(Very) brief notes on Dont Rhine talk

Great discussion w Dont on Monday - thanks to Rob for organizing & Lee for hosting. Many thoughts - on "the public record" (vs archive?), the shift from 'activism' to 'organizing' as horizon for militant arts practice, organizing as accumulating, the critique of relational aesthetics & conventional protest aesthetics ("audience as extra"), the questions around pedagogy & practice, & getting to work with/through U/R's "Theses"... etc...

But what I wanted to put out t/here for N/S is the question of audience & organization. It seems to me that a fundamental difference between a project like Ultra-Red & N/S is U/R's ongoing & direct interactions with social movements & political organizations, & how their artistic practice (& theorizations thereof) come directly out of such work. At the talk Dont gave in Emeryville earlier this year, he spoke also of how such interactions stage the question of "responsibility" (of the artist, of U/R) much more palpably when you are working directly with the communities & populations your work addresses/engages.

Anyways, this is certainly NOT meant to privilege some idea of activist-art whereby if you "work with" marginalized groups it makes for 'better' art/practice, nor to suggest that N/S is somehow working in some 'merely' aesthetic realm for being (speaking VERY generally) artists/archivists and not political organizers. But I do wonder how -- & maybe this is just a pressing concern for my own practice, & not for other N/Sers -- the politics of aesthetic practice 'work' when solidarity with certain fields/communities/classes remains largely outside of any ongoing interactions/work w said communities? What forms of listening are we participating in from behind the desk/screen/institutional divides? Which of our presumptions about theory & practice remain untested/unchallenged/unquestioned without such encounters? Are we producing more than 'works'?

DB