Nonsite Collective general meeting notes, 7/21/08

Meeting held at Get Lost Travel Books, SF, beginning at 7pm

Present: Tanya Hollis, Elliot Anderson, Lee Azus, Thom Donovan, Stephen Vincent, Amy Trachtenberg, Taylor Brady, Rob Halpern

• Thom Donovan's proposal for a Nonsite symposium in NYC.
  • TD introduces the proposal, “Quaker-meeting” style (text of proposal appended)
  • Four “conversations”:
    • Creation of new archives
    • New forms of commons
    • Activism and aesthetic intervention/response
    • On- and off-page poetry as a nonsite
  • (Taylor Brady): Germane to this discussion: Who are "we"? I.e., who is being invited to participate? How can we design a proposal process that's fairly open and transparent, given that (I suspect) there won't be sufficient funding or time for everybody who's been involved with Nonsite over the past year to attend and present something?
    • TD: 1 year since founding document, 6 months or so since website became operative, number of events and discussions have taken place
    • TD: “we” might be anyone who has participated in this range of actions and discussions > website might be the forum to reach out initially
    • TD: some ideas re: funding
      • Individuals who could make small donations for symposium (support airfare, lodging, etc.)
      • TD could help arrange room shares, accommodation, etc.
      • January might be most convenient, given curatorial schedule at Segue Series
  • TH: could we find another descriptor than “conference” or “symposium”? (Often the temptation to default to the academic panel discussion can overwhelm these events).
  • EA: moderator present work of panelists, launches discussion
    • TH: less interested in moderator,
    • TD: how do we document this as a performance?
  • EA: “procedural” re: preparation of questions, curating participants around questions
  • TB: conversations as mutual interviews / promptings
  • RH: curricula in progress as reservoirs for promptings, preparations
    • EA: development of questions that participants want to ask each other
    • TB: discussion around disability and poetics, “finding our way in common” as model of where this might go
    • RH: emergence of a discourse rather than rehearsal of an established discourse > object hasn’t quite emerged yet
    • TB: needs to model a more distributed sense of organizational labor
    • AT: need to hear that there’s a focal point of subject / context / idea, etc.
      • Maybe we throw out 10 ideas / problems, etc. in order to focus conversation on works in common rather than individuals
    • TD: four “conversations” were intended as metadiscourses
      • Site-specific components?
      • Documentation?
  • (Rob): Opportunity to focus on redrafting the “Draft Proposal”
  • General consensus: use TD’s 4 meta-discourses as a rubric, ask people to pose questions / prompts within these areas
    • “prompts” generate discussion, attract interlocutors
    • “prompter” should be ready to take responsibility for organizing the respondents to her/his question
    • create text for initial invitation / call for participation
    • AT: might be interesting to organize each discussion around a concrete “project” or “problem”, e.g., SV’s new archive
    • Maybe the prompt is a reference to a specific project – i.e., the object poses the question
    • AT: use NYC event as the occasion for cross-project collaborations to really start taking root (RH: making submerged affinities legible)
    • TD and RH will work on draft of call, circulate to folks who attended meeting
  • Push back timeline? (maybe summer 2009, or winter 09/10)
• Website: a work in progress
  • EA: needs to be more intuitive
  • AT: “bullet pointed” or synoptic version of site / dig down into it to access more detail
  • TH: more intuitive organization
  • Online gallery: how to use this, expand image reservoir?
  • General website ideas? Suggestions?
• Collective’s mailing list (email and/or post): how to expand?
• Ongoing and emerging curricula
  • (Tanya): Archives curriculum, possible events/reading group
    • Kevin, Jocelyn, Tanya re: Spicer
    • Questions of archives as tools for legitimation (role of the state, role of the market)
    • Michelle Morton: syllabus to teach archives, could ask her to give a talk
    • AT: relation between archive and TH’s visual art practice
  • Disablement: generating traction toward curriculum from online discussion
    • TD, Wednesday night “Allegories of Disablement”
    • Robert Kocik, Patrick Durgin, Amber DiPietra have launched discussion on website
    • TD interested in transition from live art to language experiment > images of cultural and material violence, reformation of the body (works by Vito Acconci, Gins/Arakawa
    • Brenda Iijima and Kocik, Larry Eigner, Hanna Weiner > allegories
    • Potluck at 6:30, talk and discussion at 7:30
    • John Killacky
  • Amy and Elliot: discussion on 8/3 at 3pm at Elliot’s place
    • Amy will forward Robert Irwin text
    • Elliot will forward Smithson text and his own synopsis
    • Susan Schwartzenberg, Becoming Citizens