INTHECONVERSATION

Free Papayas - Eating in Public by Gaye Chan and Nandita Sharma

Part 1 : Autumn

In November of 2003 we planted twenty papaya seedlings on public land near our house in Kailua, Hawai'i. In doing so, we broke the existing laws of the state that delineate this space as 'public' and thereby set the terms for its use. Our act has two major purposes: one is to grow and share food; the other is to problematize the concept of 'public' within public space.

Our questioning of public space may, at first glance, seem odd, perhaps even reckless. Many progressives, after all, see the defense of all things public as a necessary response to neo-liberal assaults on state-funded spaces and services. The maintenance of resources as 'public' is seen as working against processes of privatization. These sentiments are based upon two assumptions: that public space is the antithesis of private property, and that the existence of public space represents a victory of "the people" over nefarious special interests. The concept of the 'public,' however, is a corollary of nationalist ideologies of state power that legitimate and sustain unjust social relationships, particularly those organized through private property rights. The liberal democratic national state, in particular, is camouflaged as a political apparatus, indeed the political apparatus, designed specifically to serve 'the people.' The legitimacy of modern state power within liberal democracies, such as those of Canada and the United States, is widely regarded as being derived from popular, public consent. Concomitantly, the 'public' is touted as holding the power to revoke this legitimacy through their votes or their participation in the state's daily operations. The idea that the national state exists because of the will of 'the people,' however, conflates the existence of the national state with the actions of political rulers/administrators of the moment and promotes the assumption that all have equal access or say in the making of decisions. It also obfuscates how the historic formation of national states is rooted in the struggle over land, labour and life - a struggle lost by those who fought against capitalism and for common, rather than private or state (i.e. 'public') property (Hardt and Negri, 2000). Finally, the conflation of the state and 'public will' conceals that the 'public' is never the sum of all those who are born, live, work and die in any given space, but is limited to members of an-always gendered and racialized discourse of 'citizenry'.

Union Square: Giving It Up For Life: An Interview with Lee Walton by Joseph Del Pesco

(New York, New York) Union Square Park
September 15, 2006—life

On Friday, September 15th effective precisely at noon, Lee Walton left Union Square Park never to return again. Following a self-imposed life restriction, Walton's world got a little bit smaller. In the morning, Walton spent his final hours in the park before his departure. Exactly at noon, Walton descended the steps of the park and began walking south in search of a cold valedictory beer. Walton welcomed and appreciated the company and support on that difficult day

Interview with Joseph del Pesco, April 2007

JDP: When Lee Lozano decided to make "Dropout Piece" in 1971, which involved leaving the artworld for good, she was dissolving the boundaries between art and life. Your work seems to also enact this merger. How has this artwork affected your life?

Art Leisure Instead of Art Work: A Conversation with Randall Szott

Intheconversation's Sal Randolph talks with Randall Szott about collections, cooking, the "art of living," and infra-institutional activity.

SR: You recently announced the closing of your Dilettante Ventures project on your LeisureArts blog. Many of us are very sad to see it end. Could you talk a bit about your intentions in starting the project, and your perspective on it now that it has come to a close?

RS: I created LeisureArts and placekraft as a way to make public ideas and research I had been sorting through for several years. As I think most people are, I was shocked to discover that there appeared to be some interest in my blog(s). I also underestimated the interest in, and animosity towards, my anonymity. I never "revealed" my identity as I didn't believe it would provide any useful context for readers - as I had no real public profile prior to starting Dilettante Ventures.

I had been quite happy to quietly pursue the "art of living" in the highly personal context of my everyday life. Several people encouraged me to share what I was thinking/doing with others and I was growing suspicious of overly individualistic commitments. I was worried I was heading toward solipsism of a sort, so I decided to open up and engage in a larger conversation.

After spending nearly two years of being an advocate for new intellectual infrastructures that would minimize many of the perceived inconsistencies of people who are pursuing similar ideas within an art context, I began to feel as if my public forays had become a distraction from my interests rather than a platform for them. And really, I'm hesitant to seek a platform in the first place. I am happy to have met so many like minded people and to have been challenged by some perceptive critics. The whole thing started to feel an awful lot like a project, a "work" to use art parlance, and I am deeply skeptical about how that can shape one's thinking. I felt like I was in the service of LeisureArts rather than the other way around. The other components of Dilettante Ventures - placekraft and Studiolo54 had already run their course for different reasons, so it seemed like a good time to move on.

Field Test: N55 Shop by Hideous Beast

WHO WE ARE Hideous Beast is a collaborative effort between two artists, Josh Ippel and Charlie Roderick. Through organizing structured participatory events we attempt to encourage cultural activity outside the boundaries of mainstream entertainment and fabricated desire. Critical of the audience as a passive participant, Hideous Beast seeks to coordinate events in which an acknowledged exchange between the event (as entertainment) and the spectator (as collaborator) can generate meanings beyond traditional formalized modes of entertainment.

Service-Works by Josh Greene

from the Service-Works introduction

My name is Josh Greene. I am a 36 - year old artist and waiter. Service-Works is my own foundation that is designed to bridge the gap between my art career and my service industry career. Each month I dedicate one night’s worth of my tips to fund a project. For the past twelve years I have been doing art projects while making a living waiting tables. I currently work as a waiter in a fine-dining restaurant in San Francisco.

The Independent School of Art by Jon Rubin

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

The Love Everybody Movement by Heidi Dorow

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

:: Beautiful Money ::

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

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

Undervattenskonsert by Alison Gerber

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

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

Extreme Reading by Simon Morris and Pavel Büchler

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