图片/image: Jeronimo Voss

幸存艺术

19:00—> 2013年10月19日

继今年四月对空间模式的热烈讨论之后，家作坊现在推出下一个议题：艺术家在北京（但不仅限于北京） 组织自己的“工作-生活”的不同方式。

• 生活工作在阿姆斯特丹的Maja Bekan 和 Angela Serino目前是北京IFP（Institute for Provocation)的驻地艺术家，她们的项目是“行动中的身体：文化工作者的未来会是怎样？”
  Maja Bekan是一名行为和视觉艺术家。她是艺术家鹿特丹艺术组织“论辩与艺术区”（ADA，Area for Debate and Art)的发起人与策划者。
  Angela Serino是生活工作在阿姆斯特丹的意大利策展人和作家,自2010年起出任荷兰艺术机构Kunsthuis SYB的项目策划委员会委员。
• 方璐是一位生活和工作在北京的录像艺术家、录像局的发起人之一。录像局是设在北京和广州的独立录像档案资源库，主要致力于为录像艺术提供展览，组织和存档的平台。
• 来自德国的访问艺术家Jeronimo Voss是艺术工作者联盟（Art Workers Coalition）的组织者之一。艺术工作者联盟主要研究职业艺术工作者的政治和组织可能性及其与其它社会运动之间更为广泛的联系，如他们的项目Philosophicum就以法兰克福住房短缺问题入手，向政府提议将一个废弃的大学校园建成住房合作社。
• 在北京工作和生活的艺术家吴玉仁通过自己的装置与摄影作品阐释权力结构及其对个体的影响。2010年，吴先生参与组织了包括多名艺术家与当地民众在内的抵抗强拆活动。

Surviving Art

7:00 pm—> October 19th, 2013

In a followup to our lively discussion on different models of “spaces” in April, HomeShop hosts a discussion on the ways that artists organize their working lives, in Beijing and beyond.

In China (and elsewhere), while artistic work has often meant self-employment and being one’s own boss, it has not always translated as “self-determination.” We start this discussion from a common inquiry that unites a variety of positions: what structures can we create to endow our work with a little more stability?

Participants:

• Amsterdam based Maja Bekan and Angela Serino are currently in residence at IFP in Beijing working on the project “BODIES AT WORK: What is the future of the cultural worker?”
  Maja Bekan is a performance and visual artist. She is a co-founder and developer of the Rotterdam based artists’ initiative ADA, Area for Debate and Art.
  Angela Serino is an independent curator and writer based in Amsterdam (NL). She is member of the Programming Committee of Kunsthuis SYB, artists in residency devoted to research, experimentation and new collaboration, and co-initiator of noalanguageschool, icw artist M.Al Solh.
• Fang Lu is a Beijing-based artist working primarily in video. She is co-founder of Video Bureau, an independent video archive resource in Beijing and Guangzhou that aims to provide a platform to exhibit, organize and archive video art.
• Visiting from Frankfurt, Germany, artist Jeronimo Voss talks about his experiences with artist self organization in Frankfurt am Main. Jeronimo will talk about new urban development plans in Frankfurt, Germany as well as ways of dealing with it, both artistically and on a self-organized daily life basis.
• Beijing-based artist Wu Yuren represents power structures and their effects on individuals in his installations and photography. In 2010 Wu and a group of artists and residents in northeastern Beijing were involved in resistance against evictions.

Two interviews in 3 days in March by Asta of Peking University, and photographer and writer Lo Yin Shan. Is this community-based practice?

In the springtime HomeShop had a few visitors, as well as some very curious though inevitable vacancies (including the seeming concerted evaporation of occupants from the workshare space a month ago; now much ameliorated). During this time, and facing an uncertain future, a number of us began considering our established models of supporting and running the space. A discussion among various Beijing-based art spaces and projects also attempted to find some answers to the question of what kinds of activities are felt to be needed now in this city, and how they could be sustained.

On a return, the Teapot Exhibitions space was found to have been shattered to pieces, December 2012.

For a brief moment, following the positive experience of having UK-based artist Maurice Carlin here as first “official” resident, the idea to pursue a residency program seemed like a good way to regularly fill space and provide some inquisitive new energy, as it keeps many a Beijing institution afloat or well-padded. We consulted our friend at a space in Caochangdi to hear about how their program is run, but found that—however viable such an option might turn out—in our case it would veer down a path of specific identity and program that few of the organizers at HomeShop were really willing to adjust to. Add to that the preparation time required, and we would be looking at the rest of the year singularly geared to making this transition to something we didn’t necessarily feel consensus about achieving.

Reinaart Vanhoe and Maurice Carlin each sojourned in HomeShop, April/May 2013.

Likely an existing truism: many of the awkward feelings come from more than the reality of money, but from inside the organizational structure itself. Personal relations ripple through everything we do as a group, as well as all the effects palpable to others. And to us, or to me, at least, it hasn’t always been a desired separation, us and others. But how many others? And who? On that cusp of inside and out, the question of who gets to say, who gets to decide, has never been quite satisfactory to many. “Business” and “art group” sections were proposed at one meeting that seems like ages ago; institutional affiliations too; not to mention suggestions of becoming a real shop or a gallery. (Even old Uncle Long Beard came by one day to ask about starting a restaurant in the front space—if not at our friend’s place across the hutong, which looked empty to him.)

A curious neighbour ponders the latest question on the 問題 blackboard, May 2013.

The physical and social scale of HomeShop seems perfect for trying out the sticky substance of collaborative authorship, but each move has been prone to all the foibles and concentrations of skills and interests particular to the individuals involved. We could say this is natural, but it essentially means a certain recurring, quasi-naturalized predisposition of roles.

The Party Project does portraits! And political parties! Find out more! Ongoing deal!

This is me editorializing—when my tone turned whiny, another recent returning visitor, Reinaart Vanhoe, recommended giving space and recognizing the specific qualities of the individuals involved. This is true. If part of HomeShop’s character these last couple of years (regardless of which direction it goes in) might have been in prioritizing the values that exist in between those frequenting HomeShop, this may also be seen as its radical difference from many other spaces, organizations, and groups in Beijing. This is also what has left it open to critiques of opacity, inwardness and lack of structure; at the same time, this is what makes it exhausting and insecure. It’s a fiction.

The Aquaponics Workshop, started in early Spring 2013, is finally achieving system operation, with fish on the way any week now!

Giving space: how to understand that at this point? A time that oscillates between a feeling of latter-day busywork and a sense that we are only now achieving certain promises embedded in this inhabitation of HomeShop? Ambiguity and ambivalence sit side by side in the shopfront window with all its virtuality, while this discussion on giving space is for the most part conducted behind closed doors (like this one). In such discussions we talk about what will happen next year when the space’s contract meets its maker. Sometimes it feels a decision has already been made, and sometimes it feels that oscillation has produced the possibility that this decision is not up to us. It might appear in the question, will this given space be missed? or maybe rephrased as, who wants to take it? The offer is there.

Pointy, circa 2011, one of the many errant cats who have lived and loved and left HomeShop.

*Fine print: Taking the given space wouldn’t be a deal made for survival. In any case, debts may be incurred, facilities and signatures may be withdrawn, free labour may be cut back partially or in whole, and name may be subject to change. Then, you ask, what is offered, exactly? What is it without those things, and what can it become? If you’ll excuse the slippery language, what would be circumscribed by a survivability clause would be a set of possibilities, a certain kind of ground for particular approaches to say, art, design, critical engagement, social organizing, self-determination etc. to come into their own forms. Survivability in a sense meaning, to live beyond the lives of the individuals involved. Again, this is not about legacy, nor about feeling good about taking exits—it is about seeing that value is held by more than this current group of individuals, and recognizing the limits of these individuals in giving space.
My friend, a plurality is on offer! The Beijing wind is on offer!

**Disclaimer: these statements (which are actually questions) are the responsibility of the author and do not reflect the views of HomeShop; no offer is valid unless expressly stipulated by HomeShop.

***Note: This text was written several months ago but put on hold pending a host of unresolved questions that may have caused confusion about what was really being addressed here. At the present time, there are indeed more open discussions about the uncertain future and ways to confront the realities of rising rents, authorship, structure, and cooperation. If you are interested in joining this discussion, get in touch! More people are needed. More info on that soon…

HomeShop opened its library to the public this summer. Although its collection comprises “not-yet 10,000 items,” the moment had already arrived for questions about the content, triggering a conversation that I joined the other day in HomeShop’s front space, on the issues of inclusion and exclusion.

As the library grows mostly through donations from friends and neighbors, certain patterns gradually emerge: all the books someone couldn’t take with them, some flea market novelties, something that “might come in handy.” To host anything, or hypothetically everything, would mean all the “bad” as well. Bad in the case of a library means the superfluous, the unhelpful, maybe the hateful; from another perspective, one never knows who will value what in a public library, and cutting away the inessential means cutting away part of a potential public. The central ambiguity of any archive lies on these fissures between values. This is also dependent on the reality of passing time, by which bad qualities are outlasted as a generation shifts and becomes other to itself; however, this process is most apparent in archives proper as opposed to libraries (who, in the future, will honestly cherish all of the pulp novels as books, as opposed to documents? Or do they, even at present?). One can then imagine, as did Jorge Luis Borges, a Babylonian library comprising all that was and is, in effect re-constructing the universe in type, a disorienting and endless universe in which we all dwell.

But of course other hard realities emerge to rebut this imaginary, unlimited possibility: space and order. HomeShop’s shelves are small, but not yet full. The intention of our conversation to edit the inventory—resulting, ironically, in only one or two withdrawals—therefore compromised on a discussion of what inclusion and exclusion mean. As an independent project initiated by individuals (namely, Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga and Elaine W. Ho), whose nurturing is guided by particular investments rather than indifference, the HomeShop Library recalls Walter Benjamin’s words: “But one thing should be noted: the phenomenon of collecting loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner. Even though public collections may be less objectionable socially and more useful academically than private collections, the objects get their due only in the latter.”(1) But with its simple principle of acquisition and circulation based on personal relations, the HomeShop collection becomes a living and metabolic portrait of a community, complicating the possessive fondness of Benjamin’s ideal bourgeois collector.

The ordering methodology can be recognized as not as rigid or as rigorous as that of Beijing’s National Library of China, though it shares the Chinese Library Classification system’s categorizations (starting, of course, with Marx & Mao, passing next through religion and philosophy, proceeding to the hard sciences at the bottom/base). But where the State institution speaks the language of publicness with its vast architectural spaces and purportedly unparalleled collection, the State’s very ordering protocols eliminate even the imaginary possibility of housing the universe on its shelves, where this could at least be a fantasy in HomeShop’s case. (A review of the oddities in the not unimpressive foreign languages section at the National Library is enough to wonder what is the basis for their acquisitions; recommendations are not invited, I was told.) The universe, after all, is composed of many, many small and particular things, not just the mapped planets and giant balls of gas. Even without space, attentiveness and affect define an alternative order of ordering. As the Indian archival project Pad.ma points out: “To not wait for the archive is often a practical response to the absence of archives or organized collections in many parts of the world. It also suggests that to wait for the state archive, or to otherwise wait to be archived, may not be a healthy option.”(2)

One pertinent irony of our contemporary media-saturated world is the State’s inability to accommodate the histories that make up the most intimate (ie. unofficial) parts of people’s lives, which actually make up the majority of all stories. But is the ambition of the (art) project to recover all lost histories, to pursue the exhaustion of this chaotic universe on its shelves? And do we hope that the State eventually takes up the pursuit of accounting for this breadth of experience? But isn’t it true that they already do to some extent, through the surveillance of all of our movements and stockpiling of all of our utterances? The gap exposed is therefore not the abyss of quantities, but the ground on which qualities are encouraged to develop. HomeShop’s library, emphasizing the knowledge and feeling that flow from individuals and can be borrowed—social exchanges, that is to say—hosts a potential to reflect the library as a universe despite or rather because of its modesty, its ethics-under-development. That said, at the end of our afternoon crusade of book-purging, we finally had to put off the decision of what to cut, until some other moment in the future.

Michael Eddy

The HomeShop Library is open daily for browsing and for borrowing. Please come by.

(A Chinese version of this text to appear in upcoming issue of Yishu Shijie Magazine / 中国版的这段文字会出现在“艺术世界”杂志。)

—
1. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking my library” in Illuminations
2. From Pad.ma’s “10 Theses on the Archive.” Visit Pad.ma’s alternative video archive: http://pad.ma/

The CD was composed of American commercial rap and r&b sped up and seamlessly mixed into one-hour mp3’s. He used this pulsing and unrelenting rhythm to fuel his wild progress, despite the near opacity of the lyrics to his ears. Young and tidy, with glistening hair and a craggy cheek surface formed of the new sustenance, he was an image of youth, an animation of the performance of youth under pressures. We climbed in and with the door’s closure, an easygoing promise of timely delivery and an immediate u-turn in front of an oncoming bus set a tone for a sequence of negotiations and split-second decisions informed by flowing intuition. This pointed awareness did not count the law chiefly as its limit, working along its approximate guidelines, but hovering in a parallel state where speed and safety are blurry, immeasurable energies constituting pure duration. Looking at the license on the dashboard, one noted an older, pale, balding man gazing back; the spirit and attitude of driving had either rejuvenated an adult, or made an adult of a boy. The maneuvers, which included burst-passing on the narrow 2-lane causeways that elegantly cross-hatch the edges of East Lake, cutting corners early shadowing mini-vans, and swerving around piles of debris, not to mention hurtling past other speeding cars on the new elevated freeways, all made up a language of an urban space that sprang up and lay half-destroyed and half-in-progress. As such, it was not the code of a single person, though he is the atomic driver in an incalculable system of circulation and friction; but he can only be the atom in tension with the particles exploding around him. Even the pedestrian on the rubble margin senses the shifting values and instant momentum transformations, adjusting to this general spatial intelligence with minimal violence; the other drivers play variations on each other’s motions, together developing the chaotic vocabulary that oscillates between efficiency and entropy, creating such tropes as the cautioning head-lamp flicker and the selfish congesting lane-take. Just like the tireless and carnal mp3 soundtrack accompanying the sequence to its end, these signifying gestures don’t accumulate toward a thesis, but in their isolation gradually chip away at time, leaving us dizzy and early, present, in front of the Hankou train station. There are no straight roads, and in Wuhan, the atomic driver must hustle space with the will of an unstable citizen.

from daucle@Atelier ClaudeveretT:

“Discard Space” refers to the total space occupied in the twelve hour timespan from eight in the morning when I leave HomeShop until eight in the evening when I return. At the same time it refers to the two week period in which Elaine W. Ho leaves Beijing, whereby if I had not entered HomeShop, it could be deemed as such “discard space”. During this period of time, the effective capacity of this space is zero. But it is a temporary space. Just as my residency within the space creates a use value for it, as it resolves the possibility of my residency elsewhere, this space is full of possibilities.

If we take such possibilities (without a violation of basic rights) and divide them temporally, then there exists a segmented but equally non-violable use of space, and these are what we call temp_spaces. To face the use value of temp_space signifies allowing its users to make such use of space and access the latent potential for communication and exchange made possible by the null space of office hours.

As such, within this two-week period we make a discussion of the time_plot_ratio of residency time (temp_space). My residency fulfills one part of this, but during office hours from Monday to Friday, there remains a “discard space”. We would like for the time_plot_ratio of HomeShop’s temp_space to achieve its greatest possible potential.

HomeShop is divided into two primary spaces, one which is used as a bedroom, the other as a studio. Because the bedroom serves as a private space in which personal articles are stored and the routines of personal hygiene are not usually shared, the general public does not usually have the possibility to enter the space. But with the studio space as temp_space, therefore, its use can be made open and shared under agreement of deed. This space with its open front facing the hutong alleyway and moveable screen can be made multifunctional (commercial, display, etc.). Users have the possibility to open space or close it by the moveable screen. Given the size parameters of the space and that which opens it onto the public street, the screen serves as a crucial determinant of the space.

temp_space x time_plot_ratio will take place from 8-11 December and 14-15 December at HomeShop from 8:00 until 20:00
.

In order to participate, please fill in the temp_space deed [download WORD doc or PDF] and send it by e-mail to claudeverett [at] gmail [dot] com or directly contact by phone at 13811418056.

There are no fees involved, the only requirement is that at the end of each day the space must be returned to the original condition when entered.

douban event page: http://www.douban.com/event/11328214/

In the end we may discover, resolving space is not necessarily a return to something natural, but in fact a manner by which the rich man resolves the seat in his car. Resolving space may mean the new architecture that suddenly springs from the earth, or that’s the architect’s scheme, anyway. Space is a rich man, time is a poor man.

“home” is whoever stays in.

废弃空间指的是我从早上8点离开家作坊到晚上8点回来这中间的12小时内家作坊内部的所有空间。同时指在何颖雅离开北京的两个礼拜内，如果我没有住进去的话，家作坊内部的所有空间。在这段时间内，此空间的时间效应为0。但它是一种临时空间。正如我的入住使得两个礼拜的废弃空间得到了利用，并节约下了另外某处我可能入住的其他空间一样，它充满可能性。

如果把住宅的不可侵犯性进行时间划分，那么在某段时间内必然存在相对不那么不可侵犯的空间，这部分空间也被称为临时空间。对住宅内临时空间的使用意味着用单位空间的废弃时间段满足与他人潜在的交流与交换，同时节约出使用者在这段时间内原本使用的所有空间。

所以在这两个礼拜内，讨论住宅的时间容积率。将住宅建筑面积按时间计算，则
时间面积=建筑面积×24h；
时间使用面积=使用面积×使用时间；
从而有
时间容积率=时间使用面积/时间面积。
我的入住满足了一部分，而周一至周五白天的上班时间则使其再度变为废弃空间。我们来使家作坊的时间容积率达到最大。

家作坊的空间主要分为两个部分，一部分为卧室兼起居室，另一部分为工作室。将卧室空间作为完全私密空间，用于私人物品的储藏及出于个人卫生的不可共享，非主人允许的情况下不可进入。将工作室空间作为临时空间，主人不在时以契约的形式任意使用。对于面向胡同开放的功能（商业、展示等）通过可移动的帘子进行空间分割（阻挡视线与灰尘），形成门面；对于个人使用的功能可直接在室内进行或用帘子进行分割；如果空间大小允许，也存在部分空间向胡同开放，部分空间供室内使用的情况，用帘子进行分割。无人使用时则作为面向胡同邻居的公共空间。

只要您在白天的时候需要一个这样的空间，欢迎一切形式的介入。你可以利用它和这儿的胡同邻居交流，也可以将其变成完全封闭的个人场所。建筑的所有权在这段时间内完全自由交换，没有歧视，不分你我。

家作坊邀请您来玩！

临时空间的开放时间： 2009年12月8日-2009年12月11日，每天的早上8点至晚上8点
预订方式： 契约将在报名后收到，将契约填好 [下载 WORD 文件 或者 PDF] 并发至claudeverett [圈a] gmail [点] com等待回复或直接联系13811418056。对此空间的使用无需支付任何费用。

豆瓣：http://www.douban.com/event/11328214/

最后我们将发现，节约出来的空间并没有归还给自然，而是为富人节约出来了一个车位，或者是新的建筑拔地而起，这是建筑师的阴谋。空间属于富人，时间属于穷人。

– daucle@Atelier ClaudeveretT