----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- "Grateful for structures that make conversations possible." MR
Thanks K, M, and D. Building on the thread about conversation and its association with/collapse into play, Studio of the Streets (SOS) seems like a great project to think with. What became an early example of relational and discursive "social practice" actually began as the documentation of a protest to demand resources and space for public access television. As it was conceived by the members of The First Amendment Network for Public Access (with Chris Hill, Barbara Lattanzi, Julie Zando, Jody Lafond, Meg Knowles, and many others -- including TC and Brian Springer), SOS weekly shoots were an attempt to encourage the people they encountered on the steps of City Hall to make their own TV. Eventually that goal fell by the wayside and TC, Cathy Steffan, and Ann Szyjika developed a careful choreography in order to produce and amplify conversations with the people of Buffalo. SOS's conversational/play was shaped by boundaries, struggles with authority, and institutions: from time constraints (they filmed on fridays and aired tuesdays) to the organizing efforts of hundreds of people to demand public access .... but it was also enabled by tony's employment as a professor at University at Buffalo. He’d been teaching at UB for many years, but he used to say that SOS made Buffalo his home. I raise this because the notion of home that Margaret invoked is, for me, synonymous with conversation, a space or site for dialogue and discussion. That's what I need: interlocutors and structures for engaging with them. Call it a network, connections, friendships, relationships, "community" -- forms of association for conversation have to be produced, reproduced, and maintained. Like many privileged folks, i've been lucky to meet brilliant individuals and to carve networks out within academic institutions, but it's when I've tried to build them "outside of institutions" that's when those conversations-connections require work and resources to feel like play. From this perspective, i don't think tony would have recognized himself as a "professional amateur". Rejecting the notion of professionalization at every turn, he was a student of boundaries and disciplines -- if only just to upend the conventions. He didn't have an MFA when he was hired at UB, most artists didn't. But he set about to learn "the culture" -- having reading groups on post-structuralism and other academically fashionable material. (He was also hired to teach video having worked almost exclusively in 16mm). All power structures intrigued him. He took institution building quite seriously but in the context of the university, he was most committed to finding ways for his students to cohere as a group. He'd do anything to facilitate that and to keep the department limber and forward thinking in its offerings and hires. But the job was, first and foremost, an income. A "home base" from which to be a filmmaker, video artist, musician, writer, artist, and a teacher (or "polymath" -- a term he never used to describe himself). The current conditions of academia mean that artists are hired or expected to satisfy the never-ending imperatives of "interdisciplinarity." Artists must write, theorize, perform, produce, instruct, tutor, and criticize across media to be legible to our administrations and hiring committees. This multi-modal status (with all of its apparently boundary challenging playful potential) has become a professional requirement. I'm neck deep in this -- I have the degrees, check the boxes, and now I teach in a department with a PhD in practice where we're in the business of producing professionals in the mold of trickster, multi-modal, institution-challenging mavericks. From where I sit -- it's worrisome how well and easily "the celebration/power of play" fits into the very logic or authority it has the capacity to flout. I'm all for celebrating the virtues of being tinkerers and undisciplined but never an amateur. I don't want to cede anything, nor did tony, to the logic of hierarchy when it comes to the power of what we do. Paige Sarlin, Ph.D. (she/her) Assistant Professor / Department of Media Study / University at Buffalo/SUNY p.sar...@buffalo.edu / paigesarlin.info _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
