Originally published in AREA Chicago online

by Bill Ayers, Alice Kim, Harish Patel, Barbara Ransby and Daniel Tucker

Chicago needs a city-wide center urgently focused on creating, igniting, and sustaining the widest range of social movements capable of rethinking, re-imagining, and rebuilding our city and our nation from the bottom-up. Chicago—the city of neighborhoods, the town where community organizing is front and center—is home to dazzling and diverse examples of spaces that sustain excellent work from cultural centers like Decima Musa (R.I.P.), Mess Hall, Experimental Station, Co-Prosperity Sphere, to meeting and organizing places like the Chicago Freedom School, UE Hall and Jobs with Justice, to shared work spaces like 3411 W. Diversey, Grace Place, Centro Autónomo and In These Times, to event spaces like Heartland Café and Simone’s and institutions like the Jane Addams Hull House Museum and the Chicago Cultural Center. These spaces are constantly under pressure from fluctuating real-estate markets, over-use as well as neglect, and the on-going challenge of building sustained activity and broad community in our segregated city.

The Space Cadets Working Group was initiated in early 2011 to engage in an intentional process to explore how to set up a central gathering space in the city that can become a hub for movement building and supporting neighborhood culture and politics—a place where we can intersect, learn, grow, and build together. We need acentral space centrally engaged in igniting our radical imaginations toward movement-making. We need a creative educational home-base where we can dream big and act intentionally, “preach to the choir” when appropriate, unify neighborhood based activists, hammer out unity on major contradictions, and re-culture the movement and ourselves. And with all this we are mindful of many challenges and contradictions from the start, including the importance of engaging differences, the problem of dynamically defining community, the danger of alternative institutions disappearing, the social and political cost of money, and more. In the face of a city government that has privatized everything, we initiate this process to create a long-term and rooted effort invested in making more and better public spaces.

Research Process:

In order to present as thoughtful of a proposal to our larger communities as we could, we have been engaging in discussions, readings and meetings to generate a clearer vision for what this movement building center might be and what challenges we should anticipate.

We started out by reading some recently collected reflections on what this space could and should be, in the AREA Chicago interview, which asked several space-makers, “Why does Chicago need a new community cultural center that will facilitate city-wide networking and community and movement-building? Where would you imagine this place being located, and what are some things that might happen there?” See their replies here.

Readings:

We have also been sharing our own reference points and readings about making such community spaces. Some excerpts of readings that motivate and challenge us are included in the footnotes from the following books: In and Out of the Crisis, Memories of Black Mountain College, Caution! Alternative Space! by Group Material, Transformative Organizing by Movement Strategy Center, and Memoirs of a Dil Pickler (1).

Interviews:

In addition we have been investigating and interviewing folks from a wide range of progressive spaces around the world, and we are mapping what exists both locally and nationally. Thus far our “map” includes Highlander Research and Education Center of Tennessee, the Brecht Forum and 16 Beaver Street (both in NYC), and the Heartland Café in Chicago (2).

These meetings led to significant insights and offer invaluable lessons for any future endeavor. Those include: the central importance of relationships and truly caring for the people you embark on this process with; respecting history without getting stuck in it; the role of the movement center changes with the state of the movement – sometimes attracting more of a generally critical/curious crowd and other times being a center for organizing; being in debt, overworked and underpaid; informal structure may be more efficient at times but can also lead to a small number of people holding power and notoriety while others come in and out and gradually disinvest as the work gets more challenging; mission statements and other trappings of non-profit organizational structures can be important guides and declaration of values but can also stifle development and prescribe audience/constituency/community; importance of approach to external communications (tone of emails, flier design, function of website, etc) to defining how open or closed the project is and where it can go; involving people from different backgrounds only happens through involving people with different backgrounds and not through endless discussion, guilt or processing; long-term engagement, endurance and time determine a lot about what the project will be and what role it will play in peoples lives.

Real Estate Consultation:

In a meeting with representatives from Livingroom Realty we visited five properties for sale located between 18th street on the South, Ashland on the West, Canal on the East, and Chicago Avenue on the North. The properties included an office space, frozen food locker, former Italian restaurant, late 19th century light industry factory, and a former bar. Each space was full of possibility and we were surprised by the prices being lower than expected at $200,000-$750,000 depending on how much work each space required.

Conclusion

After considering past and current models and various options for starting a space from scratch, we have come to the conclusion that it would be most advantageous, practical and symbolically powerful partnering with others already engaged in the maintenance and operation of venues and spaces for the intersection of community and political engagement.

With a new globally networked Mayor who is advancing neoliberal restructuring of schools, neighborhoods and public services as well as playing host to the G8 and NATO conventions next May – we need to take this step together. With our rich history of Labor, community and cultural organizing falling victim to non-profit depoliticization, corruption and budget cuts – we need to take this step together. With neighborhoods simultaneously experiencing land-grabs and disinvestment – we need to take this step together.

Chicago’s movement for the future needs a place to come together. If you agree and want to discuss this further then email us at harishichicago@gmail.com to keep in touch about an upcoming fall potluck dinner to discuss and plot together.

Footnotes:

1) Reading Quotations:

In and Out of Crisis:

“… effective political participation demands the time to do it – the time to read, think, learn, attend meetings and events, debate, take part in strategizing, and engage in organizing others…..How we do this is what the question of alternatives is ultimately about. Crucial to this rebuilding is to get people to think ambitiously again…Educational centers that can cut across current campaigns are absolutely central for developing a deeper and broader understanding of issues, and also for developing the set of skills that people need to become effective organizers and grounded community leaders.”

Memories of Black Mountain College:

“A group of ex-BMC Mountaineers in New York is thinking of making another try of it elsewhere. I sincerely wish them luck. But they should ponder the question whether the defects of BMC and other experimental colleges are all accidental and avoidable or inherent and inevitable. BMC has had many accidental failings. But i do not think the conflict of personalities, for example, can be numbered among them….they overestimate the extent to which we can in these ways escape and surpass our world. Policy is still economically determined, only by the money-getters, not by the money-givers….As a determinant it is weak; it is itself largely determined.”

Caution! Alternative Space! by Group Material, 1982:

“We looked for a space because this was our dream – to find a place that we could rent, control and operate in any manner we saw fit. This pressing desire for a room of our own was strategic on both the political and psychological fronts…. We never considered ourselves an “alternative space.” In fact, it seemed to us that the more prominent alternative spaces were actually, in appearance, character and exhibition policies, the children of the dominant commercial galleries.

Everything had to change. The mistake was obvious. Just like the alternative spaces we had set out to criticize, here were were sitting on 13th street waiting for everyone to rush down and see our shows instead of us taking the initiative of mobilizing into public areas. We had to cease being a space and start becoming a work group once again….”

Movement Strategy Center:

“Transformative movement building has the potential to reshape the vision, values and practice of organizers and organizations. It holds a promise for a long-range cultural shift in the progressive movement through a dynamic process of transformation and change at multiple levels: Individual , Organizational and Societal.

Our goal is not to make everyone into a professional organizer, but to create a movement that is relevant, attractive and accessible to all kinds of people.

This does not mean watering down the politics. Rather, it means watering down the politics with the richness of diversity and an openness to change.”

Memoirs of a Dil Pickler:

“…I thought Greenwich Village was America’s intellectual center. Red argued that it was only the artistic center; when people went to the Village, he said, they went looking for poets, writers, artists, and other longhaired members of the Great Unwashed. But when they came to Chicago’s Near North Side, they were looking for the bums who talked like college professors.

But what was the Pickle? Art center, little theater, indoor Bughouse Square, Bohemian tourist trap, latter-day hangout for country-store solons, or just a dive for nuts? Maybe it was all of these things. How would I know? I was just one of the habitues. Considering myself a young pseudo-intellectual, it was home to me. Home is where the heart is. Home is where you establish rapport with other humans. Or, if you want to be nasty about it, sub-humans. Who cares?”

2) Thank you: to everyone that responded to our interview requests, Pam McMichael @ Highlander, Katy Hogan @ Heartland, Jesal Kapadia, Pedro Lasch, Rene Gabri, and Paige Sarlin at 16 Beaver, Kazembe Balagun, and Max.Uhlenbeck at Brecht Forum; thanks to Kristen Cox, Robin Hewlett, Ryan Lugalia-Hollon, Wishbone, Lauren Cumbia, Experimental Station, Abraham Mwaura, Beth Gutelius, AREA Chicago and Annie and Richard from Living Room Realty.

“Healthy social movements need spaces for learning and experimentation, healthy democracies need wise citizens to make wise decisions about resources and politics, and healthy people need outlets for dialogue in order to learn about new ideas and form cooperative tendencies to help one another.” From the Call For Proposals for AREA Chicago Issue #5#

AREA Chicago is a magazine/website, event series, and a group learning experiment for adults who identify as artists, researchers, educators and activists inhabiting the city of Chicago. I was involved in founding it in 2005 and after the 10th issue of the publication was released in 2010, I stepped out of the organization to pursue new efforts. This is the first writing I have attempted on the subject of AREA, from the position of being outside the organizational effort that was my primary political and community practice for over five years. I will attempt to weave my personal opinions with quotations from the publications and with some more general notes on AREA as a collaborative effort by a rotating cast of individuals, though it should be clearly noted that the project continues to evolve in new directions and my writing cannot speak to that and therefor will focus on the period of time between March of 2005 and October of 2010 in which I was a central organizer.

“Chicago hit its growth spurts in the waning days of the old imperial metropole, as empires shrunk but market logics expanded, creating centers and therefore peripheries throughout the world. Ever since the time of Chicago’s late nineteenth-century ascent, the tension between centers and peripheries in the colonial mold has informed all economic and political relations conducted over distances of every scale, whether that be between downtown and the neighborhoods, between the city and the suburbs, between the metropolis and rural outstate, between Chicago and the multi-state Midwest, or between this part of the developed world and those regions on the global periphery. The interchanges and flows between these places, and all combination of them, collapse distance. The uneven distribution of resources, economic benefit, and cultural reach reinforces and amplifies it. This tension shapes not only our experience of place and political understanding, but our psycho-social constitution as well.”AREA Chicago #9 – Editorial Introduction by Dan S. Wang#

That AREA was conceived of and cultivated in Chicago, Illinois is not a coincidence. There are numerous factors about this place in particular that percipitated the work and ideas that inspired the creation of this project. And undoubtedly there are factors about the people and organizations who’s work was either documented in the pages of AREA or were happening alongside in the common space of the city that made the project what it has been and continues to become.

“In the summer of 1967, organizers in Chicago created a “School of Community Organization,” an outgrowth of the Chicago Freedom Movement. The program was intended to attract recruits from around the country, mainly to train Black and Latino organizers to work in Chicago neighborhoods. Chicago was a testing ground for movement work because it was considered the most segregated city of the north, with the most powerful political machine. While classes for organizers were held in Garfield Park, college students, most of whom were white, were advised they could participate by conducting research into topics essential to grassroots work in order to produce handbooks for the teaching and practice of community organizing. These students also had the opportunity to take “free university” classes with radical faculty and invited lecturers such as Staughton Lynd, Jesse Lemisch, Rennie Davis, Heather Booth and Naomi Weisstein. This collaboration at a distance between middle-class white college students and Black and Latino organizers followed the emerging Civil Rights movement ethos of “organize your own,” articulated by Stokely Carmichael in 1966.” – AREA Chicago #10 “The School of Community Organization and the Center for Radical Research” by Rebecca Zorach#

Upon my arrive in Chicago ten years ago it quickly became apparent that there were generational divides in the city’s political and artistic movements in addition to the geographic divides that segragated different races and classes from one another. There were “old school” organizations based in rigidly defined neighborhoods that were organized along the principles set forth by Saul Alinsky 70 years before that largely mirrored the “top down” policies of the city government. Then there were younger activist groups that looked and felt very different, employing creative new tactics and embracing complex subcultural, queer and globalized identities. In the arts there were stagnant institutionalized museums, galleries and theaters that hardly reflected the culture of the neighborhood clubs, theaters and experimental art centers that were community-centered and not concerned with mythical art markets or culture industries that seemed to bipass the city anyways. On the academic front, the city’s prominent research institutions bubbled over with student activism that represented great discontent yet had little to do with ongoing activity by non-students; researchers studied the social problems of the city in great detail only to publish their analysis in academic journals no one would ever read; and in individual public, private and after school programs innovative “social justice” curriculum was developed while the labor unions argued for fixing entire systems over piece-meal reforms at every school. In media there were established major newspapers, The Tribune and Sun Times, which had risen to the top after an era when 11 daily newspapers were produced in the city#. The media underground of the 60s had produced some lasting institutions in the Chicago Reader and similar “alternative weekly papers” focused primarily on entertainment listings in an attempt to keep up with online platforms. The rich tradition of social commentary documentary in the city, led by Oral Historian Studs Terkel and filmmaking collectives from the 60s like Kartimquinn, Media Burn and Chicago Film Group exist in parallel to more recent phenomenon of Indymedia and gapersblock, though at this point most people seem to get their news from corporate-owned social networking websites. The fragmentation and sense of disconnection between parallell struggles and activities was dizzying and disorienting.

“Our focus on discussion arose in the course of our collective activity and our many disagreements. The people who came together to found the 49th St. Underground had many different ideas for action. But we shared the feeling that we could benefit from discussing these differences. We thought that activists’ discussions too often remain confined to particular activist groups, and that revolutionary organizations too rarely engage one another in serious debate. We thought, further, that we could benefit from critical reflection on our activity. And we hoped that our discussions would interest new people who may not already be radicals.” – AREA Chicago #1 “Introducing: 49th Street Underground” #

One dimension of AREA was an event series that roved around the vast and diverse geography of the city, slowly accumulating connections and building relationships. Events included a series called “Infrastructures” which focused on learning from self-organized infrastructures such as “community land trusts” in San Francisco and independent media centers like Spain’s “Hacklabs” (this presentation inspiried a hackmeeting regional convergence# in the Pilsen neighborhood in Chicago the following year). With hundreds of events over 6 years, the organization collaborated with dozens of new venues and engaged different and divergent communities. Along the way traces of each event would inform the others, as some participants would curiously engage in subsequent gatherings that piqued their interest. As a publication, a similar editorial method was employed. The people, the histories they brought and wrote about, and our conversations all left incredible traces on my sense of the city. On a personal level, it was becoming a device for deepening my relationship with this city and learning from this place.

“What is shared between students of 1968 and today? The social conditions propelling calls for revolution are remarkably similar: a highly unpopular and politically motivated war, repression of civil liberties, excessive materialism, a neglect of human rights. As in the 1960s, some radical students today are beginning to band together to provide opportunities once again for free and democratic education. When speaking to free school organizers of Chicago, I heard familiar themes re-emerging. Some attempt to make their own universities more democratic; others oppose conventional schooling altogether because of its connections to perpetuating social harm. Most free school classes, workshops and dialogues aim to be anti-capitalist, anti-hierarchical, anti-specialized and anti-competitive. Instead, free schools reclaim the ideals of education by embracing cooperation, community, mutual aid, responsibility, accountability, autonomy and liberation.” AREA Chicago #7 “Free School Movement” by Ashley Weger#

In the 1970s interesting community education experiments continued to be developed in the form of the Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos High School created by Puerto Rican independence activists and the People’s Music School in the Uptown neighborhood#. This rich tradition was expanded upon in the 1990s with the “info-shop” known as the Autonomous Zone and the ongoing Open University of the Left and continued at the turn of the century spaces like Buddy, Highschool, Mess Hall, Biblioteca Popular, Platypus, Dorkbot, Co-Prosperity School, La Casita, Centro Autonomo and other shorter-lived experiments such as ARC, Chicago Political Workshop, Chicago Free School and the local branch of the LA based The Public School. Universidad Popular and Chicago Freedom School expand on the limited offerings of more established and traditional adult education in City Colleges and after school programs like After School Matters#.

“There is a core group of eleven “keyholders” that coordinate and organize all of the events the take place at Mess Hall—or under the Mess Hall name, since sometimes Mess Hall projects happen at other places too. I am one of the people in that group. But beyond that group there are so many people who have contributed huge amounts of energy, thought, time, material, and emotional support to this experiment: neighbors, scholars, speakers, activists, introverts, artists, technicians, organizers, locals, tinkerers, eccentrics, landlords, hoarders, travelers, archivists, cranks, writers, cooks, talkers, audience members; all of them are cultural contributors: the foundation of Mess Hall.

   Egregiously, I left educators off that list. Certainly many professional educators have contributed to Mess Hall and wonderful things have come out that, but Mess Hall has also been a place for co-education, a place where non-professionals can educate and where there is some possibility for anyone to become a teacher. Sometimes teaching happens by overt, formal lesson; sometimes in spontaneous situations where lessons can’t help but bloom, and other times there are difficult situations that can only be navigated by on-the-spot learning.” – AREA Chicago #5 “Can Experimental Cultural Centers Replace MFA Programs? by Mike Wolf#

These efforts often parallel inspiring activism and social-justice education happening within public schools and universities to reform them from the inside. The most notable of which include Caucus of Rank and File Educators and Teachers for Social Justice representing those working in primary education, and ethnically or culturally identified student unions, student worker organizations, and labor unions represending staff, maintanance and service workers and faculty within public and private colleges#.

“So the question is: Who will decide what kind of education our children should have, the Commercial Club of Chicago, mayor Daley, and the big real estate developers? Or parents, communities and teachers?

There is an alternative beyond failing schools and business-led education. There are examples of city schools that are grounded in children’s lives, cultures, and identities, that are anti-racist and pro-justice, that have a rigorous curriculum and are hopeful, joyful, and visionary, and that teach children to think critically about the world we live in so they can actively participate in making it more just.” AREA Chicago #1 Position on Renaissance 2010 by Teachers for Social Justice#

In this rich context of education about politics and engagement with the politics of education, AREA has attempted to provide a sustained space for dialogue and inquiry related to the relationship between education and social movements.

“Woodlawn is a neighborhood with a rich history of social and political struggle and a long tradition of community organizing. For decades the neighborhood has been home to an array of civil rights organizers, black power activists, community organizations, musicians, and artists. In the 1960s, residents forced the University of Chicago to halt its southward expansion at 61st St. and built power to address a wide array of community issues. The idea behind STOP/Student-Tenant Organizing Project was to build a principled solidarity based not on service, hand-outs or dependence but rather mutual learning and action to address displacement in Woodlawn. Immediately, questions emerged: what role would students play? Who would train the student and tenant organizers? Which buildings should we start with? How can real trust and solidarity be built given the transitory nature of students?” AREA Chicago #3 – “Introducing STOP” by Matt Ginsberg-Jaeckle#

“Chicago needs a centrally located center that can serve as a home to any one or any group working to create city-wide change. If we call it a community center, we must redefine “community.” This term can no longer apply only to isolated neighborhoods if this center is to serve all of Chicago. This city needs a physical space that serves as a political home for activists of all ages who want to exchange and test new ideas, create networks, and grow as leaders in movement-building. This place should be actively working to free itself from oppressive practices and committed to ongoing public programming as a way to provide continuous education to youth and adults committed to social justice. I envision a fully accessible, state-of-the-art facility located somewhere in the South Loop area, with easy access to all the major train lines. We at Chicago Freedom School are committed to helping this become a reality.” – AREA Chicago #10 What Does City-Wide Movement Building Look Like? by Mia Henry#

Series Description:

This series of five articles will be an introduction to Chicago, Illinois USA and its local critical cultural experimentation, written from the perspective of a magazine editor and curator committed to navigating the city in all its complexity. In previous articles in this series I have overviewed local art history, arts publishing, artists working in groups and running spaces, and surveyed the state of local cultural institutions.

6/20/09

Critical Culture in Chicago – Article #5: Artists Making Community
by Daniel Tucker

I’m always hearing arts organizations talk about “outreach.”

In 1999 Malcolm Gladwell published an article in the New Yorker magazine that described Lois Weisberg, the Commissioner of Cultural Affairs for city government here in Chicago, as a “connector.” While this article popularized the term, the concept has been utilized in sociology and the research of social networks for many years longer. And as a concept, it’s pretty straight forward – there are people in this world who know lots of people, are good at making introductions between people, and generally behave socially in a similar way as a “node” does on an communications network – connecting and redistributing connectivity.

Connecting people in service of building community is particularly impoverished at this historical moment. This is due in part to the new and unresolved networking potential of the Internet, yet there are certainly other material and psychic reasons for gradual fragmentation and alienation that are much more complex than communications technologies. While it can be easier than ever to accumulate “friends” through online social networking or mass distribute information via the web, those of us interested in artistic practices that have potential to affect and alter social relations know that getting together in the same room as others to dialogue about and enact our passions and commitments is as necessary now as ever.

With this final text in the five part series, I will focus on introducing individuals that do the hard work of building community in Chicago – in person. They don’t have fixed organizational affiliations and they float around town engaging and touching many projects, communities and spaces. This is intended to be an introduction to their work based on my observation of local cultural production over the last nine years. I must acknowledge that there are many other people involved in this work, that community is the result of more people’s participation than just those that organize and promote its existence and do projects to foster it, and that these are a few strong examples among many occurring simultaneously and historically here in Chicago.

Making Introductions

Nicole Garneau was born in Chicago and makes performances that use the city as a backdrop and as a material. In recent years she has taken to developing long term projects that combine research and playful acts in public space that help her and others think through challenging history. One such project was the 2005 series Heat05 where Garneau did one performance everyday (often enlisting the help of others) to honor and reflect on the nearly 500 lives list in a heat-wave in Chicago in 1995.

Dan S. Wang is the only person in this listing that does not actually live in Chicago, but his impact is so significant in this city that he had to be included. Dan strives to identify potential connections between disparate communities which should have a lot to share but because of various forms of segregation cannot seem to see one another. He was one of the founders of Mess Hall, has had a role in other southside institutions like Southside Community Art Center, Experimental Station and most notably at the Hyde Park Art Center where he recently completed curating 18 sessions of a monthly lecture series featuring local artists.

Another artist with tremendous influence on the southside of town, whom also carefully concocts collaborations between institutions in different corners of the city is Theaster Gates. Raised on the westside of the city, his roots in various communities run deep. Through the creation of a number of his own micro-institutions he blurs the line between an individual practitioner and a collective force, even creating elaborate mythologies around some of his more conceptual identities like the Yamaguchi Institute and the Black Monks of Mississippi. Gates makes things out of clay, he also pushes and pulls his audience throughout the city – encouraging them to learn to discover the place where they may live but do not yet know.

Unfortunately music, art and politics don’t mix as much as they should in Chicago, but one person who defies that dynamic is Damon Locks who fronts a band called The Eternals, DJs all around town, makes socially conscious collages and illustrations, and directs the content of The Population – a website that tries to bring together essays on the politics of architecture with interviews of punk musicians reflecting on their changing industry.
Two other musicians doing an immense amount of community organizing are Mark Messing and Jon Cates. Messing is the instigator of a number of large scale noise, music and dance exuding marching bands which tour the conventional music circuits, as well as street parties and protests. The marching bands often serve as connecting points for different communities in the city, at times through performing at fundraisers for activist causes or through bringing a large scale celebratory spectacle to a neighborhood picnic. Cates has been able to bridge his interest in new media and noise music through the curation of a number of festivals such as r4WB1t5 and gatherings like the Upgrade Chicago and Dorkbot. Many of his most frequent collaborators are the people of criticalartware, a collective research project about the early history of new media and making art inspired by those traditions.

Sometimes what is needed is for someone to just take the time to tell others about what is happening around town. Salem Collo-Julin is the person. She will take the time to send an email to her friends about an upcoming event organized by an out-of-town artist that would likely go under attended otherwise. She also brings people together as the administrator of GoChGo, an email listserv for artist-activists in Chicago that sometimes hosts physical conversations when the online dialogues do not suffice. She is also one of four Free Store organizers who turn empty lots into temporary chaotic malls of reciprocity (‘bring something, take something’). One Free Store collaborator, Melinda Fries is the proprietor of Ausgang.com which documents the city (and other places) on a seasonal basis and has been a platform for Chicago’s and non-locals alike. Collo-Julin’s collaborators in the group Temporary Services play similar roles in other contexts: Marc Fischer hosts events dedicated to obscure music histories and special collections while Brett  Bloom and his partner Bonnie Fortune develop publications, exhibitions and gatherings like the 2008 “What we know of our past, What we demand of our future” which serve to clarify visions and cohere community for politically engaged artists.

Miguel Cortez is another person that keeps everyone in touch. From his own visual art and curating that often tackles politically urgent subjects, to being a force behind organizing artists in the Pilsen neighborhood where he lives via Pilsen Open Studios and art-pilsen.org, to his ten years of work running the Polvo venue, magazine, events newsletter and art making group he manages to draw people together. Now with Antena a gallery he operates out of his apartment, he has a new base for his same busy practice.

Jennifer Karmin is a local poet and performer with her hands in everything. Together with Lisa Janssen she programs the monthly Red Rover reading series – one of the more experimental of the local literary events. With Kathleen Duffy and others she is Anti-Gravity Surprise. Duffy bridges the gap between art, health and food politics with her dedicated efforts as an organizer for Campaign for Better Health Care and as the initiator of a drive to create a food cooperative.

Another person mixing ecology and art is Nance Klehm. Her diverse practice includes writing a column for the Arthur music magazine about edible weeds, leading walks in neighborhood parks and along streets to identify edible plants growing in public space, and teaching classes locally and abroad about the intersections of art, space, food and ecology. She sometimes makes work which is more familiar as sculpture or performance, but there is almost always a pedagogical or social component to the work – consistently engaging people in learning processes that help them to think about their bodies, the land, and food.

Aay Preston-Myint jumps between three ambitious projects and still manages to show up everywhere. He recently became affiliated with Mess Hall, an experimental cultural center on the far northside of the city. His other organizing work places him mainly on the southside where he collaborates with six other artists to run No Coast, a printmaking studio and shop that also hosts irregular events and popular 24 hours silk screening “epic” parties. Finally, the last leg of his practice situates him in the northwest-side neighborhood of Wicker Park where for the past five years he has collaborated with a rotating cast of friends to produce Chances, a monthly dance party for the young queer community that lacks cohesion and doesn’t relate to the commercialized atmosphere of the Chicago’s more prominent gay and lesbian ‘districts.’
A frequent collaborator of Preston-Myints, Charlie Vinz is another local figure who bridges disparate worlds. He works as an architect and diligently attempts to get architects, designers and educators to meet and talk and collaborate. One concrete contribution he has made to two local cultural venues, No Coast and the Orientation Center, has been to design and build recycled furniture customized to the uses of the spaces. He also hosts regular dialogues between those working as architectural educators, and teaches Chicago youth design principals through an after-school program. Education is a substantial recurring theme across many people’s work and backgrounds.

Two public school teachers who manage to bring critical culture into their classroom and still maintain active practices outside of school are Lavie Raven and Bert Stabler. Lavie Raven founded the University of Hip Hop and has collaborated with numerous others from Hekter Gonzalez to Trinidad Castillo and others at the Southwest Youth Collaborative to produce exciting and politically relevant arts education a since the mid ’90s.
Bert Stabler could easily be writing this article. He consistently writes texts that promote local activist art scene for Proximity magazine and other outlets, while also maintaining a connection to more eccentric art communities concerned with psychedelia and utopia. In the classroom on the far southside of the city, he has been known to develop creative curriculum using the music of Sun Ra and highway underpasses.

This article couldn’t be complete without mentioning the work of Ed Marszewski, the consistent force behind Lumpen and Proximity Magazines (organized with his wife Rachel and collaborator Mairead Case) and the Select and Version annual new media and public arts festivals. His rotating cast of collaborators includes most of the people listed in this article and countless like-minded cultural producers from outside Chicago – he is a local booster without being too provincial.
Chicago is a city where community organizing, in the tradition of Jane Jacobs, Saul Alinsky, Jesse Jackson, Fred Hampton is really strong. Numerous artists and arts organizations have integrated parts of these traditions into their work. One prominent example is Tom Tresser, an organizer who actually treats arts “scenes” as constituencies (in a political sense) which are ripe for organizing. He has tried to get more artists, who he identifies as insightful critical thinkers and actors, to run for political office. Additionally, he an organizer working to protest the current bid by the city to hose the 2016 Summer Olympic games with the coalition “No Games Chicago.”

Anne Elizabeth Moore comes out of publishing independent zines and magazines, a tradition she connected with as a teenager. She hates consumerism and commodification. That much is clear from her nearly two decades of hating on capitalism and the banal culture it encourages. In recent years her work has shifted from being primarily a writer and editor for magazines such as Punk Planet and In These Times to working as a curator, a public artist, public intellectual, and organizer of an ambitious series of Unlympic participatory sporting events, another project intended to protest Chicago’s bid on the 2016 Olympics.

Laurie Jo Reynolds has been behind many group efforts from Brechtian theater productions to large scale social events like ASK ME! where everyday people with expertise sit behind booths and get to talk to everyday people with questions. These projects have often been produced under the name Chicago County Fair, but the grouping and its identity is quite loose. Most recently Reynolds has been a major force in a political organizing effort to reform a prison in Illinois that has been torturing prisoners in conditions worse than Guantanamo Bay for over ten years. For this work she has called upon the arts community heavily to produce symbolic events relating to the prison and has strategically used the special interest the arts receive to break the barrier of the media which refuse to write about torture in their backyard yet dedicate immense resources to promoting the entertainment industry.

Aaron Hughes is a relative newcomer to the city, but his impact cannot be understated. He is a local leader in the Iraq Veterans Against the War and has found ways to connect his art practice to his organizing efforts with that group. Connected to his recent thesis project concluding his graduate studies he developed Demilitarized U, a temporary learning space dedicated to the intersections of anti-war organizing, activist art practices, and countering military recruitment in the city, among other subjects.

Conclusion

One thing that is consistently said about culture in the city is that people are incredibly willing to collaborate. Its common to hear debates about what it means to “be a Chicago artist” or what local rootedness means in relationship to globalization. But these debates will not help us see one another differently, they will not negate the meaning of place or the presence of global connectivity in our lives – they can only distract and make us question our potential. It is for this reason that the work of the people listed above is so important – they are realizing in themselves and others a great potential. These people are going to create the new languages and frameworks that we need to see ourselves in relationship to one another in this age of fragmentation. They can do this because they reach across subcultures, scenes, disciplines and niches. Yet this is not “social work”, and its not professional networking – these are artists making community, for themselves and others.

=-=-

Daniel Tucker is one of the editors of AREA Chicago and is currently working on a book of interviews with activist-farmers throughout the US with Amy Franceschini, due out on Chronicle Books in 2010. see miscprojects.com

Here is my 4th text in a series about Chicago art for the Belgian publication (H)Art due out later this month

Series Description:

This series of five articles will be an introduction to Chicago, Illinois USA and it’s local critical cultural experimentation, written from the perspective of a magazine editor and curator committed to navigating the city. In the final article in this five part series I will focus on individual artists working alone or without a consistent group identity.

5/1/09

Critical Culture in Chicago – Article #4: Art Media and Publishing
by Daniel Tucker

(Publication pile from "How We Coordinate" Discussion at Version 07 Festival in Chicago)

Documenting, Clarifying, Promoting, Projecting, Interpreting, Evaluating. These are some basic answers to the question: what is the function of writing about art? To consider the impact of that project on a local level, it will be necessary to survey the range of outlets for such work. This text will serve as a brief introduction to Chicagoan’s efforts to write and create space for writing about art. Additional, yet limited, attention will be given to the broader literary production occurring in the city, and infrastructures that support or nurture this work.

Chicago’s major daily newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, just laid off their only art critic Alan Artner last month. The Chicago Reader, the most widely available weekly newspaper, doesn’t publish regular reviews of art, music, theater or independent publishing – but serves as an active space for promoting events associated with the arts. The smaller weekly papers Newcity and Timeout both cover arts events with consistency, yet have limited resources to do so and also fall into the event promotional paradigm. The Chicago Sun Times, our other daily paper, doesn’t put enough resources into visual arts reviews despite being an important place to find out about neighborhood and city politics. And that is really the state of affairs – writing about art is completely absorbed within the logic of the market – it is promotion for the entertainment and culture industry. Writing that purports to do something different – to critique, to unearth lost histories, to address history, to experiment – is destined to remain at the margins.

Luckily, this city is home to a several print publications and websites that write from the margins about art and culture. Yet that means that very few people are getting paid to write about art or reflect on the local cultural production. Thankfully we are home to critics like Michelle Grabner, Brian Holmes, Hamza Walker, Lane Relyea, Jason Foumberg, Kathryn Hixon, and James Yood. But for everyone else, it has to remain a side project.

The city has also seen people with a great interest in producing publications that define this place or produce a sense of local culture. Ausgang.com is a web platform organized by local artist Melinda Fries that takes thematic approaches to examining everyday life. She publishes every season and is credited with being the longest running local art website. There are a few printed publications that really consider the social and political context of art production in the city, but a few of them include the Marxist paper Platypus Review that occasionally includes exhibition reviews, the irregular yet highly acclaimed Baffler Magazine, the School of the Art Institute’s F-News, and AREA Chicago which I am involved in editing. The Public Media Institute publishes two great projects, the long running and rather open-ended Lumpen Magazine and Proximity Magazine – the new effort at taking stock of local arts and culture and presenting it to people outside of the city. Proximity shows great promise and will hopefully fill the void left by the loss of locally focused art publications like New Art Examiner, MouthtoMouth, TenbyTen, Bridge, and the short-lived BAT journal and Prompt magazine initiative by the Chicago Artist Coalition.

Websites which try to document the local “art scene” in a broad sense are numerous and ever changing. Some of the most consistent efforts include: The Shark Forum, On the Make , Art Letter , the broad reaching View From Here, the Gapersblock A/C Blog, Houndstooth, Art or Idiocy, the mostly defunct but still useful spaces.org and Panel House, the gochgo list-serv for socially engaged art discussion and announcements, the ChicagoArt.net gallery announcement network and the Art and Culture in Chicago blog. Some of the more robust web initiatives include podcasted “Bad At Sports” weekly local art talk show and the impressive publicly funded Chicago Artist Resource.

Other publishing endeavors have the feel of curated collections including the publishing efforts of two galleries who are often in cahoots, ThreeWalls Press who publish the quarterly “Paper and Carriage” as well as Green Lantern Press. They have both opted for use of the term “slow media” adapted from the “slow food movement” as a counterbalance to the gradual disappearance of the printed art publication. Both of these presses have done significant work to make more connections between the visual arts and literary arts scenes locally and nationally, including publishing the annual “Phonebook ” of artist run spaces throughout the US. The art group Temporary Services has been one of the most consistent publishers of printed art projects and also shares a passion for compiling and archiving marginal culture and directories of collaborative art practice. The now defunct print-only Skeleton News served a similar role of bridging gaps with the strong community of comic artists, providing a free monthly paper in which their work could circulate to new audiences. It would be great to see more collaboration between the various local art scenes, especially in the realm of publishing since there is so much of the same labor that goes into producing a publication despite specific focuses.

Pooling resources between the local visual and public art communities and the local literary and creative writing projects like Poetry, Say What? the project of the teen writing initiative Young Chicago Authors, the 2nd Hand, Afterhours, Journal of Ordinary Thought, MAKE Mag, or the web platforms bookslut or Is Greater Than would not only expand audiences, it would also inspire more cross-disciplinary cooperation. For those interested in following efforts at documenting this kind of work, three online sources Chicagopoetry.com, Literago and Chicago Literary Scene Examiner keep up to date on big events like Nextbook and The Poetry Center as well as small readings like Sunday Salon , Quickies , Bookslut, the Green Lantern Gallery/Bad At Sports collaboration The Parlor , Red Rover, Reading Under the Influence , or the numerous weekly and monthly poetry “slams” that have been made so famous in this city.

Book publishing is a changing industry anywhere you go, and while it is certainly centralized in New York City, we have a handful of local publishers keeping things going including Third World Press (the largest independent African American press), the University of Chicago Press, the feminist Switchback Books, the brilliant pamphlet series Prickly Paradigm Press, Featherproof Books, and soon Stop Smiling Books (an example of a successful local magazine turning into a book imprint). For years the only consistent art book publisher has been the diligent Whitewalls headed by Anthony Elms, and now they are joined by the Half Letter Press – recently initiated by the folks from Temporary Services to publish their own fascinating and obsessive collections, interview projects as well as other people’s like-minded work.

One place where all of this comes together is the annual Printer’s Ball event organized by Poetry magazine. So the story goes, Poetry magazine had a commitment to writing thoughtful rejection letters to poems which were submitted but not accepted for publication. They rejected the writing of Ruth Lilly, who upon her death in 2003 decided to donate a substantial portion of her amassed wealth to the Modern Poetry Association who published Poetry. The organization was then renamed as the Poetry Foundation and is now one of the largest literary organizations in the world. One small use of this significant increase in resources is paying for the Printer’s Ball, a free event every year for the local publishing scene. Other efforts at networking initiatives involved in publishing include the publicly funded, Chicago Publishers Gallery, as well as other archives such as Chicago Underground Library, the eclectic Public Collectors , Lichen Lending Library, DePaul University’s zine collection , and the Alternative Press Centre who specialize in indexing leftist culture and politics periodicals from all over the world.

This overview of the local independent publishing landscape gives a sense of where things are at in this moment. Yet one of the most consistent features of arts-oriented publishing in Chicago has been the inconsistencies of publications and platforms for dissemination. Either they dissolve into thin air, they have inconsistent quality, or they slow down to such an irregular pace that its hard to rely on them. The same is equally true with printing as it is with the web, with online publishing often being less reliable because of over ambition and poor planning born out of the convenience of starting up. What this city, and most places, need are consistent outlets for evaluating culture and creating a sense of place through documentation, historicization and critique. We may need to imagine platforms for collaboration across artistic fields in order to remain resilient and to acknowledge the complexity and overlapping desires of contemporary cultural producers that cannot be satisfied in disciplinary confines. After all, most of these efforts are representing the margins of cultural production, so why not take advantage of being small and marginal and actually experiment a little!

——-

Bio: Daniel Tucker is an editor of AREA Chicago (areachicago.org). For more information see miscprojects.com

Series Description:

This series of five articles will be an introduction to Chicago, Illinois USA and it’s local critical cultural experimentation, written from the perspective of a magazine editor and curator committed to navigating the city. Look for two more articles in 2009: In the next article I will deal with cultural media, criticism and journalism and the final article in this five part series will focus on individual artists working alone or without a consistent group identity.

3/10/09

Critical Culture in Chicago – Article #3: Cultural Institutions
by Daniel Tucker

This article, the third in my five part series, will introduce international readers to the cultural institutions both big and small, old and new existing presently in Chicago. The cultural institutional landscape here is vast and diverse, rich and imbued with history. For the purposes of this introduction, I will focus on the venues that host contemporary visual art with special nods to the spaces that are sympathetic towards work with socially engaged content, that function to build community, or that present work in various disciplinary forms all at once.

Museums

If you are interested in large scale institutions that have the capacity to execute large and expensive exhibitions and projects, there are only a few options in town. The Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) was established in 1871 following the great Chicago fire that killed hundreds of people and decimated nearly 4 square miles of the still young city which was settled first by non-natives in the 1770s. While the Art Institute is known for its massive collection of Impressionists and post-Impressionists from Europe, the collections also include a substantial amount of art from the U.S. and Asia andpre-Colombian meso-America. The museum is drawing closer every day to the opening of the new Modern Wing designed by Renzo Piano, the first major expansion since the 1988 expansion to incorporate its growing contemporary collection. The contemporary visual art and performance presented by the museum is significant but conservative, confirming the role of this institution as the arbiter of culture of the past. To give a sense of their scale and budget, the president of theAIC made $371,985 in 2007 and the overall budget reported to the government for that year was $187,779,151.

Located just 1.4 miles down the street from the AIC is the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), its closest compliment in the city. Opened in 1967, the MCA moved to its current location in 1996, which significantly expanded the potential to execute large projects and educational programs, and to show the collection of art made after 1945 that it began collecting in 1974. The director of theMCA made $450,000 in 2007 (one of the highest paid museum directors in the world, who has since been replaced) and the overall budget reported to the government for that year was $14,670,821. The museum has struggled to differentiate itself and stand out, yet has opted to constantly reference and take cues from other global centers for art selling and collection. This tension has left theMCA generally stifled and uncreative, without a clear mission or objective in terms of the kind of work it shows, its relationship to the city or region, or its relationship to the art market. Over the years many attempts have been made to show local artists, including a series of solo shows in 1994 and the establishment of a tiny yet prominent gallery for “emerging artists” in 2002. The institution received significant criticism and a partial boycott in 1989 when they partnered with the local government’s Department of Cultural Affairs and theAIC to mount “The Chicago Show” which ended up selecting only 6 out of 90 artists of color, despite the exhibitions goal of celebrating the diversity of the city. The racially diverse selection jury was a “blind jury” and argues that their decisions were not informed by race and that only 6 percent of the original 1,417 applicants were minority artists. TheMCA published an apology in the exhibition catalog and also featured an additional profile of 25 artists of color. Regardless of the afterthought, many artists from the catalog and exhibition worked to organize a counter exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center (though the exhibit boycott did not occur).

Along the same artery of Michigan Avenue is the Chicago Cultural Center – a nerve center of public culture in the city -  the largest 100% free gallery and performance venue in the city. It is also home to offices for the local government’s Department of Cultural Affairs, headed up by Lois Weisberg who founded the Cultural Center in 1991 in the renovated building formerly used as the main public library. The building is home to numerous performance venues, large public sitting and meeting rooms, an archive of local literary culture, the main public tourism office, several art galleries and an arts education project for local teenagers called Gallery 37 is located across the street. While the budget for producing exhibitions and events is tiny compared to the Museums across the street, this venue feels more vibrant due to the multiple uses that bump against one another on a daily basis in its halls. For years they were home to the Museum of Broadcast Communications which is slowly moving into its new location less than eight blocks away.

Other midsized exhibition venues for contemporary art include National Museum of Mexican Art, National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum, Spertus Museum, Experimental Station, Experimental Sound Studio, Hyde Park Art Center, ThreeWalls, Southside Community Arts Center, Intuit Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art , Ukrainian Institute of Modern Art , State of Illinois Museum Chicago Art Gallery, Beverly Art Center, and Zhao B Center.

Festivals that bring art to town or highlight what is happening here for art tourists include ART Chicago , Next Art Fair, Versionfest , SOFA , Chicago Humanities Festival , Chicago Calling , and Around the Coyote .

BFA/MFA Factory

The city has taken a similar trajectory as many places, in that it has become home to a number of competing art degree programs. In addition to boasting strong lecture series and public programs, many of these schools are also home to high caliber exhibition venues for students, local as well as non-local visiting artists. There are only a few private art schools that are unattached to universities. One is Columbia College, which boasts several exhibition venues including the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the remarkable Center for Book and Paper Arts. The School of the Art Institute of Chicago is the other prominent private art school, which has a strong history and dedication to socially engaged art. The School is associated directly with theAIC museum and has a number of exhibition venues located downtown, including the Rhymer and Sullivan Galleries and their own Joan Flasch Artist Books collection. One of the best features of this institution is its association with the Video Data Bank and Gene Siskel Film Center, with experimental and foreign videos and films (often accompanied by discussions and lectures) that are a great compliment to the other main venues for film and video in town like Facets Cinematheque and Chicago Filmmakers on the north side, a half dozen informal microcinemas, numerous festivals, and the DOC Films programs at the University of Chicago on the south side.

Among the private universities featuring art programs, the University of Chicago brings a small MFA program, the incredibly consistent and smart Renaissance Society and the fantastic mid sized Smart Museum . Northwestern University has a similar sized graduate program in “Art Theory and Practice” and also has its own Block Museum. The two Jesuit Catholic universities Loyola and DePaul both have small museums. University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) is by far the best public (therefor the most affordable) program for art study. The school is also home to two of the city’s most interesting small venues for exhibition, performance and lecture. One is the Gallery400, which hosts student exhibitions as well as commissioned exhibitions called “At the Edge.” The other UIC based museum is Jane Addams Hull House Museum which is actually a history museum about social work and community organizing around poverty and human rights that occured at the turn of the 19th century. But the Hull House Museum has taken a turn in recent years to become not just a history museum but an embodiment of that history through contemporary culture and action. The place is a hub for all sorts of arts and culture as well as debates, activist meetings and conferences – serving as a reminder that sometimes the best way for the lines between art and life to blur is to actually allow them to be in the same room together.

Other cultural institutions that have their own focuses but occasionally mount exhibitions as demonstrations of different ways of seeing or thinking include: Chicago History Museum , Dusable Museum of African American History, Newberry Library , Chinese American Museum of Chicago (temporarily closed), Museum of Holography, the Little Black Pearl arts education facility, McCormick Freedom Museum , Cervantes Institute , Oriental Institute ,Smith Museum of Stained Glass , the Nature Museum , Goethe Institute, Pullman Porter Museum , the Museum of Science and Industry, and the International Museum of Surgical Science who’s “Anatomy in the Gallery” project brings contemporary art about the body into their unique facility.

Progressive Institutions?

While my series for this publication is focused on so-called “critical culture” in Chicago, you’ll easily note that most of the institutions (like most cultural institutions, universities and museums) I have listed here don’t necessarily have a reflexive dynamic that could produce what we generally understand to be institutional critique from within (self critique). They certainly have the capacity to present the work of artists who critique institutions as their subject matter, and they have the capacity to more generally present culture and ideas that are addressing social and political concerns in their content explicitly. This is what they do already. They show art about war, about oppression, about cultural amnesia, about revolution, and about democracy. And in fact, they are showing more and more work about challenging social and political subjects. But does that constitute a progressive institution?

I would suggest that one way that they could become more “progressive” beyond the relevant content of the art work would be to self-critically address their internal mechanics. These institutions rely on the steady stream of aspiring artists and young people willing to be subjected to labor insecurity out of necessity or of desire to work in the field within which they hope to some day professionally achieve success. This is combined with the caterers, guards, and janitors that may or may not have a vested interest in the field of art, but who have come to rely on its institutions through their precarious and often subcontracted labor to reproduce their lives. So how could cultural institutions find a balance between presenting ideas and embodying ideas through focusing on the intersections of art and labor?

In this time of economic depression, we cannot only speak of hypothetical ways of reforming the existing institutions. We must also think of life after these institutions, for we will undoubtedly see some of them fall, some of them further contract, and likely all of them layoff workers and  compromise their missions and goals in order to stay afloat. So perhaps it is time to start thinking: If you had hundreds of thousands of square footage, millions of dollars of A/V equipment, thousands of new BA and MFA students getting pumped out into your streets per year willing to subject themselves to internships and ladder climbing, free days for the public sponsored by corporations that no longer exist….what would you do? How will the institutional landscape which I have described be altered in our city and in your city?

Sources:
NY Times; May 12 1987 “Burst of Growth in Chicago’s Art World”
Chicago Tribune; Apr 13, 1990 “Minority artists blast city exhibit”
NY Times; April 20, 1990 ” Chicago Journal; Art and Ire Mix Again, This Time Over Race”
Chicago Tribune; Apr 21, 1990 “Art exhibition boycott called off”

Bio: Daniel Tucker is the editor of AREAChicago (areachicago.org). For more information see miscprojects.com

This post is written as a dispatch from California, where I was at the College Art Association conference and speaking in classes at CalArts, SFAI, and the CCA Social Practices studio.

Initially when invited to contribute, I was challenged by the prompting question, “how can art effect political change?” because of how broad it was and because I didn’t think that I could begin to address that in one short post. It is one of the central concerns of my work. But the challenge was interesting and offered an opportunity to try to communicate (somewhat) concisely some of the lessons I’ve learned from many years of practicing socially engaged art at various levels.

Off the cuff, I should be clear that I work in many different places and in many different ways, which strongly influence my ideas (hence my forthcoming eclectic listing and ranting). Most often the place is in Chicago, and the most consistent method or form I work in has been a biannual publication, AREA Chicago. I also find myself working on numerous other projects simultaneously. That diversity of tactics and approaches is both informed by my life situation, which requires me to work in different ways and different places to earn a living. It is also a recognition of the fact that there are limits to all forms and there is much to be learned by trying new ones. So you’ll find on my website that my time is also spend writing essays, organizing conferences and exhibitions, lecturing extensively, and working on various kinds of documentary and research projects.

Last Wednesday, while speaking on a panel discussion entitled “Relocating Art and its Public” at the CAA conference here in LA, I was compelled to think through the work that I care about and am involved with as it relates to audiences and participants. I realized I could not clearly talk about any of this without spelling out what kind of relationships I wanted to have in this world, in a broader sense. That is not to say that the work I’ve been involved in has always succeeded in creating those relationships which I desire and want others to have. But the work that I do is so informed by a political concern about people’s potential to self-actualize in a world which stifles that possibility that I have to be up front about it. This is how I intend to address the question posed on this blog.

I concluded my presentation by recounting the provocation put forth to me by my friend Chris Carlsson in San Francisco: that the challenge for those opposed to capitalism and in favor of a different (”anticapitalist”) organizing principal for life and economies is to take the “anti” part of our perspective and make it into something that we can all strive for together. A further elaboration would be that a challenge for anticapitalist cultural work is to articulate and represent a life better than the competitive and commodified social relations that currently dominate how most of us relate to one another. One step in that direction would be to create contexts that allow us to see our relationships in ways that both benefit from our diverse experiences and insights needed to face everyday challenging situations, and that also allow us to be powerful enough together through organization so we can tackle the big stuff we all face. I honestly think that most of us barely know what free feels like or looks like. We need each other to figure out how to know how to get there. In the last eight years, most of the projects that I have been involved with  have had some component that was about articulating a different kind of “we” or collective toward the ends described above. Admittedly, they are on a pretty micro scale. To the extent to which any transformed social relations are actually realized, the impact beyond the people directly involved is limited, rendering it primarily symbolic and experimental.

DSLR Call For Participation Spring 2001. For more information about DSLR and other critical public art in Chicago from 2000-2005 see “Trashing the Neoliberal City” booklet (free download) by Tucker/Forman at http://www.learningsite.info/trashing003.htm

I’ll now summarize few of the events with which I have been involved as a participant or organizer that have tried to articulate a new or different “we.” The first is the Department of Space and Land Reclamation (DSLR), which took place in Chicago in April of 2001. The “campaign”  was organized through an open call for participation circulated in email and via heavy postering throughout the city. It asked for people who are concerned about the state of public space in the city to come together and launch a coordinated and highly visible collective effort to highlight potential uses for public space, as well as to articulate criticisms or protests about how space was being controlled. This took many forms. Some were quite playful, such as poetry slams on El trains or ladders leading to nowhere placed on fences to suggest potential over-comings or transgressions. Others asked neighbors to sign petitions in order to get sidewalk kiosks to be accessible to everyone, not just real estate developers. There were over 70 similar small scale temporary initiatives that took place throughout the city that weekend. The effort, like so many complex social projects that involve people from many political persuasions and cultural backgrounds, had its successes and failures. One general success is that temporary space, opened up through coordinated space reclamation, allowed for housing activists, graffiti writers, urban planners, activist educators, pirate radio broadcasters, and critical artists to see themselves in relation to one another through a shared concern about public space in Chicago.

The DSLR spawned many relationships and catalyzed many new projects that continue to this day. By 2005, some of the folks who met through that work, along with others with overlapping interests, got together to develop the biannual publication AREA Chicago, of which I am still an editor. AREA has built on this methodology of creating a lens through which various practitioners and concerned citizens of the city can see themselves in relationship to one another. We have done that through 8 “local reader” publications, the collection of hundreds of hand-made personal maps about subjective experiences of the city into an archive entitled “Notes for a People’s Atlas of Chicago,” as well as over 50 events in the last 4 years.

Our methodology is quite simple: what is a pressing or challenging question in the city? What are people doing or not doing about it? Once that is identified, then a call for participation is circulated and people from local networks associated with art, research, education, and activism formulate a response. That response is edited, designed, and printed, then circulated back out to the networks from which it came.

AREA Issues #1-5

We’ve asked the following question in our publications:

• What kind of infrastructure of services and resources do we need when our welfare state is in disrepair and being increasingly privatized? (AREA #1)
• What kind of food policy can we create to make sure that people of the city are healthy enough to pursue organization? (AREA #2)
• What are the things we mean and want when we say ‘we’? What are critical approaches to the commonplace political concept of solidarity? (AREA #3)
• In contexts where more and more Chicagoans are entrapped in the expanding industry of mass incarceration, how can meaningful, visionary, and practical changes to the criminal justice system occur? (AREA #4)
• What is the role of education and pedagogy in strengthening social movements? (AREA #5)
• How do experimental policies turn the city into a social and economic laboratory? (AREA #6)
• What kinds of logics and strategies do contemporary social movements inherit from their predecessors, especially the New Left and Counter-Culture Left of the late 1960s/early 1970s? (AREA #7)
• How does the concept of money and the financial crisis impact our political and cultural work? (AREA #8)

“How We Learn” panel discussion at Hyde Park Art Center (July 2007). Co-organized by AREA Chicago, Neighborhood Writing Alliance, and Stockyard Institute

Other projects elsewhere in the world frmo which I have taken inspiration include the incredible work of:  What is to be done? (St. Petersburg); Collectivo Situationes (Argentina); the Neighborhood Story Project (New Orleans); Center for Urban Pedagogy (NYC); Justseeds (US); the City From Below (North American); What, How and for Whom? (Zagreb); Victory Gardens (San Francisco); Mute Magazine (London);  16 Beaver Group (NYC); Public School (LA); and Pericentre Projects (Cairo).

Participating in this work and observing the like-minded efforts listed above have given me greater insight into the potential for art to change society and social relations. I am not overly concerned with the difference between so-called art and so-called activism. The categories that are more profound for me are culture and politics. I have to be very honest when talking about those two categories of life, as they are indeed different and mean different things in terms of their role in making our lives and the lives of people everywhere better, more just, and more complete. At the same time, I’ll be the first to admit that these two huge aspects of our lives—culture and politics—are completely shaped and informed by one another. So teasing out the differences can be a challenge. I have spent time in another text articulating my basic understanding of what politics is:

[Politics involves] views about social relationships involving authority or power, with specific recognition that capitalist states have a monopoly on the form of power that structures most of our lives. In relation to artistic practices, the political relevance is not as easily understood, as it is in, say, organizing workers or communities, running for government office, or taking direct action to make a point.

When I think about culture, it is equally difficult to define, but I would start out by saying that it is comprised of the ideas, beliefs, and experiences that make up how we understand society and our relationship to one another.

Considering the dialectical relation between culture and politics, in which that each produces the conditions in which the other is realized and enacted (which we see everyday on the scales of both us as individuals and the national governments whose policies affect all of our lives), I want to spell out other reasons why I feel that working in culture can or might effect social change:

• At this moment in time, culture is a strategic politically-charged terrain, as the “culture industries” become an increasingly significant part of our economy;
• Art and culture bring subjective, emotional, and effective considerations to society and politics that would be less explicit otherwise;
• Art can bring experimental methods and doesn’t have to be effective in a traditionally measurable sense. This highlights its non-instrumental or counterproductive potential to change how we think about efficacy;
• Visual communication is multilingual and available to people at multiple literacy levels. This is increasingly important as more elements of our diverse society collide and co-exist (this is certainly part of the argument for sophisticated visual propaganda used in so many political campaigns throughout history);
• And the space of culture facilitates unique and unexpected resonances and potential cooperation between people who might otherwise not see one another as equal or part of the same society.

Social change will get occur as time moves on, regardless of the art we produce or the experimental situations we create. The challenge for those of us who actually want to know a life better than the one we have, is to enact carefully considered cultural work that helps us better understand the role of history in shaping the present, critically approach the present moment, and imagine our possible futures. The biggest challenge to making culture that produces the kind of social change we want is not the limits of our imagination, as I am quite sure those boundaries do not exist. The challenge that is much harder to address is how we can behave differently (less competitively) towards one another, trust each other, and organize ourselves so we might avoid reproducing the same deformed social relations that capitalism has inscribed in our work, behavior, and relationships. Culture can help us represent, analyze, and refine our approach to articulating and realizing a different and more supportive social body—a better “we.”

12/30/08

Critical Culture in Chicago – Article #2: Groups and Spaces

by Daniel Tucker

Hey Obamacrats! Lets learn about Chicago!

Since the time of my first article in this series on social/political art in Chicago, the whole world has had an introduction to this city through the lens of Barack Obama – who adopted the city as his hometown 20 years ago. What this event means for the world is yet to be seen. What this event means for Chicago is that the local culture and politics are going to come under greater scrutiny and more people are going to be trying to learn about and be introduced to this city.

The extraordinary amount of cultural production in Chicago wasn’t missed by Obama in his time in the city – he was actually on a foundation board (the Woods Fund) that gave out grants to community organizers and socially engaged art.

Visitors observations of artistic practice in Chicago consistently cite an extreme commitment and openness to collaboration. It could be that this derrives from some lack of pretention or commitment to egalitarian living. It could also be a pragmatic response to scarity of resources for cultural work. Regardless of the root cause, the city is undoubtedly ripe with art collectives and small collaborative initiatives. Interestingly, a number of those groups actually run cultural spaces or venues. Both the groups and the spaces will be discussed here, in an attemp to give an international audience a sense of the range of practices coexisting in this newly founded Obamaland.

One key art group HAHA began in 1988, initiated by Wendy Jacob, John Ploof and Laurie Palmer. Their twenty year long practice shifted focus regularly from the highly local and public to whimsical works made for galleries and museums throughout Europe and the U.S. Their forms ranged from Flood – a storefront community center on the north side of the city where vegetables for AIDS patients were grown and distributed, to a rooftop advertising unit on a taxi cab which could be programmed with site-specific text messages controlled by a GPS unit. Their approach to community, participation and pedagogy has had a strong influence on the local art scene, not least of which on the group Temporary Services (TS) directed by Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin and Marc Fischer. TS has strongly defined the field of collaborative art in the city, with over ten years of public work, self-publishing and the facilitation of at least three different venues for presenting the work of other artists. TS’s work about ecology and economy has had a clear influence on collectives like Material Exchange, JAM, People Powered and InCUBATE. Their approach has made the nature and style of collaboration their material and subject matter with a number of projects literally dealing with how groups work together – most notably in their recent book simply entitled “Group Work.” As a group they have collaborated closely with other artists like Brendan McGaffey, Melinda Fries of ausgang.com and the couple duo Rob Kelly and Zena Sakowski aka The Biggest Fags Ever – sometimes leading to the renaming of a super-group known as the Biggest Temporary Gang Ever!

TS maintains groupsandspaces.net, a virtual platform for documenting collaborative art practice and has initiated a venue for forming new collaborative relationships known as Mess Hall – another storefront on the north side of the city just blocks away from where HAHA produced Flood in the mid 1990s. Five years later Mess Hall has minimal involvement from the original TS members and is run by a group of “keyholders” who are responsible for maintaining and coordinating the space’s weekly free events ranging from yoga to sewing workshops to reading groups and lectures by traveling activists and thinkers.

Other groups running venues in the city include the artist-run bookstores Golden Age and No Coast, both in the southern Pilsen neighborhood. Just down the street is Antena, the project space of Miguel Cortez and the Polvo collective who have also run magazines and galleries together for ten years.

Publishing and the administration of venues seem to go hand in hand. Three other important spaces – the Green Lantern Gallery, ThreeWalls residency and gallery, and the Co-Prosperity Sphere all publish their own magazines and pamphlets. All three venues are committed to educational festivals, seminars and workshops. They have also been committed individually and collaboratively to cataloging the proliferation of “alternative spaces”, non-commercial galleries and the ubiqutous apartment galleries that Chicago is known for. One important apartment gallery to collaborate with nearly everyone mentioned in this series is Vonzwek, founded by Philip Vonzwek in 2005.

Fortunately the city boasts several theoretically oriented group learning projects, including ARC109, Finding Our Roots, Freedom School Communiversity, Chicago Political Workshop/49^th st. Underground, the Midwest Radical Cultural Cooridor, Platypus and FeelTank. The latter three have strong commitments to considering the intersections of art and politics. All of the projects have significant, though unofficial, connections through their membership to local universities – leaving the significant challenge of making rigerous educational projects trancend the academy partially unresolved. Their contribution to the intellectual and theoretical development of the city’s self-identified political artists is hugely important.

The city has a rich theater tradition exemplified in the 200 producing neighborhood based theaters, forming an impressive constallation of hyper-local live entertainment within walking distance of peoples homes. David Issacson of Theater Oobleck has said “it is a point of pride that Chicago does political theater.” The theater scene is divided from the visual arts community, which is unfortunate because their physical infrastructure of venues could easily facilitate collaboration with other disciplines, serving as a home to multi-use activities of other artists and activists operating without a stable home.

There are a number of performance troupes blurring the lines between visual and performing arts with their art actions including Lucky Pierre, Chicago County Fair, the Neofuturists, and the now defunct Goat Island. Groups like the Drag Kings and Teatro Luna put gender politics on the stage, while the FeFees, Young Women’s Action Team and the now defunct Pink Bloque took them to the streets.

Public art groups like CAFF Collective, You Are Beautiful and Anti Gravity Surprise ask people to participate in the production of their own public space. Similarly, the youth-centered art groups Cooperative Image Group, University of Hip Hop and Kuumba Lynx all blend street art and graffiti in public space with Pedagogy of the Oppressed inspired educational and political work.

This city is indeed ripe with collaborative and social art and venues that faciliate its presentation and evolution. Without being able to pinpoint the source or motives for this, it is undoubtedly a virtue and a feature which makes working here easier and more sustainable for those interested in cultivating an artistic practice which can hope to transcend the logic of the commodity.

My previous article in this series dealt with the local history which preceeded these examples of groups and spaces. The next article will deal with the institutions both large and small, which hold the city’s culture together, or in some cases which keep it from evolving.

Daniel Tucker is the editor of AREAChicago (areachicago.org). For more information see miscprojects.com

Series Description: Chicago Illinois USA is a place where people pass through and people settle. In terms of cultural work, it is a city where people work hard, build community and navigate the dynamics of little economic support for their work, intense local politics, harsh conditions and a level of affordability in living (compared to other major urban centers) that opens up room for experimentation. In the absence of economic and institutional support for this experimentation, the city has produced a robust infrastructure and community for self-organized and independent culture – often committing much of its energy to addressing local and regional political concerns and social issues. This series of articles will be an introduction to the city and its critical cultural experimentation, written from the perspective of a young magazine editor, writer, and curator committed to navigating the city. Look for five such glimpses into Chicago socially and politically engaged culture to appear in H-Art over the next year. The next article will survey a number of the groups and spaces currently dotting the landscape in Chicago.

November 15th 2008 – Article #1 – Chicago: Introduction and History
by Daniel Tucker

In the late 1960s, cities in the U.S. saw its people struggling for civil rights, protesting the war in Vietnam and fighting for their lives. Chicago, nestled on the southern edge of Lake Michigan and in the center of “mid-western” agricultural and post-industrial States, saw more than its fair share of social unrest in that period. The third most populous city in the U.S., its unique migration patterns over the course of 100 years produced a diversity of heritage and backgrounds with the potential for cross fertilization as well as cultural clashes. In 1966 southern civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. moved his operation to Chicago in a symbolic effort to fight for fair housing and jobs in the North. The next year, in the majority African-American neighborhood of Bronzeville, a massive mural project slowly came into being, with every day of painting producing an informal public arts festival and forum for thinkers, activists and cultural producers to gather. The mural was dubbed “The Wall of Respect” and was initiated by the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), a short-lived coalition of artists and thinkers. The diversity of portraits on the wall featured historical figures from the struggle to abolish slavery, labor leaders, Marxists, civil-rights organizers, Afro-centric nationalists, jazz musicians, poets and philosophers. The depiction of a broad spectrum of historical and present day figures provided numerous points of entry for the surrounding community to connect with the work, while they brought their own experiences literally to the streets as the Mural unfolded. One of the photographers of the wall, who was also associated with the broadly defined Black Arts Movement of the time, Bob Crawford has called the Wall of Respect “An outdoor community center.”

In subsequent years the OBAC would eventually fade and transform into AFRICOBRA, a collective of artists that exists to this day. They are joined by the Association for the Advancement for Creative Musicians (AACM) and Third World Publishing as self-organized cultural institutions in serving primarily Black Chicago.

This was a catalytic moment – just one of many which I will briefly touch upon here. In future essays I will focus primarily on contemporary cultural practices, and so it is my goal now to introduce a number of flashpoints in the last 40 years that provide the context on which the activist and socially engaged artists of today are continuing to develop and build upon.

Concurrent with this history of the Black Arts Movement was an expanding muralist movement which intersected with most of the diverse communities in the city, something that has always been a challenge. That movement saw its most concrete coordination in the 1971 founding of the Chicago Mural Group, which was later renamed as the Chicago Public Art Group and exists to this day – a pillar of the tradition of U.S. style “Community Arts”. Lesser known but related history is the Chicago Womens Liberation Union’s poster making group headed by Estelle Carol, which would have connections to a wide variety of second wave feminist work including the JANE group which provided underground abortions before they were legalized in 1973.

The commitment of muralists to representing social struggles has ties to the fact that Chicago was also a hub for media activism in the form of Film and early video work. Groups like Kartimquinn, now an institution of documentary filmmaking, were working alongside groups like the loose knit Media Burn (now an online archive) and the TV commercial producers turned lefty documentarians, the Chicago Film Group. All three had formally experimental approaches to representing social movements of the time. Chicago Film Group took the form of educational public service announcements and turned it on its head in their “Urban Crisis and the New Militants” series which tried to represent leftist youth movements of the late 1960s into educational films to be shown in schools. The films had such titles as “Law and Order vs. Dissent”, “The Right to Dissent: A Press Conference” and “Social Confrontation: The Battle of Michigan Avenue.” Kartimquinn made one short work, “What the Fuck Are These Red Squares” which responded to the Yippie frontman Abbie Hoffman’s provocation for students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago during a lecture who were making conceptual art in a time of war. The film documents a group discussion between the students soon after about the role of art in the political and social struggles of the time.

Another connection to the students from the Art Institute is the broadly defined indigenous art movement known as the Chicago Imagists. This name accounts for a wide variety of young art students who were making surrealist and grotesque representational art in the late 60s and were showing their work at the Hyde Park Art Center on the southside. Groups from the time included the Hairy Who and Monster Roster and included well-known artists such as Leon Golub, Nancy Spero, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, and Barbara Rossi. The group is less coherent as an art movement than people typically acknowledged, with a branch regularly showing work in exhibitions curated by Don Baum, as well as participating in northside galleries like Gallery Bugs Bunny, which was a temporary exhibition project designed to protest the Art Institute’s 1968 “Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage” exhibition.

Gallery Bugs Bunny was founded by a Chicago branch of Surrealists, headed by Franklin and Penelope Rosemont, who found connection with simultaneously occuring developments of French, British and Danish situationists; as well as the tradition the Wobblies, the branch of the US organized labor movement that made the best use of culture. They ran a radical bookstore in addition to the gallery and have continued the legacy to this day in the form of Charles H. Kerr publishing house.

The final example of late ’60s art that I will address is an event which is only begining to be examined and better understood – The Chicago Artist Boycott. Following the police brutality and suppression of anti-war sentiment at the Chicago meetings of the Democratic National Convention in August 1968, artists from all over the country signed on to a statement saying they would not show art in Chicago for one year as a protest. Artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, Claes Oldenburg, and Barnett Newman all signed. Then soon after Richard Feigen Gallery convinced Claes Oldenburg and dozens of other artists to participate in an exhibition in Chicago entitled “The Richard J. Daley Exhibition.” This show was remounted 40 years later this fall 2008 at the galleries of DePaul University and was the site for a weekend long symposium on Chicago in 1968.

While the boom of slick commercial art emerged from the rubble of a 1970s economic recession, it was actually Chicago which produced the first precurser to the now ubiquitous art fair in the Chicago International Art Expo. But commercial art was not then and never has been the strong suit of this midwestern city. The 1980s saw an continuation of much of this work in the informal spaces of Axe Street Arena, which drew from the now-strong tradition of surrealist and situationist-inspired art, mail art, and publishing as well as making connections with the emergent hip hop, graffiti and punk rock subcultures of the times. A more institutional space for critical and socially engaged visual and performance art, Randolph Street Gallery, emerged in 1979 and did not close its doors until 1998.

In the late 1980s the performance troupe Theater Oobleck migrated to town from nearby Michigan and changed the theater landscape with their collectively produced director-free productions about current events. Theater Oobleck would cross paths with the dance and improvised music practices at another emergent institution, Links Hall, which was founded in 1978 and continues to this day to operate in a space shared by the Chicago Womens Health Clinic, a direct decedent of the JANE abortion group. The time also required strategic responses to emerging social issues in the form of AIDS. The local branch of ACT-UP produced performative protest actions ranging from early ad-busting through replacing public transit advertisements to dragging fifteen mattresses into a downtown intersection to demand the opening of beds for women in the AIDS clinic of the public hospital.

As the international art market produced more trade shows and international survey exhibitions, one such event Sculpture Chicago (SC), tried something new. In 1993 they invited former Museum of Contemporary Art curator Mary Jane Jacobs to produce “Culture in Action.” Considering the stiffness of the SC board and track record, the resulting event series was a surprising contrast to what they were known for producing. Jacobs would use this event to bring together a number of artists who would go on to define the terrain by which “Relational Aesthetics” and “Social Practices” would be based. Eight projects would make up the exhibition, including Haha, Robert Peters, and Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle whom were all residents of the city. Other contributors included Daniel J. Martinez, Mark Dion, Simon Grennan collaborating with Christopher Sperandio, Mel Ziegler collaborating with Kate Ericson, and Suzanne Lacy. The concept was simple, pair contemporary artists up with a non-art community to engage in a relevant social issue and see what happens. What happened by many accounts was less meaningful than the work which was already happening in the city on an ongoing basis.

Manglano-Ovalle’s contribution to this project, Street Level Video, would involve a temporary video collective of youth addressing issues of community and gang violence, which led to a series of street parties on the west side of the city in which young people and neighborhood residents would make video works about their lives and show them on the streets. This would lay the ground work for Street Level Youth Media (SLYM), a non-profit organization that would continue to grow for another fifteen years. This practice would predict the development of a number of similar youth oriented video/art/activism projects that would evolve in the mid and late 1990s, and would gradually form into a whole field of professional practice and study termed “Youth Media.” Chicago would become home to a great many such organizations from Video Machete to Insight Arts and Beyondmedia, to name only a few. This emergent field would continue the legacy of sensitive listening and community responsiveness developed in the “community art” work of the muralists and the early video activism. It would evolve into a profession all its own, based on the infusion of significant amounts of funding that would accompany the corporate-responsibility drive to bridge the “technological divide.”

Despite a number of criticisms being written in the subsequent years, Culture in Action would receive mostly positive attention due to the interesting combination of artists and a significant push to promote the project to the non-local art press. Two years later SC brought on Joyce Fernandes to curate “Re-Inventing the Garden City” which included Pepón Osorio and Dennis Adams, and Chicago residents Ellen Rothenberg and Miroslaw Rogala.

This work I have described built on the history of work which had been happening in Chicago for years, as well as an upsurge of long term projects and collectives. Inspiring work in the Pilsen neighborhood included Calles y Suenos, a gallery and mostly-Latino punk performance space which is said to have been directly inspired by Axe St. Arena of the ’80s and be continued today in the lineage of the Polvo art collective and gallery in the same neighborhood. Also growing out of the Axe St. Arena years would be ongoing collaborations by artists such as Michael Piazza, Bertha Husband and Jim Duignan. Another such project by Dan Peterman involved setting up shop in a recycling center which was friendly to cultural producers in an area just south of the University of Chicago’s base in the Hyde Park neighborhood. Peterman would develop his own practice in response to the ecological discourse of that context, but would also work with others to transform the space into an informal cultural center which included self-publishing; furniture, car and bike repair; and an artist residency/exhibition space. The residency known as Monk Parakeet would bring in such international artists as Rirkrit Tiravanija, NSK, Christophe Büchel, Superflex, and Art Strategy & Landscape 3-day international artist workshop. The space would also provide a context for new projects to emerge with long time Chicago artists like Michael Piazza or with younger collaboratives such as Temporary Services or the Suburban gallery. While this work was halted significantly by a devastating fire in 2001, the work continues today in the rebuilt and slightly more formalized Experimental Station.

Town Hall Talks: Five cities discuss regional models of art and activism
by Daniel Tucker

Impetus

The impetus for a series of Town Hall Talks comes out of a belief and observation that many cities in the United States have produced robust infrastructures for art and activism. These local examples need to be documented and discussed widely to glean information on art and activism models and practices operating in relation to regional concerns. While some theorists of capitalist globalization suggest that homogenization is occurring in global urban locales – examination of these cultural practices reveal many particularities to local contexts as seen in Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans and New York City. Following the explosion of energy in the “Counter-Globalization Movement” of the late 1990s/early 2000s where everyday people across the world were educating themselves about the global production chains effecting everything from manufacturing to food and elite education, there appeared to be a pragmatic turn towards the local.* This turn is demonstrated in the work happening in these cities – practices that directly interrogate and are integrated within the fabric of a place. Their unique characteristics can prevent them from being interpreted in relationship to one another and prevent them from being seen on the popular art radar. In highlighting these forms, we hope to strengthen the much-needed critical art community by sharing models and by encouraging potential networks of critical artistic practice.

As a follow up to the 2005 “Who Cares” initiative sponsored by Creative Time that set out to discuss artists’ reactions to the current political climate through three by-invitation dinners, the Town Hall Talks jump off from New York City into other urban contexts. The four other cities chosen were selected because they demonstrate a range of practices that would be productive in conversation with each other. We hope that each conversation raises complicated questions in regards to what constitutes a effective and engaging political art practice.

THT in NOLA at Community Book Center March 2008

Process

Each conversation took place in March 2005 and was organized and moderated by Nato Thompson and myself.  Each meeting was hosted by a local organization and consisted of a single four hour long discussion broken into three parts: the first part consisting of Nato and I introducing the talks and the goals behind them, the second part consisted of artists sharing local models and strategies that have been successful, and the final third section involved considering how to best organize locally focused efforts nationally and beyond.

To be frank, these gatherings were closer to a Town Hall Focus Group than a Town Hall Talk. There were no fliers posted on busy street corners or even emails calling for open participation – there were no broadsides nailed to the outer doors of the “town hall.”  These meetings were closed and participation was invitation only. This was motivated primarily by the goal of having a publication-worthy transcript that would extend the life of the conversation beyond the initial gathering. This was informed by past experiences with large gatherings that were difficult to moderate and easily dominated by a few loud individuals. While large public events can be very meaningful and can catalyze conversations and socializing that is beneficial to the local context – we wanted to be true to our goal of documenting local practices in an attempt to take that snapshot of a moment in time to share with audiences in other regions.

The participants were invited based on combination of factors and criteria.  We wanted to privilege age, gender, and racial diversity yet avoid asking questions that specifically addressed that diversity because all too often it is either not on the table at all or it is the only topic explored.  We wanted to find individuals whose practices, aesthetics and ideologies differed significantly – in order to represent the diversity of approaches that are found in that place.  And finally, we wanted to have participants who practiced their art in close proximity to social movements, community participation or progressive politics. We wanted them to have practices that could be read as being locally oriented and in some cases involving long-term engagement and process, as we were interested in highlighting work that was difficult to represent or catalog in the published or exhibited forums typically afforded to contemporary art.

In order to achieve a form of documentation that was suitable to publishing and would allow all participants equal participation we developed a fairly strict method for executing each Town Hall Talks [THT].  We were convinced that more people would find the documentation useful if it was executed in an interview format, as it can be quite hard to follow a less structured discussion in transcript form. This is another reason why it was like a focus group – because the terms of the participation were fairly rigid and predetermined.   Five questions were conceived of and then circulated to all participants prior to their attendance of the meeting.  Then each participant was invited to respond to no less than one and no more than three of the questions with each response being subject to a three minute time-limit. The responses to the questions were spoken in rotation, with gradual priority given to those who had not responded to previous questions. The participants were reminded that their role was unique, and that their responses should also attempt to articulate the broader concerns of their peers, collaborating organizations and communities – since they were at the meeting and others were not.  This “representational” or “spokesperson” role is not a common position that artists are asked to occupy, but it is common in politics and is something we wanted to emulate in order to encourage a serious reflection on the broader context in which these artists were working.  In circles that practice “direct democracy” this form would be called a spokes-council.

The set up was a bit risky, with methods and tactics borrowed from town hall meetings, progressive activist group-process, sociology and crowd-sourcing market research  – then introduced to a collection of artists who don’t necessarily know each other or the moderators, and who may have never given interviews – much less a group interview! And to add a bit more chaos in the mix – the five city’s meetings were visited and gathered over the course of twelve days with the two moderators traveling from one city to the next with a suitcase full of recording equipment.  But somehow, it worked.

The Questions

1.  Who is your audience and how does your work mobilize them toward strategic local concerns?
2. Given that the ways we make money impacts the type of culture we produce, how does the local economy effect your art practice? How do you work to obtain and share resources?
3. Describe a local cultural event that productively expanded the social networks that your practice operates in? That is to say, the event produced a new sense of community that had political potential.
4. As a politically engaged artist or organization how does your practice relate to existing social movements?
5. These conversations come out of a nation-wide concern about the fate of democracy. How do you see your projects tying into a larger national structure? Is organizing nationally productive? What are its limitations?

The Outcome and Evaluating

What do I mean when I say it worked?  Well, 100 artists in five cities got a chance to discuss their work and ideas through the lens of five broad questions that were intended to shed light on the existence of shared and differing conditions and concerns.  The work being produced in these various traditions and contexts stands to gain a lot by being discussed together, yet we tend not to cross-over as much as we would like and are generally comfortable shaping our own highly specific niche market communities. The THT created a shared context amongst very diverse practices from youth media and local zines; to everyday-life-plop-art and long term community collaborations; to theater and story-telling performances; to interventions and conceptual art that can be read in relationship together – all articulating a spectrum of interrelated practices.

The technical outcome involves a multi-faceted distribution process, including this book, in which the content of these transcripts will also circulate to diverse audiences via a website, and printing in various local publications in the cities where the THT occurred.

But really, what happened? And where can it go?
We were granted unique access into the spaces and communities that produce profound ideas about how culture works in relationship to politics and social life. The questions that the THT participants are responding to were carefully conceived of to inspire answers that would illustrate the artist’s environment, history and ideas.  These practices are difficult to account for in simple documentation or exhibition, and these questions explain how and why people do this work.

People discuss in great detail the questions and issues that motivate them. You will read that some individuals in certain cities talk seriously about their work as operating as a community organizing force – seeing arts role almost as an instramentalized culture that can serve the needs of producing dialogue or context for gathering. Still others felt very concerned about their relationship to art history and the discourses that shape it – demonstrating the usefulness of legible categories for many practitioners to relate to. The frequent mentions of gentrification, displacement, precarious employment and housing demonstrate the very real and disorienting effects of economic booms and busts that are occurring everywhere. The frequent mentions of prisons, detainment, profiling, access to education, youth and police abuse indicate that artists are using their representational and conceptual skill-sets in the service of disenfranchised peoples. The rather infrequent discussion of the war on terror was striking, while the absence of discussing the elections is significant of how those not interested in electoral politics are increasingly unlikely to find themselves in “mixed political company.” (1)

Producing a THT makes discussions in and of themselves, it facilitates the distribution of ideas, it historicizes a moment in time and a wide range of ways of working.  But can those different ways of working be productively expanded when put in conversation? Can they be literally networked or coordinated? Or are they simply symbolically connected through their representation on the same pages?

What would a network of socially engaged artists look like and what would it do?

The individuals and practices represented in the THT transcripts are inspiring, no doubt. The difficult and challenging labor involved in working as an artist in relation to activists dealing with the most pressing issues of our time – speculative local/global economies, mass incarceration, ecological devastation, and the suppression of culture – produces near insurmountable questions about the capacity of art to change the world.  And all of the people who spoke in these meetings are pressing up against those challenges every day.  They are the answer to the often asked and always vague questions of “how can artists do politics?”; “can political art be beautiful?”; “what is the ROLE of the artist today?”. These artists are providing us all with better questions.

As these questions get refined and evolve, a new question arises for me:  What would a network of socially engaged artists look like and what would it do? Because if the questions are really going to be pushed and circulate widely, and if people are going to feel accountable for asking them diligently and effectively  – then some kind of organizational apparatus for coordinating the language and methods of evaluation is going to be necessary. Very few young artists, or leftists for that matter, have a sense of what it means or feels like to participate in a coordinated large scale organization.

But there are precedents for artists getting organized. Throughout the country (and internationally) there are examples of artist collectives and networks with explicit political goals. In Chicago, where I am based, we had a local incarnation of the John Reed Club in the 1920s; in the 1960s there was the Afri-COBRA group, which brought together artists aligned with black power and black liberation work.  In New York City in 1982 there was the February 26th Movement which was a weekend long conference intended to network activist-artists from throughout the country (2).  And currently cities throughout Europe from Copenhagen to Zagreb are forming professional trade union like organizations and networks that are explicitly connected to critical contemporary art (3).

Talking about an idea of coordination and realizing it are two very different things, as it is not uncommon to talk of the “fragmentation” of social and political life today.  Artists, like anyone, are faced with serious obstacles in coming together to form a  political organization (4). There are three significant factors that impede the coordination of artists in the U.S. from developing coordinated efforts to change dominant forms of political and social organization . Those factors are the dominance of subcultures and social networks over other forms of organization (5); a general fear of ideology from self identified progressives; and the entrenchment of our labor in non-profit organizations and other structures that serve to depoliticize our work (6).

Moving Forward

There are a great many challenges to artists “getting organized” to work together on common projects or even in support of common ideals. Through initiating the THT project, we hoped to ask the questions that would be necessary pre-requisites to imagining what an artist organization that is politically progressive would look like. We also hoped to ask questions to find out what questions might better address the general concern about the potential for cultural work to influence and impact politics – and to address the impediments that currently exist to doing so. The THT participants and their responses to these questions give us the fodder to ask better questions in the future. They show us the diverse terms by which an artist today can act and self-identify as socially engaged and politically relevant. They show us the complex web of organizational forms which those artists can take and gather under. And they reveal that the place from which we are starting is not unified, and that aesthetic, cultural, geographic and economic differences are as challenging as ever to translate from place to place or person to person. This diversity can be a strength in the future, but it will require the identification of some terms, goals and structures which we can share.

While reading these intelligent, insightful and inspiring responses, it is my hope that you will generate your own responses and your own questions share them on the Town Hall Talks page of creativetime.org

[Citations]

* “the local”: From ecology to public space to gentrification – activists have turned their attention to the local scale, often citing the ability to witness faster results and/or an intimidation with larger regions or national spaces. This “localism” is not inherently naive or ignorant of the necessity of a structural and international analysis. It could be seen to be a reaction to the crisis of the left following the dissolution of any coherent or powerful organization or as a pragmatic response to the limitations of international solidarity and Internet activism.
1) For a more serious investigation of these issues, read “The Big Sort” by Bill Bishop (Houghton Mifflin 2008). Bishop argues that Americans have been sorting themselves into ideological homogeneous communities for the last thirty years.
2) For more information on February 26th Movement see “Collectography of Political Art Documentation and Distribution: A 1980’s Activist Art and Networking Collective ” by Greg Sholette, available through http://gregorysholette.com/writings/writing_index.html (accessed June 20th, 2008).
3) Union of Young Art Workers (UKK) (http://ukk.dk) in Copenhagen and Zagreb Cultural Kapital of Europe 3000 (http://culturalkapital.org).
4) This section is an edited excerpt of the essay “Getting To Know Your City and the Social Movements that call it home” by Daniel Tucker for inthemiddleofawhirlwind.info edited by Team Colors and published online by the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press.
5) “The Big Sort” by Bill Bishop (Houghton Mifflin 2008) provides data on how Americans have fallen into niche-market social and political life.
6) The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, Edited by Incite! Women of Color Against Violence (South End Press, 2007).

by Daniel Tucker

Published in In the Middle of a Whirlwind Edited by Team Colors and Published by the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest

Introduction

This text will outline a methodology for researching local social movements as a means to analyze their history, effectiveness, and strategic ability to participate or intervene in politics. I will use insights gained from AREA Chicago – a publication that has compiled an print/online archive based on interviews with over 100 Chicago activists, cultural producers and organizers, to offer up a proposal for a broad-based pan-leftist approach that can help avoid classic sectarianism while still asking challenging questions and producing forward moving analysis.

In the following paragraphs, I outline a method of ‘movement mapping’ that is very long-term and locally situated. Much of what you will read is situated in a particular project. That project will be explored as a possibly reproducible model. First, I explain a method for critical examination of place and context. Then, I explain an approach to under-standing the work and ideas of the currently existing left in your place or context. I conclude with some more general observations and recommendations, which should be relevant regardless of your interest in reproducing this kind of project. Finally, after the essay there is a small glossary to help understand some of the vocabulary in this piece. The text should be relevant to anyone hoping to strategically contribute to the development of a robust and critically reflexive left.

Getting to know your city

The cities we live in are always expanding, contracting and changing. People who think about these things have compared cities to living organisms (living, breathing), microcosms (reflecting and reproducing the world in which they exist), and parasites (sucking the resources of the region on their periphery), as well as to independent nations (having their own rules and identities distinct from the world around them). Others view cities simply as markets (where people are merely buyers and sellers) and command-and-control centers (where networks of people, wealth and resources are organized and manipulated from a safe and distanced vantage-point). These metaphors are frameworks for understanding what cities are, why they exist, how they work and where they are going.

AREA Chicago is a magazine and events series based in Chicago. One approach we have used to examine the city is a ‘conceptual limiting’ strategy, which is borrowed from literary traditions – if you limit and focus the framework to a specific area or topic, then you can more fully explore that area and navigate complex ideas through that lens. Some people might try to explore contemporary capitalism through the lens of culture (such as soccer), or commodities (such as tea), or possibly though a particular movement (such as socialism). The books in the cultural criticism or sociology section of many bookstores are overflowing with such analytical projects. In our work, a place – Chicago – is the lens through which we view the complexities of an increasingly mobile and always violent capitalism.

Soon after we started the AREA Chicago project in 2005, there was a feature article in the Economist magazine hailing Chicago as a “post-industrial success story.” The article read:
This is a city buzzing with life, humming with prosperity, sparkling with new buildings, new sculptures, new parks, and generally exuding vitality. The Loop, the central area defined by a ring of overhead railway tracks, has not gone the way of so many other big cities’ business districts—soulless by day and deserted at night. It bustles with shoppers as well as office workers. Students live there. So, increasingly, do gays, young couples and older ones whose children have grown up and fled the nest. Farther north, and south, old warehouses and factories have become home to artists, professionals and trendy young families. Not far to the east locals and tourists alike throng Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent Mile, a stretch of shops as swanky as any to be found on Fifth Avenue in New York or Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. Chicago is undoubtedly back.

Back, that is, from what many feared would be the scrap heap. In 1980, when The Economist last published a survey of Chicago, it found a city whose “facade of downtown prosperity” masked a creaking political machine, the erosion of its economic base and some of the most serious racial problems in America…”2

This declaration was curious as it conflicted significantly with our experiences and observations. One question that informed the development of AREA as an activist research project was a slight re-framing: “Is Chicago a post-industrial success story?”
It is difficult to assess the validity of “success stories” in our contemporary cities. In an era of place-marketing and of cities competing with cities for everything – from tourists, to Olympic games, to corporate re-locations – seeing through the public relations haze of what constitutes success can be tricky. In an era of urban real-estate “renewals” amidst housing bubble bursts, wading through the public relations muck of simultaneous mortgage crisis and neighborhood Renaissance can make ‘success’ seem like an abstraction.

In order to provide critical perspectives of our city’s success narrative, AREA printed numerous articles dealing with the flip side of Chicago’s supposed success.
From AREA #1:
The new world order [very loaded term] is coming to roost in Chicago with a vengeance. Increasingly the city is defined by Neoliberalism, the global policies of transnational capital that make the market and individual self-interest primary in every sphere of economic and social life. On every side we see the elimination of the public interest and public control-from privatization (and corporatization) of parks (Millennium Park), schools (Renaissance 2010), and bus shelters to the elimination of public housing. Corporate and financial capital in collaboration with the Daley administration are reconstructing the city to serve their interests. Their agenda grows out of changing relations between cities and the global economy and the emergence of gentrification as a pivotal force in urban economies.3

From AREA #2:
One day I decided I wanted to eat something healthy and I thought greens would be perfect because they were healthy for cleaning negative particles out of my body. So I started on a horrible journey from one store to the next, about eight stores to be exact. I went from California and Jackson past Pulaski and Madison. I was getting very angry. I couldn_t understand why there weren_t any fresh vegetables in these stores. Was it because it was a predominantly Black area, or was it because the community didn’t care enough to demand that the stores supply the essential goods they needed? I couldn_t believe it.4

From AREA #4
After a four-year, $7 million investigation, special prosecutors have released their findings into police torture in Chicago, and the results are familiar. Once again, former Commander Jon Burge and the white police officers under him—who, in the words of the Chicago Tribune, “for two decades coerced dozens of confessions with fists, kicks, radiator burns, guns to the mouth, bags over the head and electric shock to the genitals”—are walking away scot-free for their crimes.5

From AREA #6:
I have lived in Chicago since 1979. My family was a part of the exodus that followed the steel plant closings in Buffalo, and we arrived here when I was seven. I grew up in Logan Square and have spent most of my life on the Near Northwest Side. There have been two major sea changes in the landscape of Chicago since my childhood, which parallels the era of the deepest deprivation and disinvestment in the history of the city. One is the rise of the Latino community, in numbers, in community development, in aspiration, creativity, and political power. The second is the gutting of the inner city and its replacement with an amnesiac, upscale consumer paradise for outsiders with money. What has changed the least in Chicago is this state of control by a cohort of elite gangsters known as The Machine, who are desperately trying to buy out the first change and raking in buckets of cash over the second. I hate how we betray the best of our histories and our communities, which I love to death.6

While cities are not the end all/be all of contemporary capitalism, they are strategic places to focus our energies because of the dense accumulation of contradictions within them. As Nik Theodore recently stated in AREA#6:
…cities (including their suburban peripheries) have become increasingly important geographical targets and institutional laboratories for a variety of neoliberal policy experiments, from place-marketing and local boosterism, enterprise zones, tax abatements, urban development corporations, and public-private partnerships to workfare policies, property redevelopment schemes, new strategies of social control, policing and surveillance and a host of other institutional modifications within the local state apparatus. The overarching goal of such experiments is to mobilize city space as an arena both for market-oriented economic growth and for elite consumption practices.

Indeed, we must understand this function of cities in the more diffuse and international manifestations of uneven development and capitalist exploitation. Cities are home to nearly half of the world’s population, and our existence in them plays a significant role in their reproduction. How we direct that basic existence is the topic of another exploration.

Getting to know the Left in your city

Once the context is thoroughly understood, or at least underway, it is time to get to know the social actors and engaged citizens – the subjects of the city. There are many kinds of practices that could be considered, or consider themselves, to be social movements that operate in a progressive left tradition. There are many strands, many stripes, many projects and many approaches. The deeper you look, the more fragmented it will appear. It can be difficult to map them out or get an image of what these dedicated people and organizations are doing and where they are going. Yet, such a map is essential for any strategic effort. This map, and the process of making it, can give one the understanding of the full spectrum of actors, and enable the mapmakers to assess the most effective sites for intervention and/or engagement.

This may seem a bit abstract, so I will provide an illustration for this point. Imagine a field and think about a political or social question, wherever it is you are reading this from. Think about the variety of social and political actors that share similar goals. Then think about the ‘group of groups’ that share related goals. The pool gets bigger. Maybe the labor union in town has one tactic they use to work towards that goal. Perhaps there are some non-profits that do some combination of reform and community organizing around that goal. There are politicians working on the inside to try and get to that place too, and being influenced and pushed along the way by these other actors. These are the obvious characters in this story. Then there are self-organized groups, there are artists making culture that directly addresses the issue at hand, there are teachers who integrate the questions into their classroom work, and there are community groups that work with a model of popular education to try to understand how this issue is playing out in their hyper-local context. You could probably take this further and find more folks and organizations occupying a place on the field.

Developing the capacity to assess the spectrum of interrelated practices that are attempting to achieve similar goals through the use of different tactics and methodologies is an essential first step towards a variety of strategic and long-term goals. First, it helps in building strategic alliances that bring visibility to the issue. These alliances also maximize the limited resources available to do the work (avoiding redundancy). Secondly, it assists in identifying weak points where unity and collaboration across many different groups may be difficult, or where the movement is most susceptible to external-disruption. Thirdly, it helps to interpret the potential for currently existing groups to achieve their stated end goals. Finally, it provides a vantage point for beginning a complex and critical capacity for evaluating the efficacy of different ideas, actions and forms of organization.
It is a first step, though it is not the solution to resolving historical disputes, economic differences or cultural tensions. It is also not an argument for an abstract multitude. Rather, it is an argument for an honest assessment of the actually existing left and the ideas and actions it produces.

Our methodology is quite simple: What is a pressing or challenging question in the city? What are people doing or not doing about it? Once that is identified, then a call for participation is circulated and people from local networks associated with art, research, education and activism formulate a response. That response is edited and designed and printed, then circulated back out to the networks from which it came. What we are still working on – and what we are always challenged by – is how to create a feedback mechanism that allows the final publication and events to serve as a starting point for larger strategic efforts.

We’ve asked the following question in our publications:

• What kind of infrastructure of services and resources do we need when our welfare state is in disrepair and being increasingly privatized? (AREA #1)
• What kind of food policy can we create to make sure that people of the city are healthy enough to pursue organization? (AREA #2)
• What are the things we mean and want when we say ‘we’? What are critical approaches to the commonplace political concept of solidarity? (AREA #3)
• In contexts where more and more Chicagoans are entrapped in the expanding industry of mass incarceration, how can meaningful, visionary and practical changes to the criminal justice system occur? (AREA #4)
• What is the role of education and pedagogy in strengthening social movements? (AREA #5)
• How do experimental policies turn the city into a social and economic laboratory? (AREA #6)
• What kinds of logics and strategies do contemporary social movements inherit from their predecessors, especially the New Left and Counter-Culture Left of the late 1960s/early 1970s? (AREA #7)

Through this approach of asking questions about the city, how it works and where it is going, we have been able to learn a great deal. Through this research soliciting the reflections of our city’s activists and organizers, AREA Chicago has pieced together a map of the local left. While it is incomplete and always evolving, we can better understand where local groups and initiatives are situated and where they might be going. This is important because these social and political actors are what we have to work with. The left in its current composition is going to provide the basis and history for future forms of thought and social organization.

Composition

We are flailing in these times. There is no compass and no rhyme or reason for what we do – its like shooting in the wind. Anxiety explodes as we wonder if we are being effective or getting anything done. This should not be the case. There is much to do and much to think about. There is much to be angry about and much to be excited about.
We live in a historical moment when two things happen regularly enough that we should be learning from them. The first of these is that our resistance is commodified: it is depoliticized, packaged and sold back to us. Sometimes we don’t even know that it happens – its not always as simple as seeing a political graphic show up in an advertisement. The second of these is that we are encouraged to work locally and marginally while often starting our own organizations to accomplish massive tasks. Solidarity has become an agreement of “You do your thing and I’ll do mine and if we write our names on each others fliers then we are bound.” This is ineffective. We are too weak and too marginal to constantly be starting our own splinter groups and initiatives without a strategic assessment of our role in the broader left, and the commodification of resistance.
There are a handful of sweeping generalizations upon which I am going to base my understanding of the current composition of left and progressive social and political work in the United States. In order to get a generalized image of this complicated mess, it is absolutely necessary for me to step back and consider these major factors.

To understand the contemporary U.S. left, one must consider two state-sponsored power-plays:

• The state disruption and counter-intelligence campaigns that decimated left organizations: The two periods most relevant to our time are the 1950s era red-scare, which were followed by the spying, assassination, imprisonment and sabotage campaigns begun in the 1960s and lasted well into the 1980s; these were directed mostly at various New Left and anti-imperialist organizations. There are histories of state counter-intelligence and “red-baiting” that precede this and that have followed since, but these two periods effectively destroyed much of the organizational infrastructure of the Left in the US. There are other political and economic events to consider in order to fully grasp the fate of these organizations, but it is my belief that acknowledging the Cold War strategy of smashing internal leftist projects within the U.S. over the last 60 years is key to having a clear understanding of where we are now.

• The gradual dissolution of state sponsored welfare programs that had stabilized economic growth in the U.S. following the great Depression (with significant growth occurring directly following the second world war): The neoliberal restructuring of the priorities and policies of the state has meant that many of the gains won by previous generations of progressive social movements and reformers were swept away. Additionally, on a more basic level, this represented the gutting of welfare infrastructure to the extent that the State didn’t do anything for most of its citizens. In turn, the people who cared about the livelihood of their neighbors – people who in previous generations might have been a part of leftist labor unions or political parties – had to pick up the pieces. This means that agencies, groups, NGOs, collectives, websites, magazines – the potential organizational infrastructure of a left social movement – started doing the work that was previously paid for and, even if only partially, implemented by the State. The movements became service providers because that is what people needed.

One must also consider contemporary organizing tendencies that, combined with the aforementioned state disruptions, contribute to our collective marginalization:

• Heavy reliance on rhetoric over strategy. Think “solidarity” in all its incarnations and interpretations.
• Mistaking subculture for politics and relying on codes, symbols and aesthetics associated with culture with a clear in/out crowd. This easily reduces movements to niche markets, ideal for targeted marketing.
• Considering social-networking to be solidarity. As a result of being strapped for resources, we “organize” via commodified forms of social networking such as online media platforms like Friendster, Myspace and Facebook. This “narrowcasting” is more affordable, but if we really care about the ideas we are engaging in, then we can find a way to saturate the visual landscape with our messages. This will provide points of entry for those who are compelled by the ideas but outside of the narrowcast distribution systems.

Three Crisis Case Studies

The time and place in which AREA Chicago is being initiated is a state of disrepair for left and progressive organizations and politics. Surveying a local left at this moment has allowed for several insights into challenges facing us. As well, we see people trying to propose solutions to the challenges facing progressive and leftist efforts.

• Case Study 1: Communications

In my neighborhood in Chicago, there is a new initiative to revive a community bulletin board that has been underused and in disrepair. This initiative involves an email list and a Blog. Regular working meetings occur to manage the revitalization efforts. While I am excited to have a new outlet for my propaganda, the initiative has inspired in me many questions about social organization in my neighborhood and city, as well as communications issues facing social movements. There is so little evidence of any kind of critical visual culture on the streets, storefronts, and bulletin boards of my city. This absence is a shame and makes it difficult to assess the quality and quantity of cultural and political efforts by merely looking around. Further, this very noticeable absence contrasts starkly with the flood of emails I receive daily for concerts, benefit parties, Marxist reading groups, community forums and block parties. This absence also significantly contrasts with my experience in other places and other historical moments when the culture of a place was apparent: splattered on its walls, stapled on its phone poles, stuffed under doors and car windshield wipers.

This absence is the result of a variety of factors – most significantly the policing and sterilization of public space, as well as competition with the low-cost alternative communication outlets online. The effort to revitalize a single bulletin board in the third largest city in the U.S. requires a substantial organizational effort. Yet, this work is invaluable as a basic communication tool in the everyday life of an urban neighborhood with over 60,000 residents.

The above initiative and its context point to a crisis of communications. Regardless of the fact that your home may or may not be faced with this exact situation, the communications crisis of public space versus virtual space is having a dramatic impact on the quality of our organizations. When was the last time you did a mass distribution campaign about a current political challenge or important public event? If we care as deeply as we say we do about the politics and ideas we commit our lives to, then why shouldn’t we commit energy to disseminating those ideas in a broad manner?

• Case Study 2: Infrastructure

There is a project that has attempted to operate as an infrastructure for other organizations to take advantage of – to support the growth and development of a larger community. This was a “speakers bureau” of local activist intellectuals and journalists. The effort emerged in response to a perceived demand for speakers on a variety of topics as well as, a perceived lack of access to or representation of the potential speakers who specialized in those same topics living in this very city. The concept was simple: if we list and promote these individuals and their specifically relevant expertise then people will more easily be able to put together interesting and high quality events.

Although this initiative failed due to poor publicity and lack of community support, the concept and intention were admirable. The goal of creating an infrastructure for the circulation of ideas and people was necessary in order to strengthen the analytical capacity of local social movements, and to develop leadership figures within those movements. Additionally, within a context of scarce resources, it made sense to celebrate and utilize local thinkers in lieu of recruiting speakers from outside the city.

Still, a problem arose that reflects a limitation often faced by infrastructure initiatives: If you create a platform for resource-sharing amongst local organizations or a project that is intended to help develop the intellectual and critical capacity of local social movements, what do you do if they cannot or will not bite? In other words, if you build an infrastructure to improve aspects of local social movements, will they come? This limitation occurs for two primary reasons. First, there is the challenge that people don’t want to change or evolve. This happens because they have limited capacity or because they are bound to their routines and methods and cannot break from them. The second reason people may not be responsive to infrastructure projects is that the ideas or intentions are not clearly communicated or are not trusted.

There are many entrepreneurial activists out there with ideas that will “make the left better.” However, if people do not understand or know about your initiative then they cannot really be considered to have passed the opportunity up – they simply didn’t get the message. Or, if the work to build relationships with the relevant practitioners was not performed, then they cannot be faulted for never engaging – they simply aren’t willing to take a chance on an unproven scheme that may or may not float.

Regardless of whether or not you would engage with a speakers bureau, the concept of building infrastructures to support, grow and catalyze leftist culture and politics is essential if we are to move from the margins and have a significant impact on electoral politics, fair distribution of resources, or the wide circulation and availability of critical thought.

• Case Study 3: Fear of Ideology

I would like to focus on an organizational initiative happening in Chicago that was founded to respond to the fact that “the left is dead.” This effort started as a reading group and has gradually morphed into an organizing project that attempts to make critical interventions in events and organizations that are somehow symptomatic of what they see as part of this tradition. They take on a polemical style that is akin to the Spartacist League or even, perhaps, the filibusters of a political meeting. This assertion of the need for a radical rethinking of what the left is and where it is going takes the form of antagonism towards the actually existing left of today. While the ideas are quite profound, they become lost or obscured due to a perceived antagonism against current political and cultural practices.

The terrain that we currently operate on has a deficit of relevant ideological programs. Such programs might identify how we activate forms of political and social organization that can potentially dismantle competitive and oppressive social organization. Generally speaking, there is a severely underdeveloped capacity for combining an analysis of power and capital with a strategy for overcoming it. Attempts at overarching ideological approaches are often shot-down or dismissed without thorough consideration.

Admittedly, most proposals for drastic or revolutionary social re-organization that I have encountered during my short life span seem like impossibilities, as well as often undesirable from my perspective. Yet the disparity between a highly organized network of powerful institutions working in concert to advance right-wing neoconservative and neoliberal ideology and a completely weak and fragmented left is cause for concern. There was a time before a so-called left existed and there is no reason to think that we couldn’t return to some new version of that in the future.

So what is it that scares so many of us about groups that articulate and advance revolutionary ideologies about how the world could work differently? Why is it that when they do come around, they have such poor delivery? Regardless of your specific experience or proximity to radical left wing thinking, this may be of concern to you because of how dire this historical moment is and how visions of a future you might want are lacking. There is something about that feeling of flailing – of knowing things must change but not having the capacity or the level of organization to do anything about it. That feeling is not going to go away unless we take a measured and careful approach to identifying an ideology, culture and politics that can reflect this moment, learn from the past and reach for a better and more livable future.

Conclusion

In this text I’ve attempted to overview some considerations relevant to those interested in playing a strategic role in contemporary social movements (particularly in U.S. cities). I’ve tried to use my experience in one local project to ground my reflections in a place and a practice. Because this larger Whirlwind publication project is being widely circulated amongst participants in a diverse array of local and international leftist tendencies, I’ve taken the occasion to invite readers to collaborate. If the text or methods outlined above resonate with your concerns and interest, please feel free to get in touch. Also, please get in touch if you would like to develop a locally situated research project about the social movements in your situated context.

Developing an AREA project in your home is importantly different from independent media projects that articulate their goals as being alternatives to corporate monopolized “news.” By taking on this kind of project and approach, you are committing to examining the conditions of your context and the various ways that left and progressive social actors respond to and shape that place.

If there were a functional network of various local research projects then we could compare and contrast local initiatives in order to have an analysis of what we share and how to coordinate our efforts. In this historical moment of a weak left, we must carefully assess and learn from one another. We can use this time to deepen our understanding of our history and our resources, and to find alignment in our movements towards an overcoming of capitalism and the deformed social life it produces.

Authors Final Notes:

You will note that this text does not offer a distinct ideological platform for what should be done with cities and their social movements. This is obviously a bigger and more essential question, but is not the task that was taken on while writing this text. To discuss that political project in more depth, please contact me via miscprojects.com

Did this text resonate with you and your interests? Would you like to develop a publication that will research your city and its social movements? Well AREA is expanding and looking for other cities to collaborate with. At this point a few other AREA project are in the works in other cities on the Coasts of the US. Please let us know if you would like to develop an AREA in your home and we can provide resources like website templates, editorial content for your issues and a healthy support network to help you develop the project in a locally specific and beneficial manner. Contact areachicago@gmail.com

Thanks to my collaborators at AREA Chicago and all our contributors. Thanks also to the folks that attended the workshop that served as the basis for this text at “Finding Our Roots: Anarchist Organizing in the Midwest” this last April 2008.

Please see www.areachicago.org for more information.

Footnotes:

1. The database can be found at: http://areachicago.org/p/authors/
2. The Economist, March 16, 2006
3. Pauline Lipman, “Who’s City is it Anyways?” Online at: http://www.learningsite.info/NeoTrashing.pdf
4. Nancy Thomas, “Looking For Greens.” Online at: http://www.areachicago.org/p/issues/issue-2/looking-for-greens
5. Julien Ball, “The $7 Million Whitewash.” Online at: http://www.areachicago.org/p/issues/issue-4/seven-million-dollar-whitewash
6. Jesse Mumm, City Wide Interview about What Has Changed and What Has Stayed The Same. AREA #6

Glossary of Selected Terms:

Neoliberal: A project of radical institutional transformation. This term refers to a unique period in Capitalism in which some economic elite of some countries have encouraged a free-market fundamentalism that is unprecedented since before the Great Depression. This fundamentalist ideology has promoted a reversal of much of the regulation that has protected local and national economies from foreign competition, in addition to much of the social and political gains of social movements (including organized labor). Much of this transformation occurs through the privatization of industries and services previously monopolized by the State, and many of the social programs associated with Welfare. This period is also marked by the opening up of new markets in sectors of life previously untapped for profit-making potential – including those basic services provided by the state, as well as the growing importance of industries like culture, health, environmentalism, and education (to name a few). Neoliberalism is considered to have grown out of the University of Chicago Economics Department, promoted by its ideologues such as Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman. The concepts grow out of a “liberal” tradition, dating back to the theorists of early capitalism in the late 1800s, who were compelled by pure concepts of freedom. For the liberal, “freedom” was the ideal. For the neoliberal, the “free market” undisturbed by any State intervention is ideal. What must be constantly kept in mind is that the ideal is far from the truth, and current so-called neoliberal policies require massive State intervention – only this time around it is exclusively on behalf of economic elite with no attempt to promote policies of economic redistribution, equal opportunity or civic participation.
State retrenchment: This phenomenon could be correlated to “down-sizing” or lay-offs by an employer, but in this case it is happening to the state. Republicans after the Nixon-era have often promised “smaller government and fewer taxes” and in the policies of deregulation and privatization promoted by Reagan, Bush (both of em), and Clinton – we can see retrenchment happening. This means the roles historically associated with the state are no longer what we can expect – their services are being outsourced and in some cases, off-shored. Still, the myth of “small government” is that it is actually small. In the experience of the US, we have merely seen resources taken from the programs of the welfare State and transferred into military – everyday working people are no longer the recipients of subsidies because now nothing can be spared in the subsidies provided to corporations and their economic-elite leadership.

“the local”: From ecology to public space to gentrification – activists have turned their attention to the local scale, often citing the ability to witness faster results and/or an intimidation with larger regions or national spaces. This “localism” is not inherently naive or ignorant of the necessity of a structural and international analysis. It could be seen to be a reaction to the crisis of the left following the dissolution of any coherent or powerful organization or as a pragmatic response to the limitations of international solidarity and Internet activism.

Welfare State: This term generically refers to any instance in which the State provides or subsidizes resources for its citizens. However the term has a diverse and locally specific meaning – with different examples and histories taking root all over the world. In the context of the US, it generally refers to the social programs developed after the great depression produced hunger and malnutrition as well as homelessness and other examples of extreme poverty. These programs developed and grew significantly after Roosevelt’s “New Deal” program which created national infrastructure for these programs and further following the second world war – they grew to encompass public housing, public education and many other basic services. By the 1990s these national programs were rolled back and put in the hands of the individual state governments, or dismantled federally nearly all together. Some critics (because they are anti-communist) consider any “Social expenditure” to be Socialist, while other critics (because they are Anarchists or radical Socialists) consider it to be the means of controlling working class dissent through marginal subsidization of middle-class lifestyles. Regardless, we no longer have much of one in the US.