05-01-2025
This morning, Marcus came with a young Black woman who wants to learn more about woodworking. She is a photographer and a picture framer. I told her about Abriel and showed the work she had done with me and asked her to wait until the end of June, when the present residency ends. Then, as a matter of fact, I told her about the Ise Shrine and its twenty year reproductive cycle. Proof that architecture is the mother of all arts? Possibly. But also as an example of what and how important it is, for artists and artists, to pass knowledge on and on, particularly the art of architecture which is the most responsive to human needs. The Ise Shrine, to be sure, shelters a deity, not your common dweller, but what a lesson unlearned by all the designers who, forever, over-decorate palaces from Versailles to Mar-a-Lago. What an obvious instrumentalization of art, becoming an expression of power and self-indulgence. As a provider for everyday needs, shouldn’t the art of architecture show (self) restraint, modesty, insight and tranquility? All qualities which enter in the definition of accessible living, by the way.
05-02-2025
May Day is definitely THE day for Labor forces to march and chant their discontent! But not in Charleston. From what I know, there was a picket at Elbit, a defense-related industry, somewhere in Ladson. And that’s it.
Good thing Renaud sent us one of his almost-daily links to events in France. There, in every city and town, May Day means no work and lots of marching and protesting. A way for France, the State, to recognize that for the People to speak its mind it needs time off from work: May First!
Here, in America, on May Day, we were offered, via PBS, a new lesson in typical Trump government gaslighting. Some Trump lackey was attempting to prove that the US government and all American universities with DEI policies, discriminate, manipulate history, promote communism and have done it shamelessly for years. From what I understand, doesn’t any hiring of a ‘minority’, be it Black or Brown, LGBTQ or handicapped, mean that a white male has been disregarded, somewhere? Hasn’t hiring a white male been declared the default in Trump America. By Executive Order!
Doesn’t this confirm one of my preferred sayings:
PRIVILEGE SHARED IS PRIVILEGE LOST?
05-03-2025
Lately, I have resumed keeping notes, quotes and references that I pick up here and there, or thoughts that cross my mind. They do not necessarily have to do with the work of TINYisPOWERFUL, but the collective is never far on the horizon.
For example, earlier on, I found the following quote from Roland Barthes. I translated it:
<< ... it is because there is no thought process without language that 'form' is the first and the last instance of responsibility ... >>
Also, at random, from a nameless Literary Criticism site which I opened by chance, as I was checking the meaning of ‘reification’, I found this one:
<< Treating Concepts as Material Objects: Abstract ideas, social constructs, or emotions are depicted as having a tangible, independent existence of their own.
Loss of Agency: People are portrayed as passive actors within a system, with little control over the REIFIED forces that shape their lives. >>
There is nothing abstract in the above quotes. The Barthes quote fits perfectly with what I was telling Abriel a few minutes ago, in the studio. I was congratulating her for the ability she has to translate the language of her thinking process into that of her three-dimensional art, without avoiding her responsibility of being true to her vision and to the consequences on people and things . She has been working very steadily on her piece a few hours a week for the last year, and she has lost neither interest nor sharpness. She should really consider becoming a declared artist when she returns from her sabbatical in Mexico, Argentina or Japan! What about that? This kind of extended world-wide travel shows an unusual spirit of discovery.
05-07-2025
This morning, the NEA ceased to fund hundreds of Arts and Humanities organizations, large and small. Misappropriated dollar, they say, which will be better spent in defense contracts and border police. Hundreds of thousands (?) of artists will have to self-fund, crowd-fund, not fund at all.
TINYisPOWERFUL is affected by this, as all other art organizations are.
And of course, this is instantly creating a new class of privileged individuals: the official artists of the Trump State, new serfs in art! Isn’t the man at the head of the Kennedy Centre, now? Isn’t it the privilege of a sovereign to indulge in the intimate conviction that (s)he is excellent at everything (s)he does? Art is one!
Yesterday, Pam and Gwylène had put together an afternoon of TINY INVESTIGATION brainstorming activities. One of the topics was the survival of the TINYisPOWERFUL collective…
Brought about by a sense of doom, a premonition?
Certainly not. Gwylène and Pam are remarkable in that they are moved by the belief in
very hard work. And that the most modest result, under the circumstances, is a great success. I call this courage.
05-08-2025
It did not take long for Victoria to consider taking a full time job. She has to, as a responsible single mother. But why wouldn’t she show more creativity in her quest? I am puzzled by the difficulty she, and Rayn and Marcus, seem to have to fully immerse the arts and the spirit of the arts in their everyday life. It still seems to be a job before being an artistic adventure, to be payed members of TINYisPOWERFUL. Why wouldn’t Rayn, who is studying accounting but does not intend to practice the trade, consider instead injecting it with poetics, enjoyable enough for her and her clients? And why couldn’t Victoria, with her aplomb at public meetings and her talent for synthetizing and communicating the diverse thoughts that emerge from group thinking and usually vanish in the collective inattention … why wouldn’t she imagine a form of standup format for her professional delivery? Creativity as a mode of living. For sure this is not what they were taught in school, even art school. The tyranny of productivist education has a price: conventional behavior. I always try to push against exactly this. I suppose humor is my tool of choice. But so is the drama of raw thinking.
If I understand correctly, this difficulty for our young partners to see art and life as one reality is what brought Pam to wonder whether the reason Rayn and Marcus did not participate in the Tiny Investigation session, on Tuesday, was that there was no compensation. Only Victoria was present. Pam for one, although she does not have an art output that we know, calls herself an artist and acts as one in the group, just as she did when teaching: passionate about education, constant in her goals, doing the necessary collective’s work. Accountable, as she likes to stress.
05-08-2025
“Habemus papam”! Leo XIV – this is a scoop!
He was sort of handpicked by his deceased predecessor! Good man, Francis, for having prepared Leo for the job, when he named him “Prefect of the Dicastery”, partly in charge of nominating some of the 113 Cardinals who, in turn, nominated him! Highly political stuff, but not at all uncommon in the Catholic Church. The Holy Spirit works in mysterious ways, they say. But why not? The first American born pope will need all that the Holy Spirit can give him to take on our president who, himself, recently, dreamt of being – himself – Pope!
Wouldn’t this require the assent of Congress or would a Presidential Decree do-do?
05-09-2025
For the last while I have taken up Simone Weil again.
Privilege – Simone Weil –
She remarks that the privileged classes, although they depend on the labor of others, hold in their hands the fate of those they depend on …
Where is equality! Certainly not in this transaction.
Above all, there is no reciprocity.
In this mode of asymmetrical interdependency, I know, Trump would say that workers, are in no position to bargain for their rights.
But in fact, this asymmetrical interdependency is a subservience, for both side
—–
Serendipitously, I just found an article showing the complexities generated by the fluid nature of social dynamics!
In “Norbert Elias par lui-même” (1991), the sociologist describes how, « le ressentiment surgit quand un groupe marginal socialement inférieur, méprisé et stigmatisé, est sur le point d’exiger l’égalité non seulement légale, mais aussi sociale, quand ses membres commencent à occuper dans la société des positions qui leur étaient autrefois inaccessibles, c’est-à-dire quand ils commencent à entrer en concurrence avec les membres de la majorité en tant qu’individus socialement égaux, et peut-être même quand ils occupent des positions qui confèrent aux groupes méprisés un statut plus élevé et plus de possibilités de pouvoir qu’aux groupes établis dont le statut social est inférieur et qui ne se sentent pas en sécurité ».
Below, my translation of the quote:
<
—–
Why not place in key government positions the dummest and most incompetent
yes-(wo)men available – mostly coming from privileged classes – when it is a matter of dealing with the rejects of Trump’s world: African-Americans, Latinos, immigrants, LGBTQ’s, and the poor – although they are also called “the most indispensable front line workers” – in times of major crisis. Until, that is ….
Ask Elias!
05-13-2025
This is nothing short of a frontal racist insult to everyone living in America legally or not: Trump is inviting Afrikaners to immigrate here because they are victims of a genocide in their own country. The South-African government is stealing their land and they are being persecuted! It is not mockery, it is not spite? It is cruelty. And a lie. At a time when the same Trump throws to the dogs immigrants from Cuba, Ukraine or Somalia, Sudan, Venezuela, Afghanistan and, of course, Palestine.
In line with the general dehumanizing practices of a government whose only real power is mob-like violence, fed on perjury and justified by lies.
But violence is not power. It is abuse of power.
—–
This morning, at the end of the creative sync, I regretted the absence of our ritualistic introductory check-in. Because I would have raised the Afrikaner issue with our team, just to keep us all real! Instead, Gwylène proposed that the little money there is left in the TINYisPOWERFUL till go to hiring a part-time administrator. Of course, I objected that no administrator would stimulate the making of art in the group, although this was what we were suffering the most from: a lack of art production. A creative administrator maybe. A poet!
Then, later on, the news comes that the Puffin Foundation just awarded TINYisPOWERFUL $2 or 3.000 to pursue work on the film with Daniel. As a matter of fact, I really believe that someone should ask Daniel how he describes his relationship with the collective. His answer may shed a light on what is successfully enticing him to keep working with us. This in turn should help in further approaching new potential partners. When I say ‘partners’, also, this is a word to be very clear about. We are not a membership organization. But we thrive to have partners in art-making. How can we propose this relationship to others, simply and directly, beyond our ability to keep getting (some) money for art projects? How to call it? Gwylène has come up with a beautiful word: COLLABORATORSHIP. I actually think this will be the thread for her’s and Pam’s next Tiny Investigation …
And so will TINYisPOWERFUL survive!
Immersed in COLLABORATORSHIP.
05-14-2025
Art, the practice of art – in/with community art that is: how my perception of the surrounding life is broken up into bits, filtered, through the convolutions of my analytical intelligence, into concepts which translate into verbal language, or images, or movement, or sound; all expressions of the same plasticity, for the purpose of living together in the world of the moment.
Art, the discipline of art – in/with community art that is, is well equipped to relate the impermanence in which, individually and collectively – depending on circumstances – we must find ways to move forward. Not because artists are problem solvers, although they can well be, but because practicing in/with community art means tinkering together, around the most sacred cows of social, political, cultural, ecological routine clichés, question them, debunk them is that’s what it takes, and turn pages.
05-17-2025
It is fascinating to learn that Ancient Greece, in the late Bronze age, saw the end of the so-called ‘Palace Economy’ when Mycenae, Pylos, Athens, Thebes were destroyed by fire. So was Troy (Troy VI), around 1250 BC. In these cultures, writing was mostly used for bookkeeping, to track the wealth of princes and kings. When their economies collapsed, so did the written languages … Simultaneously, that is when bards and rhapsodes started weaving oral stories around the Iliad and Troy. It took hundreds of years to recover the skill of writing and of the literary arts.
I wonder whether it is possible to compare that kind of unimaginable cultural collapse with the deep recessivity of today, intellectual and moral, the rise of genocidal violence. In 2025, one may not be burning palaces but ….
“See how I can crush entire territories and pulverize an entire people!”.
Is our world entering the blanked out spaces of bottomless barbarism?
Or are our duly elected dictators,
Sensing the dulling of their spikes,
The shortcomings of their spite,
The little time there is to wipe out any rival idol
And consolidate their sand castles …
Are our duly elected dictators, seeking a final solution,
Hastily sear their sham signature onto Executive Orders
Not to spare women, children and witnesses?
05-18-2025
Am I now reduced to literature? To hours of fine-crafting bloated sentences for the purpose of expressing anger and spite? This would signal the end of a major effort on my part, years of efforts certainly, to convert from polemical writing that gets nowhere to positive writing that gets … where? I thought I had learned to tame my language with the exercise that “a Tale” is, where silence is also a medium of sculpture.
Isn’t the peace, in “a Tale”, irresistible? This word-free, non-violent, appeased state has carried me for a year and more now, into a territory of empathy and love for others. A love made of solidarity and profound compassion. Made of difference, also. Inaccessible to the identity barbarians of the day.
So,
We can rest – and smile
Knowing that
their self-importance
their crusty ignorance
their insignificance
their cecity – will protect us.
05-21-205
A word I cannot remember using often or having used for a very long time: LOYALTY.
In the TINYisPOWERFUL collective, we talk a lot about accountability or trust. But we have not studied what these two notions are based on, rooted in. My contention is that they both depend on the quality of common experience, life episodes two or more people have gone through together, which gave them a mutual sense of what to expect from one another in case of difficulties or, why not, good times. Are they players in the same team or is everything simply transactional, in passing, occasional, opportunistic? Come and gone are many a friend around here. Many ‘move west’ or pivot on a dime for convenience.
LOYALTY is not fashionable these days anyhow. It characterizes teamwork in times of backbiting individualism and in a cultural atmosphere of liberal competitiveness. Loyalty
to oneself is what it is usually about. With all the feelings of self-centeredness it generates, contained in phrases like “you owe it to yourself”, “nobody will do it for you”, “you are on your own here” or “Your fight to lose” … and so many other ways to convey a terminal state of solitude along with the misery, the violence, that come with it.
With LOYALTY on my mind, two related sources come up instantly: ‘the Odyssey‘ and ‘Revolution through friendship‘, a book by Dionys Mascolo, Marguerite Duras’ second husband.
Ulysses? What would he have concocted and accomplished, alone, on his journey back to Penelope? The whole saga, foundational in and of art, is one of longing, imagining, unflinching solidarity and friendship. As for Mascolo’s book, it is a full hymn to socializing, engaging, not alone and for oneself but collectively, because …. would there be a social consciousness at all, without even a marginal sense of others, good or bad? What intrigues me most is how I instantly came to naming Ulysses and Mascolo together? Whether it is just sheer luck or the unconscious hard at work, the fact is that both have a relation with Greece – Dionys is Mascolo’s first name after all! – and, more seriously, both have a Homeric story to tell. Homeric, epic, yet so very human, as it exposes the centrality of the better half of man that woman is (ancient saying!).
We all know about the Odyssey, Ulysses’ journey back to Penelope, the destruction of Troy, gods either antagonistic or supportive …, and only one of them, fully dedicated to his safe return: Athena, a goddess, of course.
But what do we know about Dionys’ journey? One of its most glorious episodes goes like this: Marguerite Duras, Robert Antelme (her first husband) and Dionys Mascolo were friends in politics, in literature, in life and in the Resistance Movement. Antelme was caught by the gestapo and sent to Dachau. After the defeat of Germany, the death camp was liberated. Dionys drove from Paris to Dachau with his version of Athena to protect him: François Mitterand! Yes, the future president of France and Dionys saved Robert Antelme from certain death and drove him back to Paris. There, Marguerite/Penelope spoon-fed Robert/Ulysses back to life for months .. The story turns luscious, in true Olympian style, when Dionys/Dionysos, steals Marguerite from Robert and marries her … for a while.
The centrality of women in this universe of masculinity is worth our deepest regards.
Mascolo himself, in his essay on ‘Revolution through Friendship’, qualifies his deep communion with the cohort of intellectuals who, in 1985, collectively signed a “Declaration for the Right of Insubordination to the War in Algeria” , as ‘femininity of the spirit’. Such a congregation of courage and mutual support may also qualify, again, in his own words, as ‘the most intense sentiments’.
LOYALTY is such a ‘most intense sentiment’.
05-24-2025
Somewhere, in the middle of an article of ‘En Attendant Nadeau’, (French literary magazine), there is an article about Anselm Kiefer among other topics. Kiefer has the limitless ability to turn out quantities of giant, anxiogenic sculptural representations of wasted landscapes, so obviously designed for public awe that I wonder, sometimes … why? The article, if I can extract a bit of clarity from its extremely arcane and specialized language, blames Kiefer for his sources, as shallow as they are thunderousness . Somewhere in the same article, for a reason I forgot, Pierre Rosanvallon, (French contemporary historian), is quoted for these three words: trust (confiance), authority (autorité), legitimacy (légitimité). I am thinking about applying them to the LOYALTY study.
05-25-2025
I did not realize that the “word of the month” – LOYALTY – popped up with urgency in my consciousness right around Memorial Day 2025. Under the reign of a roaring, bombastic, depraved president who never hesitates one second to instrumentalize patriotism despite his indefensible January 6, 2021 betrayal of the US constitution. We all saw him swear to uphold it, on the US flag and the bible. LOYALTY. It is not because gaslighting is rampant these days that I should abstain from using words grossly appropriated and soiled by some passing usurper(s).
As a matter of fact, I daydream that, when enough people will realize the costs – psychological, moral and financial; real and symbolic – to the country, of all the destruction, in such a short time, there will be a popular call for LOYALTY on the part of government personnel. Excluding the White House cohorts: they will be shipped to El Salvador. Furthermore, I can imagine a party-neutral realignment around LOYALTY and the personal, individual engagement it requires. At this moment, though, the notion of accountability, as it relates to government, does not meet the mark any longer. It would require precisely what has been taken from it: agency, at all levels of decision-making. Less chain-of-command mechanisms needed. They disincentivize people, deplete autogenous responsibility and are highly corruptible.