Curricula

Which Is To Say

by Tyrone Williams
(reproduced by permission of the author) Read more

The legacy of the Situationists, with their emphasis on urban exploration, critical aesthetics, and collaborative "play," has influenced many local art practices, especially those focused on the practices of the derive ("drift") and psychogeography, two practices aimed at pushing citizens out of our everyday understandings of urban life. Merging surrealist art practices with Marxist sociology and urban critique, the Situationists and their followers aimed to break down the boundaries between art and life, as well as promoting a more radical appreciation of the matrices of power fundamental to the modern urban landscape. Today's post-industrial American city, sanitized by security and surveillance in the post-Guiliani, post-9/11 era, has become increasingly designed for the tourist's gaze, the weekender's wallet, the shopper's safe haven. If San Francisco has yet to become a complete mall, or reduced to a single codified "49-mile scenic tour," it is in part thanks to the long tradition of urban activists and artists who have continued to stage interventions in the public sphere, from ecstatically carnivalesque political protests to fly-by-night events such as parking-lot cinema, billboard reclamations, or street theater. Read more

On Saturday, July 28, Thom Donovan presented a talk entitled “Presencing the Disaster.” In attendance were: Bruce Boone, Beverly Dahlen, Taylor Brady, Tanya Hollis, Brandon Brown, Lee Azus, Miranda Mellis, Brian Whitener, Stephen Vincent, Jocelyn Saidenberg and Rob Halpern.

The talk’s point of departure was a question: how do artists, writers and activists “presence” otherwise inaccessible social and cultural disasters while remaining sensitive to the possibility that the disaster may have rendered traditional forms of representation impossible. Thom addressed a series of difficult concepts developed by Lebanese writer and artist Jalal Toufic in Toufic’s essay “Forthcoming” from the book *Forthcoming* (Atelos 2000) [see Curriculum Resources for link to article]. In particular, Thom focused on Toufic’s idea of the “surpassing disaster,” which refers to a catastrophic socio-political event of such magnitude that it creates a rupture and destabilizes, at the deepest level, a culture’s relationship to its history and even its understanding of time. Under conditions of the surpassing disaster, victims of social divisions, ethnic cleansing or imperial militarism are as if under quarantine, severed from their traditions or land, and subjected to a situation where to continue living is “to die before dying.” For Toufic, this constitutes a state of “undeath” and describes those geopolitical subjects whose personal identity and recognition have been repealed, as it were, as a result of a radical enclosure whereby normative forms of self-representation and transcultural communication are no longer available. Read more

The following is a transcript of Rob Halpern’s introduction to Taylor Brady’s and Thom Donovan’s Nonsite/Camerawork reading on 7/25/07:

I want to introduce Taylor’s and Thom’s work by way of a little thought experiment. In the spirit of the Nonsite Collective’s commitment to turning the space between related projects into a kind of learning commons, I thought I’d talk about the commitments Taylor’s and Thom’s writing share, and I want to do this by way of the concept of the “nonsite” itself, insofar as this rubric has the potential to bring two projects into relation whose surface effects don’t resemble one another.

I should say, first, that while it’s difficult to dissociate the concept of the nonsite from the work of Robert Smithson, the Nonsite Collective isn’t interested in rehashing Smithson’s ideas. As Thom mentioned to me yesterday, the limit of Smithson’s notion of the “non-site” was made pretty clear recently by Tonya Foster. Responding to Smithson's fascination with Central Park, Foster remarked that his work on Central Park would have looked a lot different had he done a little bit of research regarding the impact of the park's construction on the African American community. Instead, that impact, and the various displacements that occurred around it, underwent a secondary erasure in Smithson's essay on “The Dialectical Landscape,” thus becoming a real, unacknowledged “nonsite.” And this touches on the way the collective wants to orient its attention, while testing the potential of such concepts for different kinds of critical and practical use. Read more

Materials for Thom Donovan's talk "Presencing the Disaster" include:

Jalal Toufic's "Forthcoming," in Forthcoming (Atelos, 2000). A pdf of this text is available at:

http://www.unitednationsplaza.org/readingroom/

Rebecca Solnit's "The Price of Gold, the value of Water,"in Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics (UC Press, 2007).

This continues our report on Thom Donovan's Nonsite talk on July 28, 2007 ( see “Report: A Nonsite Talk w/ Thom Donovan").

Following Thom's talk (July 28 2007), the group pursued the follow threads, among others:

— Picking up on Toufic’s distinction between “counterfeit” and “resurrection,” we spoke about the role of the artist, as well as that of the community, in distinguishing between the two.

For Toufic, “counterfeit” is conditioned by a false sense of identity between the past and the future (mediated by a present that merely appears to be continuous with both). By contrast, “resurrection” affirms historical discontinuities and ruptures in cultural identity. At the same time, “resurrection” might be said to potentialize more radical subjectivities and alternate temporalities having nothing to do with the hardened identity formations bound up with notions of cultural permanence ( so often an effect of violence).

Again, following Toufic’s line of thinking, we asked about the role of the artist and the community in creating conditions of possibility for “resurrection:” moving away from the individual “I”—whose “contract” to appear self-identical over time is a guilt-ridden promise attached to vengeance—and toward more depersonalized and community-based forms of personhood (Toufic’s use of Nietzsche’s “Every name in history is ‘I’) Read more

Imagine a primer, grammar or glossary that documents this evolving vocabulary, written collectively and kept in progress over time.

It seems as though there are certain key terms that are apt to arise again and again in our collective discussions.

What these terms probably all have in common is that they are
contested.

A wiki seems like a good site for the dialectical refinement of the definition of certain words that we are probably going to be saying a lot together. Read more

worth checking out in Oakland:

Amanda Hughen & Mike Meyers @ Johansson Projects New gallery, interesting work.

City:Surface @ Oakland Art Gallery (esp. Patrick Day's "Sprawl Jetty")

"Words Can't Describe it" @ Creative Growth - incredible text-based work by local & Japanese artists. really pushes writing & gesture into interesting & uncanny places.

also check out the free mp3s from Leonard Schwartz's radio show "Cross-cultural Poetics" at PENNsound, including two interviews w/ Michael Hardt.

Table of Contents

Hi everyone,

Here is the start of a much more extensive work I would like to write about the work of Nonsite Collective in relation to problems in poetics, art, and cultural intervention...

Hope all are well!

Thom

Discussing George Oppen with my friend Kyle Schlesinger recently, and contrasting his work with the collaboration of Taylor Brady and Rob Halpern, *Snow Sensitive Skin*, Kyle reminded me that the situation distinguishing contemporary poets from Oppen is not just a matter of generation and historical embeddedness, but of degree. When I proposed that the poetry of Taylor and Rob was a new kind of lyrical reportage, Kyle imagined the daily routines of the poets searching beyond mainstream newspaper dailies for indymedia sources, bringing to bear on these sources minds shaped by radical habits of thought, attention and action.

Between ourselves and Oppen I do not think we can say anymore that “All this is reportage” since when I read many of the writers of my generation I am reminded just to what extent an unprecedented problem of coterminous information explosion, implosion, saturation and occultation delimits what we can do as writers at the hands of a certain technology (the fact that we use word processors and internet search engines and multimedia software, rather than typewriters and printed newspapers as our parent and grandparent generations did/do). I would even argue that the situation of poets today, while many of us take up the mantle of Oppen’s lyrical valuables in relation to his ideological preoccupations, resembles as much if not moreso those of writers in the 30s such as Bertolt Brecht, Lola Ridge, Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Reznikoff, and the Louis Zukofsky of “A – 8” whose works embody problems of reportage as both the “getting down” of facts, as well as the critical reflection of those facts through formal discovery, filtration, and negativity. Read more

I was going to add this to the agenda, but I wasn't sure about how that worked since I cannot attend the Sunday meeting. I thought it could live here for now and I will re-post it again later when there is a meeting I can go to.

In June, the Bay Area will be treated to year 27 of Superfest, the longest-running disability film festival in the world. This year, films
from 60 international entries were narrowed down to a select few.

Last weekend, I attended the Dance Under Construction conference hosted by UCB’s Theater, Dance and Disability Studies Departments. Academics and artists from all over the country came to discuss how integrated dance and new explorations with differently abled bodies are reshaping the core aesthetics of performance arts and creating a fresh movement vocabulary. The Bay Area is at the heart of this, with AXIS Dance Company residing in Oakland and Dandelion Dance Theater in San Francisco.

Each year, since 1986, the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired in conjunction with the San Francisco Arts Commission holds a juried
exhibition of visual art made by blind or low vision artists. Gestural, kinesthetic and tactile process unfolds through sculpture, paintings and even photography.

Meanwhile, the Bay Area, home to the Disability Rights and Independent Living Movement in the 1970’s, today remains one of the most accessible
cities for the disabled in terms of transit, policy and programming. The Bancroft maintains an impressive written and oral archive of the movement while UCB and SF State offer departments that figure prominently in the burgeoning academic discipline that is disability studies.

So, I suppose my question is—how does all this energy and innovation translate into the poetry community? In conventional literature,
disability is shackled to outmoded tropes (the saccharine triumph stories and the throwbacks to telethon pity). It goes without saying that Read more

Hi everyone,

Here is a section from a paper I wrote for the Oppen conference at SUNY Bflo the week before last, in relation to the work of Nonsite Collective and the poet George Oppen. Tho the section is already posted to the web I thot I'd post it here to share and for curricula...

Thom

---

Discussing George Oppen with my friend Kyle Schlesinger recently, and contrasting his work with the collaboration of Taylor Brady and Rob Halpern, *Snow Sensitive Skin*, Kyle reminded me that the situation distinguishing contemporary poets from Oppen is not just a matter of generation and historical embeddedness, but of degree. When I proposed that the poetry of Taylor and Rob was a new kind of lyrical reportage, Kyle imagined the daily routines of the poets searching beyond mainstream newspaper dailies for indymedia sources, bringing to bear on these sources minds shaped by radical habits of thought, attention and action. Read more

Proposal for Renovating The Feldenkrais Center in Manhattan

by Robert Kocik

GENERAL ISSUES AND IMPRESSIONS

DIMENSIONS

The dimensions of the TFC space are problematic—specifically the ceiling height. Upon entering the TFC room, one’s sense of space tends to waft up to the ceiling and get caught up in all the pipes, sprinklers, light fixtures, conduits and beams. Reinforcing this accent on ascent: all the existing lighting is upward, ceiling-lit. Currently there are too few features (furnishings) keeping one’s feet on the floor. The floor itself, unlike the original hardwood flooring in the hallway, is unattractive. These same dimensions are also responsible for the poor acoustic properties of the room resulting in a limited intelligibility of the voice. A listener in the space is receiving the same sound signal at slightly different times (first as direct sound, then as reflected sound and flutter echoes) which has the effect of blurring the intelligibility of the original signal. Adding furnishings will serve to dampen the reverberative effect. The proposed curtain-dividers are in fact the overall plan for absorbing the wayward waveforms. If for any reason the curtains can’t be installed, attaching short (2’ height) absorptive panels from the ceiling beams in between the sprinkler pipes, would be an effective second choice. Such a system would also serve to lower the ceiling and deflect attention from the mechanical systems.

LIGHTING

Without windows and hemmed in by bordering spaces, the TFC space effects a year-round hint of Seasonal Affective Disorder. Also, the existing standard cool white fluorescent lighting (as studies show) tends to adversely affect children with learning and behavioral problems. Read more

Just drawing attention to a document I've added to Curricula: Robert Kocik's "Proposal for Renovating the Feldenkrais Center in Manhattan." http://nonsitecollective.org/node/428

I link to it, as well, in my comment responding to the discussion on Disability and Poetics inaugurated by Amber DiPietra.

Amy Trachtenberg and Elliot Anderson will discuss practices of translation with respect to landscapes and their inherent social ecologies.

Thursday night, at SF Camerawork. See events.

Elliot Anderson: GreenhouseElliot Anderson // Average Landscape: "Average Greenwood Lake"Found in Translation: Photo by Amy Trachtenberg

Bay Area Nonsite General Meeting:

Monday, July 21 at 7 pm
Get Lost Travel Books
1825 Market Street
San Francisco (betwn Valencia and Guerrero)

Join us to discuss ongoing and future Nonsite projects, including Thom Donovan’s proposal for a Nonsite symposium in New York. (See Thom's recent blog post for the text of that proposal.)

A workbook page will also be posted where you can add items to the meeting’s agenda.

SF Bay Area:

Come out for a potluck dinner followed by a talk and discussion facilitated by Thom Donovan.

Wednesday, July 23
Dinner at 6:30
Talk at 7:30
Rob and Lee’s home in SF Mission district
email for address and directions:
rob[dot]halpern AT gmail[dot]com

Thom’s talk will pertain to the recent discussion on the website around disability and poetics, while considering work by Brenda Iijima and Robert Kocik.

“How might an art of ‘disability’ potentialize the body under threat of harm, erasure and (mis)representation? I believe this question addresses relations between poetics, performance, movement study, architecture/design. How might the poem itself be a site for recomposing (or ‘remembering’) the body thru ‘disability’ — a term which implies for me not the opposite of capability or ability, but its inverse counterpart? How also can language sites, like poems, offer tools for disability, just as disablement reveals sites of potential conceived as virtual power, or powers yet-to-be. And how, through, disablement, may we gain keener insights into what a ‘body can do’ as a means of ‘overcoming fitness’ (Kocik)?”

— Thom Donovan

As a way of introducing tomorrow nite's talk/discussion, "Allegories of Disablement" [see events], as well as being in the general interest of the emerging curriculum around disability and poetics, I'm posting this excerpt from a recent exchange between Robert Kocik and Thom Donovan (the whole text of which will be posted here soon):

<<Every kind of work I do deals in disability. To make matters worse (even richer) I went to the collective’s site and re-traced the history of the disability discourse—combining Amber DiPietra’s “How can we have a dialogue around disability and poetics, not just at the political or social level, but at a generative level--one that begets new experiments in writing? To live with or study disability is to be constantly questioning form and constantly working toward formal innovation—whether that is through accessible architecture or the far reaches of cyber humanity. How can this be translated to syntax and the raw stuff of poetry?” with Eleni’s: “disability founds aesthetics— for all persons, not just those with disabilities. If we became conscious of that, perhaps we might start to see how all our conditions determine our forms...”, and the demand becomes a pan-demand—wanting a way of working in which there’s no discrepancy between activism and formal poetry innovation (which is an age-old imperative) by means of embracing disability (which is almost entirely unheard of).>>

--Robert Kocik

See also the discussion thread beginning with a post by Amber DiPietra:

http://www.nonsitecollective.org/node/397

I prepared the following notes as part of my introduction to Thom Donovan’s talk, “Allegories of Disablement,” on July 23, 2008, which took place over a potluck dinner last nite, with 18 people in attendance. I’m posting these notes here for comment and elaboration as they might contribute to a description for a new Nonsite working group / curriculum.

As I mentioned last nite, it’s been exciting to see this discussion around “poetics and disability” emerge, not only because of the obvious value of its content, but also because it illustrates how the provisional and still fledgling framework of the collective really can enable a self-organized curriculum to take shape organically. Following the various threads of the discussion has been like watching an amphibious discourse emerge from the marsh, as it imagines its own terms, problems and questions without recourse to sanctioned coordinates of knowledge to measure the success of its becoming.

Amber DiPietra began the discussion by pitching an inquiry in a post dated 5/04/08, responding to a call for agenda items for the Nonsite meeting that month, and this was quickly followed by posts by Eleni Stecoupolos, Patrick Durgin and Robert Kocik (excerpts of which appear below). This immediately suggested the sort of traction necessary to sustain some generative work around Poetics and Disablement. Thom’s talk last nite no doubt extended this, pointing toward areas for further research, collaboration and event planning. (The text of Thom’s talk will be forthcoming here).

I’m wondering if the following notes can contribute to the process of generating a description for such a curriculum, which will require some collaborative writing. Please respond with ideas/suggestions as to how we might amend this proposal, as well as any thoughts about how such a project might take shape: reading groups, events, discussions.

Poetics of Disablement: Notes//July 23, 2008 Read more

Here is a written version of my talk from last Wednesday. Thanks to Rob and Lee for hosting, and to all in attendance. It is great to see responses from Amber and Chris (at Nonsite), and John Sakkis at his blog. If anyone has any pics from the event (Lee? John?) and could put them up here it wld be great to have some visual documents. I will be putting the talk and ensuing conversation up in an audio form just as soon as I'm back in New York with the proper tech support....

Thom

Allegories of Disablement: some consequences of form towards potential bodies

Wandering the artist’s monographs at a University of Maryland library in the spring of 2006, I came across the following:

Possibly, in earlier pieces, I used the body as a proof that "I" was there—the way a person might talk to himself in the dark. So, with that assumption—that the body was analogous to a word-system as a placement device—there was an attempt made to "parse" the body: it could be the subject of an action, or it could be the receiver, the object (it should be noted that most of the earlier pieces were kinds of reflexive sentences: "I" acted on "me."

This initial fragment, from a monograph of Vito Acconci’s work, among other materials I’ve gathered in the past few years, has led me to a prospectus of sorts, if not an inchoate essay on what may be called “disability” in relation to practices in poetics, architecture, design, “live art,” and movement research.

What interests me about the Acconci quotation, is how it may encapsulate a larger discourse occurring in the late 60s and early 70s. This discourse, I believe, concerns the constitution of subjects as they are extended in space by movement, language and image; it also concerns what I will call, after a remark by Martha Rosler conveyed to me by a student of hers in conversation, the performance of the body mediated by the imminent threat of harm. Read more

Elliot Anderson: Greenhouse

It was a rich follow-up discussion with Elliot Anderson and Amy Trachtenberg this past Sunday, which included a little "field-trip" down to the Greenhouse--a kind of counter-atrium?--set up for the occasion beneath a redwood. Some notes should be forthcoming.