Where to begin with the topic of gentrification?
Of course, in our city, right here in our very neighborhood where we are implicated.
No.
We will get to that.

Suppose we start in a future-primitive state: something beginning from a point far too under-urbanized than we conventionally conceive in such a process, resulting in something far too over-developed, centrally-marketed and artificial, not to mention out of the city, to speak the gentrified language.

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小运动群论第三——艺术实践中自我建构的可能性
Little Movements Round Table Discussion No. 3: Possibilities of Self-Construction in Art

个体体系——“家作坊”的实践
Individual Systems: the Practice of HomeShop

主持 Moderators：刘鼎 LIU Ding、卢迎华 Carol Yinghua LU
参加者 Participants：戴章伦 Asea DAI、何颖雅 Elaine W. HO、黄然 HUANG Ran、欧阳潇 OUYANG Xiao、苏伟 SU Wei
摄像 Photography：王俊艺 WANG Junyi

时间 Time：下午1点半至3点，2011年1月20日星期四; Thursday, 20 January 2011, 13.30-15.00
地点 Location：家作坊 HomeShop，北京市东城区交道口北二条8号

会议纪要 Discussion Summary

家作坊［Home(work)shop]由何颖雅与欧阳潇创建于2008年，最初落户鼓楼附近的小经厂胡同，后迁至北新桥附近的交道口北二条。正如空间名称本身所提示的，它意在探讨“家”与“作品”之间关系，私人空间与公共空间之间的流动性转换，更替。“家作坊”，这个看起来像是具有私密感的空间事实上却在不同的公共社区中活跃而公开地进行着自身的实践。

无疑，“家”这一寓意丰富的能指在中国这样一种特殊文化语境中所暗含的私人与公共领域之间的微妙而特殊的关系是值得进一步反思并在实践中进行探讨的。关于这点，我们或许能想起日本汉学家沟口雄三（Youzou MIZOUGUCHI）及岸本美绪(Mio KISHIMOTO)的观察，在他们看来，在中国，“私”与“公”并非是两种平行的异质领域，而更像是一种同心圆的层级递进关系（因此，国人的公私观向来是不那么分明的）。而这与持续了千年的“家国同构”的社会形态密切相关，“父母官”这样的称呼可称得上是国人的一大“发明”。传统儒家更是将这种层级递进的关系上升到一种所谓的 “修身，齐家，治国，平天下”的政治-伦理法则的高度。

因此，在这样的语境下，相较于在相互平行的公私空间中谋求交流对话，“家作坊”更像是在“同心圆”中进行着相互叠加的双向运动：对于已然形成了某种情感维系的社区来说，它无疑是陌生的进入者，它的活动是从同心圆的外层向里层的逆向运动；而就其“家”的名称而言，它又是试图进行从内向外进行辐射递进。倘若将这种同心圆的模式从与社区的联系转化到“家作坊”作为一个有机个体与整个艺术界的联系，它的运动同样耐人寻味。艺术家刘鼎便敏感地意识到，这种向外辐射的过程所产生出的强度和张力决定了“家作坊”如何在作为整体的艺术界中定位自身的工作，也即苏伟所说的，若干年之后的走向问题。

然而，如果我们搁置上述假定，另从阿多诺关于 “介入的艺术”以及“自治的艺术”的对立统一关系来看待“家作坊”的工作时，发现它作为一种与其平行的，（也许）体制化了的艺术界的否定（或制衡）因素而存在并与其形成一种持久的张力也是成立的。然而也许正如艺术家黄然和策展人卢迎华所担忧的，即便是作为一种平行的，自治的制衡力量，“家作坊”的这种艺术生产和输出也必须考虑到它的最终去向问题，对象的接收问题，也即，是给予对方一块砖还是给予一块砖背后的观念的问题（如果我们不使用“启蒙”这个显得有些一厢情愿的词的话）。这种不同语境之间如何衔接铆合或许也正是“家作坊”工作坊的难点和意义之一吧。

– 戴章伦 Asea DAI

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原文2011年1月27日发布在卢迎华的博客 Originally posted 27 January 2011 at Carol Yinghua LU’s blog: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_5cd68bae0100ol7p.html

The first post-New Year meeting will be held at HomeShop on February 23rd, 2011. We will read Critical Art Ensemble’s Electronic Civil Disobedience (1994), the first chapter (p. 5-30) of “Electronic Civil Disobedience” (1995).

It is available for free from the Critical Art Ensemble website: www.critical-art.net/books/ecd/

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I recently ran into this mini project from students of FEI Jun‘s media lab at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (courtesy of NO+CH). They call them “micro-observations”, and according to the students, serve “not merely as a magnification of the thing itself, but as an enlargement of the act of noticing. ‘Micro-observations’ bring about not only a paying attention to the unnecessary, but in revisiting these objects the transformation of their semantic meaning.” Nice public intervention~

点击图片查看箭头指向的物体 Click on the images to see enlarged object

“微观”公共艺术项目

材料：水、粉笔、现成品

人们似乎只习惯关注宏观风景，而忽略身边的细微之物，尤其是在公共环境中。指向性的标识符号往往对人产生直觉性的吸引力，我们在公共空间中使用粉笔、水等创建了临时性的导视符号，用于指向日常环境中的一些微小的物件，墙角的昆虫躯体、地上干枯的残花、马路上散落的烟蒂…叠加的标识使得这些平常无奇的细节被人为的放大，其实被放大的不是物件本身，而是人们的关注，“微观”导致的不只是一次可有可无的关注，被关注的那些物这样的再访中被转化了语义。作为对于特定公共空间的一次微小和瞬间的干预，“微观”企图引发“再访－再现－再定义”的感知体验。

参与艺术家 Participating artists：费俊 FEI Jun、尚钰 SHANG Yu、宋思琪 SONG Siqi、张宝珠 ZHANG Baozhu

我们今天开会之后，溜达到外面去仔细看野猫给我们留的“平面保安”。周围的人评价包括了“是你们弄的吗？”，“真吓人”，“什么意思？看不懂”以及“你听过苏打绿的歌吗?” 我们对着墙猜测它想表达的意义以及作者的目的。讨论最欢的是图像是否像曲哥。我们的“探讨”听起来很像美术馆里一些参观者的无知言论。看了这个“保安”的创造者讲了“艺术”与“行动主义”的分别，引发我们回到了一个老话题——行动主义是activism吗? 百度了一下，得到了两个回答：激进主义，行动主义。那激进导致action吗，thinking和doing的边界在哪？激进想法能存在吗？

After a morning meeting, we venture outside to take a good look at the traces left by a few rowdy rascals in the area. Commentary ranges from “Is this you guys’ doing?” to “It scared the shit out of me“, “What does that say? Not understandable” and “Have you heard Soda Green’s songs before?” Speculation about meaning, intention and whether or not the smiling figure looks like QU sound a lot like museum chatter, so it is perhaps not so irrelevant that the inside word has it to drop considerations of “art” and “activism”. Conversations meander, and a quick Baidu of activism（激进主义，行动主义） reactivates an ongoing discussion about thinking and doing. If 激进 (i thought it sounds more like ‘radical’) must also involve the act, does the 激进想法 (‘radical idea’?) exist on its own, and how close to 激进 could we be from the viewpoint of a cubicle of a well-intended NGO?

周五早上，我们在胡同里边溜边闲谈——就是这样，大家探讨一些无聊的事，也许不怎么懂，也有可能知道内幕。不时流露的独家信息和没有边际的话题让我们的对话从thinking到doing漫无目的地徘徊。最后，即兴的结果是我们的“小保安”突然长胡子了。是thinking吗? 或许doing?

Standing around and chatting in our hutong on a Friday morning looks kind of like this. Speculation on the state of affairs, not really understanding, maybe knowing the story behind the story. Tidbits of background knowledge and free association make a conversation wander aimlessly between a kind of doing and thinking, like the spontaneous outcropping of a goatee on our new bodyguard’s chin.

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关于尤莉•约翰逊 ／ About Ulrike Johannsen

德国出生，在维也纳生活和工作的艺术家尤莉•约翰逊的作品主要关注的是文化之间的切磋和交流，以及对于社会的集体构建。通过她一系列的装置、现成 品和纸上作品，约翰逊始终置疑着被消费向导的生活方式给人们带来的关于“幸福”的许诺。通过巧妙地利用大众传媒和挑逗文化产业中的技术性手段，她为人们揭 示出人类欲望与后资本社会之间的缝隙。

约翰逊从2008年起在中国的工作成果，呈现在她近期的作品《斯德哥尔摩综合症》以及2010年春天在Baden艺术协会策划的群展“东西 Things”中。（点击这里－见家作坊关于此次展览的作品）

Ulrike Johannsen’s work is focused upon the negotiation and communication of culture and the collective contruction of society. Employing a range from installation, objects to paper, Johanssen questions the promises of happiness offered by the consumer-oriented lifestyle. By manipulating popular media and flirting with the mechanics of the culture industry, she reveals the gaps between human desire and post-capitalist society.

Johanssen’s engagement with China since 2008 has resulted in her latest work, entitled “Stockholm Syndrome”, and the curation of the group exhibition “东西 Things” opening at the Kunstverein Baden in 2010. (See HomeShop’s contribution to the exhibition here)

www.johannsen.net/ulrike

There is nothing less passive than the act of fleeing… reading group day 10, photo by caleb waldorf

The thing to remember while crossing the threshold is that the process of world-making does demand the maintenance of suspended spaces of inquiry, even as it presses toward effective changes in the way that you sustain your material existence:

With whom do I create a world? What will it be made of? How will we maintain it? Where will we find the gazes that we humans need to keep doing whatever it is that we do? How to raise our own gazes past personal satisfactions to an activity that can attain the bracing and tragic dimensions of a real world? Can we or should we bring along any symbolic or material supplies from the richly appointed illusions we’ve just left? Is a politics necessary: do we somehere have to stand and fight? Is a counter-institution necessary: do we have to set up objective structures to start sharing whatever we have learned with people we don’t know? And how to keep this whole quixotic enterprise from failing, or drifting by inertial necessity back to the established and symbolically stingy formats of what you are calling the artworld?

–Brian Holmes, responding to Quitting: a conversation with Alexander Koch on the paradoxes of dropping out

Last summer, a critical “cultural exchange” led to another kind of unexpected trajectory, meeting Italians in the hutong, meeting 1,500 bricks, all the serendipitous occasions* to generate a certain interest in something as random as the building block, parts and parcel, production and pieces. If we should start from the elementary, we come upon the city, piles in preparation, rubble. It’s a deception, that solidity, for things break and fall apart as much as they are constructed. Such temporalities come fired here in coal burning kilns—in both an economic and an environmental sense a dangerous consideration of only the momentary—things are just not built to last. Our building block seems more a blockade than an independent solidity, less object (or part thereof), but a conjunctive to be considered alongside the motion around it: the brick is door stop and speed bump and chalk all in one. Solidity delineates, separates, blocks, protects and becomes an object of relation. Then add sticky rice, and we’ve got all the time in the world.

Mud brick by Stephanie Shepherd

Artists Stephanie Shepherd and Barbara Balfour recently came by HomeShop and we happened to stumble upon our common interest in sticky rice and bricks, though Stephanie has taken it to a critical experimental level, self-concocting her own re-mixture of an ancient technique involving a sticky rice mortar (found dating back to the North-South Dynasty, 386-589) to attempt an ultra durable block similar to those found as parking markers all over the city. A thousand year old blockade, a point which we would be invited to keep coming back to again and again. To delineate or separate, block or protect, to become an object of relation. These are continuities more than divisions as we might have first thought, the building blocks of an imagination for another time-sense.

from the series “Behind the Restaurant”, by Barbara Balfour

Would it be possible to say the same for something non-created, or to ask further, what forms of imagination take place in a way of seeing? Barbara’s series of photographs of the backside of the Tuanjiehu branch of Beijing’s famous 大董 Dadong Roast Duck restaurant take on a similar time quality, though here solidity comes in the form of constancy and routine. Continuities embed themselves in the daily processes behind, outside of and next to the restaurant’s main activities of cooking and eating. People enter in and out, make and receive deliveries, take inventory, line up for staff meetings, take smoke breaks. While the camera maintains a fairly fixed position from her apartment window, the frame is searching, zooming in or out and moving somehow relative to all the action below, an object of relation.

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*Further reading about contemporary brick production and serendipity can be found in the second issue of Wear journal, published May 2010. In response to Sportsbabel, I don’t know if better bricks would necessarily slow down the process of killing ourselves, but those were a nice conjoining of material loops. Not what contemporary capitalism is good at at all, indeed.

The topics set forth during these kinds of meditative acts allow for a gentle interplay between a free flow of thought and teacherly instruction, the affectionate chastising of others’ work and the occasional bite of lovers: “You can stop talking now.” Interludes of silence are comfortable moments of concentration, the hands in motion while we think round thoughts. It was a round-a-bout way to discuss contemporary art and value creation, another chuckle over the money that we’re missing and the reverberations of Ms. Lu’s comment that Also Space² lay some far outside from “what’s going on”. But it is an understandable inconspicuousness to position oneself also, in addition, alternative, marginal. This externality to the core—-what had been a very critical moment in the historicising of Chinese contemporary art this past week—-left us feeling insecure, slight. But why? It was his premise from the beginning that these should not be hierarchical estimations, and rather, we had been discussing art and democracy, art and anarchy. Perhaps these things are not so far off from panel discussions of the sort, but we seek form from our politics, like the organisation of ever smaller grains of mud and sand. So small that they reflect light on their surfaces. Shiny mud balls. Value and importance are self-created entities, perhaps overdetermined, like the roundness of a mud ball made smooth and glossy by caring hands.

At the end of the workshop she came to treasure the imperfectness of her sphere and its mottled terrain, but its shine gave her that comparative sense of pride with which all our notions of value and capitalist competition are based. No matter. In the end she gave it up, placing it carefully it in the wire basket with all the less fortunate attempts.

photos by 何颖雅 Elaine W. Ho and Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga

Below is an excerpt from an essay by curator/critic Steven L. Bridges concerning contemporary practices in art in the public sphere. Let’s hope this doesn’t sound too pretentious, but sometimes you feel like someone knows exactly what you’re going through… (and they’re a lot more well-versed at it than you are) Thank you to Doug Lewis, for indirectly leading me to it. The full essay can be found here.

photo from me, February 2010

The current climate surrounding contemporary art production—including recent curatorial and exhibition practices—is especially marked by an ongoing expansion of the field across disciplinary boundaries and beyond the conventional spaces of display and reception.  This expanding field of artistic production spreads in multiple directions, an expanding universe without any definite center or edge.  One facet of this expanding field concerns the arm of contemporary art production today that takes the very nature of human relations as the source material for the undertaking of a project or research initiative.  In doing so, artistic processes are combined with social processes of transformation through the “making visible” of that which is otherwise invisible: that is, the very socio-politico-economic tensions and power relations that organize societal life, as well as the “invisible” people within society, the marginalized and/or disenfranchised.

Many projects of socially engaged, collaborative art are highly complex systems that entangle both aesthetic and socio-politico-economic issues.  These kinds of practices often speak to diverse groupings of people, who—while deeply interconnected—may or may not have access to the necessary socially, culturally or politically viable opportunities for the articulation of their personal views and concerns, their own subject positions.  This type of working process—layering aesthetic and sociopolitical issues; employing open-ended, dialogical modes of production; testing the very publicness of the spaces in which the work permeates—requires a kind of artistic and curatorial prowess that focuses on notions of collaboration, representation and improvisation.  Yet, the very mutability of these practices does much to dissuade the use of oversimplified categories and concepts, and without sufficient tools (theoretical or practical) to measure and gage their multiple values and points of reception, analysis can often lead to a reduction of the works to a single dimension or create a misleadingly narrow critical framework.

In order to avoid the numbing effects that accompany the use of generic terms—the pitfalls of overgeneralization—I will take a moment to further explore the concepts of collaboration and representation in the hopes of reactivating them within the context of this analysis.  My interest in collaborative processes extends far beyond merely the definition of two or more people “working together.”  This is a rather mundane interpretation and does not convey the sense of reciprocal activation—processes that create a sense of agency and empowerment among the participants that they may not otherwise put into practice—that is fundamental to collaboration.  The exhibitions, and works of art within, develop situations for the expression of multiple subject positions, and it is through these kinds of exchanges that the possibility for change is enacted, with careful attention paid to the aesthetic potential of the communicative act.  Above all, these projects come to function as critical sites of debate and contestation, a form of productive interaction that invariably metabolizes the different viewpoints of those involved in order to produce other viewpoints to be mulled over and debated.  Such processes are ultimately dialectical in nature, productive in their sustained oppositionality and interconnectedness.

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Read the rest of “Making the Invisible Visible: A City in Multiples and the Art of Multiplicity“.