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SITE-BASED PRACTICES
a workshop led by David Buuck & Jessica Tully
Marin Headlands Bunkers
Sunday June 21, 11am-2pm
co-sponsored by Small Press Traffic & the Headlands Center for the Arts

Still a few slots open if you want to join us this Sunday--
more info at:

http://buuckbarge.wordpress.com/2009/06/03/site-based-practices-workshop-621-marin-headlands-bunkers/

http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=756

Shaviro begins with a review of Peter Ward's The Medea Hypothesis, which argues that "life on earth is doomed" due to positive feedback mechanisms driving seemingly self-regulating systems to unsustainable extremes, and he moves toward a more generic critique of autopoiesis by way of a heuristic comparison between neoliberal faith in the market and anarchistic faith in antagonistic forms of self-organization, that is, between Goldman Sachs and anti-WTO protestors in Seattle. He ends his post by proposing an "aesthetics of decision": "What we need is an aesthetics of decision, instead of our current metaphysics of emergence [...] and we cannot characterize decision in 'voluntaristic' terms [...]".

Implications for self-organized pedagogy, and Nonsite's organization more generally?

Michael Davidson, poet, professor and critic, and Susan Schweik, professor, both gave talks as a continuation of the Nonsite Collective’s discussions of the poetics of disability/disablement, and the fourth in a series of events in the Aesthetics as Somatic Practice series.

My 'haptic' drawing in response to Michael' talk, can be seen on my blog - �7� - i.e., I am not sure how to get images on this blog!

This Sunday evening, at least, I cannot begin to paraphrase either talk, other than to say both pieces were ‘loaded.’ Michael’s talk began with a focus on the implications for queer theory for a man who actually became pregnant and brought the baby to term. Susan’s focus took off from her just out, The Ugly Laws from NYU Press, which she describes a social and cultural history of an ordinance adopted by many American cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The law prohibited “diseased,” “maimed,” and “deformed” people from exposing themselves to public view.
Both Michael and Susan are professional academics, the former at UC San Diego and the latter at Berkeley. The audience of poets and some artists, some of us who teach periodically, at least, are not professionally identified academics as such and included folks as various as Norma Cole, Beverly Dahlen, Michael Palmer, Michael Cross, Taylor Brady, Amy Trachtenberg, and others who I know only by first name, Amber, Neil, Petra, members,formally or not, of the ‘disabled’ creative community. Many of us - and I suspect that is part of the role of the ‘Nonsite Collective’ - live critically thoughtful, creative, and productive lives outside the regulatory, etc., boundaries of academic life. A kind audience, as well as the speakers, for sure, but, as many might suspect, the source of implicit tensions and/or expectations between the two worlds. Read more

For anyone who is interested, my video/poem STALK is now up on blip.tv. I recommend downloading it and watching it full screen (download link is on the bottom of the page).

http://blip.tv/file/2192353/

This is the work that Kaia Sand's nonsite talk "Poem/Non-Poem" discussed in context with a number of other works, and which is also available in the archive.

At the beginning of “That Same Nowhere,” a panel featuring Norma Cole and Amber DiPietra, in the context of what was called “Poetics of Disablement” but then was changed to “Aesthetics As Somatic Practice,” Norma with Amber’s nodded agreement, indicated that the event would be about the literal and so it was. There was an atmosphere of support and interest and shared, if unstated, poetics. The questions were mostly personal and having to do with life. The answers were usually anecdotal. Sometimes the answers were demonstrations or tiny performances as when Norma graciously and repeatedly thanked the audience in relation to a discussion of how it is to depend on others. Words such as brain death, patient and patiency (the latter two posted by Amber as key words) became important . Actions such as getting out of bed or from one place to the other (again, Amber: “here-to-there”) were imagined. Focusing on aspects of life as opposed to an aspects of poetic practice made me long for a connection back to practice. This occasionally occurred, but it seemed to me from the discussion that physicality is both important and incidental. It doesn’t really characterize the writing of wither Amber or Norma. The connection between poetry and one’s situation or identity is not always direct, apparent or intentional. Neither Norma nor Amber have worked out a ‘poetics of disability’ and neither needs or seems inclined to do so.
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