Input sought for Nonsite's Alternative Exposure grant proposal

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Start: 05/11/2008 2:49 pm

Timezone: Etc/GMT-7

Members of the Nonsite Collective at our last open meeting agreed to pursue a revision and re-submission of our 2007 grant proposal for Southern Exposure gallery's [http://soex.org/Event/168.html Alternative Exposure] grant fund. Any site users who would like to participate in the revision are encouraged to read the grant description by following the linked text above, and make changes/additions/excisions to the text of the grant proposal found on [http://www.nonsitecollective.org/node/409 this new workbook page]. We will call another in-person meeting on either Monday, June 2nd, or Monday, June 9th in order to review the editorial suggestions and arrive at a final text for the proposal. Revisions to the workbook page can be included in that review process as long as they are made by Sunday, June 1st. Please bear in mind that this text should be very brief, and should emphasize our work with visual artists and visual arts communities, but does not need to restrict itself to this work exclusively. Items for particular editorial attention include the descriptions of planned events, which were almost all prospective when last year's version of the proposal was written.

Posted In: Nonsite Publications>>Funding Proposals

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Comments

response to disappointing guidelines

Submitted by Scott MacLeod on Tue, 06/10/2008 - 12:11.

Before spending a lot of energy drafting a letter to SoEx about disappointment - I would call Courtney, just casually & honestly tell her that you are confused by the disparity between last years' specific invitation & the language of the current guidelines. Written guidelines are, after all, just guidlines. The current language may have a specific purpose unrelated to their desire to see another proposal from nonsite. They may not realize that they have confused you (& possibly others). If the guidelines do in fact trump last years' invitation, you can always write a letter later, incorporating info from the conversation...

Grant Reversal

Submitted by Rob Halpern on Wed, 06/04/2008 - 09:27.

After reading the grant application guidelines carefully Monday nite, we were dismayed by Southern Exposure's repeated insistence that the grant will only fund "visual art." Unlike last years application, which explicitly encouraged collective projects like Nonsite, whose practices are divergent and communities porous, the revised guidelines clearly discouraged such projects as our own from applying, instead underscoring "visual art" aggressively. While we could certainly foreground the place of the visual in the collective's curricula--drawing attention to recent presentations by Susan Greene and Mike Basinski, and forthcoming events with Amy Trachtenberg and Elliot Anderson--we felt it would require us to misrepresent or deform the collective's larger commitments, which are precisely to render the traditional boundaries between disciplines permeable, while creating conditions of possibility for sustained conversations and collaborations in the spaces between hardened divisions of cultural labor. In light of how Southern Exposure's grant application uncritically reinforces those divisions, we decided it would be inappropriate for us to apply. Immediately after last year's round, SoEx encouraged us specifically and personally to apply again for the grant this year. Because we received this directed push, we thought we would draw attention to the incompatibility of our multi-disciplined project and the uncritical aims of the grant by writing a short letter to the gallery, expressing our disappointment in this year's guideline revisions. I am hoping we can post a draft of this letter as a workbook page, for anyone to contribute to, and then send to SoEx by the application deadline, June 13. This is a call for that initial draft.

Fodder For Initial Draft

Submitted by Robert Kocik on Wed, 06/04/2008 - 11:25.

...or, perhaps go about it the-other-way-around. Go ahead with the proposal, accepting the restrictive category of visual art by bringing the manifold modes of nonsite to bear specifically on the visual (perhaps addressing, redressing, the visual as key component in the hardening of divisions of cultural labor). Exploding the visual--with an engrossed, not disengaging, approach. Certainly there is an overall unavoidable visual aspect of nonsite--the website itself, the meeting places, not looking at each other (very visually provocative), looking at each other, as well as more underlying aspects. For example, speaking from the point of view of my own partial participation and potential input--nonsite is itself the combined actions of creative workers expanding the role/undoing the isolation of respective sectors. I can rather readily interpret (we each have our penchants and pathologies) other members' movements outside the box as architectural specification--as undesigned sites--as unheardof facilitations--genre revamps (ah yes the grit of phenotypic plasticity--how could we possibly fall outside SoEx guidelines if our medium is phenotype?). For my part, as one component, I could work with who'd'ever be interested and create a series of architectural drawings (wished-for, worked-toward, cultural portraits or portrayals latent in each member ) that represent/present the collective. Use exhibition space for what it's good for (if only its own demise). Just a thought. Robert Kocik

Phenotypic Visuals

Submitted by Rob Halpern on Wed, 06/04/2008 - 14:39.

your right on, robert, with yr fodder. and had you been with us the other nite, i would have loved to run with yr tack: pressuring and exploding "the visual." this would have been the innovative thing to do, and the result would have been a compelling project/text in its own right, divorced from the instrumentality demanded by "the grant," as a form (really not about use, but stuck in exchange). we had only intended, however, for the instrumental: to revise the texts and materials we'd prepared last year for the grant application (which you can read under "nonsite publications"), the components of which are the same: project summary, collective's goals and intentions, etc.. we were only prepared to do a minimum of work this time around: redraft our texts to update the collective's "history" and prepare a new budget for projected use of funds (what we were thinking to build into that $3000.00 budget was pretty modest: recording equipment, website funds, and money for a possible publication, something we are discussing, but remain unsure about). the deadline for the application is in a matter of days, and to do anything but the minimum for revising the materials seemed beyond what we were prepared to do together. rather than "inappropriate," it simply seemed beyond our resource at the moment. i wish we had had the vision and energy monday nite to imagine and compose an entirely new proposal, but alas, we were exhausted, and the prospects seemed stacked against us. there was sadly nothing there to encourage our effort "to make use without using." next time, however... "The question of use will thus remain a priority for the collective as it works to generate, activate, transform and conserve its energies and material effects within a sustainable environment of renewable resource." (from the Nonsite draft proposal)