INTHECONVERSATION

The Independent School of Art by Jon Rubin

The Independent School of Art is a nomadic experimental art school. Without institutional affiliations, degrees, or public funding, the school exists solely through the labor and efforts of it's participants, and thus fosters a proactive approach to college-level arts education, a real-world model where students are challenged to determine and create their own artistic realities. The school's barter-based tuition system makes explicit and direct the social contract between students and teachers and honors their collective labor as a vital form of cultural production. By existing without a site and locating nomadically, the school prioritizes social over physical architecture, and challenges students and teachers alike to imagine how their practice might intersect and respond to a larger set of physical situations and cultural possibilities. Since the ISA is not driven by tuition payments, employee payrolls, facility maintenance, fundraising quotas, degree granting and accreditation requirements it can be fluid and experimental, changing each semester to reflect the ambitions, personalities, and abilities of those in its community.

The Love Everybody Movement by Heidi Dorow

Founded in 2001, the Love Everybody Movement creates one-time-only events that include performances, spectacle, stunts and feats that promote love, fun, and community for both participants and viewers. The Love Everybody Movement also makes puppets, costumes, objects, installations, videos, publications, merchandise, and accessories.

Beautiful Money (some notes on art as currency, art as experience) by Sal Randolph

“Giving it away, not giving it away, is there any difference. Giving it away, not giving it away.” Gertrude Stein [1]

“The meaning of money lies in the fact that it will be given away.” Georg Simmel [2]

“It is essential to the nature of money for the objects into which wealth or value is condensed to be practically useless. . . . This theorum is equally true for modern money (gold) and for archaic money (dogs teeth).” Norman O Brown [3]

“To be useless and unprofitable is one of the characteristics of the works of genius.” Arthur Schopenhauer [4]

“This useless thing we expect civilization to value is beauty.” Sigmund Freud [5]

:: Beautiful Money ::

I have on my desk, in a tiny handmade bowl, a piece of candy wrapped in silver. It was a gift: a birthday present from my friend Michael, a gift on the occasion of his birthday, not mine (on his birthday he likes to cook for his friends and give them small presents). The candy is a double gift, part of a piece by the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres who made, among other things, works in the form of spills of candy which anyone is invited to take and eat.

When someone buys one of these works what they receive is a piece of paper which gives them permission to exhibit the work and instructions on how to do so. Then they order the candy in bulk, install it in an exhibition space, and allow the public to take it away bit by bit. [6] One thing that's wonderful about this body of Gonzalez-Torres' work was the game he played with collectors: whoever owns one of these pieces owns the obligation to spend their money giving it away.

Undervattenskonsert by Alison Gerber

I invited eleven artists working with sound to make pieces for an underwater broadcast for bathers in the sea between Sweden and Denmark. For two days bathers at Västra Hamnen in Malmö were able to listen to works made especially for the event.

I wanted to create a situation for listening, one in which the act of listening would be necessarily new and arduous. Listening to anything through underwater speakers requires some adjustment. Most people have never listened to anything in such a manner; their experience of sound underwater is that of quiet, muffled sounds from above – the way it sounds when your mother calls to you while you’re under the bathwater. Sound broadcast through the water, however, sounds nothing like that; sound travels much faster through water than through air and while your eardrums don’t work underwater the bones in your head work more than adequately.

Extreme Reading by Simon Morris and Pavel Büchler

Simon Morris writes: Extreme Reading was made through conversation, on the telephone. The artist Pavel Büchler and I had a 59 minute conversation about Kenneth Goldsmith's book Soliloquy which was also constructed through conversation. Goldsmith recorded every word he spoke for an entire week (April 15 to 21 1996) - 183,685 words. Both Büchler and I recorded our conversation in Manchester and York respectively. I then transcribed both halves of the conversation. They were intended as bookends to Goldsmith's work 'Soliloquy' with one half of the dialogue at the front of the book and one half at the back, so that it was impossible for the reader to see both sides of the conversation at once. Like walking into a room with someone on the telephone, only one half of the conversation is ever audible but the listener can always imagine what the other person might be saying. As with Goldsmith's work in which the voice of the Other has been erased, by leaving a gap, a space left by the missing dialogue, it leaves a space for the reader to resonate within the text - the reader can locate themselves within the dialogue: extreme reading.

Public Alley 818, by Kanarinka

From December 2003 to February 2004, Kanarinka created and performed artworks in public alley 818 in Boston, MA. She selected artworks to do from a pool of instruction works contributed by users from around the world.

Over 80 instruction works were submitted by participants around the world and are on view in the Gallery of Instructions. Kanarinka realized 12 of these projects, documented their performance/installation and presents the documentation online in the Gallery of Enactments

From kanarinka: "I am interested in how one proceeds from language to action and how even the most tiny instructions, actions and enactments can bring about radically new things in the world."

Lost, a Correspondence, by Kathe Izzo

The following is a the email documentation of a LOST contract transaction with the Love Artist Kathe Izzo. LOST is an adjunct to The True Love Project, and, like TLP, is an ongoing series of private love performances (beginning in April 2002), in which the artist promises to love the world one person at a time, for one day, hour, afternoon or morning at a time.

From: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: project
Date: November 20, 2003 5:11:04 PM EST
To: [email protected]

hi,

I'm curious about your project
if you have more information, please send it.

sincerely

Carolyn

From: [email protected]
Subject: re: project
Date: November 20, 2003 7:18:04 PM EST
To: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Hi carolyn,,

My performance LOST operates pretty much wherever you want it to be, whenever you want it to be.

Lost is an off-shoot of my True Love Project. All of the True Love Projects are designed for an audience of one and based on the concept of direct energetic transmission from the artist (me) or love as art. In other words, we spend time together and, by that time together, we are both transformed. LOST is a more casual Love project, as intimate and/or as friendly as is required, a full gamut of possibilities. We pick a neighborhood or an event and we wander around, separately, talking on our cell phones, looking at things, taking photos or movies, picking up omens, talismans, gifts for each other, simultaneously paying attention to ourselves, each other and our surroundings. This can go on for anywhere between an hour to four hours. It's quite nice actually.

I like to wander around and be outside on my Lost appointments. Think of an event that might be exciting or a neighborhood or location that you like or want to explore.

Love, kathe

PS You can still ask me any questions you like.

Burning Questions by Abinadi Meza

Abinadi Meza's installation, "The Burning Question" (Katherine Nash Gallery, Minneapolis, Minnesota, May 11 - June 4, 2004) explored Intellectual Property, Copyright, and the impact of property on culture. Visitors were provided with computers, blank CD's, and over 24 hours of copyleft audio works contributed by composers, musicians, and sound artists from around the world. As visitors generated playlists to burn themselves CD's, they also generated an Internet radio broadcast streamed from the gallery. The gallery becomes a studio/radio station and users become DJ's. The following text is Meza's essay for the show's catalog (download catalog pdf).

BURNING QUESTIONS

You do not really leave a library; if you do what it wants you to do, then you are taking it with you. – Elie Wiesel

How is culture linked to property? Every day we face the growing problem of exclusive control over art, music, computer technology, agriculture, medicine, and numerous other creative works. For artists, this question is quickly complicated by the need to protect one’s own work from exploitation and the desire to reach or affect a wide audience. As cultural participants our daily activities and creative gestures prove to be socio-political acts with global significance. As Joseph Beuys said, we make Social Sculpture as our ideas shape the world in which we live.

It is clear that those who profit the most from private control over creativity are deeply threatened by recent changes in our technological abilities. If we are able to communicate with others over vast geographic distances, we might also share artifacts and information freely, thereby undermining the primary motivation for commercial creativity—profit. Sadly, these profits are often paid by those without a voice in the dominant system of ownership and access.

Practice Active Pause by Dana Bishop-Root

Yes, I have an idea.

Practice active pause,

welcome!

pra•ctice act•ive pause, verb.

Verb, the part of language
that expresses action,
existence, and practice.

A verb is alive!

Active pause is language.

Notes on Social Architectures as Art Forms by Sal Randolph

Social Art Forms

The idea of an art made from the social, from people participating in social interactions, descends from the Dadaists, revolutionaries, and utopians, infusing various strands of artmaking in the 50's and 60's including John Cage's Black Mountain events, Alan Kaprow's happenings, Fluxus, Gutai, the Situationist International, conceptual, body and performance art, and the work of Joseph Beuys, who crowned the swell by coining the term "social sculpture."

Joseph Beuys defined "social sculpture" as "how we mould and shape the world in which we live." It is in this context that he made his famous statement that "everyone is an artist." He envisioned an art that was literally revolutionary, in which every human being would be participating in "the total artwork of the future social order" which he imagined as a "free democratic socialism". He viewed the art objects he made as being "stimulants for the transformation of the idea of sculpture. . . .Or of art in general. They should provoke thoughts about what sculpture can be and how the concept of sculpting can be extended to the invisible materials used by everyone." Beuys felt that the promise of participatory art forms (dada, fluxus, happenings) could only be realized by a complete artistic and social revolution (his own), but he also frequently acknowledged that this idea of what social sculpture could be or could become was still largely unexplored and unrealized.