"DEFENDING YOURSELF FROM THE QUIETNESS OF AMERICAN BULLSHIT":
AN INQUIRY INTO COLLECTIVE AND COLLABORATIVE APPROACHES TO
SUBVERSIVE ARTISTIC MEDIA IN WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA AND BEYOND
An Ethnography
By Douglas Berman Young
Spring 2010
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ABSTRACT
This ethnography provides an inquiry into those efforts to create hybridized forms of art to provoke, and transform public consciousness. Subversive, collective and collaborative approaches to the performance and production of artistic media have created opportunities whereby formalized or institutionalized conceptions of domesticity, public and private space, and art and art making can be challenged.
By providing an alternative view of the world through images, sounds, and shared spaces, groups such as the Elsewhere Artist's Collaborative in Greensboro, North
Carolina, and others of specific mention in this ethnography, help the viewer, participant or otherwise engaged individual visualize an alternative to a constructed world of consumer culture, simulated realties, and adolescent power dynamics. The concatenation of art and social change present in collective and collaborative approaches to artistic media in the context of shared living spaces has every intention to resist and replace the refuse of conventionality and the perversion of power. Alternative forms of education, paired with certain practices and acts of resistance, engender reclamation, and collective interaction as the means by which absorption within a constructed continuum is avoided.
A TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART ONE | TO FORT THUNDER AND BEYOND – AN INTRODUCTION
Research Statement and Questions
An Introduction to Findings
Overview of Paper and Each Section
PART TWO | RECLAMATION, ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION, AND THE
COLLECTIVE ENTERPRISE – A THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
Reclamation
Alternative Education
Collective Interaction
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6
8
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15
19
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PART THREE | CONNECTING PEOPLE AND THINGS – A DESCRIPTION OF RESEARCH
METHODS AND SETTINGS 28
Understanding Collective and Collaborative Approaches
To Artistic Media
Welcome to the Dollhouse – Entry to Setting
Applied Methodology
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31
33
Pathogeography: An Opportunity for Reflexivity 36
PART FOUR | THE COBRA HOUSE – A STORY OF RECLAMATION AND THE ALTERED
LANDSCAPE IN HISTORIC MONTFORD 38
PART FIVE | THE KINSHIP STRUCTURE OF FERNS – DEWAYNE SLIGHTWEIGHT’S
ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION AND DISCOURSE OF THE MAINSTREAM IN COMIC
ART 44
PART SIX | COLLECTIVE INTERACTION WITHIN THE “LIVING ART MUSEUM” –
COMMUNITY, DISPERSAL, AND RECIPROCITY WITHIN THE ELSEWHERE
COLLABORATIVE IN GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA 48
PART SEVEN | CONSIDERATION, INCORPORATION, GENEROSITY, AND
MANIFESTATION – A CONCLUSION
Bibliography
Images
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56
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PART ONE | TO FORT THUNDER AND BEYOND - AN INTRODUCTION:
Before being appropriated by fans of comics, music, performance and printmaking, Fort Thunder was the name of a place. It was a living and performance space located in the Olneyville neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island that had existed from 1995, until 2001; when the residents were evicted and the building torn down to create a shopping center for low-income residents in the surrounding area.
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As a former resident of Providence, Rhode Island, I was privy to the collective live/work space of Fort Thunder, which for me, has been a key player in several arts scenes, including those of specific interest and mention in this ethnography.
Fort Thunder began in 1995, when Rhode Island School of Design students
Matt Brinkman and Brian Chippendale sought an industrial location where Brinkman could book live music shows. There was the tenuous task of creating it as a living space for those involved. Consideration of it as a living space was not originally in question; however, The Fort would also come to house the studios for any other arts the residents wished to pursue. The original residents were Brinkman, Chippendale,
Rob Coggeshal and Freddy Jones.
The name "Fort Thunder" was selected by the quartet upon moving in, as the space needed a name in order to advertise its music shows. The name is related to the fact that the space, on the outer edge of a sparsely populated neighborhood near downtown Providence, allowed music to be played as loudly as they wanted.
Brinkman also liked the idea of a Fort where "you're there to defend yourself from the quietness of American bullshit." Another explanation given in a local newspaper article years later is that the words provided a play on nearby "Howell Lumber." The name proved appropriate, acting as the kind of buffer intended, but also encouraging the same type of isolation and absolution from responsibility that traditionally leads children to build tree houses or dirt forts. Fort Thunder was a place where the aspects of adult life unnecessary for sustained artistic output could be kept from walking through the door (Stosuy 2006).
Perhaps a testament to that logic is that The Fort, and spaces like it have flourished. I was recently introduced to the Elsewhere Collaborative in Greensboro,
North Carolina; a mixed-use, residential and community live/work space that hosts a
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variety of interns and residents of regional, national and international acclaim in a multitude of artistic disciplines. The space was established as a collaborative live/work arts space and "living art museum," in 2003, following a visit from George
Scheer and Stephanie Sherman. The two were collaborating writers and friends, whom while on a spring break trip to the South with friend Josh Boyette, stopped in
Greensboro to see George’s grandmother’s old thrift store. Carolina Sales Company
(the original name of George's grandmother, Sylvia Gray's old thrift store), and its subsequent incarnations, had maintained a space on Elm Street in downtown
Greensboro for nearly 60 years. Scheer and Sherman brought back with them a box of things from his grandmother’s shop to George’s Philadelphia apartment, hereby demonstrating that shared fictions can be told through things, and as a collection have the power to expose ideas that stimulate communities. It is this exchange that has fostered the idea of reclaiming the old Greensboro thrift store as something other than itself, and something very similar to what it was: a thinking playground and creative community, the dream fueled by fantastic combinations, hence producing a name that indicates a reclaimed space outside of and beyond common perceptions of space.
The unique qualities of collective or collaborative living and arts spaces in terms of design and decoration remains one of the enduring legacies in art, seen in spaces like the Elsewhere Collaborative in Greensboro, North Carolina or the former
Fort Thunder. The visual cacophony has had a definite impact on those visiting, including myself. It also clearly influenced the kind of work being done there. Visitors admit a lingering fascination with living spaces like Elsewhere. One unique aspect of these communities is that "membership," at least as the public perceives it, beyond the core members is very fluid. The bigger influence of these spaces may be in their
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ability to let artists see beyond very narrow expectations of what art should look like.
When it comes to helping subsequent generations of alternative artists see beyond previous constraints, it's difficult to separate the influence of the mythologies of creative collective spaces like Fort Thunder or Elsewhere Collaborative, and the impact the artists themselves have enjoyed. But exposure to either deepens the feeling that any set of influences, any approach to art, has the potential to become compelling work. This is the same set of feelings that many discover/explore in collective and collaborative approaches to artistic media that are incarnate(s) of the
Fort Thunder or Elsewhere space(s).
RESEARCH STATEMENT/QUESTIONS:
My own interactions with the kinds of spaces described herein, and work as an artist, have motivated this ethnography. From a practical and theoretical point of view, I will pose this question: Are there opportunities in the current social milieu to avoid absorption within the structural conservatisms in historiography, formalized/institutionalized academia, and the art world? This ethnography has provided me with the opportunity to examine the lifestyles and intentions of the individuals and collective living spaces of which they are some part. My own current living experience within a self-appointed collective space has made the penning of this ethnography truly immersive. I have incorporated the theories outlined in my literature review within the knowledge I have gained throughout my research and personal collective living experiences. This ethnography therefore forms a basis of understanding about the growing subculture of collective or collaborative approaches to artists' group living and media production and their connection with reclamation of
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public space, alternative public education, and collective interaction as means by which conventionality and the perversion of power are challenged and refuted.
In order to focus my research, I have developed several research questions upon/from which to base and perform my inquiry. As my own collective living experiences have evolved and my knowledge about my participants and the lifestyle and intentions to which they commit in the spaces that they inhabit has grown, the intent of my research has been refined. These research questions reflect the content of these experiences:
In what ways do visual artists who reside or participate in collective or collaborative approaches to artistic media use their art or visual media, and living arrangements to: a. ...express and advocate for their beliefs? b. ...actively reclaim and alter certain landscapes? c. ...reorder, subvert, alter, or amend public consciousness, with specific regard to the function and financing of art or art policies in a specific context, notions of domesticity, or traditional education? d. ...promote collective interaction to explore social issues and alternative histories?
AN INTRODUCTION TO FINDINGS:
I have found three specific sites of interest, and have represented them in this ethnography as they relate to the specific aims of my research questions. Each site
(or, in one case, an individual) was chosen for the different means by which they express and advocate their beliefs, actively reclaim or alter certain landscapes, reorder, subvert, or amend public consciousness, and promote collective interaction
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to explore social issues and alternative histories.
The space, in which I live, The Cobra House, was chosen as a site of interest, for the unique effort of its residents to reclaim and alter a particular landscape. I had found that the situation of the Cobra House in the greater context of Asheville, and more specifically in the Historic Montford District to be notable for several reasons. The Montford neighborhood of Asheville is a predominantly uppermiddle class area however, the presence of the Cobra House is a deliberate affront to this motif of maintained horticulture, automated sprinklers, and family sedans.
The Cobra House is home to several students and young artists working in a variety of mediums, intentionally living together. These individuals are bound by a consciousness to come together and physically manifest a coherence and similarity of values. Attempts to share and exercise political and social power and to make decisions occur on a consensus-driven, egalitarian basis, that deviates from the traditional familial enterprise and approaches to domesticity.
Dewayne Slightweight, a comic artist from Chicago, who works often in
Asheville, is given attention in this ethnography as well. Dewayne works as a comic artist, creating panoramic narratives based on a nexus of his own unique experiences. Dewayne's art presents his own experiences, depicted with anthropomorphic polygons, and genderless dodecahedrons in a comic panel format.
His newest work, "The Kinship Structure of Ferns," relates an organic analogy, and therefore presents comic art as an alternative means by which people are educated about unique trajectories or approaches to kinship, love, support and education.
Dewayne's art is a new discursive strategy for the effective communication of nonnormative efforts to sustain a life beyond mainstream concerns and fixed categories of meaning.
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The Elsewhere Collaborative, a "living art museum," with manifold programs, which bring artists, makers, and thinkers each year to Greensboro, North Carolina to create site-specific works for the living museum and Greensboro community, and to advance Elsewhere's concept of an amalgam of physical collections and imagined, shared fictions. My observation of Elsewhere and conversations with its visitors and staff members revealed that the space sustains a unique opportunity. Community engagement is both encouraged and manifested, as Elsewhere's staff, interns, and visitors are urged to collaborate with an international artist community in an experimental and responsive creative environment. I found each member and contributor to be amended and integrated well to/in the Elsewhere community. Each individual was an excellent host, able to multi-task, and work closely with artists and creators, facilitating collaborations of all kinds in the context of an experimental residency program in conjunction with a vision for a living, evolving, changing museum.
The efforts engendered by the aforementioned individuals or sites coincide with an effort to dislodge and subvert the oppressive conditions of an era. Each space or individual worked in the context of isolated or specific efforts to express or advocate certain beliefs. These spaces were united, however, in common passion for resistance and the active pursuit of a better world. The active reclamation or alteration to certain spaces, like that of the Cobra House in Historic Montford, amends to the public consciousness that power and authority are able to be negotiated in the context of an eschewed landscape.
Works of art that are widely disseminated have immense subversive potential, showing that resistance works also through aesthetics. A symbolic fit distanced from the everyday, communicated as a set of agreed symbols and
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personal adornment, promotes collective engagement and respectful autonomy from the perpetuation of certain social issues and privilege of elite histories. Art that deals with representing not only an opposition to a specific orthodoxy, but that also reveals a methodology or set of discursive strategies for the dislodging of said orthodoxy, like the comic works of Dewayne Slightweight, is fundamental to the alternative forms of education manifested in collective approaches to simultaneous living and art-making.
Collective and collaborative approaches to artistic media also provide an opportunity to advance other unique concepts. The efforts of the Elsewhere
Collaborative, for example, reveal that there are collective and collaborative approaches to artistic media, intent on non-profit organization building, and production assistance. There are those willing to engage in the functioning of an experimental museum and creative community, and learn to practice operational, responsive, responsible, thoughtful collaborative structures for living art. The reordering of things and the tradition of collections speaks to the potential to reimagine collaborative creativity and the role of place and presence in telling a community’s narrative, and a re-imagining of what social theorist Guy Debord labeled the "spectacle" (Debord: 1995: 5).
The individuals and sites in this specific ethnography are far from reducing the connections between present and past to single, official lines of succession like traditional museums and archived historical societies, allowing for singular voices in the function and financing of art in particular contexts, submitting to prescribed avenues of intellectual prosperity, and passively accepting regulations on collective interaction. Artists working in the collective or collaborative contexts of particular mention in this ethnography, instead expend huge amounts of energy to complicate,
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ramify and extend connections, regardless of where they might lead. As an artist, these efforts provide for an infinite capacity to make connections. These efforts have manifested a concentrated expression against the hegemonic order, producing a moment of critical and collective interaction/reflexivity.
OVERVIEW OF PAPER AND EACH SECTION
In response to the debate over what constitutes the "real artist," theorists and others have advanced arguments supporting art as a vehicle for some countercultural or social change movement. German social theorist Walter Benjamin claimed, "A work of art relates to the production conditions of its era..." and that
"...the task of the artist is to adapt this apparatus to the purposes of the proletarian revolution" (Benjamin 1935). This ethnography provides a comprehensive inquiry into a particular acts of resistance. Collective and collaborative approaches to artistic media that occur within the context of shared living spaces and the commerce of collective resources posits a remarkable practice. These communities of individuals are confronting a discourse that confounds universal access to resources and apparatuses of production, and formalizes a public consciousness around the notions of domesticity, the function and financing of art in a specific context, and individual attenuation.
In order to create a cohesive review of the methods utilized by collective or collaborative artist groups to accomplish the goals of dissolving conventionality and the perversion of power, I have focused on several key aspects of the communal or collective approach to living and art making. A review of the literature follows the introduction to demonstrate an informed analysis of these groups. My research
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methods, and a description of setting follow, to give the reader an understanding of how the data was found, how individuals were accessed and selected, and an entry to the particular setting amongst which the aforementioned are all situated.
The paper then more cogently describes and delineates three major themes or practices by which collective or collaborative artist groups or living spaces dissolve a formalized discourse surrounding art and art making, domesticity, individual agency/attenuation, and public space. Several elements of their practices uncover that the intent of these groups of individuals in large part manifests in reclamation , alternative education , and collective interaction . I will first talk about reclamation in the context of the collective or group house in which I reside, as being supportive of a discourse of reconfigured space and the altered landscape.
The house, which is located in the historic Montford neighborhood of Asheville, is remarkable in its existence in that it inimitably provides a space for alternative and affordable living in a predominantly upper middle class area. I expand next on the idea of alternative education. In particular, I look at the work of comic artist
Dewayne Slightweight, whereby an arsenal to dissolve the mainstream is manifested through widely disseminated, consumable media that exalts an organic, homological structure of love, kinship and support. Comic art will be revealed as a means by which realities are alternatively simulated in non-academic texts and pictorials to educate people about the transgression of a normative, institutionalized discourse.
The final and third section will analyze the prospect of collective interaction within the
Elsewhere Collaborative "living art museum," particularly the immersive experience of collective or communal living and the commerce or exchange of ideas by which alternative histories are generated and elite histories are no longer privileged. The movement to dislodge archival or archetypical representation and isolation of the
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artistic artifact, and transpose it to a context within which it is in constant interaction and view by a fluid, collective enterprise, is of particular relevance.
PART TWO | RECLAMATION, ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION, AND THE
COLLECTIVE ENTERPRISE: A THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
From a theoretical and practical point of view, efforts to avoid absorption within "the opaque and terrible essence of the state" (Raunig 2007:16) have been reviewed. There are always new attempts in new situations to break open the constructed continuum of a homogenous time. The rigid canon of the formal academic institution traditionalized views of domesticity and standardized or regulated sites for collective interaction have obscured historical complexities and discontinuities, of which certain literature has tried to remedy. To purposely construct life is at the center of collective and collaborative approaches to artistic media. This has manifested in previous and continued efforts to communalize and re-situate certain apparatuses of artistic production, promote and sustain unregulated collective interaction, and alternatively educate and espouse the means by which new histories, traditions, and principles are considered in a non-hierarchical way.
Roszak (1968) and Hebdige (1979) analyzed how the hippie and punk subcultures challenged the conventions of the 1960s and 1970s through subversive aesthetic styles. I draw upon the work of these theorists; their examinations of subcultural aesthetics, elucidation of those examples of alternative representations or challenges of/to a public consciousness, and collective interaction abreast a similar ideological sensibility. These efforts are situated in a place and time, as a work to represent an individual or groups of individuals who are intent on semiotic or image-
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based transgression of a normative discourse. The deviatons of these individuals briefly expose the arbitrary nature of the codes which underlie and shape all forms of discourse (Hebdige:1979: 91). According to Hebdige, "spectacular subcultures express forbidden contents (consciousness of class, consciousness of difference) in forbidden forms (transgressions of sartorial and behavioral codes, law breaking, etc)"
(92).
Domesticity, however, as a context for those efforts to construct a comprehensive and resolute set of practices that ostensibly combat a traditional discourse has been rarely examined as it relates to the production of alternative or subgenres of artistic media. This ethnography has the clear intention of including and expanding this exact notion - domesticity and alternative approaches to it are an extension of the very same logic that has generated a nexus of dissatisfaction with traditional values and politics. In order to make sense of my findings, I have drawn upon the work of these theorists and used their theoretical frameworks to describe the manifold ways in which collective or collaborative approaches to artistic media simultaneously and inextricably link efforts to reclaim space, sustain alternative approaches to formalized education, and provide un-regulated opportunities for community engagement and collective interaction.
RECLAMATION
Reclamation herein represents a change from the pejorative, socially-scripted terms of a hegemonic enterprise to the more acceptable, re-configured conditions of those of a unique, symbolic fit distanced from the everyday (Willis 2000). The word reclamation can be thought of as an ability to redefine and re-appropriate elements from an individual's situation within a hegemonic discourse and a capitalist economy.
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Seizing art from its role in legitimizing a hierarchal social order, and producing it within alternative, intentionally-considered contexts is key to the practice of reclamation.
The landscape of tradition, while it may provide a structure that is seemingly mandate and resolute, typifies certain individuals as its proponents. This translates to the institution, within which certain notions of the function and financing of art in a particular context, are produced and supported. Subversive, collective and collaborative approaches to artistic media cause others to question the idea of altered landscapes by using single family homes and old mill spaces as reclaimed spaces. These spaces are then designated for an alternative to traditional, familial or independent residency, re-appropriated/configured manifestations of domesticity, collective interaction, and a site for the genesis of an alternative to the generalized principles of art making.
The production of art within alternative constructs, and furthermore within non-traditional living spaces reclaims this landscape from privileged voices and rather than dominate with alternate views, the proponents of these practices speak from a level of respectful autonomy. Their amendments to the public consciousness occur more subversively. Communal or shared residencies, whereby certain concerns and practices are approached in a consolidated, or vertically-integrated, spatial approach to life and work are integral to the formulation and execution of certain amendments to the politics of art, and furthermore public consciousness surrounding its production and display.
In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Walter Benjamin proposes a theory of art that would be “useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands in the politics of art," (Garner: 2007:262-27 9). Benjamin’s discussion of
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the reproducibility of art and its intrinsic flaws and consequences bears upon the awe and reverence of the original image. Mechanical reproduction and therefore the reproducibility of the artistic image were believed by Benj amin to “emancipate a work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual.” This text is relevant in the interpretation of the intentions of the artists working in the collective or collaborative context. It will help to reveal their efforts as a deliberate and subversive commentary on mechanical reproduction.
The production of art in a subversive, collective context is often deliberately shrouded from the mainstream, revealing an intention to emancipate the artistic image from the control of the bourgeoisie. A ritual of technique and tradition is no longer necessary in the collective or collaborative contexts of particular mention in this. Their efforts are purposely removed from institutional concerns of technical aptitude, juried exhibitions, or commercial success. Most collective or collaborative living and work spaces may maintain a studio space, venue space, or thinking space for the parturition of the work of a group of individuals, in which the apparatuses of production are situated with universal access and no singular ideological presence.
The fact that most of the work being produced is then widely disseminated or easily reproduced aims to dissolve the awe and reverence related to the original image.
Authenticity, therefore, is not established as means by which certain people, images, or ideas are exalted. The original image is not as easily discernible in reproducible media forms, and thus no individual narrative is privileged. Therefore, there is immense subversive potential in mass-produced media that utilizes reclaimed or resituated apparatuses of mechanical re-/production to undermine fixed categories of meaning, production, and distribution.
There is a complex nature of public secrecy and to the act of defacing things
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society holds most sacred. When applied to the idea of artists defacing the facades of buildings, reclaiming certain public spaces for living, or re-appropriating ubiquitous media and common fetish objects, and re-situating apparatuses of mechanical reproduction, they are edifying the urban terrain with their art
– forcing a new critical sense of the art object before its re-appropriation and also a consideration of its revelatory, intrinsic capacity (Taussig 1999:8). The work of the artists working in the collective or collaborative live/work spaces, to which I devote attention in this ethnography, is being produced in a reclaimed or reconfigured space that may have been the former site of some manufacturing practice, or in the case of some spaces, intended for single family or traditional, multi-family living. Residence in this space therefore sustains a new trajectory in intentions.
For Michael Taussig, these acts of resistance reveal the subversive potential and revelatory power of defacement; attempting to expose the impermanence of enforced traditions (Taussig 1999:7). The insular nature of the institution as a site for commonly associated confirmations of validity is refuted. Other sites are being established for the parturition of art that deviate from the physical and intellectual nature of typical institutional representations of art and art making, and furthermore are independent from the function and financing of art in a particular context. By deconstructing the abstract and almost secret nature of traditionalized approaches to the production of art, use of space, collective interaction, and education, through complex visual narratives and inhabitance of reclaimed spaces, collective approaches to living and art-making are transforming otherwise eschewed social spaces into platforms for subversive, and respectful autonomy from the imposed conditions of an era.
For others, the act of reclamation is simply more pervasive. Addressing
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industrial concerns, a pre-occupation with mechanical reproduction, or the subversive act of defacement, may just be some avenues by which art is reclaimed from its role in legitimizing a hegemonic social order. The production of art, for some, in alternative constructs is just one such conflict waged on an expanding battlefield to reduce the concentration and perversion of institutional power.
Antonio Gramsci described the workings of hegemony – the tacit consent of the ruled (Gramsci: 1971: 47). Hegemony subjugates or incorporates antithetical perspectives. Resistance, however, is pervasive, indicating the failure of universality. Hegemony is therefore always incomplete, according to Gramsci.
Those artists who work in a subversive format or alternative approach to living and media generation are in a position of resistance to a totality. There are certain projected desires, manifest perhaps in a seemingly resolute public consciousness or valid generality, to which the artists of collective or collaborative live/work spaces do not consent or submit. These individuals then transpose their ideological concerns to practical ones, relayed in a contrary, counter-hegemonic, holistic existence of reclaimed, shared living spaces, alternative sites for experiential forms of education, and un-regulated collective interaction.
ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION
The concept of "alternative education" presupposes some kind of orthodoxy to which the alternative is opposed. In general, this term has arisen to combat the rise of standardized and compulsory education [at the primary and secondary levels]. Many individuals have suggested that the education of young people be undertaken in radically different ways than ones in practice. In the 19th century, for
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example, Swiss humanitarian Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi; the American transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau; the founders of progressive education, John Dewey and Francis Parker; and educational pioneers, such as Maria Montessori and Rudolf Steiner (founder of the Waldorf schools); among others, insisted that education be understood as the art of cultivating the moral, emotional, physical, psychological, and spiritual aspects of the developing child. Anarchists such as Leo Tolstoy and Francisco Ferrer y Guardia emphasized education as a force for political liberation, secularism, and elimination of class distinctions (Miller: 2008: 26).
More recently, social critics such as John Caldwell Holt, and Paul Goodman, have examined education from more individualist, anarchist, and libertarian perspectives, that is, critiques of the ways that they feel conventional education subverts democracy by molding young people's understandings. Other writers, from the revolutionary Paulo Freire to American educators like Herbert Kohl and Jonathan
Kozol, have criticized mainstream Western education from the viewpoint of their varied left-liberal and radical politics (56). Several common core elements are common to many contemporary educational alternatives: respect for every person, balance, decentralization of authority, noninterference between political, economic, and cultural spheres of society, and a holistic worldview. These themes reveal the intentions of collective and collaborative approaches to artistic media that are dissatisfied with current academic institutional practices, including those intrinsic properties [of it] that reproduce class hierarchies.
The traditional complex of institutionalized academia has allowed for certain voices to be privileged. In "The Dialogic Imagination," Bakhtin (1981) described the way in which these voices are privileged and solidified as "elite histories." Elite
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histories are constructed to cement a favorably epic version of the past in a sort of fixed mode that allows it (the epic history) to be distanced from everyday. The creation of alternative histories by subversive or deliberately non-mainstream artists resists the commonality of motifs intrinsic in generalized or projected histories, and narratives (Bakhtin 1981:16). The elite version of history produces a repertory of recurrent images depicting a condition of authentic essence and significance, manifested in the conquest of a singular ideology (democracy) led by its proponent(s) (the white, educated, middle-class, heterosexual, child-rearing male).
In this way, history is produced as having conclusiveness and a finality that obscures a complex discourse. There have been attempts at discontinuity, whereby efforts to amend public consciousness or resist its mandate singularity prove that history or the elite version of it, is not only the version of the past.
The discourse sustained within collective and collaborative approaches to alternative forms of informal and experiential education creates a phenomenon.
These efforts implore that an alternative history be presented, one of autonomous pursuits, devoid of mainstream concerns, and relevant and important to the everyday lives of all people. Many collective spaces play host to skill-shares, workshops, and other public presentations on particular skills within the living space of the individuals of a collective. These are open to all skill sets and backgrounds, do not mandate any sort of nominal membership, and are devoid of institutional, or vertical hierarchies. There are no masters, but rather people experiencing life differently, but simultaneously. Gilles Delueze offers a capacious and synthetic analysis of human psychology, economics, society, and history that can be amended and integrated within alternative histories or education efforts as well.
In Deleuze's "Anti-Oedipus," he criticizes axiomatic, money-based
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economies, stating that they create abstract forms of organization, rather than local or material (1977:24). This is important in the interpretation of subversive media or alternative educational opportunities that are produce and disseminated amidst reconfigured economies, and localized, more material-based transactions of intellect and useful, subsistence skills. Advocacy for communalized resources within a vertically-integrated, shared living space is rooted in an unwillingness to comply with the institutional discourse of American freedom.
Nuclear families or the traditional forms of matrilineal or patrilineal descent should not typify ideological liberation. The proponents of most collective or collaborative approaches to artistic media are not related in the traditional sense of blood, etc., and thus again extend the ability of these efforts to create work separated from all avenues of a traditionalized discourse. Artists working in the collective or collaborative context may be institutional drop-outs or otherwise disinterested in an explicitly academic vernacular, because of the virtue and integrity that established hierarchies and exchange of abstract values lack. Freedom is not apparent in a discourse that privileges a relative order of legitimacy and authenticity.
A commitment to freedom manifests in the pursuit of difference. Alternative approaches to the domestic make-up, reclamation of public spaces, dissent from the tradition and technique of formalized art-making, and the creation of a verticallyintegrated space wherein all avenues of life can be concatenously expressed are at the center of the approaches to collective and collaborative art-making and living described herein.
COLLECTIVE INTERACTION
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This ethnography examines groups of individuals that are intentionally assembled. These groups of individuals then transmit their sentiments and concerns often as units, or in the specific case of the groups examined in this ethnography as collectives. For the purposes of this ethnography, a collective describes a group of entities that share or are motivated by at least one common issue or interest, or work together on a specific project(s) to achieve a common objective. This consciousness to come together and physically manifest a coherence and similarity of values, comes in those attempts to share and exercise political and social power and to make decisions on a consensus-driven and egalitarian basis. Collectives differ from cooperatives in that they are not necessarily focused upon an economic benefit or saving (but can be that as well). A commune or intentional community, which may also be known as a "collective household", is a group of people who live together in some kind of dwelling or residence, or in some other arrangement (e.g. sharing land). Collective households may be organized for a specific purpose (e.g. relating to business, parenting, or some other shared interest), like those of specific mention in this ethnography, intent on sustaining alternatives to traditional education, domesticity, art making, common uses of space, and regulated interactions amongst individuals.
These efforts engender new visions and opportunities to evade a constructed continuum. Art that effectively agitates, educates, and organizes has the transformative power to motivate a culture of passive consumers and proponents of an institutionally-informed mainstream, to make hopeful strokes against the tide.
Like the alchemist's trick of turning shit to gold, collective, alternative contexts for the creation of art combat the conditions of authentic essence and significance, taking on conclusiveness and finality by appropriating elements from these conditions in re-
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imagined landscapes.
Theodore Roszak would conceptualize and operationalize the term
“technocracy,” to indicate the character of the current epoch or dominant paradigm that produces seemingly mandate conditions
– an era wherein the industrial society is controlled by the terms of a regime of corporate and technological expertise
(1968:23 ). Roszak’s research on 1960s era radicals and hippie dropouts is used to conceptualize and operationalize “counterculture,” wherein he indicated specific people, publications, periods, or events composed of a common resistance to the projected conditions of an era, that are responsible for some visible phenomenon that reaches critical mass, flowers and persists for a period of time.
Bearing certain parlance in mind, this ethnography attempts to describe the several communities of inimitable mention herein, as "countercultural." The artists of these spaces have produced and sustained movements over a period of time. Their movements have reached critical mass in the furtive exploration of various subgenres of music and visual media which still enjoy success in a continued influence and source of inspiration amidst new collective formations of artists. These communities can be examined as the functional means by which the assertion of a collective identity occurs. Spaces like Elsewhere, and The Cobra House encourage the intentional designation of spaces for the concurrence or confluence of social engagement, industrious pursuits, sustained artistic output, use as a domicile, alternative forms of education, and moreover, to sustain a series of collective strokes against an unbending tide of tradition, authenticity, and significance.
Collectives also assemble to combat the tradition of a historical discourse. In
"The Written Suburb," John Dorst critiques the idea of "tradition" displayed in most museums, for example (writing in particular about Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania).
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Tradition, from romantics, according to Dorst, takes tradition as coming from Nature; links between past and present through heritage (complex of cultural goods) (1989:
129). Dorst describes traditionalization as "forces in the present," that "legitimize current institutions by obscuring historical complexities and discontinuities." A heritage in this view is the simplified set of images, objects and narratives that, though presented as natural and inevitable, have been constructed to serve particular interests (130)." Museums are those sites that edify the above-mentioned processes. The archival space in which collections or artifacts are curated to present a historical society acts as a traditionalizer; through which a selective narrative for a single authoritative line of artistic production is communicated.
Dorst's critique of the archived presentation of a historical society, in particular the notion that such efforts (museum curation) install barriers between past and present through an absolute past (late colonial), "a past conceived as a clearly bounded, solid object, subject to various manipulations and appropriations… “will be presented as a parallel to the efforts of collective or collaborative approaches to art, art making and living (130). Instead of reducing a complex past to a tableau of a few key elements; without politics, religion, trade, labor, war, transportation, hardship, poverty, and focusing entirely on domestic economy; food and household objects and their production, collective or collaborative approaches to art and living are blatant in their pastiche. Through a recycling of ubiquitous media and adorning paraphernalia, the residents and artists of collective or collaborative live/work spaces edify a new terrain that allows associations and communication of experience without any privileged or dominant voice. The experience is shared, birthed of infinite collective interactions and therefore a conflux array of temporal locations and concerns.
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These efforts solidify that there is an intrinsic unwillingness to comply with prescribed conditions. Occupying and creatively disrupting eschewed environments is a key function of the art being produced within many collective approaches to living and art making. This capacity to creatively amend public consciousness demonstrates that power, in some form, is everywhere. There is audience to many of our engagements, and therefore, also opportunity for influence, and therein a commerce of power. The collective efforts of specific mention in this ethnography, however, allow for separation from singular, pervasive ideologies, largely because they are birthed to combat certain conditions.
Power, related as a negotiation of forces, connects to Michel Foucault's intention to differentiate amongst domination and power. Power, according to
Foucault, is a concept of universal proportion, as the fluctuating forces of the world manifest differences in both the order of the natural realm, and the relative order contrived by human forces of social proportion. Domination, accordantly, is the perversion of power, and has negative ramifications, repressing the separation between society and politics, limiting certain freedoms (Foucault in O'Leary
2002:158).
Foucault's theories on power relations regard freedom as an effect of the capacity to challenge both power and domination. Freedom represents the "revolt within the practice of domina tion” (Foucault in O’Leary 2002:160). Collective and collaborative approaches to artistic media are exercising their freedom to challenge the power of certain spaces and practices. Concurrently, this produces an affront to the forces of tradition, whose proponents attempt to dominate certain spaces and practices. Power then, according to Foucault, is never fixed to any once force, and is instead represented as this form of social relation that is negotiable between/by
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individuals and groups within a society, allowing for constant amendment to traditional values and politics.
While they may not subscribe to traditional values and politics, an order is composed amongst sub-cultural groups by a symbolic fit between the way groups are organized, the way members of the group make sense of the world ideologically, and the aesthetic expressions that result from their lifestyles. Subversive artistic media is made to appropriate into distinctive creations and ensembles, symbols and objects which are homologous with the focal concerns, activities, group structure, and collective self-image of the subculture. Paul Willis related these theoretical connections between art and identity construction. Willis applied the idea of a
"homology," to subcultural style, to describe a sort of aesthetic resonance that connects the ideals of the group with their lifestyle and forms of expression (Gelder and Thornton 1997:137).
Paul Willis' objective was to appropriate an incisive examination of "symbolic expressions, signs, and symbols of everyday life and activity, through which individuals and groups seek to establish presence, identity, and meaning” (Garner
2002: 573). Willis defined the manifold activities herein as part of "symbolic work"; the “application of human capacities to and through, on and with symbolic resources and raw materials (collections of signs and symbols… images and artifacts of all kinds) to produce meaning” (573). According to Willis, it is through the necessary life process of symbolic work, that we place our identities in larger wholes, producing and reproducing ideas of who we are and what we can become (579). A homology is one such structure in which artists may situate themselves consciously or through external application, whereby the resonance of their common enterprise is relayed as a union of aesthetic interests, lifestyle choices and other forms of expression.
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The philosophical underpinnings of many collective and collaborative approaches to living and art-making, for some, are related to organicism and holism.
Transgression of a normative discourse, in the case of this ethnography, occurs per the manifestation of spectacular subcultures that are different from others.
Collective and collaborative approaches to artistic media are intentionally fabricated.
Through intentional communication, the individuals working within these efforts, display their own codes (Hebdige:1979:101) as opposed to "a mainstream culture whose principal defining characteristic,” according to Barthes, “is a tendency to masquerade as nature, to substitute 'normalized' for historical forms, to translate the reality of the world into an image of the world which in turn presents itself as if composed according to 'the evident laws of the natural order'".
It is this “collaborative” as a creative model that invites individuals to pursue their own visions by building from shared collections of materials upon, within, and amongst others’ works. The collection and arrangement of objects are used in these contexts, as the common basis for creation, and the cultivation of aesthetic visions.
Creators express critique and creative practice through their interactions and intersections, composed within a more intuitively-derived natural order. These collaborative processes help to engender a real reciprocity towards things, environments, and histories. Thus collective and collaborative approaches to artistic media can be assessed in the context of other attempts towards configurations that accept new responses, conditions, and scenarios. It is through collective interaction, that resistance to a normative totality can be explored, and by which the conjunctions of permanence and transformation, intention and accident, the everyday and the exceptional, can be boldly exhibited.
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PART THREE | CONNECTING PEOPLE AND THINGS - A DESCRIPTION OF
RESEARCH METHODS & SETTINGS:
Many artists produce artwork with a fear of incompetence, and an intent ear on everyday speech and convention. Most artists are content to live their lives in accordance with the function and financing of art, and furthermore art policies in a specific context. Valid generality, expressed throughout [this ethnography] as that of the formal, academic institution, exalts technique and tradition in the form of ideas, people, and places. It is often seemingly mandate and resolute that an artist's success is measured by their technical aptitude, formal training, academicallyinformed vernacular, and appeal to a public consciousness. The parturition of artistic media should not be limited to specific spaces, audiences, or an academically-informed intellect. Juried exhibition, academic palatability and acceptance are not the only standards by which art can or should be judged.
Collective and collaborative approaches to artistic media that exist to combat or refute commonly held sentiments that art has specific parameters; will therefore be explored as an alternative relationship to the production conditions of an era.
UNDERSTANDING COLLECTIVE AND COLLABORATIVE APPROACHES TO
ARTISTIC MEDIA
The communities of mention in this ethnography are similarly intent on a dynamic relationship between art and social change. These spaces combine individuals to engender an art of the future, separate from traditional contexts, opposed to a valid generality or public consciousness (i.e the “mainstream”). Their
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efforts have a dynamic nature, through which individuals and their works serve as active tools, assembled to explore new ways of collectively interacting in the world, for alternatively educating people about the injustice of imposed authority, and as a way for reclaiming space for the specific needs of the people occupying it.
A key aspect to understanding the efforts of collective and collaborative approaches to artistic media is the dynamic and manifold methodology by which public consciousness is altered and amended. Collective approaches to conflux artmaking and living allow work and ideas to be developed collaboratively, enabling the individuals therein to carry out larger-scale, more ambitious projects with the many hands of a group. These groups engender a near sub-cultural quality, the characteristics of which may vary based on the degree to which the comprising individuals align with a particular ideology and allow these perspectives to be manifested in certain lifestyle choices. I've come across several different practices of resistance sustained within collective approaches to living and art-making.
Groups such as the residents of the Cobra House educate and raise awareness in a humble, organized manner through acting as a host to various skill/work-shares that serve as compelling instances for alternative education that inform a community about social issues, egalitarian approaches to living, and practical skills. The group has a non-hierarchical approach to living, hosting weekly meetings amongst the residents, based in a formalized process of complete consensus. The Cobra House is home to several young people, mostly artists, living together to reclaim ubiquitous objects from the everyday in new and appropriated forms, share food and other material resources, enact localized and non-traditional forms of commerce and exchange, and constantly enforce communication methods that are more holistic, accessible and invite community participation.
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The Elsewhere Collaborative is a nonprofit, “living museum” located in downtown Greensboro, NC. The museum is built from one woman's (Sylvia
Gray) collection of objects and materials, collected in her time as the owner of a thrift store for 58 years (1939-1997) in the same space that the museum now inhabits. At the time of Sylvia's death in 1997, the store was left in a state of disarray, and objects were piled to the ceiling. Rather then disposing of it, or converting the space for an alternative use, Sylvia's grandson - local artist
George Scheer, took it upon himself to organize the objects and space into an amalgam and landscape that honored Sylvia's collection and memory and gave the space a new life as an arts organization, and interactive space, one inspired by the place and objects themselves. The space was renamed "Elsewhere" and artists that work and play there refer to themselves as Elsewherians. Nothing is for sale, nothing leaves, but artists are invited to the museum in the form of residencies to work with, alter, and create new meaning from objects of the permanent collection amassed by Sylvia.
Artists like Dewayne Slightweight produce comic art, while living in collective contexts. Comic art can act as a form of visual resistance, providing compelling narratives that inform viewers and readers that it is collective motivation and influence that inspire action, rather than the conditions of institutional accreditation and laurels. His comics are almost part and parcel to a dialectic or symposium amidst visual narratives regarding sex and the future. Emphasizing the emotional investments, temperatures, traumas, pleasures, and ephemeral experiences circulating throughout the political and cultural landscape, Slightweight's comics invite other collectives and individuals-artists and non-artists alike-to create
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suitcases, real or imagined, that can carry tools around to incite, create, collect, and record political/emotional scenes and return them to be inspected, collated, discussed, distributed, and diverted to new uses. His art can reveal hidden political histories, while also mapping the affective expressions of the body politic, and to create magical linkages and utopian intensities that might extend our political horizons.
WELCOME TO THE DOLLHOUSE: ENTRY TO SETTING
Be their efforts manifest as a dazed recapitulation of junk, or the creation of some other fantastical landscape stuffed with the proponents of a narrow niche of culture, subversive, collective and collaborative approaches to living and art-making are presenting an effective inversion of the grain of the "spectacle." My introduction to these spaces was at a young age. My uncle and his friends began a commune in
Western Massachusetts in the late 70s that has since expanded to become an improvisational dance and retreat center for a variety of performance-based media.
The collective enterprise has thus been something I have easily engaged and endeared.
My recent living experiences, mainly as a resident of the Cobra House, have saturated me with a practical understanding and sincere delight in a collective enterprise of living and art-making. I was introduced to this space by one of its residents, Smith, a visual artist and ambient/electronic musician, with whom I commonly interacted at gallery openings, social gatherings, and music performances
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both in the downtown area of Asheville and even at his home before I was a resident sharing that same living space. It was my concurrent move with two other transplants to the space, Flesh Cat and J Ruby that solidified my experience of it as a site for the nexus of an array of aesthetic visions comprised of a similar ideological rejection of the conditions of accreditation and academic austerity.
Sijal Nasralla, an undergraduate student at the local university also studying
Anthropology, has been an acquaintance for some time. Working as a musician in
Asheville, Sijal has resided in a group house on Broadway Ave. in downtown
Asheville for several years. His home has been the site for a variety of music performances, one of which featured Dewayne Slightweight in his musical project,
"RRIND." Sijal had insisted that I meet Dewayne, at which point I solidified Dewayne as an acquaintance and friend of my own, based on our immediate connection from a mutual love for the city of Chicago and comic art.
These experiences and others produced a commerce and exchange of subcultural capital, aesthetic resonance, and symbolic work. Amongst these artists and individuals, a homological structure/network of support was engaged. This produced a series of interactions based on a commonality of interest and experience. Most individuals were therefore eager to engage a furtive exploration of others involved in the same enterprise of collective and collaborative approaches to living and artmaking. This was a conduit of concatenous information, through which I was referred to an article in ARTPAPERS magazine, detailing the experiences of the
Elsewhere Collaborative in Greensboro, North Carolina, and manifold other documentations and experiences relevant to the content and aims of my research and moreover, my individual experience.
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APPLIED METHODOLOGY
This research used mixed qualitative methods to represent various characteristics of the respondents and their living spaces. I had used data collected from in-depth conversations, electronic or analog (post, mail) correspondences, participant observation, to posit the intentions of collective or collaborative artists' spaces. Conversations allowed for insight into the dynamics of a common agenda developed by subordinated groups within the context of living/work spaces. I was interested in any overt criticisms on restrictive expression from a contemporary academic institution. Conversations were generally directed by an interest to review the propagation of subgenres or alternative modes of artistic media, and the mutual rejection by the groups of interest of a certain paradigm. I was also interested in more subversive practices as well; the reclamation or alteration to/of certain landscapes, the provision of immersive experiences and opportunities for unregulated, collective interaction, and an examination of tactics for alternative public education. Ultimately, I wanted to examine whether there is a commonly perceived effect of a formalized, institutional ideology on artistic expression and whether any effects of the traditional representation of space, domesticity, art and art making, as well as regulated interaction, are observed in active and collaborative approaches to the living/work artists’ spaces in Western North Carolina and beyond.
Conversations often elicited responses from the informants within the particular context, intent and aims of the research. These interactions and the insights gained herein about the lifestyle and intentions of collective or collaborative artists' groups aimed to indicate the informants' inclusion in a countercultural movement. Bearing in mind the conceptualization of “counterculture” as an effort to
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dislodge a certain [technocratic] paradigm, operationalization of this concept involved the dimensions of its active enforcement or expression by particular individuals or groups against particular institutional methodologies or notions of use of space, domesticity, art and art making, and regulated interactive experiences.
In Asheville and in Greensboro, I conducted participant observation and conversations (via tape recorder, or in some cases video recording, and also email and written correspondence) with people purposively selected from the community of individuals whom resided in my own living space - "The Cobra House", a feminist collective known as "Castle Distrakto," and the Elsewhere Artist Collaborative, as well as community members from the nearby area who might visit any of these spaces, including one of my primary informants, comic artist Dewayne Slightweight.
These individuals were selected based on my own living experience and knowledge of other collective or group houses in the greater metropolitan area of Asheville and beyond, as was the case of those informants selected from the Elsewhere space in
Greensboro, North Carolina. Secondary data (largely narratives or recent interviews) had created another means by which I was able to select respondents in the group of residents, and establish contact with individuals like the Program Director at
Elsewhere, Danna Rooth, of whom I read in an article in ART PAPERS magazine.
My most recent living experiences in Providence, Rhode Island, and Asheville, North
Carolina, my familiarity with the current incarnations of live/work spaces in the immediate vicinity and beyond, visits to these spaces, as well as correspondence with current residents, ensured a sensitivity to the nature of the work in which my informants were involved.
Conversations, which I view to be a more informal exchange, although planned, were largely unstructured. I interviewed twelve participants in total from a
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variety of backgrounds and locations - some via face-to-face interactions, others through email or written correspondence. However, I have had many more conversations with my housemates, friends, and family throughout, which I have taken field notes on, as well as allowed to develop my overall understanding of a culture of artists producing in collective contexts. E-mail correspondences and written letters have allowed me to contact participants not only from different geographical locations, but also from different discursive strategies and sensibilities.
A diversity of communication strategies ensured sensitivity to a range of participants and their particularities.
Semiotics and the social scripts appropriated or used by artists working in collective contexts are central to a complete review of the groups and individuals on which I focused in this ethnography. An analysis of the works produced by the artists individually or collectively, as well as the spatial frameworks in which they resided was crucial in my research. Mapping and other visual expressions of the spaces were performed in order to get a broader perspective. The mapping exercise focused on common perceptions of physical layout in collective spaces. The mapping documented the physical layout of the spaces, revealing consistencies in the representation of space amongst various collective living environments. For example, consistencies were noted i n the presentation of residents’ quarters as proximate to or intersecting with communal spaces, work spaces, etc. Maps were drawn from the collective representations and recollections of the Elsewhere Space, and the other from an examination of the contemporary, reconfigured live/work spaces in Asheville, North Carolina. The maps were compared for commonalities in layout, design, and for whether the overall consideration of physical space manifests to represent the consolidation or an inversion of common or practical approaches to
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domesticity, etc. These more ostensible, diagrammatic or image-based manifestations of a particular rhetoric and social interaction serve as helpful sources of data. Examples have been included in some form herein to reveal an interesting layer of interaction taking place in the visual environment and spatial framework of collective living and art spaces.
PATHOGEOGRAPHY: AN OPPORTUNITY FOR REFLEXIVITY
This ethnography has inspired quite a bit of individual/personal reflexivity. I was formerly in pursuit of an undergraduate degree in the fine arts at an institution that I have since left. I had often felt at odds with the thought of assigned artistic work, exercises in technique, a preoccupation with traditional methodology, juried exhibition/critique, parallel coursework in largely Western-based general education, and the concentration of apparatuses of artistic production for use only by the pupils of the institution. I have since engaged new endeavors that celebrate my experience as an academic and non-academic alike. With my background as a visual artist, avid academic pupil, lover of wild crafts, collector of junk, I was confident that I would be amended and integrated well in conversations with my informants. Having worked for the Music Department at Brown University, as a gallery intern at the
Bannister Gallery at Rhode Island College, as a commissioned mural artist for several years, and having organized within several subversive artistic communities for some time, my experience in art has been quite immersive and broad.
My recent experience as the resident of a forming artist’s collective in
Asheville, North Carolina has developed my capacities as an artist to communicate at the nexus of different visions, synthesize distinct aesthetic interests, and provide
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coherence amidst the subversive endeavor of art as a collective enterprise. Also, my current educational trajectory in the Social Sciences has allowed me to learn the distinct nuances of academia as a reflection of certain broader paradigms, and provided me with good investigative, analytical, and archival skills. My academic interests are paired with a pre-existing sensitivity and humility. I have engaged both directly and peripherally, the opportunity to advance t the unique concept of collective and collaborative approaches to artistic media. I am focused and intent on non-profit organization building, production assistance of subversive endeavors, transgressive or alternative discursive strategies, and unique social structures.
The opportunity to engage with an experimental museum and creative community like Elsewhere, and to learn to practice operational, responsive, responsible, thoughtful collaborative structures for living and art making on a firsthand level as a resident of The Cobra House, and through my meeting of comic artist Dewayne Slightweight, was inimitable. The dualistic nature of my observational role, wherein I was simultaneously performing an ethnography and manifesting the very same intentions as my informants on a practical level, allowed for a unique description and account of the collective and collaborative efforts at living and art making mentioned herein. I have often thought of the re-ordering of things, the tradition of collections, collective discursive strategies, and practices of transgression.
This ethnography reveals an evolution in the perception of these efforts.
Herein, it will be revealed that these efforts at collective and collaborative living and art-making, speak to the potential to re-imagine collaborative creativity and the role of place and presence in relaying a community’s narrative, and a re-imagining of what social theorist Guy Debord labeled the "spectacle" (Debord:1995:8). Dewayne
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Slightweight, the residents of Cobra House, and the people of Elsewhere, are far from reducing the connections between present and past to a single, official line of succession, creating art that legitimizes a hierarchical social order, allowing for the regulation of interactive experiences, or passively resigning to live traditionally. No, the individuals and sites of mention in this ethnography expend huge amounts of energy to complicate, ramify and extend connections, regardless of where they might lead. As a penner of this ethnography and an applicant to the socialized world, I have been happy to engage this infinite capacity to make connections. A blatancy of pastiche, irreducible to narrative coherence that runs against the hegemonic order, describes a moment of critical and collective interaction/reflexivity, of which I have been a unique part.
PART FOUR | THE COBRA HOUSE - A STORY OF RECLAMATION AND THE
ALTERED LANDSCAPE IN HISTORIC MONTFORD:
"Things and Stuff," reads a sign on the front lawn, an arrow pointing to the edified terrain of a late 20th-century domicile on Pearson Drive in the historic
Montford District of Asheville, North Carolina. Not unlike the dazed recapitulation of junk engendered by the revered spinster of Charles Dickens' Great Expectations,
Miss Havisham, the house on Pearson Drive projects the history of it's residents, past, present, futuristic or fictional in a topographical amalgam of fantastical landscapes and reclaimed ubiquity. The residents of the house are transplants of near and far, the limb and flesh of their own stories, customs, and systems of belief.
All are combined to purposefully create life and amend the contexts of sociallyscripted life to which they were all formerly privy.
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My experience at The Cobra House on Pearson Drive was at first reverence and awe, held from my peripheral recognition of it as a group house in the Montford neighborhood near downtown Asheville, in which several close friends had lived. I would eventually become a resident of the space at Pearson Drive in February of
2010, giving me an opportunity to use dialogue in the above-mentioned way: as something that cuts against the grain of the “spectacle.” I immediately recognized this space as populated with the stories of an imaginative youth. Baby doll heads, knit trees, animal skulls, a diagram of the Star-Trek Enterprise, miniature muscle men, crystal balls, tarot cards, and monsters - the space was at once a zoology and an adventure: stripped of language, the stories of it's residents seemed more basic, more primal — primordial, even. Through its display of artifacts, narrative fictions acted like strange creatures, propagating themselves, dancing or spazzing out, devouring each other, fighting, and holding funeral rites. The style was rough but thoroughly confident: the ragged lines of a nexus of multiple identities appeared as an organic, almost inevitable outgrowth of the collective intentions of the residents of
The Cobra House. Their own stories acted like an enzymatic reaction, receptors sometimes fit into each other eccentrically, like puzzle pieces, or like cells crowding together to form tissue, something apparent even to its many visitors, guests, and transient residents.
Cobra House visitor, Tron Distrakto, attended a noise show in one of its bathrooms, and noted to me the adornment of a ceiling in a downstairs room:
"...That ceiling, being obscured from sight, just covered in hanging things - bits of garbage and junk. There is no sense of it being a mobile, nor is there a
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design that I can see."
Tron also noticed that none of the rooms escaped a sense of artistic contribution:
"The bathroom was the most room-like room, but again it was adorned in random stickers, or glued items, drawings and paintings. It is clear that these artists have dialogues with one another through their decorations - that a picture of Mao can be answered with a piece of collage."
The term that best describes the need of the artists to fill every inch of their space has a name that evokes its artistic qualities, as in this quote from E.H.
Gombrich's The Sense of Order : "The urge which drives the decorator to go on filling any resultant void is generally described as horror vacui. Maybe the term amor infiniti, the love of the infinite would be a more fitting description ” (Gombrich:
1979:116).
This branding of the group, to some, is what matters most (Willis 2000).
When I asked Cobra House resident Skelly Brubeck, of his sentiments regarding the construction of a living space like Cobra House, he had this to say:
"I've dropped out of college twice! I've always considered my sensitivity towards art to be my defining feature, but today, a feature seems only to be definitive when it has been validated by a diploma! What BULL SHIT, man! Not that it shouldn't be respected, but more that those without it shouldn't be disregarded, and shouldn't be labeled with patronizing terms like "outsider" or "untrained". "Outsider" says academia is the inner
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sanctum, the privileged elite, the sole bearers of the flame. I want to establish a gallery/studio/living/show/community place that exemplifies and celebrates the non-academics and academics alike."
This passage, from a letter addressed to me, describes the simultaneous nature of these efforts, solidifying the intentions of artists in the collective or collaborative contexts to live and create as a consensus-based unit, and then take this homological unit to a larger community (Willis:2000). Creating concurrently, as opposed to just communally is an essential element of the act of resistance intrinsic to this type of collective interaction. The work of the residents of the Cobra House operates to deface a contemporary context of tradition and conditions of domesticity, and reveal the manifold functions of a singular structure, with an aesthetic resonance and symbolic fit distanced from the everyday (Taussig 1990, Willis 2000).
The Cobra House was one of the operating sites for the Asheville Freeskool, for example, a teaching and learning network by and for community members.
Membership, however, is fluid. You need not be a taxpayer, a homeowner, or even a permanent resident. There is no physical school, center, institution, or corporation involved. Teachers, which could be any individual hoping to communicate their insights on a particular subject or practice, find space and put on free classes for community members that have some interest in that subject or practice. Cobra
House resident, Double D, is a facilitator for the Asheville Freeskool. The Cobra
House hosted three workshops one one day in March, headed by different individuals on a variety of subjects and practices, including self-defense, fermentation, and computer file sharing. Double D sat down with me on that day, and
I asked her to describe the importance of alternative education opportunities like the
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Asheville Freeskool. She responded:
“Freeskool, is just this, like, amazing opportunity for you to learn from others and share what you know, and create self-reliance, vital communities, and beauty in the world.”
The Cobra House, as an operating site for the mobile Asheville Freeskool, plays an important role in the social function of collaborative and collective approaches to living and art-making. Freeskool Asheville is just one other avenue, by which an interactive, decentralized model for learning-without the limitations of hierarchy, is established. These and other similar programs attempt to "de-school" ourselves and provide opportunities to learn from one another the skills necessary to transform society and better our lives. The Cobra House, as an operating site for the
Asheville Freeskool, provides an environment that inspires individuals and facilitates the exchanging of tools they need to create their lives on their own terms. The aim of such efforts is to offer a network that supports peoples capacity to live more autonomously and build communities that are not limited by the constraints of outside (or inside) institutions. Many have a wish to share skills, not just to survive within the institutional framework imposed but to thrive without and beyond it.
In addition to discussions, events, and classes, The Cobra House has a unique focus on displaying the skills of its residents and visitors in other ways as well. The Cobra House operates also as a subversive music and performance venue and art gallery. Many residents use the space as a studio for their own work, utilizing certain re-appopriated apparatuses of production to create work in a context that is autonomous from the accreditation, laurels and austerity of institutionalized approaches to art and art-making.
Flesh Cat, a recent addition to the Cobra House, hailing originally from
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Dallas, Texas, just left a salary-paying job as an assistant to the publisher at Oxford
University Press in New York City, to move to Asheville and pursue a career as a painter. She was also heralded by the opportunity to have a concurrency of endeavors. She is an avid gardener and farmer, as well as keenly interested in wild crafts and f ermented foods. Flesh Cat’s background, however, had until recently only provided a peripheral interest in and appreciation of visual art. Her undergraduate studies were in Literature, and except for the requirements of breadth in institutional academics, she had never taken an instructional course in any visual or craft-oriented artistic tradition. Her move to Asheville to pursue a career as a painter, could be considered by most a leap of faith, however, her actions prove a consciousness and intent in elucidating the social function intrinsic to the art and approaches to living mentioned herein. By distancing herself from the intended, linear trajectory of most institutional endeavors and approaches to living, Flesh Cat’s actions acknowledge that pursuits autonomous from the institution can, in fact, glean positive results for intuitive satisfaction; that it is motivation and influence on an experiential level that engender alternatives to forced trajectories.
The Cobra House proves that a living space can provide a garden, space for wild crafts, an arena for skill-shares and educational workshops, a performance venue, a gallery space, several living spaces, all within a vertically integrated structure. These efforts or practices need not be isolated in a bureaucratic complex of separated specialties. Niches and specificity can be engendered in a unitary amalgam, a singular enterprise of multifarious pursuits built on an edified terrain that displaces the eschewed landscape of tradition. This forms a poignant contrast to those individuals who surrender their agency to institutional structure, conditions of authenticity and significance, laurels and accreditation.
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The residents of Cobra House are taking an active role in commemorating and exploring what Bakhtin referred to as a "novelized past" (1981:16). These artists are using not only a unique spatial framework to present an alternative to domesticity and an eschewed, bureaucratic landscape, but are also using radical visual narratives and collections to reclaim art from its role in legitimizing a hierarchical, hegemonic social order. Instead, this complex array of reclaimed media that alternately displays the use or location of certain apparatuses of production, actively negotiates power relations in a way that legitimizes and celebrates the experience of the people that live amidst alternative visions of communities like the Cobra House
(Bakhtin: 1981, Benjamin: 1935).
PART FIVE | THE KINSHIP STRUCTURE OF FERNS - DEWAYNE
SLIGHTWEIGHT'S ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION AND DISCOURSE OF THE
MAINSTREAM IN COMIC ART:
Dewayne Slightweight is an acquaintance of mine, not widely known in the commercial context, but a remarkable young artist. Born anatomically bearing female parts, Dewayne identifies as "gender queer," preferring to be referred to with male pronouns. Slightweight has thought a lot of identity; his work is very consciously focused on exploring and building, as he puts it, “a feminist or queer or anti-capitalist community.” His comic, “The Kinship Structure of Ferns,” attempts “to make an art that communicates a new form of kinship” built around “love, hope, desire, and friendship.” Slightweight argued that “hierarchical capitalist culture privileges sight,” by, for example, saying, “I know what a woman looks like,” or “I know what a terrorist looks like.” So in his work, Slightweight tries to complicate the conventional gaze by
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turning his comics into performances; he will project them on a screen and dance and sing in front of them, contrasting his body with drawn bodies and with music. He includes a CD of musical accompaniment with each comic as well, the effect of which is pleasantly disorienting. As you read and listen along, words and phrases pop out and repeat in odd, out of sync ways, "breaking linear progress up into effervescent bubbles of sound and meaning," says Slightweight.
Slightweight’s focus on separate communities and non-hierarchical experience is mirrored in his career. All of his work is self-published; most of it is not sold, but traded with friends in the underground rock and queer arts communities of which he is a part. When asked about his take on current cartooning or mass culture,
Slightweight said that he had “not bought a book or comic or record in something like three years.” Partially this is because he makes virtually no money; he said he walks during the winter rather than taking the bus in order to save up the funds to put out his comics, and he mentioned that one of his main sources of support is food stamps. In ad dition, though Slightweight noted that he isn’t part of the comics’ scene, mainstream or alternative, because he doesn’t want to be. “I don’t need to pay attention to what dude is the up and rising star,” he pointed out. “Nor do I need to worry about sexism or discrimination, since the underground community of which I am a part has lots of women, and lots of queers, and lots of feminist men. A grouping of women and queers is not a ghetto
— it’s a wonderful thing,” he said.
Slightweight, then, is committed to a separatist rather than an integrationist model of feminist culture; when asked if he would be more interested in the mainstream if it included more interesting, feminist-friendly work, his answer was essentially, “no.” For Slightweight, "the very existence of the mainstream is the problem"; he argued that "the point of feminism was to decentralize power." "You
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have as much right to talk back to culture as culture has to talk to you,” he said. The point, then, for Slightweight, is not for marginalized groups to step into positions of power, but for them to "speak from where they are, and so break down a hierarchy which insists on privileging certain creators or certain voices (Bakhtin: 1981).
This makes a clear point in my analytical summary - the separatist focus of this particular individual, which is expressed through Dewayne Slightweight's ideological rejection of what he sees (or smells, or represents; "I don't want to privilege sight!") as the dominant culture, his self-removal from the economy, both as a producer and a consumer, and his rejection of dominant gender categories (he proposes 3 categories in his world - women, queers, and feminist men). Dewayne
Slightweight embraces an alternative separate community characterized by reciprocal rather than market exchange and a general egalitarianism (Deleuze:
1977). Comic art is his means of espousal and thereby, education.
The reality of his comics, although simulated and told through anthropomorphic, un-sexed quadrilaterals, takes an active role in commemorating and exploring what Bakhtin referred to as a "novelized past" (1981:16).
Slightweight's radical visual narratives actively negotiate power relations in a way that legitimizes and celebrates the alternative experience of the communities of which he is some part (women, queers, and feminist men). Slightweight appears to connect to an understanding of power relations as a negotiable process (Foucault
1966). This is based on an organic, homological structure of kinship, love, and support, by which distinctive creations and ensembles, symbols and objects which are homologous with the focal concerns, activities, group structure, and collective self-image of the subculture are depicted in radical panorama (Willis 2000).
When I asked Slightweight - What is at stake in such a project? he
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responded:
"Some could argue that despair is the prevailing emotional current right now in many political communities-where the only "belief" is in our collective and accumulated failures-of stopping the war, of building a creative and effective left."
Slightweight hereby speaks to the conditions of a current paradigm, wherein the political arena seems either unthinkable or out of reach, eliciting intense cynicism from people whose votes aren't counted, whose needs are ignored, whose grievances have no impact, and for whom "politics" signifies little but abuse of power.
An unending sense of emergency is matched only by a corresponding sense of alienation, of not "knowing what to do," and often, of not knowing what to think and how to feel. And yet, like so many, Slightweight persists; to move people, not only by necessity, but also by a relentless search for joy, for a life that can be called good and just. Can hopelessness be transformed? Is there anything useful about guilt?
How might we collectivize our despair, and our joys? What's YOUR utopia in need of a rescue? To explore all this, Slightweight's work demands engagement, ideas, energy, and participation, to express and enact our opinions about the world.
PART SIX | COLLECTIVE INTERACTION WITHIN THE "LIVING ART MUSEUM" -
COMMUNITY, DISPERSAL AND RECIPROCITY WITHIN THE ELSEWHERE
COLLABORATIVE IN GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA:
In 1937, Joe and Sylvia Gray, with the help of Joe’s brother Melvin, began
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construction on a retail space for stock furniture in downtown Greensboro, North
Carolina, at 607 South Elm Street. Before long, the business, known as Carolina
Sales Company became too big, and in 1939, they moved across the street, purchasing a larger space at 606 and 608 South Elm Street. In 1955, Joe Gray unexpectedly died, leaving Sylvia with three children to raise and the business to run. At some point in the years subsequent to her husband's death, Sylvia began buying ends of fabric bolts from local mills. Upholstery, denim, and finishing ribbon were purchased for cheap and resold. During the late 70s Sylvia’s inventory expanded to include general thrift items such as toys, books, dishes, housewares, wigs, and knick-knacks, junk, whatsamacalits, parts and pieces and particulates, bits and bobs, furniture, glass, etc etc etc. Shopping daily, Sylvia increasingly filled the three-story building until only a small path between the boxes and piles remained.
In time, Sylvia's inventory would become more or less a collection, a hoard, an archive of memory detailing her tastes, interests, and perception of value.
Ribbons were tied around tissue boxes stuffed with toy cars, each individually labeled with tiny white stickers detailing date, year, [and often an exorbitant asking price.] The floor was packed with objects. Some shelves were so full of things that they were spilling out into the aisles. Strings of objects were tied together like charms, each individually knotted. Dolls were preserved in Roman Meal bags, strung together with various other bagged collections, like dresses, jewelry, plastic toys, dried out pens, and were placed on shelves, presiding over a sea of treasures. This was just the downstairs, for the upstairs too was filled. Fourteen rooms on the second story had accumulated artifacts from Gray's collection, in addition to the remains of the mad experiments of an inspired and aspiring furniture entrepreneur,
David Gray, who throughout the 80’s and 90’s produced a series of injection molding
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designs and a line of fine furniture made of glass and metal.
In 2003, George Scheer, Sylvia Gray's grandson, and Stephanie Sherman, collaborating writers and friends, took a spring break trip to the South with friend
Josh Boyette, and stopped in Greensbo ro to see George’s grandmother’s old store.
They brought back with them a box of things collected from the store. In May 2003,
George recruited two friends from Michigan, founders Josh Fox and Matt Merfert, and together, they moved to the store to excavate and explore, clearing just enough space in the front of the store to make room for a couch. Declaring “Nothing for
Sale!” the crew began the extensive process of discovery and organization. Without neither roadmap nor design the group set to organizing, sorting, categorizing, and shifting the vast collection of things, guided by the simple understanding that through organization the place for a community would evolve. Founders Stephanie Sherman and Allen Davis joined them in October.
Elsewhere became a 501(c) 3 non-profit organization in 2004, and launched its artist residency program in 2005, bringing 35 creative producers across media and discipline to Greensboro to create new works using the collection. Soon the store where nothing was for sale became a living museum, and to this day continues the ever evolving process of “moving things around.” The salience with which visitors and artists alike share, and interact collectively in the immersive experience of this unique site, speaks not to an idea but to a shared narrative written in attics and basements across the country.
The Elsewhere Collaborative invites participation in a variety of ways, providing daily access through tours, and creating special events for community engagement every Friday. On my first visit to Elsewhere, I participated in a roleplaying game called “CITY!” CITY! is a collaborative, subjective, performance game
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where players re-imagine the building , and everything in it, as a City with
Elsewherians and museum visitors acting as CITYizens. Drama, corruption, and a button economy ensue. The goal is for the participants to explore the politics of exchange and pretending through the ongoing collaborative penning of the fictional story of the CITYizens, in the re-imagined landscape of the Elsewhere museum as a city.
Often, games of pretend don't stand up to the test of time- but at Elsewhere, the museum uses CITY to transition easily through a re-imagination process into a museumenclosed metropolitan arena. Visitors and residents are invited to play and perform, buy in to the State, fight the power of an imagined currency of buttons, attempt to climb corporate ranks, or even write for CITY's local newspaper.
CITY!, serves as an important link between the organization at Elsewhere, and the community. When I asked Steve, a founder of Elsewhere, if he thought there were certain specificities that make Greensboro receptive to Elsewhere's creative endeavors, he recalled Greensboro’s unique history:
“…Greensboro definitely has an appreciation for the arts, which I think was spurred largely by wealth from all of the local textile mills throughout much of the twentieth century. And uh, the economic development of downtown Greensboro is probably another contributing factor. I know that following the depression, real estate in the area was cheap, enough that the Grays were able to purchase the buildings on Lower Elm Street that would eventually house our space.
”
A review of the history of Greensboro reflects Steve’s sentiments and perspectives. For example, post-WWII saw a manufacturing boom, and accordantly, the city grew. In large part, however, manufacturing began to be outsourced to Asia, halting growth and encroachment from developers in much of downtown Greensboro, thus
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avoiding the evidenced pandemic of industrialization in other areas. History was preserved in downtown Greensboro, whereas in many revitalized cities, old buildings have been turned into chic shopping centers, (as was the case with Fort Thunder in
Providence, Rhode Island). Thus, space remained for the fledgling arts group, now known as Elsewhere.
CITY, therefore, serves as the means by which residents, interns, and visitors to
Elsewhere, insert themselves in an interesting history. To embody that effort, each staff member, resident, and visitor assumes a persona for the evening. There is usually a banker, who doles out the local currency of buttons, on his/her personal esteem of one's good deeds. There is an immigration officer who welcomes visitors and somewhat directs traffic into the space. Press agents may walk around, encouraging participants to reveal their stories of immigration and emigration. These are a few of the recurring elements, beyond which each performance varies based on what participants, who have free access to all clothing and props, can create. On my visit, for example, CITY!
– welcomed me as the proprietor of a phantasmagoric deli, and others in a fantastical amalgam of this created landscape.
The ephemeral nature of the performances and the ever-evolving physical space mean that it is crucial for residents to understand the inimitable history of spaces like Elsewhere. Unlike other residency programs, where some new crop of artists and instructors come in to clean empty studios each year, Elsewhere manifests a trajectory that started with Sylvia's thrift store. Residents jump on at random intervals throughout the season, adding their mark to the space without taking anything away.
A friend of mine, and fellow working artist, Curty Cush, toured the Elsewhere
Collaborative space with me in March of 2010, and candidly described to me his
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experience:
"So we start poking into these rooms. Everything was immediately critically bizarre. My sense was that there were no real ceilings on the rooms; because the ceilings were so high, there were just built these walls of shelves ten feet high or so that didn't seem to quit. The walls looked attacked but ordered, covered with all kinds of crazy shit. There were doll parts and board games everywhere, in amazing colors. There were bolts of fabric, animal figurines, cast-offs from upholstery projects. I don't seem to recall a horrible stench or piles of laundry or anything else that I would have associated with a bunch of mentally disturbed people living together, or the collection of a deranged hoarder. There were piles of stuff, and books on the shelves. And handmade clothes. I remember immediately wanting squeegees and paintbrushes and bottles of ink and carving utensils and glue and chicken wire and stacks of parent sheets and staple guns and all of the stuff you could imagine needing to make something awesome. And after all of this overwhelming information, like 10 rooms or something, I finally noticed that the walls were covered with Army soldiers glued perpendicular to the wall, in battle with one another. Seriously, there was enough room that whoever had put that shit up there had illustrated whole battalions, one outflanking or ambushing another. There were just objects crawling violently all over the wall..."
Almost daily, Elsewhere's residents, interns and visitors as well as other artists working and residing in collective living spaces or collaborative approaches to
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the production and presentation of artistic media discover new objects that reflect their own fascinating mind and life, and whose placement and preservation reference the eccentric process by which the objects of collections are ordered. This mass of objects tells a cultural narrative about material excess, consumption, and overproduction. The re-ordering of things and the tradition of collections speaks to the potential to re-imagine collaborative creativity and the role of place and presence in telling a community’s story, and a re-imagining of what social theorist Guy Debord labeled the "spectacle".
Far from reducing the connections between present and past to a single, official line of succession like the museums on which Dorst focused in his critiques of traditionalization and the archived historical society, Elsewhere residents, interns and visitors have expended huge amounts of energy to complicate, ramify and extend connections, regardless of where they might lead (1989:129). The space at
Elsewhere alternatively manifests an "indexical" relation to the past - not living history (recreate past way of life) or traditionalization (present unfolding from past).
The Elsewhere Collaborative interns, residents, and visitors have collectively appropriated to themselves the tangible reality of the past through fragments chipped directly from it, in some cases quite literally, remaining dedicated to an interest in things, not their images or ideas. Collective interaction is sustained through the existence of an "un-alienated tourist." Unlike tourism in the traditional museum or archived depiction of visual images that might reduce the experience to a dispersed form of consumption, the interns, residents, and visitors to the
Elsewhere space have the infinite capacity to make connections. Their effort is revelatory, in its resistance to a totality. A blatancy of pastiche, that is irreducible to narrative coherence, and manifested by the concentrated expression of a
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discourse/practice that runs against the hegemonic order, describes a moment of critical, and collective interaction/reflexivity.
PART SEVEN | CONSIDERATION, INCORPORATION, GENEROSITY, AND
MANIFESTATION - A CONCLUSION:
The efforts of the Cobra House, artist Dewayne Slightweight, and the
Elsewhere Collaborative have all provided different opportunities for creative collaboration and acts of resistance. Through Elsewhere’s living museum, innovative residency program, educational initiatives, projects and events led by the collective efforts and interactions of many, Elsewhere connects people and things.
Elsewher e’s museum explores and exhibits the conjunctions of permanence and transformation, intention and accident, the everyday and the exceptional. Both the
Elsewhere Space and the Cobra House explore the collection and arrangement of objects as the common basis for creation, creators express critique and creative practice through their interactions and intersections. Collective living spaces like the
Cobra House engage “collaborative” as a creative model wherein individuals pursue particular visions by building from a shared collection of materials upon, within, and amongst others’ works, skills, and approaches to living. Collaboration occurs with others through reciprocity towards things, environments, histories, and as a positioning towards configurations that accept new responses, conditions, and scenarios.
The collection (or “set”) of objects from these spaces forms a limit within which infinitely derivable contexts, works, and arrangements are demonstrated and
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performed. Here, antique objects and art objects, neither sacred, coexist in a transforming installation in the public landscape that creates constellations of materials, processes, and products. The internal circulation of things enables new approaches to creative practice as a basis for communication and response.
Layered orders provide the conditions of possibility for shifting legibilities that discover symbiotic productions at the juncture of object as event. Organization becomes a means for ordering and tracing the trajectories of an evolving community.
Dewayne Slightweight’s complex visual narratives offer an ongoing, unfolding story of life and community as an art form. Through his art, we are heralded to explore the slippages of ourselves as characters in our own lives as an ongoing performance t o us and others. Slightweight’s comics urge that we remain open to being visible, being read, considered, interpreted, imbued with meanings we didn’t intend. Ideas are explored through the enactivity of visual narratives that intend to dismantle certain conventions and the privileging of elite voices. And all of us are collaborating on curating this process, wherein we follow tributaries, trajectories, caverns, methods, experiments, that express our wonder and agency in an ongoing unfolding of this story of making something, and truly becoming.
Through a multifarious commitment to site-specific works, actions, ideas, the spaces and individuals mentioned in this ethnography have established an ethos of consideration, incorporation, generosity, and manifestation. I have investigated this microcosm as a means for exploring the interaction between the particular and the general. I have remained interested in how these specific contexts define prevailing contemporary logics and paradigms, and how individuals and groups can operate responsively to and within those contexts and frameworks to engender new acts of
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resistance. Collective and collaborative approaches to artistic media, as I have demonstrated, are deeply invested in place-making as a practice. Within an environment of at-hand resources, notions and concepts are always within reach, driven by the proximate and reconsidered in acts of reclamation, alternative education, and immersive, collective experiences.
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