AUTHOR: Sarah Kanouse
TITLE: A Tactical Community, Neither Blessed nor Imagined
STATUS: Publish
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
CONVERT BREAKS: __default__
ALLOW PINGS: 1
DATE: 03/02/2004 12:23:32 PM
-----
BODY:
My posts thus far have run the risk of glorifying the technological possibilities
of the project more than emphasizing the community-building necessary to making
not only the project effective but in extending that effectiveness beyond the
three-week timeframe of the exhibit/installation/events. The uncritical glorification
of technology as an end unto itself cuts across political ideology, from Gore's
liberal rhetoric of "bridging the digital divide" to more radical open
source and open publishing movements such as Indymedia. I maintain that the primary
and most effective way people learn is through experience and interpersonal contact:
we learn best from each other, face to face, when our intellects and emotions
and senses are all engaged.
The term 'community' itself is not without problems; it is easily appropriable
(think of 'community policing') and tends toward reductive descriptions of
what are actually very complex relations of geography, belief and identity.
However, most of us consider us a part of a community, even if we might struggle
with how to describe it and struggle with our understandings of self and
connection within it. I have had my share of struggles with community during
six-year residence in Champaign-Urbana, and in this project I hope to connect
the various communities with which I've felt differentially connected at
various moments, towards a community of tactics, a connection forged around
goals at times related but at other times just as significantly divergent.
Elaborating these ideas will be a key component of the project, and a series
of posts on the 'tactical community' created by the project. Many of these,
like this one, will be diaristic.
I'm coordinating various groups to help realize the project. One, the smallest,
is my 'tech team,' composed of (regrettably) four or five men with extensive
experience in programming, webstreaming, and low power broadcasting. I've
known most of them for several years, though one I met for the first time
three weeks ago. Here's the rough biographical sketch.
ZM is the first person I contacted about the project's tech side. I've known
him since 1999 or 2000, when I first got involved in activism in Champaign-Urbana.
At the time, he was an undergraduate student, in computer science I believe,
and I think we first met around the Nader campaign and anti-globalization
work and later worked together (with many others) to start the Urbana-Champaign
Indymedia Center. I've always been impressed with his enthusiasm, committment,
and strong desire to share his skills, which has occasionally gotten him
pretty burned out and overcommitted. Over the year's, he's learned to keep
his hand down when a call for volunteers goes out and he's nearing the edge,
but he still shares generously of his skills.
PR has been active in independent media and low power broadcasting for many
years, and I got to know him through Indymedia work. We've alternately argued
and agreed at many long meetings over the years, and I appreciate the perspective
he brings by virtue of being involved in all this much longer than I have.
He also is making connections for the project with pirate broadcasters around
the country, extending the local networks created to a more diffuse national
community.
I first met JE when we were travelling to the Quebec City protest of the Free
Trade Area of the Americas in April 2001. While our contact with one another
has been quite sporadic since then, there is an undeniable bond that is formed
when you've washed tear gas out of each other's eyes. I mentioned the project
at PK's son's 2nd birthday party a few weeks ago, and his eyes lit up. I'm
honored to be working with him again.
I'd seen PT around some, since he's in a band with PK and another friend, but
I'd never really spoken to him until PK arranged a meeting to discuss the
project. PT had made an impression at the 2 year old's brithday party by
giving the toddler a harmonica, the 'music' and the hammy stage presence
that ensued provided lots of laughs for us grown-ups.
Since PK has been a major connector in my life, and his name keeps cropping
up in this cast of characters, I feel the need to give him some credit. In
many ways, PK is responsible for the life I've been living for the last five
years. He has an uncanny knack of making the right invitation at exactly
the right time. At the beginning of my second year in Champaign-Urbana, right
after the WTO protests in Seattle, my friend and I approached PK after a
gig at Caffe Paradiso, wanting to talk more about his experiences in Seattle,
which I had followed on WEFT and on the brand-spakin' new Indymedia website.
He invited us to a follow-up meeting in his living room later that week,
and my friend and I went from being active spectators and sympathizers of
the Champaign-Urbana activist community to active elements. His invitation
to his son's birthday party and his arranging of a meeting with DT are similar
happy more-than-accidents, and I have nothing but the utmost gratitude and
respect for PK and the subtle and powerful impact he has had on my life.
Thanks for being my friend these five years.
AUTHOR: Sarah Kanouse
TITLE: tactical community, pt.2
STATUS: Publish
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
CONVERT BREAKS: __default__
ALLOW PINGS: 1
DATE: 03/07/2004 09:19:21 PM
-----
BODY:
" Community-based art" as a descriptive term for the work of artists
who collaborate with non-artists has come under scrutiny both by those who want
to discriminate between 'true' art (presumably that which doesn't relate at all
to non-artists) and critics who are sympathetic to elements of the contest of
representation, uncovering of suppressed voices, and anti-heroic responsibility
undertaken by some community-based projects. While the dismissiveness and elitism
of the attacks by some detractors of community-based art inspire sometimes uncritical
defense of any project that acknowledges its grounding in the social, it is the
more nuanced critiques from sympathetic writers that contributes most to understanding
the problematic assumptions of this sort of work.
I find myself interested in community-based art and quite sympathetic to the
goals of its more radical practioners, but often I chafe under the unproblematized,
feel-good celebrations of community, reductively and unreflexively defined,
produced by community-based artists. I recently reread both Rosalyn Deutsche's
trenchant analysis of the public sphere, "Agoraphobia," and Miwon
Kwon's nuanced critique of dominant model for community-based practices.
Taken together, they articulate my reservations about the field better than
I ever could and suggest ways understanding how community is actually a relational
and produced/productive entity, and not a descriptive term.
Some dissident voices, such as the Critical Art Ensemble, take issue with the
bureaucratization of community-based art, whereby artists, embedded in the
goals of a sponsoring organization by virtue of the funding contract, find
communities easier to identify and join by working through another bureaucracy
that claims to represent the community, with the result that little more
than multiple layers of representative structure are included in the final
project. Miwon Kwon observes that 'community' is usually reductively defined
according to a common trait (be it racial/ethnic, geographical, or interest),
rather than as an emergent and inconsistent process. The resulting project
then reifies both the fixed identity of the specific community in question
and the belief that communities can be so defined and expressed without complication.
Iris Marion Young (not an art critic but a political philosopher) maintains
that a political community is based more on affinity and heterogeneous relationships
among groups than on substantial differences between groups, defined and
referenced against a (white, bourgeois) norm.
In considering the various 'communities' engaged and produced by "The
Public Square," I rub up again and again against the impulse to immerse
myself in some community, to claim to be an integral part of it, to hold it
up to represent 'itself.' This is the dominant model of a 'responsible' community-based
art practice. That is also not what I'm doing. While I have lived in Champaign-Urbana
for six years, the communities engaged and produced by the project do not map
neatly on to the groups with which I've worked and consorted during this time.
Rather, an overlapping set of temporary communities, defined by work and interest
(or Iris Young's 'affinity), are emerging. Where is the community here? Is
it the tech collective, the sound engineers, the set of individuals and groups
organizing events for the broadcasts, the invited guests to the events, the
assembled audiences, or the audiences to the broadcasts or website?
Taking my cue from Miwon Kwon's invitation to theorize a 'collective artistic
praxis' rather than community-based art, I hope to curate the events to suggest
a vision of the divergence and incompletion of an ongoing project of 'community'
(whether social, cultural, or political) in this location. I will understand
the communities produced by the project as:
" a provisional group, produced as a function of specific circumstances
instigated by an artist...aware of the effects of these circumstances on the
very conditions of the interaction, peforming its own coming together and coming
apart as a necessarily incomplete modeling or working out of a collective social
process. Here, a coherent representation of the group's identity is always out
of grasp. And the very status of the "other" inevitably remains unsettled,
since contingencies of the negotiations inherent in collaborative art projects--between
individuals within the group, between the group and various "outside" forces--would
entail the continuous circulation of such a position."
Now, I can envision how to build this recognition into the working process
of project, but making it visible to the non-collaborator audience--that
will be more difficult.
AUTHOR: Sarah Kanouse
TITLE: Frustrations
STATUS: Publish
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
CONVERT BREAKS: __default__
ALLOW PINGS: 1
DATE: 03/14/2004 01:17:35 AM
-----
BODY:
This evening we hoisted the antenna in a cold drizzle and lashed it firmly
to a duct. That resonant activity provided at least some sense of accomplishment
in a day marked mainly by disappointment.
A few days ago, a friend asked me about the way I've been writing in the blog,
with corollary questions to how I write in general--this analytic, composed,
academic writing (he used the word 'antiseptic'). It hurt alot, partly because
I want his respect and partly because I realized how many ways of experiencing
and expressing I have perhaps deferred to develop the capacity to impress
and be taken seriously (in some circles). In the spirit of his question,
I will try to vary the types of writing I practice in this project diary,
as well as the sorts of information I relate.
A tightness in my chest has been with me throughout the day, a realization
of all that there is to do and a sense of helplessness in my dependence on
so many others to make this all work. That we blew out our amp, that fewer
than half the people who agreed to organize events came to the meeting--those
both didn't help the sense of frustration and panic at everything to do.
I had been hoping, perhaps even convinced myself somehow, that this project
would be different, would not require hours of solitary labor in buildings
given sound only by wind and ticking clocks, would not involve frenzy and
that peculiar sense of being outside of myself when I am busy, of watching
my body do work like a wind-up toy, almost without thought. But it may yet
come to that.
Working with tech boys, I am aware of my own ignorance, of my own politeness,
of my own femininity (though I tend not to think of myself as ignorant, polite,
or feminine usually). Though I've known these folks for years, they bring
their own space with them when we work together. I am not at present a member
of that space. Without changing my humor, learning intricacies of electronics
or programming, or assuming the mantal of ease (with technology, with each
other) that these men share, I never will be part of the space they create
together. Ironic, less that I am the supposed 'author' of the project and
more because the project is about space, claiming space, making space.
AUTHOR: Sarah Kanouse
TITLE: Back from Break
STATUS: Publish
ALLOW COMMENTS: 1
CONVERT BREAKS: __default__
ALLOW PINGS: 1
DATE: 03/29/2004 11:16:51 AM
-----
BODY:
This spring has been strangely lengthened for me due to travel. Returning here,
to central Illinois, I found the coming-back-to-life part of spring occured
all of a sudden and in my absence. We have a few weeks of snowdrops and crocuses,
mixed with light snow, then all of a sudden a flash of yellow--daffodils and
forsythia. And that's where we are now, just a few weeks before the tulips,
just a few weeks before this project goes from words and furtive work to actions
and publicity.
I've been absent from Illinois for most of the last two weeks. First, to Texas
on sad family business. There, the weather was balmy and the ornamental pears
swayed with their fishy-smelling, inbred blossoms. Then to Gainesville, Florida,
where tall, tall trees arched over every street and lilacs, azaleas and flowers
I don't know weighed down green branches. And now, the mobility that affords
hopping through continents and climates allows me to experience a third distinct
spring in as many weeks.
I'm eager to get back to work on the project. It's been difficult to work from
afar, which drives home how rooted this project is in the community I've
inhabited for the last six years. The sudden death of my nephew, which sent
me to Texas for a week, also made the importance of abstract concepts like
public space recede from my heart and mind for awhile. I'd like to believe
there is a way to balance a sense of immediacy, intimacy, emotion, and care
of interpersonal and familial relationships with valuing an awareness of
the abstract, structural, conceptual undepinnings of society and culture.
I feel so excited and in love with ideas and work that the connection seems
obvious to me, but I have trouble communicating that to others. Hence the
apparent 'sterility' of the writing in this blog.
|