12-01-2025
Early morning, yesterday, this idea struck me: to create a business whose profits go to art ventures! Great, right! Why – I have proposed variations of it to the collective so many times, without ever raising much interest! But, why does it sound so familiar! A senior moment? No! Hasn’t it been the Fast&French plan for the last 40 years! A bit troublesome, this temporary mental blindness! But not surprising …
Eureka moments, senior moments? They depend a lot on the uncontrollable encounter, in space and time, of autonomous paradigms – paradigm islands – which rise from the horizon at the most awkward moment, after being for
ever long invisible to the mind. Unexpectedly, several islands morph into an archipelago, made one in their meeting of paradigms and their sharing of an ever changing medium: the ocean of the subconscious!
Case in point:
This TINY BUSINESS PUTS PEOPLE OVER PROFIT.
When Fast&French first opened, we did not post that sentence on the front door! But everything we did was meant to convey the message! Including the few times a customer bullied a worker. The customer would be warned. Bad for income? Good for the humanity of the offended and, hopefully, the offender!
Business schools teach profit. As far as people, they distinguish between customers and employees. “Customer King” used to be a universal motto. Now the king is treated with rebates, mammoth sales, coupons or free delivery. But rarely with respect. As for workers, the closer they are to the frontline, the less respect they get.
Business schools are not meant to teach PEOPLE matters.
They teach BIG BUSINESS matters.
TINY BUSINESS matters are PEOPLE matters.
Let’s practice what we teach: COMMERCE AS RECIPROCITY.
In the phrase TINY BUSINESS PUTS PEOPLE BEFORE PROFIT, how many paradigm islands are there? I count five: tiny, business, tiny business, people, profit. I believe the archipelago they form as they connect, opens its libraries to lots of books written about gift economies, reciprocal economies, cooperative economies, unions, federations … everything ‘people over money’ or POM!
EG, this very morning, Living On Earth, LOE, a National Public Radio program worth tuning to every time, featured Robin Wall Kimmerer:
Robin Wall Kimmerer is perhaps best known as the author of Braiding Sweetgrass, about living in a reciprocal relationship with other beings and the gifts of the Earth. And in her 2024 book, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, she focuses on gift economies. You might encounter gift economies in your daily life – Buy Nothing groups on Facebook, community fridges where people share food with neighbors, or the little free libraries down the street. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi nation and professor of environmental biology at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, and she joins us now. Hi Robin, and welcome to Living on Earth! …
Here are the links to her interview and the LOE site:
https://loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=25-P13-00049&segmentID=3
12-07-2025
Yesterday, there was an other session of Bob Leonard’s Affinity Rhizome.
I joined late and listened to him and the single other participant talking about … guess what: aesthetics! Precisely the subject I believe ROOTS is not capable of approaching without risk. But, after yesterday’s Zoom, I know why it is such a perilous topic for my alma mater.
Years ago, at the time of Nayo Watkins, there was a workgroup named ‘Research for Social Change’, acronymed RSC. It was a rather exclusive and esoteric group which was, as far as I could understand, trying to rationalize the processes of going about social justice and related issues. Under the heading: ‘Principles of Community Engagement’, they identified five areas of research which became the chapters of the final version of the RSC BOOKLET, meant to be a training tool for interested ROOTS members. Chapters were:
Power – Partnership – Dialogue – Transformation – Aesthetics
If aesthetics is last on this list, it is because Bob put it there yesterday, explaining that there always was lots of energy spent covering the first four areas but, when it came to Aesthetics, everybody was tired and … “we never really got to it”!
This is where I intervened! I referred to a workshop that took place at the
2023 ROOTs Camp, where Bob presented his vision of aesthetic as having to do with color, shape, sensations, everything ‘beauty’ and the likes. For the first time at a ROOTs meeting I intervened rather vehemently without being invited to. In other words, I cut someone off – which is a no-no in a brotherly group – to assert that “There is no aesthetics without ethics“, meaning, that aesthetics is also politically, socially and morally engaged, just like power, and its other booklet companions.
Yesterday, more than two years later, I jumped on the occasion to push further, affirming that, at ROOTs, if it is so difficult to approach aesthetics, it is because the linearity of the booklet’s architecture forces ROOTers to consider aesthetics as one chapter among the other four, although it is not equal to the other four but common to the other four. Just as ethics also is – at least, this is my opinion.
Similarly, for a long time, in the course of art projects, I have attempted to bend the arc of aesthetics away from the pseudo-romantic posture it seems to be stuck in, as if protecting itself from the more ‘bitter’ impulses of twentieth and twenty first century historic developments. But why?
Yesterday, I also wanted to keep the conversation within the field of the arts. After all, at ROOTS, isn’t art the single most unifier?
Trying to show that aesthetics and ethics irrigate the whole field, I referred to the work of Thomas Hirschhorn, a Swiss installation artist. Bob did not know him but the other participant did. She had even seen his ‘Gramsci Monument’ in the Bronx a few years back. My point, and I am sure she agreed, being essentially that Hirschhorn, with his installations, draws a vast and open picture of what art’s concerns and reaches are. His work’s purpose is to be political, meaning to concern all human activities, as they define humanity. They are certainly not primarily concerned with the beauty in aesthetics but with its philosophical context and content, the importance of knowledge, education, diversity, anti-cultural stands, creating a politically marked framework. His latest installation, part retrospective, “My Atlas # Your Atlas”, reserves a space to a 2017 piece imagined for younger people. He calls it “Power Tools”, a place for them to open to beginner technology and a chance to become makers. Is this art-related enough? Inter-generational enough, and educational, and democratic?
Yesterday, I did not mention ‘Flamme Eternelle’ the Paris-2014 show and the way it so much insists on the importance for this artist to transform galleries into spaces of public encounters, random or scheduled, to perform a (forced) integration of norm-busting art works into the general public.
Interestingly, last night, all this Hirschhorn ruckus brought me back many, many years ago and the art workshop Gwylène and I developed and taught together at the Beaux-Arts School of Nancy! The experiment ran for three years. Most student loved it. Academic Inspectors did not! Of course. We were shaking the foundations of what French art education is: self-expression through an individual quest for beauty.
One summer, seriously, we took some time to write a report on that pedagogical experiment. We titled it Space and its Representations. It was articulated around the concept of Tridimensional Diagram. Students who went through the grind were introduced, precisely, to a Hirschhorn-like process of transforming the mythical quest for beauty into an awareness of what art creation turns into if one explores the wholeness and the wholesomeness of becoming more than what one is expected to. A norm buster as well as the development of a methodology where expression discovers objectivity and ways for art to generate and communicate values in a very politicizing process.
This mouthful is as simple as I could make it to describe what artist Jean Dubuffet would have called “anti-cultural Positions”. I quote Hirschhorn or Dubuffet among many others because they are the closest to my heart right now. And because I need Art Heavy Weights to give me credibility! But there is a less well known artist I want to go back to. I noted him in this journal a few times. His name is Cannupa Hanska Luger. A native American artist based in New-Mexico who, in an ART 21 <art21.org> video clip, floored me when he declared that what makes an artist is the beauty of her/his life! Luger’s production may be eclectic and formally unbound, yet each of his pieces shows a wholeness and a quality of completion which affirms the full clarity of his intents. Below is an artist statement of his.
“As a contemporary artist Indigenous to North America, I am motivated to reclaim and reframe a more accurate version of 21st century Native American culture and its powerful global relevance. The customary practices of the world’s Indigenous people have been imprisoned to the past. Indigenous craft and arts, when not cannibalized by western culture, are considered primitive or extinct. My practice is rooted in the continuum of generations before me, the urgency for Indigenous visibility in this moment and the dreaming of Indigenous futures. Building worlds and dismantling misconceptions through monumental installations, sculpture and performance, I place myself between the realms of contemporary art and Indigenous culture, moving amidst museums and the front lines to enact a more complex understanding of contemporary Indigeneity. The materials that I use are emblematic of human civilization including clay, textiles, steel and digital media. Clay signifies our connection to place, literally the ground on which we stand. We create textiles from plants and animals, reflecting our truly embodied relationship between fiber and flesh. Steel has allowed humans to develop, build and dominate; it provides the physical structures for control and capital. And technology now provides an opportunity to question our civility and our connectedness through durational and situational media. I activate speculative fiction as a methodology, a practice, a way of future dreaming, rooted in an Indigenous continuum. I engage in land-based performative actions to pledge accountability to the land and waters affected by resource extraction and industry. I practice empathetic response and community catharsis through craft based social collaboration. Whether working with institutions, communities or with the land itself, my work is inherently social and requires engagement. I aim to lay groundwork, establish connections and mobilize action – to challenge the systemic conditions of colonialism while making space for urgent and emergent Indigenous narratives.”
It is clear that his understanding of beauty includes a sense of cultural, social and political values and responsibilities.
An other quote of his reads:
“What I’m trying to do is remove the idea of art as an object, and think of art as a process. Something in action, something living.”
From artist Cannupa Hanska Luger, whose work I have never seen in person, the quotes above and the videos from art21.org, I am confirmed in the importance for art to be culturally grounded and the values it carries to reach to the universal for being locally applied. This, for sure, defines the art of TINYis POWERFUL and its claim to be IN/WITH COMMUNITY.
As for art as a process, it is an other debate. Art is more than a process. Can one call process a series of often uncontrollable developments with unexpected results, triggered by an assumed imaginary ?
12-11-2025
https://www.gooood.cn/laoyuting-pavilion-by-atelier-deshaus.htm
This is the site where I, once again, appreciate the visionary qualities of small, intimate Chinese architecture. Where the very sophisticated knowledge and use of materials, does not smother the poetic impulses of the designer. This has got to reflect an architecture education where the acquisition and practice of manual skills, traditional and updated, keeps students aware of the present existential context. Why do I say that. Because the art in architecture reflects the coexistence of culture with politics, of local with global, global, of particular with universal …. or something like that!
The intimacy I refer to in small-scale Chinese architecture brings me back to TINYisPOWERFUL. Why do we not, in the collective, ever speak about tinyness
in terms of intimacy? Because intimacy also means trust, or does it? Has it ever, in this US culture of defensive individualism which, we know, fosters fear, violence, lack of trust and, therefore of generosity …. Maybe the culture of charity over generosity is what has impregnated Foundations, Endowments and the likes. After all, aren’t they the controlling hand of the legislating State? Everything outside of It looks like a wasted, untaxed handout.
—–
A movie, French, ‘Hors Service’, by Jean Boiron-Lajous
Where a judge, a gendarme, a teacher, an anesthesiologist, a postal worker, have made the ethical choice of resigning from their profession as public employees. The dismantling of the State-run sector is such that, whether doctor or mail carrier, they are denied the time to engage with fellow citizens and, when you think of it, keep building the future together. The future is their common. All this dereliction in the name of a ‘New Public Management’ national program of improved efficiency.
Now, imagine all these characters, who never met before, invited by the movie director to assemble in an abandoned hospital, symbol of their sorrow and shame, to reflect on the condition of the French public services and to imagine ways to mend up their betrayed sense of the collective. After multiple meetings, circles, workshops, all art-spirited activities (?), they articulate a dream which takes the shape of a utopian space where people are welcome and have access to a healing clinic, legal services, creative writing workshops, medical support and … what about a boxing club? Are they reinventing the wheel? The wheel, in any case, is in urgent need of reinventing, upending, and actuating.
I just saw the trailer for ‘Hors Service’. Enough for me to understand how much joy these dispossessed workers – who share a love for their lost job and the pain of dismemberment – find in their creative ways to listen to each other, and design a common dream space, where Service generates hope.
Joël Plantet, the movie critic who wrote a review of the film, calls ‘Out of Service’ “a model political documentary film”.
(Monde Diplomatique, Nov 2025)
12-13-2025
On Thursday last, Victoria and Gwylène had an appointment at the Avery Center to pursue a conversation started quite a while ago about the possibility of a long term access to their main exhibition space, for TINYisPOWERFUL to open a Community Lab. They may have reached an understanding! Nothing official at the moment but the ball is rolling!
For such long time this Journal has been getting ready for an opportunity like this! But now that it may be here, I realize how rusty my studio practice is, compared to the present writing bulimia. If I don’t panic it is only because I can blame it on my hypertension crisis I has developed for the last few weeks, months, years really. But right now, it is in the open … Otherwise, I would have no excuse and I would panic. However, the necessity to advance the Journal remains; this keeps me focussed: a reminder that the same way there is no science without conscience and no aesthetics without ethics, there is no art without conscience and aesthetics.
Today then is the day for me to immerse myself into a position paper on the link between the ‘Tale for Reparations’ and the Journal. I have postponed it over and over. It is just such an exhilarating topic that I never feel quite ready for it. It keeps expanding! Case in point, for the last ten or so days, I bump into such unbelievably relevant quotes, observations, points, which both slow down and enrich the process. Here are some of them, random and more or less related but all worth noting!
– Jean-Luc Godard, about the medium of television: “…as a result of making [the miseries of the world] its fodder, it is becoming responsible – that is my belief – it is becoming deeply, deeply, more and more deeply responsible for it”.
I just want to extend this rather banal remark – although the way Godard spoke it out was pathetically convincing – to trash journalism, to most instances of violence-related mass media, to video games and such. It is unfortunately just as banal to link this phenomenon to greed, graft, excessive profiteering … Such banality is in no way exculpatory though. Since it factually creates the present dystopic age. Doesn’t Hannah Arendt write about the banality of evil?
– Franklin Furnace is an organization whose “...mission is to present, preserve, interpret, educate, and advocate on behalf of avant-garde art, especially forms that may be vulnerable due to institutional neglect, cultural bias, ephemerality, or politically unpopular content.
The organization provides physical and virtual venues for the presentation of time-based art, including artists’ books and periodicals, performance art, installation art, and unforeseen contemporary avant-garde art forms; and undertakes other activities related to these purposes. Franklin Furnace is dedicated to serving early-career artists, cultivating appreciation of avant-garde art for all, and fostering artists’ zeal to circulate ideas.
ON A MISSION TO MAKE THE WORLD SAFE FOR AVANT-GARDE ART.”
– Thomas Hirschhorn, the Swiss contemporary artist, came up last Saturday in a Zoom conversation of ROOTERs with Bob Leonard, about how, in my opinion, Bob mistakes art for the search of beauty! Hirschhorn, and Dubuffet before him, do not care about the pursuit of beauty. They just anchor the arts in everyone’s everyday life, as basic tool of knowledge. Which is the massage we need to pass on with the TINYisPOWERFUL Community Lab.
ART IS EVERYONE’S EVERYDAY TOOL FOR KNOWLEDGE,
12-21-2025
There is a time to work and there is a time to celebrate work.
This above is my shameless appropriation of a line I read yesterday which says: “There is a time to make history and there a is time to celebrate history.”
The substitution of ‘history’ for ‘work’ does not take away much of the simple wisdom the original sentence contains, I hope. I am just attempting its direct application to our present times: so many people work so much, so hard, these days, that there is no way they can find the time, or the strength, to work even just a little more … in order to make ends meet, except at a risk for their sanity and their life. Most low wage workers now understand that the money they do not make, the billionaires of the world capture it without one drop of sweat on their precious brow, saving their breath for the lavish celebrations of the wealth they owe to those who, no longer, are free to celebrate at all.
May this understanding be enough to spark, in the mind and soul of toilers in America, a glimmer of hope and inspire imaginaries of change.
EQUITY AND ACCES FOR ALL !
—–
TINYisPOWERFUL, with this COMMUNITY LAB and in parnership with the AVERY CENTER, is launching the notion of COLLABORATORSHIP in the ARTS .
12-28-2025
For the last week I have been struggling with a severe episode of hypertension.
An opportunity to wander into the untidy landscapes of old age.
We are leaving for France in a week. How will I fare in this state of exhaustion?
Matters not!
Gwylène just received a call from our friend Bernard who tipped her on how to meet a cardiologist. Artists solidarity. I feel better already!
—–
Going over the sentence “There is a time to work and there is a time to celebrate work”, I am reminded of Simone Weil and André Gorz who, after all, spent lots of their talent making sure that there is a meaning to labour, to the act of working. As deliberate as that of choosing not to work.
Posing. Striking. Resting. Vacationing.
A meaning to labour, any work. As long as it is deliberate.
Deliberate. Free of constraints. Work, the application of a person’s knowledge,
their ability, innate or acquired, to participate in and reciprocate within the social group they belong to. (My understanding).
Autonomous. Gorz would oppose this mountain-of-a-word to heteronomous. As high a mountain, really. He uses it constantly, when he advocates for a society free of exploitative intentions. Where dependency means inter-dependency, solidarity, amity, social love.
Such is, in the present world, my dream. A dream I have attempted to inject in
“a Tale of Charleston”. Which morphed into “a Tale for Reparations”, as my ability to analyze, to verbalize, to name and finally to represent what it means to be one among all, firmed up and turned serene.
There is serenity in “a Tale for Reparations”.
All the angry wolves of supremacy can holler all they want, the moment serenity becomes the face of conviction is the moment when resistance foresees victory.
I know I am delirious. It’s b’cause my heart of flesh and that of love share a synchronic beat! In artist’s language: although the visible part of “a Tale for Reparations” may seem esoteric and idiosyncratic, just give it a deeper reading, let your mind associate images with thoughts – however wild, disassociate cultural reflexes from rash judgements, enter the poetic world even its maker gets lost in, read over the Journal, and be serene, for one instant.
An autogenic serenity like any!
12-30-2025
This morning, the TINYisPOWERFUL collective beat Zoom-generated inertia!
In big part because we were focused on the reality of the upcoming
TINYis POWERFUL
ART / IN / WITH / COMMUNITY LAB
2026
A lesson to remember. For the collective, a collaborative project is the best and only stimulus.