Telic Arts Exchange
951 Chung King Road
Los Angeles, CA 90012
[map]
"Form+Code" book launch / Future of the Public School
This weekend, we'll be reopening our space at 951 Chung King Road with two events that we're very excited about: the Form+Code book launch and a class called Future of the Public School.
Form+Code book launch party, 5-7pm on Saturday, September 4
Three years ago (during The Fundraising Show) Casey Reas and Chandler McWilliams hosted a workshop called "Form+Code." Now, Form+Code in Design, Art, and Architecture has been published by the Princeton Architectural Press and we'll have a little book launch party to celebrate. Champagne and snacks will be served; books will be on hand; and there will be a toast at 6:30 to thank many of the book's contributors who will be in attendance.
Future of the Public School class, 12-4pm on Saturday (September 4) and Sunday (September 5)
On both afternoons this weekend, we will be discussing the "Future of the Public School" and continuing some of the conversations from "The UC strikes and beyond" and "Continental Drift / Control Society / Metamorphosis". We're fortunate that Brian Holmes will be back in Los Angeles and proposed the class, which will "look at the cultural roots of the current university crisis, and in that light, to explore the role that experiments like The Public School could play in re-imagining education."
The class will meet on both Saturday and Sunday from noon to 4pm. The two texts that Brian recommended are listed below, but if anyone has additional suggestions, you can link to them in the comments of the webpage for Future of the Public School or upload them to the issue on AAAARG at http://aaaaarg.org/node/16709
Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class (esp. chapters 1-3, 5 and 8)
Robert Samuels, New Media, Cultural Studies and Critical Theory after Postmodernism: Automodernity from Zizek to Laclau (esp. chaps 1, 5, 6, 8 and 9)
There is nothing less passive than the act of fleeing
The Public School is organizing a 13-day seminar, meeting each day at a different location in Berlin. This seminar takes the form of an open reading group, where the texts discussed each day resonate with the site selected. On 18 July The Public School and The Office will host an event to be held at Salon Populaire. The day will unfold as a series of participatory conversations and workshops.
The first meeting will be Sunday, July 4, with a discussion of the Tiqqun publication, Introduction to Civil War (sections 3 and 4) at the Island of Youth in Treptower Park.
If you aren't in Berlin but would still like to join the reading group, just reply to this email and we'll add you to the email discussion list (but be prepared for as many messages about logistics and weather as about the topics of the day!).
Deadlock: perpetual war, failing economies, the crumbling of education, capitalist realism, our environment in ruin, hostility everywhere.
Resistance? Confrontation? Insurrection?
Exodus: silence, autonomy, occupation, withdrawl, invisibility, friendship.
Organized by Sean Dockray, Caleb Waldorf and Fiona Whitton
day 1 (INSEL DER JUGEND IN TREPTOWER PARK)
INTRODUCTION TO CIVIL WAR [EXCERPTS]
TIQQUN
day 2 (LEIPZIGER PLATZ)
SPECULATIONS ON THE STATIONARY STATE
GOPAL BALAKRISHNAN
day 3 (THIS IS A SECRET)
THE FRIEND
GEORGIO AGAMBEN
day 4 (TRAFFIC ISLAND AT TU ON ERNST REUTER PLATZ)
SUPPORT, PARTICIPATION, AND RELATIONSHIPS TO EQUITY
CELINE CONDORELLI + EYAL WEIZMAN
THEORY OF THE QUASI-OBJECT
MICHEL SERRES
day 5 (TEMPELHOF AIRPORT)
POLITICS OF THE COMMON
MICHAEL HARDT
LIFE IN LIMBO
TURBULENCE EDITORS
day 6 (FUNKHAUS NALEPASTRASSE)
ANIMAL SPIRITS: A BESTIARY OF THE COMMONS [EXCERPT]
MATTEO PASQUINELLI
day 7 (RATHAUS SCHÖNEBERG)
COMMUNIQUE FROM AN ABSENT FUTURE
RESEARCH AND DESTROY
PROLEGOMENA TO ANY FUTURE PHILOSOPHY
NATHAN BROWN, MARIJA CETINIĆ, GOPAL BALAKRISHNAN, AARON BENANAV, JASPER BERNES, CHRIS CHEN, JOSHUA CLOVER, MAYA GONZALEZ, TIMOTHY KREINER, LAURA MARTIN, JASON SMITH, EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS
INTELLECTUALS AND POWER
MICHEL FOUCAULT + GILLES DELUEZE
day 8 (THE END OF THE A102)
VIRTUOSITY AND REVOLUTION: THE POLITICAL THEORY OF EXODUS
PAULO VIRNO
day 9 (ROUSSEAU-INSEL IN THE TIERGARTEN)
SLOUCHING TOWARDS BETHLEHEM
JOAN DIDION
ANALYTICON (FROM SEMINAR XVII)
JACQUES LACAN
THE NEUTRAL (EXCERPT)
ROLAND BARTHES
day 10 (BUS 200)
QUITTING: A CONVERSATION WITH ALEX KOCH ON THE PARADOXES OF DROPPING OUT
STEPHEN WRIGHT + ALEX KOCH WITH A RESPONSE BY BRIAN HOLMES
THE SCENE OF A FLIGHT*
GEORGES PEREC
BOREDOM
SIGFRIED KRACAUER
day 11 (STRANDBAD WANNSEE)
TO HAVE DONE WITH THE MASSACRE OF THE BODY
FELIX GUATTARI
THE AFFECTIVIST MANIFESTO: ARTISTIC CRITIQUE FOR THE 21ST CENTURY
BRIAN HOLMES
THE CITY IN THE FEMALE GENDER
LIA MAGALE
day 12 (TEUFELSBERG LISTENING STATION)
READY-MADE ARTIST AND HUMAN STRIKE: A FEW CLARIFICATIONS
CLAIRE FONTAINE
INVISIBLE MAN (PROLOGUE)
RALPH ELLISON
day 13 (APPARTEMENT)
WHO CARES (EXCERPT)
CREATIVE TIME, DOUG ASHFORD, MODERATOR
18 JULY, EVENT AT SALON POPULAIRE: THERE IS NO NOW, NOW
HOSTED BY THE PUBLIC SCHOOL & THE OFFICE
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz at the Distributed Gallery
Telic is excited to be exhibiting Archivo (2001) by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz at the Distributed Gallery this summer.
"A series of re‐enacted historical events with social and political significance in Puerto Rico are performed and improvised by various non-actors. The videos were shot in a very improvised way, without rehearsing or deciding beforehand in which way the body would fall or who would play whom. Various groups and individuals improvise performances of the death of a notorious killer, or the squatter-police confrontation that took place in Vila Sin Miedo. In each case, there is something trivial or significant that ties the person to the memory. In the case of Villa Sin Miedo, it is the first generation that grew up in Villa Sin Miedo who performs the event from what they have been told by their parents. In other cases, passerby, or people engaged with the place in various ways improvise a performance of the event."
Bicicleta at Ooga Booga
Ebanistas at The Public School
Hipodromo at Via Cafe
Escambron at Fong's
Beatriz Santiago Muñoz was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1972, where she continues to live and work.
March 4th at the Distributed Gallery
In conjunction with Brian Holmes' participation in "Continental Drift / Control Society / Metamorphosis" on February 27- 28, the Distributed Gallery will be showing videos from the March 4th protests centered on public education. At each one of the four video locations, one sees footage from near one of the University of California campuses, where students, faculty, and staff have spilled out onto the roads, highways, and other transportation infrastructure. By walking between Distributed Gallery locations, one walks across the state of California - from Berkeley to Irvine, for instance - to see this simultaneous expression of a growing movement against the privatization of education.
UC Davis at Via Cafe
UC Santa Cruz at Ooga Booga
UC Berkeley at The Public School
UC Irvine at Fong's
Letter from Brian Holmes
Dear friends -
Greetings, this is just a note to say how much I'm looking forward to meet everyone who will participate in the upcoming sessions in Southern California. All those I've been in touch with seem to be taking it as a chance to reflect on the current political and economic situation and on the shocks affecting cultural and intellectual production - which is exactly the point. I'm committed to the project of self-organized seminars and also to critical insertions in institutional contexts, and I really appreciate the enthusiasm that has been put into preparing these events. Thanks in advance to everyone who has been organizing: Zen Dochterman, Cara Baldwin, Jason Smith, Sean Dockray, Liz Glynn, Solomon Bothwell, Christina Ulke, Marc Herbst, Robby Herbst, the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest and the Public School, as well as a number of others in various corners of the UC system.
Continental Drift has always been about confronting research programs, artistic experiments and activist inventions with the intensifying pace of change in society. Four initial meetings organized in New York in collaboration with Claire Pentecost and the 16 Beaver Group were devoted to analyzing and also feeling out the major shifts brought on by neoliberal globalization after 1989, and especially, by the grotesquely failed bid for US empire. A further event in Zagreb, hosted by the WHW curatorial collective, tried to geographically shift the perspective on those issues. Today a long wave of economic growth and new technological rollout, begun in the early 90s, has clearly broken and brought a full-fledged crisis to the heart of the capitalist world-system, which is also the country we live in. The collapse of state budgets and the California education crisis is right in the middle of a much larger development, which will undoubtedly mark a turning point in our society and in the world. I've started a new research program to look into this:
http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/2009/10/25/four-pathways-through-chaos
What I bring to the table is only a small part of a collaboratively organized discussion, among people whose approaches and goals are often quite different. The Public School is developing a mode of collective self-education that could become very significant as the institutions freeze up in the security panic and the budget collapse. Building up this form of careful collaborative discourse, we can also start changing the other, looser or more formalized contexts in which we work. Although it is rather threatening and in no way easy to face, I see the economic crisis as a chance to spark changes that our society has been putting off for decades. We will try to measure both the depth of that inertia and the possibilities of the present, in a way that respects everybody's real situation and their voice, while hopefully opening up new territories for alternative and oppositional practice.
see you soon, Brian
Continental Drift / Control Society / Metamorphosis
On the weekend before the March 4th state-wide UC strike, we invite you to participate in a two-day theory convergence, a “Continental Drift” seminar with the Paris-based theorist, Brian Holmes. Past Drifts has taken a variety of forms in its manifestations at 16 Beaver (2004-2006) in New York, or through the Midwest’s radical culture corridor (2008); and here in Los Angeles it will confront a California whose infrastructure is crumbling, whose government is disfunctional, and whose public education is in crisis from the space of an autonomous education alternative.
Although this Continental Drift is situated here, in a time of occupations and walkouts, it will connect the changes occurring at our universities to the emergence of a neoliberal control society over the past few decades.
The structure of the weekend will be two-days in four parts. Most parts will be structured as participatory conversations, guided by an interlocutor; togetherwe will explore these themes.
On the first day, we try to understand the massive economic and psychological shifts that have occurred since the end of the 1960’s.
And on the second day, we will locate possible territories for resistance, autonomy, or invention. Continuing in the spirit of our collective conversations so far, we are leaving the lecture-Q&A format aside for themed discussions.
Text resources associated with these discussions are being posted to AAAARG.ORG
day 1. saturday, february 27
control society
12 pm: disassociation (psychological effects/desire)
facilitators: Liz Glynn and Marc Herbst
2 pm: financialization & the UC crisis
facilitators: Aaron Benanav and Zen Dochterman
4 pm occupation/ collective speech
facilitators: Cara Baldwin, Nathan Brown, Maya Gonzalez, Evan Calder Williams
7 pm: discussion day one
facilitators: Brian Holmes, introduced by Solomon Bothwell
--
day 2. sunday, february 28
metamorphosis
12pm: Autonomous Space
facilitators: Hector Gallegos, Robby Herbst
2 pm: Precarity
facilitators: Christina Ulke, Sean Dockray
4 pm: Changing Classes
Brian Holmes Lecture
7pm: Sharable Territories/ Bifurcation
facilitators: Jason Smith, Ava Bromberg
--
Organized by Zen Doctherman, Cara Baldwin, Jason Smith, Sean Dockray, Liz Glynn, Solomon Bothwell, Christina Ulke, Marc Herbst, Robby Herbst
Facs of Life screening on Sunday, February 21
On Sunday, February 21, we are lucky to have Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson visiting us from Paris to screen their 2009 film, Facs of Life. The screening will begin at 7pm, but we invite you to come earlier for a conversation with Silvia and Graeme.
Facs of Life departs from Gilles Deleuze's Vicennes seminar of 1975-1976 and follows several individuals who participated there as students. In the words of the filmmakers, it "is a film of conceptual/poetic dispositifs that charts trajectories of those affected by Gilles Deleuze’s laboratory of machinic thought at the Centre Expérimental Universitaire de Paris 8 – Vincennes (1969-1980). The film generates its lignes d’erre and its cinematographic territories from a series of encounters: with videos of Deleuze’s courses at Vincennes made by a group of militant cineastes; with several of those who attended the seminar and who appear in these images; with the woods of Vincennes where the university buildings (pulled down in 1980) once stood; with students of the new Paris 8 university at St Denis; and inevitably with the phantoms of revolution that continue to haunt our desires."
A trailer can be found here:
Ambivalence as part of "Actions, Conversations, Intersections"
The Public School is a part of Actions, Conversations, Intersections, "an exhibition of participatory projects" at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, which runs from January 24 - April 18, 2010. Our involvement begins this Sunday, February 7th at 3pm, so we hope you'll come out!
about:
Our course on "ambivalence" will be meeting simultaneously in two places - the Municipal Art Gallery (the site of the Actions, Conversations, and Intersections exhibition) and Telic Arts Exchange (where The Public School regularly holds classes). Each group will be able to see and hear the other through a commonplace video conference call (Skype, iChat, etc.). Teachers, speakers, and other guest presenters will go to whichever location seems more appealing that day and no one will be informed of their decision until the last minute.
We often wonder what happens when participatory art projects are brought into the gallery, particularly when they already regularly function without an exhibition space. This question is amplified when the project and exhibition are in the same city. Does the project migrate to the exhibition, leaving its "normal" site closed? Does it announce itself as nomadic, settling temporarily in exhibition space after residency after biennial? Does it produce an exhibitable double of itself to accommodate the requirements of the gallery? Does it refuse any mutation or compromise in order to preserve its singular authenticity?
ambivalence:
This course will (maybe) explore different concepts and theories of ambivalence, typically defined as "simultaneous and contradictory attitudes or feelings (as attraction and repulsion) toward an object, person, or action;" "continual fluctuation (as between one thing and its opposite);" and "uncertainty as to which approach to follow."
In addition to researching and reading what various contemporary thinkers have to say about ambivalence, we will also attempt to debate the relative pros and cons of ambivalence as a state/position/strategy. What is dangerous, or, alternately, enchanting, about ambivalence? How might we theorize an ethics of uncertainty?
Readings will include excerpts from USC professor Karen Pinkus' new book on alchemy and ambivalence, as well as selections from psychoanalytic, queer, trans and other works relevant to the topic. Suggestions encouraged!
This class will be led by Sarah Kessler and others.
the first class:
- How might we define ambivalence (what does ambivalence seem to signify)?
- Is ambivalence an affect? An intellectual state? An ambiance? A process?
- In what ways is ambivalence represented?
Reading: Karen Pinkus, “Excursus: Ambivalence,” from Alchemical Mercury: A Theory of Ambivalence. Possible second reading: Judith Butler, "Ethical Ambivalence," in The Turn to Ethics.
Also: Please, if you like, bring various definitions/representations of ambivalence to class (textual excerpts, images, video clips, etc.) for group discussion.
Tonight! The Last of my Time Makes a Cosmos: Rhythm and Space Analysis toward the de-gentrification of the Black Avant Garde
Nonstophome will be in residence at The Public School for the next week (beginning tonight at 7pm!) with their four-day listening, reading, and discussion-based seminar, The Last of my Time Makes a Cosmos: Rhythm and Space Analysis toward the de-gentrification of the Black Avant Garde. The class description is below, but a practical note: if you can't make it to the first meeting, feel free to come to the second class, on Thursday.
original class proposal:
In this class we will explore the poems and music of Sun Ra, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Dorothy Ashby, George Russell, Julius Eastman, Ornette Coleman, Gene Toomer, MF Doom, Madlib, Gil Scott Heron, Andrew Hill, Eluard Glissant, Kamau Braithwaite, Alice Coltrane etcetera. We will listen to a lot of music in the classroom in addition to looking at texts and liner notes, and we will map the gentrification and eviction of black artists from the avant garde. We will explore how the use of mythos serves as a shock absorber for this eviction and how the landless back avant-garde has gone on to occupy and dominate the cosmos, inventing and reifying an afro-futurist sensibility and a kinetic indifference to the places from where they have been excluded. We will try to re-map a solidarity between the two vanguards, one not based on otherness but aware of the stalemate in place. We will learn how to live sustainably in the afro-future and we will ask ourselves if any room remains for black artists alongside their western counterparts or if both have come rely upon the stagnant echo between them, and more importantly, why would anyone want to leave the Cosmos/home. Is the black avant garde at home in space.
FUDP X on Saturday
Hello!
We are hosting the tenth Fucked Up Drawing Party on Saturday evening, between 5 and 8pm. It will be guided, as usual, by Nathan Danilowicz and Daniel Gaines. Drawings from the party will be on exhibit at our space for the next week or so.
MANIFESTO:
The purpose of a Fucked Up Drawing Party is to get fucked up (i.e. intoxicated) and draw things that are fucked up (i.e. disturbing). What constitutes a Fucked Up Drawing is different for everyone. Some people discover the Fucked Up in aberrant sexuality or perverse violence, for others it may be politically charged. Styles range from abstract mark making to soft-core realism- being eccentrically overt or delicately subtle. The ultimate test is that when you look at a drawing, you think to yourself, "that's fucked up."
Fucked Up Drawing Parties are for everyone, including "non-artists." No one is pressured to make a "good" drawing in the conventional sense, meaning: perspective, accurate anatomy, composition, chiaroscuro, crosshatching.. such skills are not required. Collaboration is encouraged, especially between "artists" and "non-artists." The resulting collective momentum ensures that each individual has a network of creative support. With this momentum, Fucked Up Drawing Parties can happen anywhere.. the alley, the foyer, or Texarkana. And while these events are considered "parties," production of drawings is essential.. and of course getting fucked up.
Ideally, the Fucked Up Drawing Parties create a space where all types of people can gather and feel free to indulge their deepest, darkest, most inappropriate fantasies with out fear of castigation. This creation of abject imagery, and our exposure to it, disrupts the hegemonic flow of mass media. The affects of a Fucked Up Drawing Party can be seen in the residue of drawing and inebriation the morning after. To exit a Fucked Up Drawing Party is to embark on a walk, not of shame, but of revitalization towards your freshly fucked up life.
