinators of TRANSDUCERS), who use the methodology and various instruments of the project to create activities and projects meant to expand their collective cultural knowledge. See the Aulabierta description included in this publication


above copied from: http://transductores.net/?q=es/content/english-info-transducers-collective-pedagogies-and-spatial-politics

EARTH SENSITIVE, John Grande

(2000)

In developing a nature-specific dialogue that is interactive, rooted in actual experience in a given place and time, with nature the essential material and ingredient of the process, artists are ultimately developing a new language of expression. The emphasis is holistic, bio-regional and mutualist. Above all, it displays a respect for our integral connectedness to the environment. The earth is a living breathing organism whose elements - climate, geography, geology, other life forms - are an inviolable part of the human creative process. The inflexible stereotypes of art history, outmoded notions of avant-gardism and modernist aesthetics in general are the legacy of an era where progress was defined in purely economic terms. The land is no longer just a subject we represent through art. An essential freedom comes from identifying with the life process itself as art. It is one chance we have to ensure a viable art of the future. The imperial stereotypes of an art based in formal language, the segregation of humanity from nature, the platitudes that accompany the art object and nature subject have now passed into the catacombs of our museums and art galleries. Let us leave that labyrinth behind and celebrate nature whose presence is very much there, very much here. Essential for our psychological and physical sustenance, nature is here in your garden, there in your forest, can be found in a city park. A resurgence of ritual and respect for the cyclical process of life, an earth sensitive vision reaffirms nature is the art of which we are a part. The challenge is to break out of the limited conception that humanity is the centre of earth-based activity, to broaden our perspective, realize that other species, organisms, animals and plants are equally earth sensitive, the biogenitors of ecological diversity. They may even perceive the earth and us in ways we could never conceive.

From a native point of view, landscape cannot be characterized as either wilderness (i.e. a place in which human activity is not naturally present) or a scene (i.,e. a representation of a site) or a framed subject that embodies an idea of nature. The line between human culture and the culture of nature are indivisible. The M�tabetchouane Centre for History and Archaeology on the south shore of Lac St.-Jean in northern Quebec, with its replica of a Hudson's Bay trading post, is a place where on July 16th, 1647, the Jesuit founder Jean Dequen, a native of Amiens in France, arrived by boat from Tadoussac. Mike MacDonald, a self taught artist of mixed descent (Micmac, Beothuk, Irish, Portuguese, Scottish) whose nature works explore ways of healing cultural and biospecific differences, found a variety of introduced and indigenous species of plants growing in the surrounds of this historic site, a traditional native meeting place for centuries in pre-contact times. During the summer of 1996, he gathered and transplanted species of Native medicinal plants that included sweetgrass, northern sage, native onions, Iroquois ceremonial tobacco, Virginia tobacco, evening primrose, milkweed, Joe-Pyeweed, and Dyers camomile. These indigenous plants with medicinal properties were planted directly around the museum's walls to create a butterfly garden. Naturally growing varieties of viperine, wood strawberry, and hawthorn trees introduced by European settlers centuries ago, plants that have outlasted the early settlement buildings and continued to flourish in the wild were likewise "discovered" by MacDonald whose role was more that of an ethnobotanist than artist. Rock assemblages shaped to form footprints (an allusion to Jean Dequen's original "discovery" of this site in 1647) placed in the garden enabled visitors to move through the site without damaging the plants.

MacDonald's thesis that most plants that attract butterflies have medicinal, healing properties has resulted in subsequent reconfigurations of the butterfly garden that are a source of inspiration and healing, and painlessly beautiful. MacDonald's latest butterfly garden installed amid the ruins of Our Lady of the Prairie Church at the St. Norbert Arts Centre this summer, brought living colour to this site of a former Trappist Monastery, south of Winnipeg, in Manitoba. This heart-shaped garden was replanted with blue and white flowers, the colours used in the Catholic Marian Garden tradition. The place became a work of contemplation and healing, where past Judeo-Christian traditions brought over from the Old world were brought into perspective by a native intervention. An empty plinth overlooking the garden marks the spot where a statue once stood. The 10th in a cycle of 12 related works Patria (Homeland) by the world renowned environmental writer, educator and composer R. Murray Shafer will be performed there. The cycle relates the journey of two principal characters through the labyrinth of different cultures and social situations.

Located on the Pacific Flyway and the Fraser River Basin, the City of Vancouver has a particular environmental legacy and opportunity. To raise consciousness of songbird populations in city and country, and provide positive enhancement programs for songbird habitats in urban centres, artists Beth Carruthers and Nelson Gray, conceived of Vancouver's SongBird project after hearing the clear song of a robin rising above the background cacophony of industrial noise. Biologists, landscape architects, musicians, artists, planners, sustainability consultants and community groups assisted with the project, as did the Douglas College Institute of Urban Ecology and the Roundhouse Community Centre. Environmental concerns were expressed by specialists and city dwellers in the Living City Forum (1998 & 1999), and nature walks encouraged an awareness of urban bird habitats. FLAP (the Fatal Light Awareness Program) likewise made citizens aware of how millions of birds are killed annually in North America by collisions with office and home buildings that are unnecessarily lit up at night.

A broader than usual spectrum of the public has thus become involved in re-imagining the Georgia Basin's place in the world environmental spectrum and Vancouver has become a "songbird friendly" model for other North American cities. The core annual event of the SongBird project is the Spring Dawn Chorus Festival held in May. Begun in England 13 years ago these gatherings of people who await the songbird's dawn chorus are now celebrated around the world. The Babylon Gardens Initiative presented at the Roundhouse Community Centre, aimed at introducing to the public ways of encouraging bird populations in the city. Citizens were taught how to build feeders, nesting boxes, introduce ivy, trellises and bird baths into their home environments thus providing temporary food, habitat and water supplies for birds on balconies, rooftops, in window boxes and gardens. The Gardens of Babylon Balcony Challenge has now run for 3 years and winners are recognized for their positive bird friendly environmental interventions. The Nest, a structure woven out of willows and dried grasses by French artist and landscape architecture student Claire Bedat with assistance from public volunteers was installed outside the Roundhouse Community Centre in the fall of 1998 to celebrate humanity's connection to home, community and songbirds. As Claire Bedat says: "The making was in its essence a very intuitive rendering, as dedicated as a bird, I used each part of my body to shape and build the Nest. A nest is supposedly round, round like life, round like the body of a bird. Unconsciously I was participating in the making of a shelter, a refuge, the house of my body (...) Growth is often assimilated to change, I changed during the making of this project and feel emotionally empowered and bounded to a greater cause: preserving biodiversity on Earth."

Alan Sonfist, a pioneer of eco-sensitive projects in the 1960s and 1970s, for which his Time Landscape (1965) in Soho New York is perhaps the best known. For this project Sonfist introduced pre-contact plants, trees and vegetation to a site in New York. As Sonfist states: "One would observe, within each of the environmental sculptures, the struggle of life and death, as well as the human interaction in a historical forest. That's what the 19th century concepts were about. That is really what I am involved in, and what my thought process is trying to create. The natural cycles as opposed to doing an ecological model from a scientific point of view, or using pure history."

In the Mojave Desert at the main park in La Quinta, California, Sonfist completed a seven mile nature trail (1998) in a region of California otherwise encumbered by the introduction of non-native, northern species of trees and plants that consume unnecessary amounts of water. California bio-history is like bio-history anywhere, involves a layering of living species in the cyclical theatre of nature in time. ghost flower, bee balm, blazing star, desert star, cream cup, woolly daisy, Indian paintbrush, yellow cup, desert sienna, Devil's claw. The flux and flow of elements causes nature to reinvent itself in a myriad of ways. Sonfist's project involves reassessing each fragment of time, realize this nature layering takes place in a continuum, not one fixed moment. The locals who live near the site, seemed to favour non-natural nordic landscapes with maple trees, and grass lawns. Foreign plant and tree species are planted, landscaped into our cities and suburbs because they bring an "exotic flavour" to a place. How different is this from changing the channel on your TV in an endless search for "novelty"? Artificial environments, in this case in a desert region, require heavy watering, and are a desperate attempt to reduce biocultural diversity. Since the local indigenous plant species have been introduced to the region, the initially negative response, has been replaced by an enthusiasm about how beautiful and diverse the spectrum of flower arrangements Sonfist has brought to the place actually are. Sonfist's nature trail has become a visual laboratory of environmental understanding. The work has stimulated thought and controversy as well as providing a cathartic living environment for the people who live there. Plans are on for sculptors to introduce artworks along the trail at a later date.

For the Coast Salish Squamish nation on the West Coast of British Columbia whose numbers dwindled from 60,000 to a low of 150 after intitial contact with the white man, the world is conceived as a forest. The community of trees that grow in a forest is like a community of peoples whose health and history are inextricably linked together. Artist and activist Nancy Bleck and carver Aaron Nelson-Moody (Tawx'sin Yexwulla) have embarked on an intriguing project called Cedar People. The first stage of the project involves Nelson-Moody's carved rendition of the Society of Women in Stewardship of the Land, a "society within a society", raised from birth to act as leaders who look after the land. As Nelson-Moody states "There is no equivalent in non-Native society, as the women were as much medicinal doctors as they were environmental lawyers, as much libraries as they were land managers." A traditional ceremony has already been held to bless the log, and invitees witnessed the first stage of the transformation of this cedar wood into Slyn'i (cedar woman). Being the first of many such Welcome Figure carvings, it will be raised in a sacred site in the upper Squamish wilderness region this August. Culturally modified markings on the outside bark of ancient cedar trees can be found in such sites that indicate these places have been visited for thousands of years. Using traditional native tools, Nelson-Moody has created a twelve by three foot carving whose installation will be witnessed by the Coast Salish Squamish people and non-natives. The traditional society of women this work is dedicated to, are likewise "witnesses" who have participated through ceremony as "keepers of history". Other welcome figures will be made elsewhere, in collaboration with local carvers and participants - on site in Quebec, Germany, and Australia - locals carving traditions and motifs will be part of these initiatives.

In 1992 at M�ru in the Oise region of France, Jean-Paul Ganem created his first "agricultural composition" and this was soon followed by others in the Vend�e, Champagne, and Midi-Pyr�n�es of France and the 150 hectare Mirabel airport project in Montreal, Canada (1996). This summer, Jean-Paul Ganem has been involved in a large scale environmental sensibilization and community participation project titled Le Jardin des Capteurs. Created in collaboration with the Cirque du Soleil and Jour-Terre Quebec Le Jardin des Capteurs occupies a 2.5 hectare waste area adjacent to the Cirque du Soleil's permanent headquarters in the north of Montreal. The site referred to as the Miron Quarry, contains human waste excrement up to 100 feet in depth. Gas emission pipes (up to 400 feet below the surface), sporadically dot the surface of the land like periscopes. Operated by Gazmont Plant nearby, the gas pipe emissions provide natural gas/methane power for 10,000 homes. Ganem's art project involves youth from the St. Michel region of Montreal and volunteers from Montreal's Botanical Gardens. Thus beautified, Ganem's site intervention changes public perception of garbage and waste dumps, not only for the volunteers, but equally for those who visit the place or see it from the air. An end of the world wasteland becomes a beautiful rendition of the circus Big Top with colourful wedge-like land marks and overlapping circular motifs in varying dimensions. All this is made of living plant and flower species: red and yellow Cosmos, pink and red petunias, colza, beard-grass, wild heliotrope and buckwheat.. The colourful land markings and motifs overlap, with varying circular dimensions and shapes. An undulating path makes its way through the planting... Directional markers point to the more formidable areas of the Miron Quarry/Dump that will, over the coming years, be landscaped and transformed into a more substantial city park with a hill at its centre. Next year perennials will replace the present planting. Le Jardin des Capteurs introduces the notion that sites for human waste, the detritus of our urban consumer society can be recycled and beautified as sites, just as the goods and waste that end up there can be.

Approaching such initiatives from the aesthetic and design perspective Belgian artist Bob Verschueren is an artist who specializes in making vegetal art out of vegetal matter. His most impressive works include the Wind Paintings which are nothing less than spectacular. The Wind Paintings comprise lines of natural pigment that are dispersed by wind action. It was the unpredictability of the result that initially attracted Verschueren to this kind of art making. The experience came about after Verschueren quit traditional painting and found himself "no longer confronted by the limits of this horrible rectangle. The subject extended beyond any traditional aesthetic framework. A battle lost before you start one could say! One could not measure a work, one does not know what comprises the last grain of pigment, where it will go..." Vershueren lays variously coloured pigments in lines along stretches of sand for his Wind Paintings. Nature does the rest. The action of wind on the pigment turns the land surface into the canvas for these artworks.

German artist Mario Reis makes "nature watercolours" by placing a base material in flowing water and allowing the mineral and vegetal sediment transported in the water to accumulate on its surface. Water is the paintbrush that moves and dispaces the sediment and colour on these square canvases. Reis finds these configurations of silt, sand and sediment drawn from rivers all over North America in places as varied as the Yukon, British Columbia, Idaho, Ohio, New Hampshire, Nevada, Michigan, Alaska, Wyoming and Kansas to be as confounding in their variety of hues, shades, textures as any old fashioned artwork and much more challenging. Reis' likewise enacts such works in Mexico, Europe, Africa, and Japan. They are a powerful reflection on natural diversity. His approach is rigorous and truly global in scope.

The growth of an interactive approach to working with environment implies an acceptance of ourselves, as much as nature. These artists' actions carry a narrative on human history within their work, but circumvent artistic conventions of reproduction, containment and mimesis. Nature and art are less critically segregated, life takes precedence over the art. Links are established between human culture and the culture of nature. With each successive experimentation this new language of expression that involves understanding our place in nature become better understood. Elements from nature are the paint and nature is the canvas. Artists are the catalysts. There is no subject or object. This earth sensitive language of expression is tactile, physical and plays visually with various organic and inorganic elements in a given site. The creative growth experience is interactive. As we enhance our understanding of nature's place in our society, our civilization, our personal lives, so we better understand that our society's future will inevitably involve understanding and respecting nature's processes. Nature's endemic role as source and provider is what will enable us to achieve sustainability for all forms of life the earth in the future.

John K. Grande

- previously published in Public Art Review (Vol. 12, No. 1, Issue 23) Fall Winter 2000 issue

Writer and art critic John Grande's reviews and feature articles have been published extensively in Artforum, Vice Versa, Sculpture, Art Papers, British Journal of Photography, Espace Sculpture, Public Art Review, Vie des Arts, Art On Paper, The Globe & Mail, Circa & Canadian Forum. The author of Balance: Art and Nature (Black Rose Books, 1994), Intertwining: Landscape, Technology, Issues, Artists (Black Rose Books, 1998) and Jouer avec le feu: Armand Vaillancourt: Sculpteur engag� (Montreal: Lanctot, 2001). John Grande has published numerous catalogue essays on selected artists and has taught art history at Bishops University. He co-authored Judy Garfin: Natural Disguise (Vehicule Press, Montreal, 1998) and Nils-Udo: Art with Nature (Wienand Verlag, Koln, Germany 2000) and his latest book is David Sorensen: Abstraction From Here to Now (Centre culturel Yvonne L. Bombardier, Valcourt, 2001) Mr. Grande's Art Nature Dialogues will be published by SUNY Press in 2003.

© 2009 greenmuseum.org

above from: http://greenmuseum.org/generic_content.php?ct_id=109

Why paintings succeed where words fail, Gareth Harris

Belgian artist Luc Tuymans talks to us on the eve of exhibitions in Europe, Russia and the US
By Gareth Harris | From issue 205, September 2009
Published online 9 Sep 09 (Features)

Luc Tuymans (Photo: Grant Delin, courtesy David Zwirner, New York)Luc Tuymans has painted figurative works since the mid 1980s and few artists can be as closely identified with a particular palette. His taste for mouldy pastels, cool greys and dead plaster white make for blurred, obtuse images. This reductive colour scheme represents the elusive nature of history and memory, reflecting the artist’s belief that representation can only be partial and subjective. Loaded political themes are developed in seemingly tangential ways with the Holocaust, Belgium’s controversial role in post-colonial Congo (the influential “Mwana Kitoko: Beautiful White Man” series which was shown at the 2001 Venice Biennale) and the US response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks given an oblique, fragmented treatment. The diversity of Tuymans’s subject matter, which also encompasses banal paraphernalia such as wallpaper patterns and tea settings, goes hand-in-hand with his use of varied source material drawn from photography, film and television.

The latter features prominently in Tuymans’s first major Russian show at the Red October Chocolate Factory opening this month. Twenty new works, first shown in Brussels earlier this year, examine TV reality shows and the internet. The exhibition, part of the Moscow Biennale, forms part of a Tuymans onslaught this autumn with the artist’s first US retrospective also opening this month at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Ohio and an exhibition curated by Tuymans and the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei opening at Bozar in Brussels.

The Art Newspaper: You once said that your technique is “borne out of a genuine distrust of imagery”? What do you mean?

Luc Tuymans: Well, being part of the television generation means there is already an overload of imagery available. But a lot of the imagery is not lived through but just seen, or you pretend you’ve at least seen certain images, so this implies that there must be a huge amount of distrust towards what you’re looking at. The practice of painting is much more of a habit, rather than being something exquisite. If you try to create a style or refine your painting mode, you just lose the intensity of the moment.

TAN: Much has been made of the need to “decode” your work with viewers looking to your titles for guidance. Do you place too much responsibility on the spectator to unravel your images?

LT: First, you should not underestimate the public and try to be overly didactic which is always the problem with institutions, they force you to produce text after text. For my Tate Modern show [2004], the education department wanted bigger captions but I wanted to make them less visible. There were already explanations outside each gallery but each picture also required texts. We fought over it.

I started out as an artist to demythologise myself by giving the source material I’ve used. Journalists liked this, they knew what to write about me but later on they hated me for it because without any explanations, they couldn’t comment on me. It’s a controversy that really just exists in the media. My ultimate aim is to detach myself completely and look at my works as a spectator would but that is a dream.

TAN: Has your use of the bleached and blurred image reached its limits?

LT: That depends. Some of the later works are actually extremely colourful, like Orchid (2008). The blurriness is actually sharp because, unlike with [Gerhard] Richter, it is not wiped away but just painted. Painting is a very physical object, it’s very difficult to compromise it. It’s difficult to remember it correctly because it’s so complex. But it’s much more detailed than any photograph will ever be. But if you ask people to remember a photograph or painting, they’ll remember the photograph in terms of the size, colours, etc.

TAN: Do you believe art historians will credit your muted palette with creating a new kind of reductive form? Or would you rather they labelled you a post-modern history painter?

LT: Well, neither of those. I would be much happier if academics understood the idea of understatement. Art is not something you have to imply is political. Art is not political, life is political. Isms, such as modernism, post-modernism, etc, they’re just not applicable to the world we live in. The whole practice of painting is about two things: timing and precision.

TAN: It’s well documented that your childhood was dominated by various schisms in your family over the fallout of World War II. Can you explain how your personal history continues to have an impact on your vision?

LT: My mother was Dutch, my father was Flemish. They both lost brothers during the war. My father’s mother, she was a fanatic and determined to send her children to German schools. At the end of the war, my father managed to take his brothers out of school but he couldn’t save one of his younger siblings. Thirty-five years later, I was having dinner at my parents’ house when my father took a phone call. He went completely white because he had just found out that this younger brother had died as an SS mascot, with a bayonet in his belly.

On a historical level, WWII could have destroyed the whole of Europe while the Holocaust was a psychological breakdown of sorts. And these things completely shaped this part of the world and the US. So yes, the war has provided a basic underlying structure. I always saw it on two levels; on a personal level and then it grew into an understanding of why things are shaped as they are now. It triggered the Cold War, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden—they’re all creations of the west.

TAN: So would you agree that your work is deeply personal rather than historical?

LT: I think it tends to be more of the former than the latter. Of course, it’s been triggered by things of which I’m not totally aware, otherwise I wouldn’t do it. Every visual is in opposition to language because if we could say everything, why make a picture of it?

TAN: So you are ultimately concerned with the fragile nature of memory in relation to both personal and historical events?

LT: It always remains fragile. Every aspect of history is partly false, it’s never complete, history writing can only be factual to a point.

TAN: But your recent art, such as your works on view in Moscow which explore aspects of virtual reality found in television shows and on the internet, seems to be about disengagement from contemporary realities.

LT: “Against the Day”, the show’s title, is taken from one of my favourite novels by Thomas Pynchon. It’s about the invention of paranoia in US literature. I’ve also been influenced by the 2008 films “There Will be Blood”, “No Country for Old Men” and “Control”. On a cynical level, these films achieve something the art world has not yet understood in that, in a sort of a reductive way, they work with a narrative on a different level. For example, there is no dialogue for 15 minutes at the beginning of “There Will be Blood” which is amazing. Two works on show in Moscow, Against the Day I and Against the Day II [a diptych showing a gardener digging], capture the effect of pressing the pause of a TV remote control. But they’re a combination of things set into a scene which are not real.

And then you have “virtual” ideas which are much more instant. An assistant of Fan Di’an [director of National Art Museum, Beijing] took a photograph of me and the red focus light distorted the image [I-phone, 2008]. It will be interesting to view these works in the context of how Moscow is developing; it’s a brutal city.

TAN: Would you ever make works with certain collectors in mind?

LT: No, I would never do that. What is more important is that together with my dealers, we’ve always guarded the work in the sense that it does not crop up too much at auction and when it does, it sells for the right price, or we just buy it back. I’m very well aware of the game with Charles Saatchi who bought pieces on the secondary market for his “Triumph of Painting” exhibition in 2005 and then dumped them after the show. The US tour should lead to steady sales.

TAN: Are you happy with the selection of works for your US tour?

LT: Yes, it’s taken a long time for a US institution to ask me to do a show. There are 76 works. I’ve installed all 80 of my solo shows myself. This is the first time I can trust other curators to install my art. They’ve decided to re-create three exhibitions as they were shown in commercial galleries [“At Random”, Zeno X gallery, Antwerp, 2004; “Der Architekt”, Galerie Gebauer, Berlin, 1998; “Mwana Kitoko”, David Zwirner, New York, 2000] and then will work around this chronologically. It’s interesting as they’re not the most iconic works.

TAN: How do you think US audiences will respond to your work?

LT: The Demolition painting (2005) will be shown which has 9/11 connotations along with the Condoleezza Rice portrait (The Secretary of State, 2005). Museum people didn’t buy it at the time because it was too topical. But then Glenn Lowry, MoMA director, decided to acquire it because she’s a public figure [Tuymans’s US dealer David Zwirner gave the painting to MoMA as a fractional gift in 2006]. It had been misunderstood in a private collection, it was out of place. The fact that it’s been acquired by a public collection is an interesting insight into how the American people think.

above from: http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/Why-paintings-succeed-where-words-fail/19286

Transgressive Tactics in the Age of Unreason, Guillermo Gómez-Peña

In this rarefied atmosphere of paranoia, distrust, and scrutiny, performance artists have come to signify "potential trouble" for U.S. art institutions. We always do in times of crisis. We are perceived as irresponsible provocateurs, gratuitous iconoclasts, and, since 9/11, as cultural terrorists. Despite the fact that our audiences continue to be quite large (La Pocha averages 400 spectators every night we perform), we are invited with provisos, interrogated in advance by curators, and treated as potential troublemakers by the media. It's...a new American art rite.
The dreaded phone call comes a couple months before the project. The presenter's voice is audibly anxious. The worst possible scenario goes more or less like this:
PRESENTER: Gómez-Peña, we just had a board meeting last night and felt it was better not to bring your troupe to our city at this time. Maybe next year. The stakes are too high right now. We can't afford to risk our upcoming funding.
GÓMEZ-PEÑA: Well, thanks for being so...so sincere, Mister...culero... (the last word uttered under my breath).
Other times, when the cultural institution decides to go ahead with the project but still has some apprehensions, the conversation occurs, either by phone or in person, a few days before opening night. If it happens in person, we are taken to a nice art bar and, after a few drinks—bless his/her heart—the curator or presenter takes a deep breath and starts the euphemistic interrogation:
PRESENTER: Guillermo, by no means do we want to censor you. We just want to know what we are up against in your upcoming piece. You know...we must be prepared in case...there are fire alarms...
GÓMEZ-PEÑA: (And fire alarms tend to go off when you're looking for smoke, I think to myself) Can you be more specific, my friend? (I know where they are going, but I don't know how grave their fears are.)
PRESENTER: I mean...is this performance "audience-friendly?" (A euphemism for art without venom or sharp edges.) Is there anything we should be worried about? Frontal nudity? Violence and sex? (The deadly combo.) Bloodletting? Exposure to bodily fluids? Will your performers touch any audience member inappropriately? Will you force any audience member to do anything that might be considered humiliating or offensive? Any profanity? Any disrespect for religious imagery? Will there be flag desecration? Will you be making fun of The Troops? (The list of fears and taboos intertwined with performance art clichés goes on and on and on-depending on the site, the project, and the presenter.)
Sometimes the presenter's "concerns" might be addressed with an emphatic disclaimer placed at the entrance of the gallery or theatre, something like: "There will be nudity and/or adult content and/or political images which you may find offensive..." If the museum director or presenter is a hip Vato, he may let me write my own disclaimer—Gómez-Peña style. I always try to create a funny disclaimer that heightens the specific fears of the curator or the institution—something like: "You are about to witness chicken nudity and unnecessary Mexican violence. Think twice before you cross this border."
Or, "Patriots should think twice before entering into an internationalized space." Or, "The artists are not responsible for identity crises audience members might endure during the performance." It works. But other times, when the stakes are higher (or the city is more conservative), the art bar chat with the curator becomes a clear-cut warning—either we tone down the political/sexual content of the piece, or the project will be "postponed" (a euphemism for canceled). Short of handing the presenter a script in advance, we try to be as specific as we can in terms of describing the images and performance rituals in our piece. We then try to negotiate, case by case, image by image, the inclusion/exclusion of the most sensitive material. It's tough. If we give in too much, then the project becomes defanged, decaffeinated. But if we don't pay attention to their fears and just go ahead and do whatever we want, we will immediately be blacklisted in their circuit. It's like performing in 1970s provincial Mexico.
A presenter told me recently, "There are clearly new forbidden territories which a performance artist must avoid if he wishes to remain employed in the U.S." The obvious subtext was: Please, make sure that the piece you are about to present here is not going to get me in trouble. Because if I get in trouble, so will you.
The main problem is that the fears of the U.S. presenters are well-founded; their moral dilemmas are real. My heart truly goes out to them. Their institutions, whether mainstream or "alternative" (does anyone know what "alternative" even means nowadays?), are rapidly losing their funding. Besides, the local media is not as willing to defend art as it used to be, and the newly empowered "faith-based organizations" are constantly looking for blood—potential art scandals to call down the wrath of God.
In this highly-charged political climate, many arts presenters and curators believe that their funding, and even their jobs, may be riding on the projects they present, so a potential media scandal or even a single hysterical complaint from a righteous audience member might influence the generosity of a donor or funder; or worse (knock on wood), it might incur the wrath of a Christian organization or a group of ferocious "patriots." Then the shit really hits the fan, and both the institution and the artists are attacked with hate mail and picketed by zombies. We might even be added to one of the many lists of "cultural traitors" featured on sites such as www.probush.com/traitor or www.americantraitor.us.
Despite the undeserved reputation of performance artists as professional provocateurs and cultural iconoclasts, we really see ourselves on the same side as our cultural institutions. It is clear to us that we are all part of the same milieu, and that their fate is connected to ours. Since our job is by no means to contribute to their de-funding, (and we certainly don't wish to give more ammunition to the ferocious Right), when the "trial by fire" occurs, we tend to back off and comply. We do it, not out of fear, but out of solidarity and political intelligence. Some curators and presenters know this. But sadly, not all do. This is why, as artists, we must constantly remind them: "We are on your side, carnales. In times like these, we need to help each other. We (the artists), need you guys to broker on our behalf, and defend our integrity. In exchange, we will make sure that no acts of 'irresponsible transgression' occur on your watch."
Article by Guillermo Gómez-Peña.


above copied from: http://www.atasite.org/zine/issue5/tactics.html