Notebook
Deep thoughts with amazing Confluence collaborator Jennifer Newsom during our second class workshop for Fate is Kind.
Fri, Feb. 19, 2021 ⁄ 11:00am–12:15pm
Tomorrow is the Question: Listening as Action
Workshop #3 – Tomorrow is the Question: Listening as Action – Discussion begins @ 11am / Friday, February 19th
https://carleton.zoom.us/j/96423561102?pwd=cG16VUtLT0ZwMk1taUIwUHdXK25sQT09
Looking towards aspects of the African diasporic tradition and its tools, such as cooperative creation, improvisation, and deep listening, we are provided both inside and outside of the context of musicianship, guides that can play significant and important roles in our lives as active neighbors in community. These are social tools to carry with us day-to-day.
For this third workshop for the class Fate is Kind, we will be joined by artist, musician, and 9th Ward elder Douglas Ewart. Centering our focus on the techniques and histories of so-called jazz, “social music” as it was described by Miles Davis, or simply, as described by the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Great Black Music we will, in general, think through how this traditions qualities play a role for non-musicians to be more attentive neighbors. And in specific, we’ll listen to how these attitudes and qualities have played out in Douglas’ life and work, and what his experiences in cooperative creation can teach us moving forward in common.
In preparation for our visit to the Fate is Kind class by 9th Ward neighbor, artist and musician, Douglas Ewert, we are viewing this conversation between Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richards Abrams, Frederick Berry, and George Lewis.
As well, we are listening to the first hour of a series of radio programs originally broadcast in the late 60s on NYC’s WBAI, a long conversation between composers John Cage and Morton Feldman.
Social Margins: An Assembly in Text
As part of the Mt. Analogue class Fate is Kind we are reading Michel de Certeau’s Walking in the City, an excerpt from his Critique of Everyday Life.
“Act so that there is no use in a centre. A wide action is not a width.”
– Gertrude Stein
Social Margins: An Assembly in Text
As part of the Mt. Analogue class Fate is Kind we are reading Action Around the Edges, an excerpt from curator and critic Douglas Crimp’s critical memoir, Before Picture. This essay, read in tandem with text from Situationist International, looks at the intersection between interventionist art practices, namely that of Gordon Matta Clark and his piece Days End – a structural intervention of a derelict warehouse pier on NYC’s Hudson River – and the historical legacy and politics surrounding the gay cruising scene of the same era around the Hudson piers.
Social Margins: An Assembly in Text
As part of the Mt. Analogue class Fate is Kind we are reading excerpts from the Situationist International Reader.
Sun, Feb. 21, 2021 ⁄ 6:00–7:30pm
Mt. Analogue Discussions #2 w/ Davu Seru & Patrick Shiroishi
Sound and Self within the Social Landscape: Davu Seru & Patrick Shiroishi in Discussion
WHEN: Sunday, February 21 at 6:00 PM (US Central Time)
WHERE: via Zoom https://carleton.zoom.us/j/93952480199?pwd=U0svZHB1Rkd4VkdnU1VnT1VESmVCZz09
Patrick Shiroishi and Davu Seru, mid and west coast stalwarts of expanded composition, have each in the last few years composed pieces that speak to the power and social necessity embedded in the history of improvisation, “social music,” and the continued role that abstract sound plays in our understanding of the spaces between us. Be those spaces the distance between us, or the distance between ourselves and the realization of our best selves.
In 2018 Seru premiered Dead King Mother, a piece inspired by the oft-told family tale of his Uncle Clarence and his desperate actions following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In early 2020 Shiroishi released Descension, an album of extended solo saxophone inspired by his family’s history in American concentration camps during WWII.
For this second session in the Mt. Analogue Discussion series, Seru and Shiroishi will delve into these two works, the intersection of familial and collective historical trauma, the systems and impulses that guide and manipulate them, and how they each utilize the tools of sound and voicing in abstraction as a means of expression and communion with intersecting histories.
About Davu Seru
Davu is an improvising musician and composer. He’s worked with numerous improvising musicians and composers throughout the United States and France and is bandleader for the ensembles Motherless Dollar and No Territory Band. For the year 2017-2018 he served as the first-ever composer-in-residence at Studio Z in Saint Paul. He’s curated concert series for over the past 20 years and has received awards from McKnight Foundation (2020 Composer Fellowship), Jerome Foundation (2017-18 Composer/Sound Artist Fellow), American Composers Forum (Minnesota Emerging Composer Award), the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council (Next Step Fund) and has received commissions from the Zeitgeist Ensemble and Walker Art Center. In addition, Davu is a published author and is a visiting instructor in the Department of English at Hamline University.
He lives in Saint Paul, MN, with his partner Emily and son August.
About Patrick Shiroishi
Patrick Shiroishi is a Japanese-American multi-instrumentalist & composer based in Los Angeles.
Tue, Feb. 16, 2021 ⁄ 5:00–6:30pm
Mt. Analogue Discussions #1 w/ Julia Bryan-Wilson
Art, Work, Craft, Resistance: Julia Bryan-Wilson in Discussion
WHEN: Tuesday, February 16 at 5:00 PM (US Central Time)
WHERE: via Zoom https://carleton.zoom.us/j/94805489346?pwd=d0hpdXhlWEpoOGdQSVZ0eXY4a3NPUT09
From her pre-academic days in radical feminist media networks to her focus on art and labor, craft and activism, and now the role of dance as a cultural form of grassroots resistance to repressive structures, Julia Bryan-Wilson has paid unique focus on how matters of everyday existence intertwine with deep rooted needs for cultural production as a social force for change. For this first session in the Mt. Analogue Discussions, Confluence Studio’s on-going series of conversations with artists, academics, activists, and global thinkers, we are proud to collaborate with the Art Dept. of Carleton College to host a discussion with Bryan-Wilson about how she sees her role as an art historian who works across difference and geographies and how she sees her work as a scholar as co-extensive with her work as an activist. Through this personal frame we hope the discussion will provide space to reflect more broadly on both the state of artistic production today as well as the role that the academy could play in furthering the cause of equity and equality.
About Julia Bryan-Wilson
Julia Bryan-Wilson is Doris and Clarence Maro Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of California at Berkeley, where she also directs the university’s Art Research Center. Her research interests include theories of artistic labor, feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, performance and dance, production/fabrication, craft histories, photography, video, visual culture of the nuclear age, and collaborative practices. She is the author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (University of California, 2009); Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing (with Glenn Adamson, Thames & Hudson, 2016); and Fray: Art and Textile Politics (University of Chicago, 2017). She is the editor of OCTOBER Files: Robert Morris (MIT Press, 2013), and co-editor of three journal special issues (“Amateurism,” Third Text, 2020; “Visual Activism,” Journal of Visual Culture, 2016; and “Time Zones: Durational Art in its Contexts,” Representations, 2016).
Bryan–Wilson is an adjunct curator at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo, where in 2019 she co-curated the exhibit Women’s Histories: Artists before 1900; in 2020 at MASP she organized Histórias da Dança/Histories of Dance. With Andrea Andersson, she curated Cecilia Vicuña: About to Happen, which opened at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans in 2017 and traveled to the Berkeley Art Museum, the Henry Art Gallery, the ICA Philadelphia, and MOCA North Miami. She is currently writing a book about Louise Nevelson.
Fri, Feb. 12, 2021 ⁄ 11:00am–12:15pm
Invisible City: The Psychology of Place
Workshop #2 – Invisible City: The Psychology of Place – Discussion begins @ 11am / Friday, February 12th
https://carleton.zoom.us/j/96423561102?pwd=cG16VUtLT0ZwMk1taUIwUHdXK25sQT09
Each social landscape is embedded with its own unique, ever changing, psychological elements. The city, its dense and frenetic nature, creates a space of swirling social transformations where each day represents new possibilities of living in proximity. Time, as with everything, has its effects, and attitudes change. These changing attitudes find form in the urban landscape through our interactions as well as the structures we build and vice versa.
For our second workshop in the Mt. Analogue class Fate is Kind: Abstraction and Patterning in a Life with Others we will be joined in conversation by Jennifer Newsom, architect (Dream the Combine) and professor of architecture at the University of Minnesota to discuss the ways that artists can help illustrate these social flows and patterns, their forms and attitudes.
As always we will seed, as well as continue, our conversation through Social Margins, the Confluence social annotation platform; “an assembly in text.”
An excerpt from the Situationist International Reader
The early stages of the Mt. Analogue Discussions are beginning to take shape. First out of the gate: Julia Bryan Wilson on Craft and Collectivity, Patrick Shiroishi & Davu Seru on Familial and Collective Trauma and how sound, improvisation, and abstraction can serve as potent social tools for interpretation, and Marc Fischer on publication and self-publishing as a tool to illustrate the violence of bureaucracy.
Social Margins: An Assembly in Text
As part of the Mt. Analogue class Fate is Kind, we are reading Ágnes Erőss’s Living Memorial and Frozen Monuments: The Role of Social Practice in Memorial Sites
Social Margins: An Assembly in Text
As part of the Mt. Analogue class Fate is Kind, we are reading Acconci’s essay Public Space in Private Time. Written in 1990 as the effects of digital technology with beginning to become more prevalent in daily life, the essay allows us to consider the deepening conflicts between notions of public and private space in cities. How do Acconci’s thoughts here relate to Mineapolis’ 9th Ward, the rise of encampments, protest, the autonomous nature of George Floyd Square, and their affects?
Fri, Feb. 5, 2021 ⁄ 7:30am–12:15pm
Cities and Memory: Monuments, Publics, and the Conflicts of History
Workshop #1 – Cities and Memory: Monuments, Publics, and the Conflicts of History
Discussion Begins @
11:10am / Friday Feb. 5th
How do we memorialize historical events, most especially when those events are not singular, linear, or even history for many, but continuous living arrangements that are yet to recognize any sense of finality or definitive social transformation? For the first workshop discussion in Fate is Kind: Abstraction & Patterning in a Life with Others Powderhorn neighbor and artist Xavier Tavera will join our discussion as we think through the role of monuments and memorials, the events of the MPLS Uprising, and the manner by which monuments as historical markers act as specific objects which can record, obscure, empower, and / or manipulate People’s History.
In parallel with our discussion we will begin our series of social annotations, continuations of our conversations using the online software Hypothesis to create an “assembly in text” concerning our present conditions as 9th Ward neighbors, those conditions larger meanings and connections, as well as considerations for ways to transform those conditions for the better by looking more broadly at how they relate across time, place, and experience.
We will be reading two essays in parallel with our discussion, wherein our collective notes will be part of Social Margins: An Assembly in Text, Confluence’s collective annotation platform.
Ágnes Erőss – Living Memorial and Frozen Monuments: The Role of Social Practice in Memorial Sites
Vito Acconci – Public Space in Private Time
A great and necessary OpEd by Roy Scranton in the NY Times today. We should all take his words into account, maybe most especially his closing paragraph about connection, communion, and lasting mutual aid. He’s right, we need, and increasingly will need one another even more, in the days, years, and decades to come.
“But we do have time. We’d better take the time to fashion revolutionary selves, revolutionary lives, revolutionary relationships. Mouths don’t win the war. It don’t even win the people. Neither does haste, urgency, and stretch-out-now insistence. Not all speed is movement.”
– Toni Cade Bambara