art

Tomorrow the Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrč and collaborators officially launch a new exhibition, “The Commons,” in The Hague.  The artwork consists of the remnants of an old dune forest and a modernist office tower built in 1969 that is nearby.  You might wonder, This is the commons?!

As the flyer for the exhibit notes, the exhibition “takes the two sites – one of part of nature, the other a cultural artifact – and mirrors them by constructing a platform in the woods that is the same size as the footprint of the tower.  This physical platform is intended as a conceptual platform for the exchange of knowledge by participants and visitors to the exhibition.  From April to August [2013] workshops lectures, fairs and an open public court on topics related to the common interest and the local environment such as sustainability, peace and justice will be programmed.  Together with visitors and locals alike The Commons [will] experiment and work out ideas for the functioning of a ‘commons’ in current times.” 

I haven’t visited the site, but it strikes me a bold, provocative work.  By dramatizing the commons in a very physical way, and connecting it to the past while pointing to a future that we must build ourselves, the exhibit helps us to engage with the idea of the commons as a living social organism.  What’s especially exciting about this project is that it may lead to an actual conversion of an empty office tower into a local commons! 

Vancouver poet Stephen Collis offers us a wonderful meditation on commons as both anti-capitalist and beyond politics in a wonderful essay, “On Blackberries and the Poetic Commons.”  Noting that the culture of private property is pervasive and suffocating in modern life, Collis sets out to identify what makes an already existing commons a commons.  

He concludes that it is somewhat a fiction that we make up.  If the idea of “the market” is something that we must dream up and sustain together -- a “social imaginary” that organizes our physical and social realities – then surely we need to dream up the commons in the same way, as “imaginary alternatives.”  That is the only way to summon the commons into reality.

To this task, Collis recommends the lowly blackberry: 

"Blackberry brambles are the marginalia of the urban and suburban city/text.  Occupying unused or underused spaces, they hold forth common abundance where private property is ambiguous or in disuse, decline or abeyance.  We troll through our neighborhoods and even into the center of the city.  Along easements and the sides of highways, at the ends of cul-de-sacs and in vacant lots, along open ditches and decrepit fencing, in the deteriorating zones of post-industrial wastes, the ramble entangles and marks the very edges and gaps in the regime of private property.  They mark lulls and failures in capital, the moments of decay and depreciation after industrial production and before gentrification.  In taking to our fences, the brambles even appears to be attempting to stand between properties, on their margins, on that thin line that is neither mine nor thine.

"….We assume blackberries to be a common resource – no one in his or her right mind would pay for blackberries, though I have seen them, and scoffed, in a supermarket.  Like the historical English commons, the ‘patriomony of the poor’ (Neeson, 55), the blackberry bramble is governed by certain customary rules of use.  Take only what you need and leave enough for others.  Those in a neighborhood have first dibs on the neighborhood patch (you don’t drive in from the outside) – unless the patch is in parkland or other non-residential spaces.  The berries high up or deep in a patch are for the birds and the soil and next year’s fruit – you don’t damage the brambles to get at the difficult to reach berries.

The history of the Diggers in 1649 is the improbable basis for a dramatic production by the Bread and Puppets Theater, an experimental troupe based in Vermont that uses masks and puppets to entertain and educate people.  The troupe bills itself as providing “cheap art and political theater,” adding that it is “one of the oldest, nonprofit, self-supporting theatrical companies in the country.”

As reported by Greg Cook of WBUR, the Boston public radio station, the Bread and Puppets Theater recently produced a show called “The Possibilitarians,” a counterpoint to the reactionary Parliamentarians of the time.  The show was described as an “epic and raucous pageant” about the 17th Century English radicals called the Diggers, who were seeking to build an alternative order to the proto-capitalism of its time, protesting in particular the private ownership of land. 

The Diggers have been wonderfully chronicled by historians such as Christopher Hill (The World Turned Upside Down and Left-Wing Democracy In the English Civil War).  Of note is a recently published biography, Gerard Winstanley: The Diggers Life and Legacy (Pluto Press).

It’s great to see such history resurrected through an innovative kind of street theater.  The Bread and Puppets Theater was founded in 1963 by German immigrant Peter Schumann.  The troupe quickly became known for its massive papier-mâché puppets and for giving its audiences fresh baked break at the end of performances.  In the '60s and '70s the theater often mounted performances/protests against the Vietnam War and nuclear arms race, among other issues.  As WBUR put it, the Bread and Puppets Theater “vividly merged radical ‘60s theater with the alchemy and magic of traditional ritual, public pageantry and folk art.”

As neoliberal policies put the squeeze on cities, what role can the commons play?  Some commoners in Greece decided to explore this issue by mapping the commons of Athens – and then this year, Istanbul.  The results are an inspiration and prototype for commoners in cities around the world.  The online maps and videos make visible the subjective, experiential commons that sustain people’s daily lives, giving a new twist to the official maps of a city.   

The “Mapping the Commons” project got its start when the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens commissioned the Spanish collective Hackitectura to convene an interdisciplinary group of artists, sociologists, scientists and researchers from universities in Athens.  Hackitectura is a group of architects and programmers that theorizes, and develops projects, that explore how space, electronic flows and social networks converge.  

The Athens project describes itself as “an open collaborative cartography of the contemporary metropolis based on the importance of the commons in times in of disaster capitalism.”  The project explicitly wanted to imagine a new Athens by seeing it through the lens of the commons.  As the organizers put it:  

We propose the hypothesis that a new [view of the] city will come out of the process, one where the many and multiple, often struggling against the state and capital, are continuously, and exuberantly, supporting and producing the commonwealth of its social life.

The workshop will develop collaborative mapping strategies, using free software participatory wiki-mapping tools.

Organizers noted, “Due to our tradition of the private and the public, of property and individualism, the commons are still hard to see for our late 20th century eyes. We propose, therefore, a search for the commons; a search that will take the form of a mapping process. We understand mapping, of course, as proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, and as artists and social activists have been using it during the last decade, as a performance that can become a reflection, a work of art, a social action.”

I’ve always felt that artists will play a leading role in helping us understand the deeper subjective and identity dimensions of commoning.  In Istanbul this past weekend, I encountered a number of artists who confirmed this fact for me.  I was at the “Paratactic Commons” conference, hosted by Istanbul Technical University and Winchester School of Art.  The event brought together a number of artistic interpretations of the commons as well as activist-oriented initiatives on the commons in Turkey. 

I was quite taken by several performance and video works by the Dutch artists Karen Lancel and Hermen Maat.  (I’ll talk about other projects featured at the conference in my next post.)  One of their most provocative works is called Tele_Trust, a performance project that explores how we come to trust each other online.  It explores how our bodies – especially our eyes and sense of touch – are critical to developing trust.  So what does this fact mean as more of our personal and social lives migrate to online platforms?  How do we develop trust there? 

Speaking at the conference, Hermen Maat described how he and his partner wanted to explore the subjective experiences of trust and privacy in a world of ubiquitous personal communications.  We face a paradox in our world of ubiquitous telecommunications:  “While in our changing social eco-system we increasingly demand transparency, we cover our bodies with personal communication technology.”  Our mobile phones function as a kind of “personal armor,” said Maat, covering our bodies and rendering us inaccessible to the public.  And yet we still need to cultivate trust, if only to consummate business deals. 

If our electronic devices function as “digital data veils,” Maat reasoned, why not explore that idea by connecting it to its nearest analogue – the wearing of a burqa? 

Maat and Lancel developed an interactive wearable “DataVeil” to cover one’s entire body.  Gender-neutral and one-size-fits all, it is “inspired by eastern and western traditions, like a monks’ habit, a burqa, Darth Vader, and a 'trustworthy' chalk stripe business suit,” they explain.  “When wearing the DataVeil it functions as a second skin.  Flexible, invisible touch sensors woven into the smart fabric of the veil, transform your body into an intuitive, tangible interface. It is a a membrane for scanning an intimate, networking body experience.”

Two weeks ago, I had the privilege of touring an incredibly vital cultural commons in the heart of Providence, Rhode Island.  My host was Bert Crenca, the artistic director of AS220.  Nearly everyone knows AS220 as one of the most happening places in the city.  It offers everything:  rehearsal spaces, poetry slams, live music, dance performances, figure drawing, affordable work studios, a print shop, specialized art equipment, cheap apartments for struggling artists, and more. 

What may be less appreciated is that AS220 is a self-sustaining creative commons (lower case).  While it has all sorts of interactions with the market, government and philanthropy, it is really an unheralded model of a commons for producing and enjoying the arts.  It is financially self-sustaining, independently managed, and grassroots-responsive.  It is dedicated to art made by and for the people.

The “AS” in AS220 stands for “Artists’ Space”; 220 was the initial address of the distressed building it originally occupied in 1985.  AS220 quickly outgrew that space and in 1992, with help from the mayor’s office and tax breaks normally used by commercial developers, acquired a 21,000 square-foot building in a blighted, drug-ridden part of town.  In 2006 and 2008, AS220 bought two additional buildings nearby that have allowed the sprawling Providence arts community to grow even more.  Now in its 27th year, AS220 has a budget of $2.8 million, 50 employees and hosts dozens of art projects in the three downtown buildings that it owns.

Calling AS220 a “nonprofit organization” fails to capture its real achievement or inner logic.  AS220 has been able to create its own commons for the arts largely because of its ingenuity in acquiring three downtown buildings.  This has allowed it to generate its own revenue streams that help it protect its autonomy and take greater risks.  AS220 rents out street-level spaces to restaurants and shops that share its funky, creative ethic, which in turn has enabled AS220 to leverage that money to develop a more diversified funding base:  membership fees to use studio equipment; fees for art classes; contract work for printing and computer animation; and of course the sale of artworks.  AS220 also rents out cheap studio space and artists’ apartments, covering its costs while advancing the arts. 

Whatever you may say about the marketing firms that help large corporations sell us products, they generally tap into world-class artistic talent.  They also make it their business to track breaking cultural trends aggressively in order to capitalize on them.  How interesting, then, that a New York City design firm, Collins, has produced a gorgeous little book, The Triumph of the Commons:  55 Theses on the Future.  I find it immensely attractive and artful, if conspicuously incomplete.  I also find it fascinating that a respected NYC design firm would have a fairly sophisticated understanding of the commons (at least, digital commons).      

But given the firm’s blue-chip clientele, which includes such corporate giants as Johnson & Johnson, Motorola, Sprite, Dove and Microsoft, one must wonder:  Is this the beginning of the corporate cooptation of the commons?  Or merely a sign that the corporate world is starting to realize that it must respond to people’s palpable yearning for the commons?  Another question:  How much daylight exists between a marketing/design firm and its corporate clients, which tend to be more interested in monetizing and enclosing the commons than in defending it? 

Collins is clearly a firm that has a grip on the Zeitgeist.  It describes itself as “a multi-disciplinary design firm specializing in igniting mass collaboration.”  It adds, “The next generation of great brands will emphasize not mass communication but mass collaboration.  That means transforming your brand into a platform where communities discover, make and share new value in cooperation with your company.”  Very astute.

Collins sees this line of thinking as naturally leading to the commons.  The Triumph of the Commons, which it self-published late last year, is an “exquisite corpse,” a method of creating art pioneered by the Surrealists that relies upon the sequential, collective assembly of images or words.  As Wikipedia describes it, an exquisite corpse is made when “each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule (e.g. “The adjective noun adverb verb adjective noun”) or by being allowed to see the end of what the previous person contributed.”  Thus, one artist draws on one quadrant of a piece of paper, then folds it over – and another adds to the drawing without seeing what the first artist already drew.  A third artist follows, and so on.

One of the treats at the Vis Green Academy in Croatia last week was seeing an exhibit of photographs by Marina Kelava, of Bjelovar, Croatia, who works as a journalist and photojournalist for Croatian Internet magazine H-Alter.org, which focuses mainly on environmental issues.  The exhibit included a number of photos documenting various enclosures of the commons in Croatia as well as photos taken while covering large international events, from the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen and the World Social Forum to the beginning of Radovan Karadzic’s trial at the International Criminal Tribunal. 

Kelava graduated from the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Zagreb, with a degree in journalism.  A larger collection of her photos can be seen on Facebook at Marina Kelava Photography. 

I met Marina when she interviewed me for H-Alter.org.  Then I saw her photos on the wall and was impressed by their power in depicting the personal, social and emotional dimensions of commoning, the social practices of defending and celebrating a community's shared wealth.  The photos are simultaneously political and human, which is not always an easy thing to combine in rich, subtle ways.  Kelava's photos do.

View from the untouched hill of Srdj above Dubrovnik, Croatia, where a huge golf project is planned and the civil initiative "Srdj is Ours" is fighting against it.