Now really exactly one half year after the opening of HomeShop at Jiaodaokou Beiertiao and a dense period of activity, we come to a moment of conferring to a calmer period of assessment and reflection of our efforts. This calmness may stem from the recent (though not first attempt) stalling of certain web-based initiatives by big uncles above, including this website and the rePLACE project with its upcoming Beijing launch. It becomes therefore a natural next question to consider what things may be singled out for consideration by various audiences, what sensitive words could strike the fancy of those near and far. What does it take to make you notice, oh lover, and what does it take for you not to, scannerbot? Publicity is a series of picks and reviews, wooing whispers or a keyword engine——not so much a declaration of what is right or true, but perhaps merely a way of observing, admitting preferential treatment. Let us look at introspection from the perspective of what has been spit out in the last months. May you be forewarned, although there is a subtle difference between fermentation and rotting, this is what BALLSINESS has still been mounting, ever slowly, y e s…working on it.

For now, a picklist of recently reverberating sensitivities, as told through certain key activities which put them into motion. This is not to insinuate that they are forbidden in any way, but there are consequences which, by way of their identification, we can only hope to gain a larger perspective.

我爱你家 I Love Your Home（2010年5月）

(a pop-up real estate update)



[关键词 KEYWORD: Break-up Club]
Housing prices continue to soar in Beijing after the change in property buying regulations, such that a restriction in the number of properties (two for Beijingers, one for waidiren) a family may possess in their name at one time has pushed many homeowners to raise rent incomes, meaning the city’s renters—especially now at the dawn of a mysterious moon harkening the convening of a local Break-Up Club—shall suffer ever greatly. The search for low-cost housing for these young residents moving out of ex-boyfriend/girlfriend’s flats keeps competition fast and fierce, and as HomeShop neighbour Fan laoshi explains, “There’s no need to even advertise a room for rent, because word gets out so quickly our extra room was snatched up in a day or two.”

The following is a purely speculative stream of associations made on the part of the reporter, but the recent discovery that a small storefront space at Xiaojingchang Hutong number 6 had been put back on the market may very well be attributed to such a love-afflicted dynamic. Sources reveal that the young Chinese female tenant who inhabited the space after its term as HomeShop was rarely seen, but when at home was often accompanied by a tall Western male. Now that the space has been returned to the market, we can only make further speculations as to her latest whereabouts and latest boyfriends. All that remains is the collective nostalgia of short-lived Ikea furniture and a now tattered vinyl sign out front with a “家” character on it in a generic blue font.

For more information on renting the space at Xiaojingchang Hutong Number 6, no agent fee, please contact: lianxi[at]homeshop[dot]org[dot]cn.

大陆漂流.中国 Continental Drift China（2011年5月）

[关键词 KEYWORDS: 沉浮 chénfú, 纵向差异 vertical difference]
A post-drift discussion and later, the post-post-discussion lend to a complexly felt 沉浮 response after all that drifting. As Cici explains, chénfú pertains to a vertically oriented drift, similar to bobbing in water, whereas 漂流 piāoliú—as in the drift—may include more of a horizontal movement over geography and terrain. Though those of us from HomeShop stopped short of all the landscapes on this particular journey, our experiences in Beijing and Wuhan mark certain ambivalences between the 漂流 & the 沉浮, research for future writing or reflection & site for embedded experience and production, and also perhaps between structured programming & open play. Such struggles are not simply binary, as we note amidst certain ‘networks of validation’ that we search and flounder for the ways to balance, in and out of quandary. These are searches of organisation, searches of freedom within self-initiated systems of being together. They can move in all sorts of directions both vertical and lateral, but where ‘possible future models’ could be engaged remains to be seen. A publication, perhaps.

此地无声 The Sound of Nowhere（2011年6月）

[关键词 KEYWORD: 关键词 keyword]
Without having asked too many questions about the others, QU was highly satisfied with his grasp of 徐坦 XU Tan’s keywords performance at 米店 Detour restaurant, one of our local eateries and gathering spots. From the mention of only a few words here and there, we are able to delve very deeply into some very crucial subjects, including ___, ___, and ___. Keywords here are used as proof of our abilities to communicate in a productive way, but the following event left our bodies a bit more sensitive; see entry on the HomeShop Library Opening and the Happy Friends Reading Group.

家作坊“万物库”开幕与“快乐朋友阅读小组” HomeShop Library Opening and the Happy Friends Reading Group（2011年6月）

[关键词 KEYWORDS: 价值 value, 意义 meaning, absurdity]
Our keywords found heated barbaric inundation during the last Happy Friends Reading Group meeting coinciding with the opening of the HomeShop library. ‘Value‘ may not have been an intended discussion point for Borges’ “Library of Babel”, but several people were able to nod astoundingly at the disarray of miscommunication in the confounded attempts to assess sources for our own collective stream of consciousness. A movement towards response should not be a target of accusation, but in playing a game such as these group dynamics infer, we should perhaps always know who holds the ball and in which court. One cannot necessarily assume that affinities lead to team spirit, or worse, war-like mongreling, but as it were the very dissonances that our languages made felt resulted in a much more played-out performance rather than reading. Language is not common, but laughter is.

Note on “absurdity”:  there is a way out, or strategy, as advised by two of our finest young representatives, but one admires the other for his ability “to get serious”. More on this issue to follow; see WEAR journal number three.

OTHER SENSITIVITIES OF NOTE:

关键词 KEYWORD: 二 Èr.
Number two is not only second best, pointing always to an other, but a ridiculousness that circles back to absurdity (see above).

关键词 KEYWORD: The Third.
Some beauty that is, though it has not yet been placed. This could be a lifelong endeavour, such that being asked to consider “value” (see above) in constant measure leads to considerable doubt that six months in bring us any closer; see also 无奈 wúnài.

关键词 KEYWORD: 邻居 Neighbour.
Poetry and language, or a still crucial nearing of metaphors and the frameworks that blind us. We always trade in oversimplified examples, such as pulling a tree from the ground, snails as food or medicine, and knowing whether the fish is happy or not. None of these riddles has been solved, but there is fear that the nearing could wreak an irreparable splintering. One compassioned shoulder claims that the smallness resulting from one’s mind being changed is what leads to a certain embarrassment or discomfort, but the same could be said about making certain aging affirmations that recur over and over again. Sometimes, a desolation comes because we haven’t changed our minds yet.

关键词 KEYWORDS: 你懂得.
!

家作坊“万物库”开幕式
2011年6月18日，周六（全天）

HomeShop Library opening
Saturday, 18 June 2011 (all day long)

在交道口北二条的家作坊开幕将近半年之后的今天，我们渐渐地尝试另一种类型的开幕式，这不是一个庆祝大事件的活动，而是一种对很多平凡日子中的某一天的理 解形式。谁说数量不重要？万物库自家作坊开幕时就已经悄悄存在了，虽并没有适当的头衔或组织形式去赋予它价值，这些物品只是贮存了起来，而经历了六个月， 我们可以站在这个小角落之外足够“自豪”地（傻傻地）说一个系统已经存在，或者至少是一个使得它可以提供服务的组织形式。

这种收集可以是关于一些本源所属权的所谓的形式（我们尽量标记每一个物品的来源），这表明了一种对集体的不同态度，这可能不仅仅是为了数量上的增加，而是为了考虑更多赠送和交换的其他形式。

谁说数量不重要？如果你向万物库捐赠三件物品，可以是书、工具或者其他大家感兴趣的有用的媒介，你就能成为万物库的会员去借阅其他物品。借阅时间灵活，可以是从几天到几年，由你所借阅的物品性质和你的需要决定。数量或者时间决定了你与物品之间及你与我们之间的关系。

本公告发布的同时，万物库将向你开放参观与借阅，就像它已经存在的那样，虽然可能某些组织方面将比之前更加清楚。至于这项服务是否会促进或阻止参与的形式仍是一个问题，正如对一般的社会形态也存在这样的疑问，所以就让这周六的开幕作为其中的一项实验。

可参观及参与的活动：

• 浏览没到一万件物品，包括文学、电影、小设备及更多
• 全天图书制作工作坊
• 免费赠送万物库会员专属的由丝网印刷的手帕，可以用来擦嘴或眼泪（送完为止）
• 下午六点开始一个特别的中文“快乐朋友阅读小组”将一起讨论关于博尔赫斯《巴别图书馆》的阅读体验［下载文件：中文｜英文，第28到32页｜西班牙语，第38到42页］

Almost exactly half a year after the opening of HomeShop at Jiaodaokou Beiertiao, we venture mildly into another opening of sorts, one which declares itself not to mark the event but as a form of understanding the many amidst a few. Who said quantity does not matter? The HomeShop library has existed quietly since our first days here, without proper titling or forms of organisation to lend it the sense of value that archives tend to garner, and now in our sixth month we can stand back proudly—nerdily—from this diminuitive corner enough to say that an operation exists, or at least an attempted form of organisation that allows itself as an offering. The collection could be about some supposed form of traced ownership (we attempt to label the provenance of each item), and this suggests a different attitude towards collectivity that may go beyond mere expansion towards other forms of gift and exchange.

Who said quantity doesn’t matter? If you donate three items to the library, of a nature including books, tools or other media useful and of interest to a larger public, you will be entitled to join as a library member for borrowing other items from the collection. Loans can thus be made for flexible periods spanning a few days up to a few years, depending upon the nature of the item and your need. Quantity, or time, matters.

In conjunction with this announcement, the library will be open for your perusal and borrowing, as it has been already, though perhaps certain aspects of organisation will be made clear where they were less so before. There is a question as to whether this serves to facilitate or deter from participation, as should be asked of all our social forms in general, so thus let this Saturday serve as one experiment among the many.

Activities for your perusal and participation:

• browse the collection of not yet 10,000 items, including literature, film, small devices and more
• book-making workshop (all day long, drop in anytime)
• free giveaway of library members’ hand silk-screened handkerchiefs for wiping your mouth or your tears (while supplies last)
• at 6 p.m. a special Chinese language Happy Friends Reading Group session will discuss Jorge Luis Borges “The Library of Babel” [download here in Chinese | English, see pp. 28-32 | Spanish, see pp. 38-42]

—–

“快乐朋友阅读小组”由Michael EDDY (长期), 何颖雅和伊莲主办。万物库由何颖雅和Fotini LAZARIDOU-HATZIGOGA发起，由王尘尘组织和支持。感谢Annie SHAW提出图书馆思想的好灵感。

This session of the Happy Friends Reading Group is co-hosted by Michael EDDY (long-distance), 何颖雅 Elaine W. HO and 伊莲 Desireè MARIANINI. The HomeShop library is an initiative of 何颖雅 Elaine W. HO and Fotini LAZARIDOU-HATZIGOGA, managed and supported by 王尘尘 Cici WANG. Thank you to Annie SHAW for bibliothesque inspiration.

In light of the last Happy Friends Reading Club meeting’s topical foray into the “aesthetics of sustainability” (addressed in an essay of the same name by Hildegard Kurt, as introduced by Victor Margolin’s text in Beyond Green: Toward a Sustainable Art), the validity of pinpointing or negating the any-be-all-whatever of contemporary art still stands at insecure shoulder to the hierarchies established by the art system, the values garnered by its economics and institutions and indices of fame. M.E. pointed out an important question raised by Margolin, of a possible aesthetics of ethics to describe those ambiguous projects (in his example, Mel Chin’s Revival Field “in which the artist explored the use of plants to remediate the soil in a landfill that had been contaminated by heavy metals.”) which become artistically difficult to interpret.

And while perhaps we should have been examining the ethics of any artistic practice all this time, it’s perhaps also true that a sublime—art historically speaking—needs not adhere to any particular ethic (unless that is an ethic in and of itself), as it induces the viewer (until glorious afterlife or perhaps now merely through the clicks) to a mode not unlike Agamben’s bumblebee, in a captivated kind of productivity, guillotined and still sucking for all it’s worth. This is perhaps the pre-thought to what I mentioned in the last post, “towards a ‘new’ language starkly founded in realism, unimaginative”, where aesthetics are the attributes of wallpaper styles and design tools to address real world issues. Not unimaginative by any means, but I wonder at which point in such an assembly line can meaning be redistributed.

Margolin’s essay calls for “a new aesthetic to embrace the three categories of object, participation, and action without privileging the conventional formal characteristics of objects. In this aesthetic, the distinctions between art, design, and architecture will blur as critics discover new relations between the value of form and the value of use.” If we have come towards forms of art-making that ‘see’ us through these categories, it becomes inevitable that ethics comes to the fore, and the voice of the artist be taken much more seriously than “wildly expressionist”. This puts art and its blurriness in danger of always being held to scales of use value, but let’s hope that it is still possible to expand the realms of possibility via the languages that we use, the way the signs are laid to their signifiers, to understand modes of transmission as the aesthetics of our ethics.

In an upcoming exhibition entitled All that Fits: The Aesthetics of Journalism, curators Alfredo Cramerotti and Simon Sheikh bring art and journalism together as “two sides of a unique activity; the production and distribution of images and information.” This elevation of the importance of forms of transmission alongside the production of the object itself is crucial to contemporary thought. It is a call upon the collective, or maybe a confirmation that past forms of beautiful solitude are less relevant in our ways of production, parallel to the ethical consideration of the other as artistic criterion. The press release of the show goes on to state: “Whereas journalism provides a view on the world, as it ‘really’ is, art often presents a view on the view, as an act of reflection.” These are both response-based attitudes towards creation inseparable from their need for reader/audience reception (one could go into that other discussion on intention here), and in our case, perhaps a fitting media for engaging object, participation and action via a context-specific endeavour. It’s an emergent thought exactly without that specific intention that Q.Y.Z. is always disappointed about. But if it’s 涌现 yǒngxiàn, as H.J.Y. prefers to call it, it’s etymologically happening in large numbers, and maybe that’s something to think about. Big time, baby, big time.

Images taken from a ritual for hair-tossed-to-compost, May 2011

“I’m Dark Matter! that’s what I am!”

For the next meeting of Happy Friends Reading Club, March 30th at 6pm, we will be discussing a chapter from Gregory Sholette’s 2011 book Dark Matter. Orianna explains:

“why did i pick it? because i think that sholette attempts the first critical history of political and activist art practice. as such the book covers critical art ensemble and also a lot of the territory brought up by brian holmes. however, i think that it is really good to think about in relation to the buchloh article as well, which heavily critiqued not only contemporary curation  but the art object as document. this critique is in stark contrast to our previous readings and to sholette’s arguments about activist practices. i wonder how the practices sholette cites work against or to expose dominant ideologies? but also how these works problematize buchloh’s instance on the autonomy of the art object and subsequently art history? i also wonder how these practices relate to the avant-garde in contemporary chinese art? is it possible to think through an activist art in china?”

You are welcome to join.

Happy Friends met on February 26th.
The significance of “Electronic Civil Disobedience,” the text by Critical Art Ensemble that had been chosen back in January, had somehow shifted over the course of a month that had elapsed rather dramatically throughout the world.
A month before, the most salient resonance with the text in the present had been the ongoing case of Wikileaks.
(more…)

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/

(more…)

Happy Friends met on January 12th in the evening in HomeShop to discuss Brian Holmes’ “The Affectivist Manifesto”. Despite the particular viewpoint with which he begins his manifesto (regarding the 20th century as a monolithic period obsessed with medium), it is rather ambiguous how the text merits the “manifesto” in its title. (…)

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Dear Happy Friends,
Happy New Year.
With our passage to the year 2011, we renew our call to meeting.
We will begin softly with a text by “The Affectivist Manifesto”, by American-born theorist, writer and translator Brian Holmes. As it is quite brief, the text is simply included in the message body below.

The meeting will take place on January 12th at 5:30pm at HomeShop.

“But intimacy is still an unpredictable force, a space of gestation and therefore a wellspring of gesture, the biological spring from which affect drinks.” -Brian Holmes

Participants are encouraged to bring contributions to a definition of “affect”; what is its promise? How and why to engage it in the manner of a manifesto? Is this not the area colonized by the consumption puppet-masters?

We look forward to your presence.

(more…)

The next Happy Friends Reading Club meeting is scheduled for Thursday, the 23rd of September, in the evening somewhere inside (or ever-so slightly outside) the 3rd Ring Road.

The text is from “Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference” (2000) by Dipesh Chakrabarty.

“Let me begin with an example from my own research in labor history. Consider the following description from the 1930s of a particular festival (still quite common in India) that entails the worshiping of machinery by workers: “In some of the jute mills near Calcutta the mechanics often sacrifice goats at this time [autumn]. A separate alter is erected by the mechanics. . . . Various tools and other emblems are placed upon it. . . . Incense is burnt. . . . Towards evening a male goat is thoroughly washed. . . and prepared for a . . . final sacrifice. . . . The animal is decapitated at one stroke . . . [and] the head is deposited in the . . . sacred Ganges.” This particular festival is celebrated in many parts of north India as a public holiday for the working class, on a day named after the engineer god Vishvakarma. How do we read it? To the extent that this day has now become a public holiday in India, it has obviously been subjected to a process of bargaining between employers, workers, and the state. One could also argue that insofar as the ideas of recreation and leisure belong to a discourse of what makes labor efficient and productive, this “religious” holiday itself belongs to the process through which labor is managed and disciplined, and is hence a part of the history of emergence of abstract labor in commodity form.” p. 77 (Chapter 3)

(If you would like to receive a copy of the text please leave a comment.)

Songs of the Donkey

The reading club meeting, involving three texts somewhat innocent of each other’s connections, was held in the shop in Caochangdi. The texts—”The Burdens of Linearity: Donkey Urbanism” by Catherine Ingraham (1999), “Lethal Theory” by Eyal Weizman (2006) and “The Shanghai Gang” by Richard MacGregor (2010)—encompassed a broad range of issues whose relations could potentially crisscross and veer in various directions, for and against the grain of theory, out of or in the range of empirical topic. These texts were all further intertwined by their being chosen within the frame of the Donkey Institute of Contemporary Art’s Co-Director Michael Yuen, inviting speculation on applied theory or grounded discussion.

Within the sequence, the first text to be discussed was Weizman’s, which happened to be about the use of theory by the Israeli military in dealing with or rather in “interpreting” architecture, in their raids on Palestinian towns and settlements. The discussion led us from the “radical” technique of walking through walls, which is done by creating holes in existing architecture to make new paths through private spaces, and the supposedly non-hierarchical swarming techniques by which individual Israeli  soldiers carry out their tasks independently and in no particular order, to tactical specificity (targeting particular individuals for capture or assassination), all ostensibly based on ideas derived from theorists such as Foucault, Deleuze and Tschumi. But that is not to say these techniques or theories, though they explain the complexity of contemporary built environments, populations and conflicts, are any less traumatic or destructive than conventional warfare. Consider the upending of the categories of private and public, which, after seeming like a novel shift in print, is utterly destabilizing when your house becomes a thoroughfare. We talked about  how implicated theory itself was in this outcome, and whether such outcomes mandated changes in the way theory would be written.

Meanwhile Michael had to run outside because the donkey was getting some grief from one of the caretakers at the gate for trying to enter the brick art district. DICA had arrived, but for the moment, we pressed on with the texts.

Ingraham’s article counterposed a number of texts to draw out the subject of the beast in Modern architecture’s scheme of things. Beginning with Le Corbusier, who ridiculed the distractedness of the donkey vis à vis the straight intentional lines of Modern man and his cities; and continuing with Claude Lévi-Strauss’ description of getting lost on his mule in the jungle, which in the end becomes a revelation of his views of the relationship between writing systems, architecture, human organization and therefore mass violence; Ingraham’s account thereby leads its winding way to Jacques Derrida and to the subject of writing. To the ideas of the “origins” of straight lines and their import for urbanism. Ingraham says: “Urbanism and architecture, as we have already seen through the strange narratives of Le Corbusier and Lévi-Strauss, come (in a state of considerable hegemony) to the geometric (straight) line in the immediate presence of the animal (swerving, making a path), which irrevocably perturbs the hegemonic and the straight. And, lest we forget, the animal is not “The Animal,” but the principle of animality that belongs entirely to human culture.”

We took a group trip to the roadside display of books currently on view in DICA. A small crowd had gathered even on this side street, but this is the curious custom of the institute. The books were all translated with post-it notes, but there was one Chinese reader with his shirt off slowly, systematically orating aloud the English captions of David Shrigley’s red book. Someone stroked the animal’s muzzle (in fact, it looked like a bit like a horse). It’s interesting to see DICA at rest, because it is one of the rare moments when an institution can be seen to be loitering, waiting for the next thing, to move on, the cart owners squatting in the hot sun.

Finally, returning to the air-conditioned interior, we discussed the urban state of Beijing. To some degree the straight lines of Beijing were already unstraight from the beginning based on behavior like opposing traffic, bringing the intimate to the sidewalk; and the city’s fabric was already porous, plurally interpreted, multipurpose, because of the means and necessities of daily life, in the spaces of difference between the so-called privileged and underprivileged and the state and reality, most poignantly felt in the reducing to rubble of communities and erection of new developments within no time at all. And history. And some are happy, others angry, some come up with entrepreneurial solutions and some flee and some bear brunts. And yet as far as those people in the reading club meeting were aware, there is not much theory to support these observations, to reflect on the new perceptual and cognitive spaces that make up contemporary reality from this point of view. Not even co-opted theory. The last text was a chapter from Richard McGregor’s book about the inside of the Communist Party, a not-so-well understood organization. This chapter by McGregor, a financial journalist in his day-job, concerned the anti-corruption campaigns that targeted Shanghai’s dizzy urban developers and their government friends, marking the period of politcal turnover from Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao, while it also demonstrated the difficulties facing anyone on a lower level trying to expose corruption using official bureaucratic channels. The philosophy behind this situation is challenging, because it is often not outwardly debated or addressed; but looking around at the cityscape, the effects of this hidden philosophy—visible at least in deed beneath the bold slogans—certainly seemed materially manifest. Perhaps the theory of the donkey can only be just such a blunt confrontation of material, and the reading group’s radar could simply not pick it up. When one person present, who was a local, was asked what happened to the people who get displaced when the buildings come down, he said he didn’t know.