08-01-2023
Presently finishing up the drawing representing one of the dwellings built for the Tale. It is my 30-60 manipulation of an isometric projection, also called the John Hejduk projection, named after the once director of the Cooper Union School of Art and Architecture where I studied for two years … before he sent me packing when I tried to tell him, in person, that it was intolerable to teach students how to design castles for millionaires at a school situated in the middle of the New-York homeless district (the Bowery in the 70s).
On the other hand, my exclusion from the school of architecture gave me a chance to transfer to the Art department across the street, where I met Leo Amino … The rest is (my modest) history!
The purely conceptual way Hejduk has perfected the representation of his own, mostly unbuilt, houses has nothing to do with architecture as a builders’ trade and everything to do with the art of designing the conceptual spaces his tale-like constructions would require for themselves to glow, if accomplished. I find it well fit for my purpose! Without a single word, Hejduk’s work (and ‘a Tale’) speaks of expanding the mind, pausing, imagining. Surely not of materiality in architecture (or sculpture)!
08-04-2023
An interesting and very accessible way to develop a critique of ideology/ies can be found in Karl Korsch’s 1923 book ‘Marxism and philosophy’. At least it is my conclusion after reading an article in today’s issue of Médiapart. So much so that l immediately looked for a copy on ThriftBooks. I would give it to Rayn because, at first sight, I see a similarity in thought development between Korsch and Rayn when she says that an opinion is only as good as its holder for the time he holds it! Korsch, on the other hand, states that (my free translation), “The notion of granting a theory an autonomous relevance outside the mobility of facts would neither be materialist nor dialectic. Possibly idealistic metaphysics?”. This was 1923. The transcendence our world does not need, right now?
Our perception of reality can only be partial, limited to our own reach, our ‘local’. Past the length of our arms we are reduced to a fallible reliance on past experience, theoretical knowledge or others’ own brands of pragmatism. Is this true? I am not a philosopher! But I believe this is where TINY, the notion of tiny, gets all its importance and power. Tiny is not an idealistic notion. It is real. It defines our reach, individual and/or collective. It opens to the idea of the possible, the feasible. Therefore to that of improvement, betterment, (controlled) growth. It also puts into question that of perfection or truth.
08-07-2023
This is a good example of how reading stimulates my mind. For example, this article by Karl Korsch inspires me to put into question, once more, the legitimacy of artworks like ‘a Tale of Charleston’. Am I not autonomizing my thoughts about the future of Charleston’s local Black cultures when I insist on creating artifacts without seeking their voices? Not sure. It is a tale after all, not a community participatory endeavor which would require reciprocity and exchange. My ambition is not to propose an urban planning design but to expose a creative vision, to realize a vast visualization, open to uncontrollable interpretations, towards the liberation of some im/possible dreams!
Yet, not only does the thinking of Korsch help me justify the tale, it also stresses, again and again, the importance of actualizing one’s sources, one’s beliefs, one’s knowledge. Lest one’s hopes for transformation succumb and find comfort in the repetition of same, same, same… More like a definition for nightmare!
—–
I believe TINYisPOWERFUL will be an agent of change the day it offers communities inventive art tools for the facilitation of meetings, dialogues, public conversations.
I can remember how Amy from ROOTS was intrigued by the question of whether administrative processes, if they were more inspired and motivated by/in the spirit of the arts, if they were not relying on coded languages, could open to liberating modes of record keeping, book keeping, archiving, managing …
The Question-Relay is a case in point, where the question and answer back-and -forth remains open, beyond expectations. How about question-relay sessions on personnel interaction, cross-departmental relations, accounting practices?
I am taking all this to ROOTS camp which starts tomorrow, late afternoon.
08-14-2023
Back from ROOTS camp! And what a famous one it was. A rarely matched level of emotional expression, from collective love to individual anguish and deep anger. Too much to report, really. But for sure, what a good year for the TINYisPOWERFUL team to meet there, conduct a successful Question-Relay session and experience together the full range of Rooters’ talents.
—–
I am taking it upon myself to write a letter to Wendy – new executive director of ROOTS, after the departure of Michele Ramos – and to Aimée, who has followed us closely and has come to Charleston. I need to communicate to them that so often, in groups like ROOTS, conflicts come up between staff and membership for lack of dialogue and ensuing misunderstandings around priorities. My idea is for the spirit of the arts to better inspire the administrative functions of the paid staff as well as the work done by the membership and its Executive Committee. Practically, why not imagine and propose consistent art or art-inspired collaborative activities to both staff and members, to relieve the tensions of work, share a common experience, cultivate a deeper sense of purpose?
I already have the last sentence for the letter!
“… Let Roots become a crucible for art administrators of your’s two caliber!” ,
or something similar. This is important. I remember this anecdote about Flaubert, asked about his progress in the writing of Madame Bovary, and responding: “I have the ending of all my sentences !” I always took this to mean that he was now in control of the literary flow, the musicality. What else?
08-16-2023
Now I must write a short note for the upcoming NewsLetter. The first in possibly a year! It concerns the closure of Choice – Gourmet Foods, the TINY BUSINESS opened by Charles Vannort. I saw him before going to camp, about three weeks ago. He knows that neither the location of his store nor the opening date worked in his favor. But he is adamant: rent increases made it impossible for him to make a profit, besides the many unfulfilled promises of his landlord.
I was just reading a general economic article about big corporations which, when facing inflation, choose to surf it at the expense of their customers rather than be adventurous, restrained, empathetic, good neighbors. In other words, they jack up their prices beyond necessity, taking advantage of the comparative economic power they have over their TINY competitors, in order to guarantee and often balloon their margins of profit. So much for the spirit of enterprise supposed to inspire business.
Service to Community for the Harmonious Development of America …
Service to Shareholders, the most Pecunious Citizens among US.
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It is before covid that TINYisPOWERFUL sought out TINY Businesses which would join the cohort and participate in our activities. At one point, we counted 34. When covid hit, we had already opened a space, the COMMUNITY LAB. We had chosen Reynolds Avenue, in a very challenged area of North Charleston, to expand our territory and create as rich an exchange with the TINY Businesses there, as we had established with those in the Charleston MLK district. The pandemic pretty much wiped the collaborative/ community part of the work out of our activities.
Something else the pandemic did very expectedly was to break the back of too many of our members. It also triggered a tough wave of inflation, which acted as the final blow to the smallest among us, and their capacity to resist and survive, find a successor, get over a medical episode or adapt to today’s unjust economic model…
After Rose Florist, Island Breeze, UncLeon, the Chronicle, Poke San, the Community Owned Credit Union, and others, were pushed into the margins, still now …
… the latest victim we must regretfully announce is
CHOICE GOURMET – MARKET AND DELI –
Ever since Charles Vannort opened his business, a few blocks from Park Circle, I would visit his shop regularly, check him out, make a note of his successes and his complaints. Before opening he was already concerned with his dependency on the landlord. A corporate landlord at that! Indeed, from the very beginning, he was promised a rapid construction, a compatible neighbor, in this brand new mini-mall, close to a CVS store. Of course there were delays, long delays, which are so detrimental to good business planning. After opening, many problem arose, mostly concerning an essential piece: temperature control! Air conditioning, awnings, no shade for sidewalk extension during covid …
Then, as for any burgeoning TINY BUSINESS, without ever enough traffic, came the question of paying the rent. Unfortunately, at the end, it is the rent which did Charles in. Not exactly the rent though. I should say: the attitude of the landlord vis-a-vis his struggling tenant. The landlord would not budge when Charles would plea for concessions. It was a corporate landlord, don’t forget! Of course he would not measure the heart Charles was putting into the work. He would expect a check, regardless of circumstances. He had, in reality, separated the source of his wealth from the agents of its production.
In that, Charles Vannort’s landlord was just following the general model of the time. He was riding the inflation wave to his advantage, regardless of its human consequences. Profit before people is the name of the corporate game.
* * *
Last Thursday, around six in the evening, I was in my studio. The phone rang. Immediately I recognized the voice of the caller. It was Sammie. Sammie of Fresh Cuts Barber. We had not talked for maybe eight months. He wanted to share that he was going to France for a week! His friendly gesture, his joy became my joy. We are friends, surely.
On the TINYisPOWERFUL postcard we printed for him before covid, as we did for all our participants, Sammie’s own words are:
“My legacy is an art without an eraser!”
Eraser – Eraser? Here, we don’t erase – we celebrate!
08-21-2023
This time again, to close yesterday’s page, l was tempted to get into an unnecessary high praise of TINY BUSINESS, with deflated and tired words. They were reflective of my own exhaustion and how it translates into platitudes.
Good thing the studio work is doing better. Doing well, actually! With Gwylène, we are rejuvenating our (my?) formal vocabulary, as we remember the lessons from ‘Space and its Representations’ (the course we designed and taught together at Beaux-Arts School, Nancy, France). Indeed, the passage from the second to the third dimension and back is traitorous but exhilarating.
This morning I also discovered the present wave of feminist literature in Spain. Inevitably, I added to it the global fame of the Spanish women soccer team at the World Cup after its win over England. I felt compelled to order a book by Cristina Morales, ‘Lecture Facile’, from a French online bookstore l just discovered: RECYCLIVRE.COM. Definitely not Amazon.
Can’t wait to receive this new book, since I am close to finishing ‘Another Country’ by James Baldwin – very easy read as far as the storyline is concerned. As for the deep psychological dissection of the two questions of race and gender relations in America (and France?) at the time, good thing the literary style is smooth! B’cause the human relationships it is about are not! Rather bleak actually but sharp as a razor blade in their reality. This Baldwin is dangerously powerful.
08-25-2023
In preparation for tonight TINY INVESTIGATIONS meeting.
I have decided to test my ability to improvise!
I am writing some topics down and will ad-lib on each of them.
The subject is rather familiar though: ROOTS, the camp, what was done, how can it help us here, at the Charleston rhizome … which seems to still be one of the most active rhizomes of ROOTS.
– A FIFTEEN MINUTE SLOT FOR EACH PARTICIPANT
– much better than a 5 minute slot!
– although, the shorter the time you have to affirm your own ideas, the more important the clarity, contextualizing and updating!
– ROOTS CAMP
emotional
active
no visual arts? Is this accurate?
– QUESTON-RELAY
successful and well attended.
We even got some feedback: session was a bit too undirected, slow to start. But seemingly only, because unfamiliar to rooters?
THE USE OF ‘RE’ IN WORDS, VERBS, SENTENCES
– ‘re’ as in REnaissance? Make America great AGAIN?
My point is that we may have to come up with a grammar adapted to the reality of the moment: life is change(Heraclitus). No room for REpeats in times of change
– the Question-Relay process wants to avoid the RE, by giving participants a chance to change the direction of the dialogue in other, still untested directions …
THE CONFLICT BETWEEN ADMIN AND ARTISTS
– actually, between admin – artists – excom
– Angela in search of ‘a container’, where to expose issues, vent anger, find innovative propositions.
THE CASE OF GABRIELA WIENER: “HUACO PORTRAITS”
Huacas are sacred spaces where kings, religious characters are burried with (ceramic) objects of striking power. Precise portraits of real people: Huaco portraits . Wiener sees them as ID cards, from to the pre-columbian Moche culture.
From there she builds a whole pre-hispanic portrait of her ancestors, deconstructs the post-hispanic period and comes up with an amazingly clear and powerfully, very direct understanding of the present.
I found one of her other books translated in English: ‘UNDISCOVERED’, but I chose to buy her latest, translated in French, ‘PORTRAITS HUACAS’.
08-26-2023
So, yesterday, the attendance was disappointing in its number but not in its character. For example, it is the first time in so many years, that there were more men than women in the house! And they were of quality. ‘ Must be Victoria’s recruitment work which bears fruit. And they were all Black. I have to apologize for skipping names but here were two filmmakers, the local head of Black Lives Matters, a game designer (if I understand), and our ROOTS partner Omari. What is most striking here is that the first three are under thirty. I just hope TiP will be able to offer them a space to pursue their work as they add to and enrich our values and mission. I understand more clearly now that
TINYisPOWERFUL IS not necessarily about the number of participants but very much about the social array they cover. That is where diversity is also a matter of age, activities, geography, family roots … whatever makes up individual environments, which, together, create communities …
08-27-2023
Listening attentively to 6 different interpretations of Schubert’s Quintet for 2 cellos, offered by the Sunday morning France Musique program of this, the last August week-end of 2023 ‘La Tribune des Critiques de Disques’. I insist on the date because I wonder whether, in a year from now, I myself will be around for an other contemplative listening! It is how intensely interiorized and interiorizing this music is. Because it is actually Schubert himself, looking forward and perceiving his own destiny. We know, he won’t be around in a year. He’d better do well with this piece to pass on his message of intense melancholy, between vision and despair – and his expression of how art injects the intensity of hope into eternity: there is life in and after death. It is music!
This is Art!
Now, I go to my studio to make sure that art will be well served by my attempt at making sense of the incoherence in the unexpected, in the unknown! Because this is really where we are in this first quarter of this 21st century. We are past post-Heraclitus! Are we so certain that nothing is sure but change? Not really. If we do not succeed in negotiating the sharp 1.5º C turn, nothing will be sure but doom! In any case, either way,
in either case, we will get busy, feverishly tracing new projection curves, fully contradicting the factual uncertainty of the future.
PS: non of this is supposed to make any sense, of course.
08-30-2023
February 11, 2019, ‘BU Today’ (a Boston University newspaper) reports on a lecture given at BU by Angela Davis. One excerpt gets me going back to a remark I made yesterday during the Creative Sink. When asked what my check-in was for the day, I answered that I believed that TINYisPOWERFUL would do better if it followed up on and drew from some of its collective experiences like the Beeple show, or the latest Halsey gallery gathering and Friday’s Tiny Investigation at 68 Devereaux.
My point was that, for example, had we had the opportunity to analyse the Beeple show, I would have expressed my revulsion for its high level of violent content. Now, in the meantime, because we ignored it, I may well have forgotten Beeple altogether. This would definitely be proof of my unconsciously separating from our work. Really too bad… Fortunately though, in the meantime, I had found that series of radio hours dedicated to Angela Davis. She had been on my mind for a while now. Her relevance is so very evident today. Particularly her views on non-violence … Looping back to Beeple, his over-the-top violence makes violence ordinary. And ordinary violence, if I remember Beeple, is mostly directed at women … I am in a loop. The violent Beeple loop. Here is Beeple, at the console, chatting with admiring visitors, as he manipulates images of skin and blood!
To the point: each of our TINYisPOWERFUL experiences can be relevant and bring to the group an opportunity to broaden its scope, its collective knowledge, therefore its vision and, in turn, our individual choices.
It went this way: violence was shockingly present in Beeple’s installation. I brought it up, although weeks later. I made the link with Angela Davis. I decided to broaden my familiarity with her work …
Here it is, the (imperfect) quote from her lecture at BU!
The loop has been looped!
“I want you to imagine a world without violence. We need to find ways to talk about violence that don’t affirm its permanence, because it can be ended.”
Below, a link to the whole article quoted above:
https://www.bu.edu/articles/2019/controversial-civil-rights-activist-angela-davis-draws-huge-crowd/
I really think that it is essential that we, individuals in a collective, take advantage of each and every opportunity we get to broaden our base. The three young men who came to the Tiny Investigation the other day told Victoria and Rayn they had a great time. I observed how long they stayed at the front door, discussing for 20 minutes, long after everybody had left! Three young Black artists. What Victoria needs to do, I believe, is to invite them back, not necessarily to enroll them in TINYisPOWERFUL, but to have them show their work. Then and only then can we develop connections and reciprocity.
They are the potential content of the container we represent and are trying to widen.
I now understand what Angela and Muthi call the container that was cruelly missing for them at ROOTS Camp. They meant the supportive circle of other artists necessary for their work to be integrated in the ROOTS collective, into the membership: a body of art kneaded into the ROOTS body of artists and activists.
This is what would be needed, in any case, for ROOTS – as a container – and all its members, groups and sub-groups, to resist the onslaught of violence which may explode in this country, at the occasion of the 2024 elections.