curriculum questions re-posted from workbook pages to discussion topic (at Rob's suggestion)

Warmest greetings from Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn,

I’m in no position to propose an agenda item, as I won’t be attending the May 4 meeting. On the other hand I do have some very initial reflections on Nonsite as 'medium' that could, from afar, feed into the growing Nonsite glossary. Having recently addressed the ‘homelessness of poetry’ in SF, my concern is of course conversion of nonsite to sites. (Perhaps a translation issue, after all—and as such, a complimentarity, not contrariety.)

My problem: I can’t help but read the Nonsite framework as direct architectural specification!

To be sharp enough to see the illegibility or erosion or degree of disaster or invisibility of a site, wouldn’t we need to be seeing its re-design? Short of that, aren’t we but varmints?

Purposive, proposive, propulsive, presumptive, preposterous prosperity.

(For example: not only criticizing the 'nonnegotioable american lifestyle' by overturning and stacking single-family homes in an artpark (think Acconci), but constructing a site free of one’s own rebuke.)

In the difference between nonsite (as abstraction, as freedom of movement, as freedom from location, as metaphor, as corrective) and site lies a re-specification.

Or are poets necessarily purely interrelational and immaterial? Is it a sort of superstition—a place designed for poets would be, by definition, unusable, undesirable, dysfunctional? Is it important to not identify with any space? Or to identify with the least designed, most nondescript of spaces—boxes, cafes, bars, backs of bookstore, classrooms, conference halls? Is autonomy-as-identity a type of trap? Do we cling to the seclusion we claim to eschew? Is the aesthetic of poverty and placelessness part and parcel of that which restricts our social relevance? What’s the relationship between our limited role in society and the absence of spaces designed specifically for that which we wish we were doing? Is the practice of poetry a kind of protectionism?

A nonsite forms in response to the hyposatisfaction of an existing ‘site’ (synecdochically ‘society’).

Is it a sort of Beuysian social sculpture (perhaps, more precisely, a social prosody)? Is the Nonsite medium a social activism within architectural/urban supports? Is it the intermutability of behavior and the built environment? If so, what exactly do we want to change? What’s the object of direct effect? Wouldn’t that be ‘us’ (the prime object of direct effect is that which directly effects)? What’s an us? Psychophenotypic semi-solidity?

Effecting things directly (stated Nonsite priority) may be a matter of poets not turning into objects or performers in landscapes--or interlopers in cityscapes. (Like the dangerously defunct notion that ‘all the world is a stage’, or the just as dangerously current notion of the sufficiency of occasional poetry-reading limelight.)

Poetry in space or the space of poetry? One thing for sure--space is not a container.

If the proactive individual takes a step out into the collective medium (say, poetry...say a poet’s professional forays into spaces designed for other purposes) only to be pacified by the medium’s seemingly inherent hyposatifactions...would not one’s sense of isolation and self-referentiality only intensify?

What’s the scale of a Nonsite? A particular public place? A city? Society? I’m still wondering what the medium is. Is it measurable by size or, say, generosity of influence on the part of the poet?

As I see it, it’s not even a daring leap to move from prosody to the plasticity of the built environment—but a mere inflection.

At this point in the history of the action-body in American art (perhaps beginning with the reading of Common Sense in the trenches...or at the very latest, the action painting of the 1940’s and 50’s) what is a credible, locatable, material, artistic medium?

To the Nonsite primer I’d add: duo-plasticities of built environment and phenotype made mutable by way of prosody as action. Thus this medium links social, biological and built processes. Phenotype is the expression of our features as a result of genotype’s interaction with the environment. Phenotypic plasticity is the ability of cells to change their behavior in response to internal or environmental cues. This is not a farfetched artform—it has been rigorously shown that phenotypic effects effect the genome. Heavy metals, pesticides, nutrients, diesel exhaust, behavior, licking, nursing, mothering, fathering are each capable of causing genetic change.

Of course, to the above list of genetic movers I’m adding 'prosody'. Prosody is the use of language that acts directly upon Natural Selection and vice versa.

Artists, as materialists, as bodies, are given new credence because we now newly know that through the working of surfaces and spaces and effects and features we work human being through and through. ‘Make it new’ is certainly a dubious ecology--now that our very makeup has been frayed and made fragile by the ravages and hype of radical novel material modification. Make it fair, make it entire, make it subtle—are perhaps more sustaining, directly effective and less self-referential ecological dictums—closer to the grace of using without use.

So, I’ve gotten somewhat carried away. Maybe these terms—the dimensioning of Nonsite action as possible phenotypic foray by the architecturally enabled, may be shared concerns.

Semi-solidly yours,

Robert Kocik