Remarks on CAConrad and Frank Sherlock's The City Real and Imagined

What follows here are my prefatory remarks from CA Conrad's and Frank Sherlock's Nonsite dialogue on September 12, 2009, co-sponsored by Small Press Traffic:

CAConrad’s and Frank Sherlock’s work provokes and manifests forms of aesthetic and social practice — aesthetic practice as social practice — forms that begin with friendship and collaboration as the most basic modes of composition, and which extend all the way to community activism (PACE, or Poet-Activist Community Extension).

 Thru their modes of practice, the poem becomes a form assumed by lived social relations under the pressure of so many forces conspiring against us. What’s more, the poem becomes not only a formal expression of dissent, but the insurgent means by which “dissensus”* might potentially and provisionally be organized within contested social spaces and public discourses. Following Sherlock's own reference to Hakim Bey's "Manifesto for Poetic Terrorism," this is the poem as a kind of “temporary autonomous zone”.

 CAConrad’s and Frank Sherlock’s work as collaborators, co-conspirators, and activist-artists corresponds with two ongoing Nonsite curricula: Aesthetics as Somatic Practice, which addresses the body as the living matter of art and poetry as it resists the often oppressive forces — social, political, environmental, discursive — that would normalize, domesticate, or poison it; and, Spatial Practices, which investigates strategies for interrupting the reproduction and smooth maintenance of social spaces in and around which lived bodies organize themselves.

 By bringing the lived body into consequential contact with the social worlds and forces that press against it, Conrad’s and Sherlock’s work surges within, against, and thru the forces conspiring against it, not only in order to register and transfigure  the political and discursive effects of those forces in the manner of a sensory organ (which is always crucial), but to raise to the level of a subjective demand an already objective need to undo those forces: to demand a disruption of the hardened structures of sense that ensure the reproduction of our grotesque and deadly order.

* for Jacques Rancière, “dissensus” refers to a political process that creates a fissure in what can normally be seen or sensed by confronting the established framework of perception, thought, and social action with something that can’t be admitted by so-called "commonsense". Kaia Sand and Jules Boykoff activate this concept in the closing pages of their book Landscapes of Dissent: Guerrilla Poetry and Public Space, which addresses PACE specifically among other poet-activist projects. Kaia also refers to “dissensus” in her Nonsite talk, with reference to Laura Elrick’s work.

What followed this introduction was a wide-ranging set of discussions touching on class, coming out, somatic magic, Philadelphia's history of police violence and resistance, gentrification, war, and neighborhood politics. Running through the discussion were a series of prompts and questions in search of a writing practice (and its examples) that could work as part of a strategy for mobilizing democratic bodies of collaboration, friendship, and creative remappings of flesh, city, nation, and world. Because these prompts and questions were directed toward furthering, intensifying and diversifying the practices they indicated, the Nonsite Collective would like to use this space as an ongoing repository of that elaboration. What questions did this discussion and its various follow-ups raise for you? What practices -- your own or others' -- are illuminated by, or help to illuminate, this occasion? What texts, visual works, performances, etc., are you, alone or in collaboration, producing, reflecting on, planning, or reworking based on the tactics, rituals, exercises, and collaborative methods considered during the discussion?

You can use this link to post these reflections, texts, images, and calls for further collaborative inquiry and work. If you're viewing this page in full-page mode (i.e., not in the stream of posts on the front page) you can also use the "Add child page link" at the bottom. Please note that for either option, you'll need to be signed in as a Nonsite web user. If you don't have a user account yet, you can take care of that with the block in the sidebar on the front page, or by following this registration link. We look forward to hearing from you, and to finding occasion in your contribution to further develop this discussion's questions, methods, and prompts for further work in common -- as poetry, art, politics, and friendship.