“To the magic hat, because it is the most fun to wear...”

H A T

Produced by Kendell Harbin

Executive Producers: Blake Gibb, Ray Harbin, Carole and Mark Vorder-Bruegge

Associate Producers: Designed by Patrick Drake Edited by Logan Hamilton Acton

Printed and Bound by: Boelte-Hall, Kansas City, Kansas, May 2013

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acknowledgments

This project could not have happened without the willingness and creative energy of my fellow collaborators. I am fortunate to have worked so closely with such bright and thoughtful individuals. Thank you Amos Leager, Nate Ellefson, Ian Snyder, Frederick Vorder-Bruegge, Naomi O’Donnell, Sami Freese, Phyllis Ray-Taylor, and Stephen Kent. I would also like to extend special thanks to those key contributors who gave me the financial capacity to realize this project: Deborah and George Markward, Ellen Lev, Ruth Lamborn, Mac Akin, Woobie Bogus, and Nancy Noble. As for those willing individuals who found themselves in the midst of these projects and happily took up a camera in order to document these events (Ben Gould, Anna Kamerer, and Zophia McDougal, to name a few), I owe you one! Finally, I must express my gratitude to those professors and administrators who consistently encouraged my pursuit of this endeavor. Thank you Laura Berman, Reed Anderson, Bambi Burgard, and Michele Fricke. The production of HAT was truly a group effort, and I would not have had it any other way.

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C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments

Featured WritingsEven Bees, Taylor Wallace

Drawing, Teal Wilson

Transformations, Darlyn Finch Kuhn

Forty-Six Pessimistic Lines on Collaboration, Amos Leager

HAT ProjectsPreface

Introduction

Project No. 01 Amos Leager

Project No. 02 Nate Ellefson

Project No. 03 Samantha Freese

Project No. 04 Ian Snyder

Project No. 05 Frederick Vorder-Bruegge

Project No. 06 Phyllis Ray-Taylor

Project No. 07 Naomi O’Donnell

Project No. 08 Stephen Kent

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F E AT U R E D W R I T I N G S

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Even Bees Taylor Wallace

Collaborate—‘buzz-word’. For the sake of clarity, one of these is unassociated with bees. Similarities of the two topics of confab include, but are not limited to, their general use in conversation: to promote the drama and significance of whatever is being discussed by the collaborator(s) without the definition or significance of the word being understood (necessarily) by either party.

What isn’t collaboration? Very little. There are, in fact, almost no situations that arise in the world which do not involve two distinct parties merging to create something neither of them could create if left solitary. Movies, sex, conversation, mitosis, writing, breathing, walking, music, all require a flow of cooperation and unrelenting, unforgiving dominance. Even the creation of molecules and atoms obey this order, which suggests that its significance is inherent in, and peculiar to, life itself, the very purpose and motivation for the movement of all things forward into time; it allows us to see something we couldn’t have seen without multiple-party participation—a higher version of ourselves as individuals and a special (spee-see-uhl) collective—which instills a desire to see more or become more closely associated with this version.

Telling was a collaborative multimedia installation implementing live folk music and story-telling, video, poetry, and pre-recorded compositions. I consider it the closest I have come to finding the most accurate physical and temporal manifestation of my sensibility, not only because it had these elements (plus a discussion on the significance of banjo and bluegrass music as a form of meditation), but it authentically created a world where all of them belonged together and rationalized the inclusion and presence of the others, where logic was not something brought from the world outside the piece and flow (however delineated or tangental) was something accepted by the viewer because of the legitimacy of the world they were enveloped in.

Sure, one could say that since I use these media and techniques separately, it would be only a matter of short time that I would use them together, but this is false. Even if it were true, it would have taken me years of confusion, belligerence, countless instances of trial and error, and general dumbassedness to arrive at the results of a few months of intensified stress, jamming, practice, rehearsal, scurrying, and marvelous pleasure with two fellow artists who were relatively unfamiliar to me. One simply does not see the unique character of the attributes that make up him or her, for they have become accustomed to them and their familiar paths of tangent and resolution. An external party, a foreign media is necessary for us to notice the singularity or degree of proficiency of such characteristics, for that is the governing boundary of identity—they allow us to “notice what I see.”

Teal Wilson

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TransformationsDarlyn Finch Kuhn

“A woman’s body is the most beautiful thing in the world,” the artist says, and staring at the canvas he’s painted, I have to agree. The standing nude—young, lithe, glancing over her impossibly lovely shoulder at the viewer—shimmers with perfection.

Later, at dinner, as he raises his glass of wine in my direction, here it comes, I think, and he does not disappoint; his first suggestion for our artistic collaboration is to paint me, the poet, in the nude. So why do I feel so disappointed? “I prefer to reveal myself through words,” I demur. Recently divorced, watching my elder brother succumb with bitter resignation to the side effects of diabetes, I am weary to the bone, with no patience for any nonsense from men.

Driving home, I convince myself that while ekphrastic poetry from artworks in museums is a legit-imate form of expression I enjoy, collaboration with a living, breathing artist may not be my cup of tea. What have I gotten myself into?

Weeks pass. Give it time, I tell myself, we’ll think of something. The artist and I have spoken on the phone, written countless emails, and still are no closer to coming up with a theme we agree on, much less to putting a brushstroke on canvas or a word on the page. The deadline is looming. We cannot produce NOTHING. The poet laureate of Florida is spearheading the project; eleven other poet-artist pairs are busy producing work; the Brevard Art Museum has reserved a gallery for the results, and there’s an opening cocktail reception on the calendar. The media is invited. Failure is not an option.

Life intervenes. My brother has fallen out of bed with a seizure; my elderly mother has ruptured a hernia trying to lift him off the floor. I must travel right away to my hometown. I must handle things. I must fix this. I find a place for my brother; it is close to my mother’s home, so she can visit daily, and I can drive up on weekends. It is not cheap, but it is all we can afford. I am racked with guilt. I live alone in a house with steep stairs, in a town where he knows no one; there is no way he can stay with me. I look into his eyes and tell him this. He nods and looks away.

I cry all the way home, and, when I arrive, the artist has written an email to tell me how sorry he is that he’s been out of touch. His mentor, the teacher who taught him to paint, lies dying, and he’s had to put her in a nursing home. There is no one else to do this. He is racked with guilt. “I’m bleeding, my soul is on fire and I am ready to make a deal with the devil…or God. Not sure which one yet,” he writes.

I click ‘reply’. “Paint that! That’s poetry,” I type. Then I pick up the phone. We talk for hours. Not about art, not about poetry. About life. About pain. About suffering and guilt. About how it feels to want to fix someone we love, and being powerless to do so.

When we hang up the phone, we are collaborators and friends. He paints with abandon. I write, nonstop.

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In the coming days, feverish emails fly through cyberspace. We are no longer tentatively offering ideas to be quickly rejected by the other. Ideas flow fast and furious, and there is an intoxicating sense of possibility. Our individual pain, expressed to the world on canvas and page, will become universal pain, and thereby be shared and released.

Ideas now come easily. Execution is difficult. How to paint a broken heart, without making it a Valentine? How to write the slow dying of a brother?

I send him poems I am not thrilled with. He sends a photo of his painting, all abstract blacks, whites, grays and reds. He has painted his suffering soul, but he is unhappy with the lower left quadrant. “It is too mechanical and contrived,” he writes.

It is okay that we haven’t yet found the key. We are working, together and apart, and that is enough.

Death intervenes. I hold my brother’s hand; my mother grips his other, while the nurse discon-nects all the machines keeping him bound to his prison-house of pain. Our step-father weeps without words. My brother does not linger long; his spirit has moved on, but his heart continues to beat for five endless minutes while the alarm clangs its shrill warning and the monitor moves from steady to erratic pulses, and then to a long flat line. The nurse re-enters the room to turn the monitor off, then leaves us in the blessed silence to say our last goodbyes.

I send the artist the set of poems about my brother. The final one is called Alarm. We agree that this is the one we should choose for our collaborative project. He tells me he has finished the painting, that he will see me at the gallery, that he is looking forward to introducing me to his wife, and to meeting my fiancé.

The four of us say our hellos and wander, sipping wine, through the gallery, where works of art and framed poems are mounted side-by-side, with elegant name-plates giving the artists’ and poets’ names as well as the titles of the pieces. Alarm, reads the plate beside my poem. Alarm, reads the title of his painting. I glance at the familiar strokes representing blood, crosses, bridges, tears, a childhood dog, and what looks to me like a ghostly piano. I recognize these from the photo he’d sent, but now I see how the artist has made the lower left quadrant come alive…he has added the jagged crimson lub-dup of a heart monitor, fading slowly into a flat red line. True collaboration: I have written his guilt and pain into my poem, and he has painted my brother’s final heartbeats. Together, we have trained a mirror on the face of Death, and watched it transform into something holy.

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Forty-Six Pessimistic Lines on CollaborationAmos Leager

We want this to be awesome! I want this to… be like Fort Thunder? I guess. Those kids aren’t going to know the difference. It’s pretty obvious who’s putting in the real work here. Some people are meant to be close friends and not collaborators.Plug in the rest of the logical operators to get the rest of the truisms. Thanks for the ideas, how come you get frustrated when I try to act on them? The core within the core. We graduated from art school, we all had to get jobs. It’s going to feel SO GOOD when this is DONE. Which came first? The project or the sexual attraction? You’re just covering up my stuff. That’s literally all you’re doing. Yeah, there are five new “collectives” just this month. One has disappointed oneself so many times,why not try disappointing others for a change? At least we don’t have to worry about disappointing investors. Your drawings are so good they relieve me of my obligation to draw. Nobody’s going to know what this means except us. We made five dollars! We’ve gotten really good at talking about what’s not working!By the time we arrive at what is working, everyone’s too drunk.

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Want to go get another cheese slice?Oh God yes. Networking… *sigh* I spent all day yesterday watching Netflix.Hahaha me too! The strength of “I just want to focus on my own work for once”as directly proportional to the nearness of the deadline. Meeting the deadline isn’t as important as being satisfied with the product. That giant can of Monster is for us to share! What audience? The manager kept asking about our mural design for their dining roomso we stopped eating there. Was this worth $25,000 in student loans? Every community needs a contrarian. Every month…sort of. To be decided eventually. I mean, I don’t want to be the kind of person who cares about profit. The blog hasn’t been updated in, uh, a while. “Zine” has got to be one of the worst words in existence. We don’t consider long periods of dormancy poisonous to our project. In the recent past I’ve engaged in two major creative collaborations.Both were intended to be ongoing.One of them is still ongoing. This is…what? Our third all-nighter in a row? It feels SO GOOD to be DONE!

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P R E FAC E

In late August, 2012, I set out on a grand venture into creative communion, through various strategies of collaboration. I was struck by how and why people worked together, specifically in creative acts. When I began this project I was not entirely sure what I would be getting myself into. The project has largely defined itself as I have moved it forward, acting almost like a liquid that decides its own container. In the spirit of interactive learning I have attempted numerous shared projects, some artistic, some not. Some successful, some not. Some of my collaborators I had worked with before, some became new confidants. A selection of my various attempts, resolved or not, are documented here. The text that accompanies them are derived from conversations I had with those partners. Our thoughts and questions were brought up weeks, sometimes months, after our project was completed and thus vary in degree of reflection.

What I came to realize early on in these co-operative projects was that they all required their participants to wear a range of thinking hats: magic hats, feeling hats, creativity hats, logic hats, and anti-logic hats. It seemed appropriate that the documentation of this undertaking should be known as HAT.1 In short, my study is focused on how and why we wear certain hats while interact-ing creatively and thinking laterally. I am especially interested in what determines these conditions in artistic collaboration. We do not typically make clear which hat we are wearing, or why. These hats are invisible. I have come to believe that these invisible forces are revealed through immersion, participation, and reflection. Miraculously, the practice of collaboration facilitates the occurrence of these three things simultaneously. It made sense to me that this should be not only the focus, but also the methodology of this research.

1 For some of you, these capped divisions may call to mind Six Thinking Hats by the author, inventor, and physicist, Edward De Bono. I was pleasantly surprised when introduced to Six Thinking Hats midway through this project. Applying his theories to the business world, De Bono stressed a transparent expression of what thinking hat one wears at any given time in order to increase productivity. This exercise is now used by many businesses around the globe. He is also a proponent of teaching thinking as a subject in schools.

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As a way to introduce this atypical research project, I’d like to present the context in which this was all being enacted. Many forces in the contemporary art world have motivated me to orches-trate these events and I feel a bit of background information would be of great use. Some readers may hold an extensive knowledge of the topics covered here as they have saturated the recent critical art discourse, and some may be newly introducing themselves to the subject at hand. It is my hope that this book will be of interest to both parties.

In the post-production stage of my research, I shared a draft of what was, at one point, a rather straightforward art historical introduction with a fellow student, Logan. After doing so, and being quite intrigued by his remarks, I asked him if he would be interested in taking the posi-tion of editor for the final product. From there we realized we held certain mutualisms with our high level of interest in a number of these topics. We decided to take on the challenge of jointly writing an introduction to collaborative art practices.

Logan and I tried on a few different formats in order to write toward a similar idea. We wanted to maintain our own opinions, yet still influence one another to some extent, much like a conversation. We started our first writing session off by staring into one another’s eyes for 3 minutes. Eye contact is a powerful thing, and can sometimes be scary. It was sort of an ice-breaker, but also a slight attempt at mind-reading. After the intense stare, we decided to spend a week writing in turns. He woke in the morning to type out his ideas and I would swoop in during the evenings and contribute my thoughts. We didn’t speak to one another in person outside of the essay. Our only form of communication was through the essay. Afterwards, we met to discuss the writing more intimately and determine our desires for structure, style, and syntax. From that point forward, communication was cracked open and cohesion felt less unattainable. In our final session, we sat at two different computers, side-by-side, simultaneously typing in a digital document. The following essay is the result of our efforts.

-Kendell Harbin, April 2013

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U N D E R T H E I N F LU E N C E O F

(an introduction to HAT)

The choice of whether or not to collaborate seems oddly unique to artistic production; in the 21st century, global trends and increasingly complex systems of trade make the idea of isolated production seem antiquated, perhaps harmfully outdated. (Perhaps there has never been such a thing, as globalism has now been around for five hundred or so years.) Still, this project is situated within a discourse that is far from resolved. While it is clear that collabora-tion is essentially connected with other people, the ideas that translate to practice are multifac-eted and varied and so a shroud of mystery still rests atop this method.

Beneath our daily activities sits an unspoken collaboration, something we more commonly view as a social organism or community. Cultural interaction shows us that through our participation we become complicit in the state of the world, and perhaps it is our responsibility to engage thoughtfully, not just socially or sensually. While collaboration often takes place behind the scenes and much of what we accomplish could not occur without other people, we often forget the role that others play in shaping our experience. This is the common thread connecting everything from the writing of this essay to the printing of the book itself.

Collaboration in art requires that a certain degree of control be relinquished to others in what is otherwise a relatively autonomous process. This fact has dubbed collaboration one of the sexiest practices in contemporary art. As societies who valorize the concept of the individ-ual rally (lone wolf style, of course) towards their unknown peak, the opposing notion of the

‘group effort’ becomes precipitously more popular. Of course, a democracy is democratically popular. Notice: individual autonomy is what makes this attraction possible in the first place. We can thank the anarchists wearing their woolen libertarian sweaters for this.

But what defines collaboration really? Is it always convivial or enjoyable? Is it simply shared labor? May that labor be intellectual? (In our present economic climate, sharing intellectual property is a big no-no.)

Perhaps its definition is dependent on those parties involved. Like sex between two women; how do you decide when it is more than just fooling around? Ultimately, collaboration is a somewhat nebulous force that orbits between people.

Collaboration faces a challenge in the assumption that art production is normally a solo practice. Being distinctly collective, while so much of art history suppresses the involvement of other people, makes it seem unfamiliar. However, as it has reentered contemporary discourse it brings to light what has often been ignored in the-three-keg-and-7-layer-dip celebration of the masterpiece: that no one creates in a vacuum and often it requires the effort of multiple people to accomplish creative goals. After all, some strong-armed pair carried the keg upstairs into the gallery, did they not?

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In contemporary art, collaboration has been referred to as somewhat of a movement all its own.  Much like Impressionism, Abstraction, Conceptual art, and so-called Dematerialized art, contemporary collaboration has become a hybridized practice that is both a means and an end. For instance, in contemporary ‘social art’ genres emphasis is often placed on participation, exchange, and dialogue in such a way that makes social engagement just as much a subject matter as it is a method.

Now, lettuce pick apart the tossed salad of theories and terminology embedded in HAT projects so that we may look critically at the essentials of collaboration. After almost a year’s worth of research, HAT explores a number of different joint-production methods. Some point outward, at a social process of exchange; others may look inward, at the psychology between creators. Certainly, the two inform one another in some way. Artists have been exploring this relationship for centuries and it is in this rich history that Kendell has quarried her most seminal concerns.

More recently, since the 1990’s the ‘social practice’ art movement, as it is referred to in the U.S., has been evolving. This emerging movement remains subject to local collo-quialisms and institutional vocabularies. Social practice has many names: socially engaged art, participatory art, community-based art, collaborative art, dialogic art, among others. While these terms seem variform depending on location or application, they are not neces-sarily interchangeable. Each term yields its own focus, just as calling a sculpture a drawing would warrant a decidedly different critique.

Whatever this tendency in art may be called, one cannot stress enough how decisive the applied title may be. The art world could be compared to a restaurant wherein you choose what table to sit at and what discussion to have over dinner. Using this thinking, project genres may be regarded as dinner reservations one should not make on a whim, especially if this restaurant is very swanky and hard to get a table at. For the purpose of this essay, we will lean into the term ‘social practice’ as it is the most inclusive of the potential titles.

HAT is saturated with ideas of collaborative art; this essay, however, extends beyond this primary focus as it also explores those concerns that are common to other recent art practices. We want to touch on the focus of a social engagement in art, though the book is not necessarily an expression of such engagement. An art movement’s tendency to remain in dialogue with itself is cause for trepidation. This is particularly problematic for a form of art which supposedly aims to reach outside its own boundaries. Through a brief look at the history that precedes this work, it is important to remember that the question is this:

Is questioning/highlighting whether or not something in a work of art is subject matter versus content detrimental to its overall effect? Surely, knowing the difference between the terms is important. But does it dehydrate the work? Many formalists would argue there isn’t even a difference.

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In the case of a toilet, for example, the subject matter is the porcelain hardware and peculiar plumbing. The content could be understood as any number of things relating to ideas of refuse, cleansing, or something far removed from what we understand the function of a toilet to be.

In many ways this lack of clarity has been an ongoing focus of art theory since Marcel Duchamp placed a urinal on a gallery pedestal in 1917. In doing so, Duchamp delivered the only joke about reality that holds an infinite punch line (though it seems as if people didn’t get the joke). Nevertheless, the impact this piece has had on subsequent art theory has been monumental. Duchamp’s provocations regarding what constitutes a work of art provide a certain ambiguity that continues into our own historical moment. It is worthwhile noting that art historical precedents abound for those looking closely at the lines between art and life: Allan Kaprow, Eva Hesse, Joseph Beuys, Ai Weiwei, and the Xijing Men have all established a personal approach to connecting life as a lived experience with their artistic focus.

Although this history certainly informs HAT, the variety of approaches to the projects in this book do not wish to beat the bounds of any single inquiry. Instead, HAT seems premised on a single question: “What would happen if we...” Through this process of learning we shift from an idea of mastering one thing to discovering many. These projects were rarely a matter of correctness, resolution, or even accomplishment. Acting as a constant, Kendell engaged with each participant in a new exercise, some of which were radically dissimilar or incredibly alike. The different strengths/weaknesses each person brought to bear on their particular set of actions opens up multiple vantage points from which to see the project as a whole.

At this point, it may help to provide a cursory overview of the art historical timeline that has led up to the present moment. Some scholars and art historians have attributed the Western origins of this social turn in art to the Dada movement in Zurich, Switzerland circa 1917. Dada, a nonsense title purportedly derived from stabbing a knife into a dictionary, celebrated an “anti-art”, or an art supposedly without conventions. Dada laid the groundwork for Surrealism, Abstract art, Pop art, and Performance. Closely connected with Performance were the ‘Happenings’ that emerged in the late 1950’s. The artist and theorist Allan Kaprow is generally credited with the development of this artistic term, a term that often took form as a lively art event or action, action which is sometimes considered the prelude to social practice. The politics of viewership inherent to this genre generated a socio-political dialogue, which now support a lot of the thinking behind participatory and social practice art.

One could connect the pedagogical avenue of social practice to the art activism extant in the 1920’s and onward. Since the release of the Dada Manifesto in 1918, the lecture on Dadaism in 1922, and its subsequent anti-war publications, activism in art has taken many forms. Today, the intersection of art and social action has prompted a number of grassroots approaches to education. Consider the recent turn in art towards teaching as a medium, for example. As early as 1950 a sort of ‘trans-pedagogy’ emerged wherein teaching and art-making intersected behind gallery walls. In every city there could be found an artist-run workshop on various appropriated topics. Education as an art medium is especially prominent today, as exemplified by art education and social practice disciplines in American schools such as the Rhode Island School of Design, Otis College of Art and Design, Maryland Institute College of Art, University of California Santa Cruz, and Queens College in partnership with Queens Museum of Art.

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Let us look, then, at the work of Joseph Beuys, an artist who fronted much of the devel-opment of art activism. Beuys, a German artist and professor working in the 1960’s and 70’s, used a methodology he called Soziale Plastik, or “Social Sculpture.” He was a key contributor to the European Fluxus movement, a group that shared the desire to cultivate an art that was indistinguishable from everyday life. Fluxus encouraged a passionate indeterminacy in art-making. Beuys embraced this lack of boundaries in 1972 when he was invited to exhibit at Documenta V in Kassel, Germany. He used the event as a forum for engaging others in a discussion of his artistic and political views. From this point on, Beuys’ subsequent aesthetic sensibilities would be heavily influenced by a dialogue-based practice, previously restricted to his lectures when teaching at the Kuntsakademie in Dusseldorf. Beuys aimed to reach an entire “social organism” through art and art education; as one of the founders of the Free In-ternational University, for instance, he encouraged a more egalitarian approach to both art and learning. This is just one of Beuys’ many contributions which have made a lasting impression on contemporary art.2

Since Beuys, a number of contemporary artists have carried the notion of social sculpture

into the field of art today. In 2011 Pablo Helguera, also an artist+educator, produced the materials and techniques handbook entitled Education for Socially Engaged Art in response to the lack of technical information on the education of social practice. He presents his ideas as a brief book “meant to serve as an introductory reference tool to art students and others inter-ested in learning about the practice of socially engaged art.”Helguera provides a seven-page chapter on collaboration and what it means in the context of SEA, his preferred term for the discipline. Due to its relevance for HAT, the first paragraph is quoted here in full:

The notion of collaboration presupposes the sharing of responsibilities between parties in the creation of something new. In SEA, the tone of collaboration is generally set by the artist, even when a community invites him or her to work with its members, because the artist is expected to be the conceptual director of the project. Collaboration in SEA is thus defined largely by the role the artist assumes. There are two main issues to consider in setting up that role: accountability and expertise. 3

While projects enacted under the umbrella of HAT have dealt largely with these main issues inherent to collaboration in SEA, it is difficult to say whether or not the projects are

“socially engaged” as such. To be clear, HAT is not concerned with actively pursuing a socially engaged role. The fruit of this endeavor is found, rather, in identifying precisely what social and psychological role one assumes, engaged or otherwise, when collaborating. In order to illustrate the difference between SEA and HAT, let us briefly consider a typical art school scenario: the critique. In this proposed set of circumstances, let’s assume you are making two drawings, one with a friend and the other with a stranger:

When you approach a fellow student, someone who is presumably versed in the same art

histories and conceptualisms that you have studied, and ask them to make a drawing with you, it will likely result in a very particular work of art. We imagine it would resemble your individual aesthetic preferences, but also show a merging of your styles. Together, you make a unique drawing that neither of you could have made independently. Perhaps this influence has been

2 A useful text for getting to know Beuys is Alain Borer’s book, The Essential Joseph Beuys, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.3 Pablo Helguera, Education for Socially Engaged Art, New York, NY: Jorge Pinto Books, 2011, 51.

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going on for years as you studied the same artists and shared a studio space. You then put this drawing on the wall for critique and state, “This is a collaboration with myself and so and so.” The other students proceed to pinpoint some visual comparisons and attribute certain formal decisions to your cooperative approach. If the critique lasts for more than five minutes they may resort to the process of associating the formal qualities of the drawing to other items on the wall, in the room, or even on a nearby street corner. At this point someone might derail the conversation because they feel this sort of activity is considered frivolous in an art school critique and they remind the group to “consider the object in and of itself.” You return to discussing the drawing, but say very little about its content.

Now imagine you have approached a stranger in your city and asked him or her to make a drawing with you. As far as you know, the two of you have little in common in terms of edu-cation and are not part of the same institution. You both make the drawing and part ways. You later put the drawing on the wall for critique and say, “This is a collaboration between myself and a stranger.” Your peers then discuss the purpose of community arts and how this drawing

“serves as a symbol of corporate America.” Without ever touching upon the formal qualities of the drawing or the discernable stylistic preferences of the stranger, you talk for 45 minutes about a nearby street corner and how it seems to renounce the significance of making art.

Which is the more socially engaged work of art in these two scenarios? The drawing made with the stranger, while it warranted a lengthy discussion about social issues and likely covered all the social practice buzzwords, allowed both parties to remain strangers. Perhaps you intended to engage a community member in an activity to which they do not often have access, but this experience remains momentary at best. It was not until the critique that you realized, simply as denizens of Kansas City, that you actually had a lot in common with the stranger. The drawing made with your peer, though never proclaimed a social practice work of art in critique, ignited a number of interpersonal forces that often guide social interaction: trust, familiarity, exchange, communication, contact and conflict.

While we may dwell largely on the negative side effects of these two scenarios, we by no means intend to downplay the value in each approach. Many artists have successfully circumnav-igated these issues in their art practice, providing us with seminal works of art in both studio and sans-studio disciplines. We merely want to illustrate the point that collaboration is inherently participatory and socially engaged, though in some circumstances, it may be lopsided, unfair, or unintended. And we think that’s A-Okay. Whether or not collaboration is observed or enacted as a tool for social instigation, however, is another matter.

HAT seeks to reveal that the relationships and contexts necessary for art-making are com-plicated and inescapable. That is their nature. So, while it in no way means to complicate things further, it will invariably fail to clarify what a shared artistic experience may be. HAT wishes to em-brace the risk and experimentation inherent to working with others and use it as the amorphous mold by which to shape the overall experience. Often, when you experiment you do so to reach some sort of conclusion. You might ask ‘to what end’ you are experimenting. This is, unfortu-nately, a common and self-defeating question for an artist to ask. Art is successful in that it is necessarily open-ended and experimental. You need not know ‘to what end’.

4 See The Nature and Art of Workmanship by David Pye (Sep 29, 1978)

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The idea of ‘risk’ in art-making is a rich area for phenomenal investigation. While the risk inherent in a situation may not disappear as we acquire more information about it, we certainly improve our likelihood of ‘success’ as we become better informed. The amount of risk tends to decrease as repetition and practice increase levels of expertise. Like riding a bike, any activity may become a usual part of your repertoire, given enough practice. Of course, the situation is more complicated than such an analogy suggests. We sometimes have to learn these things the hard way...

“I am a performance artist who used to juggle chainsaws.”

Experience itself does not always guarantee success; failure is incredibly important. With practice, the probability of the performance artist harming him or herself while juggling chain-saws will hopefully diminish (or not, if we are looking for a good show). And this applies to any and all disciplines. David Pye, a professor of Furniture Design at the Royal College of Art throughout the mid-1960’s and 70’s, talks about the subtle nuances involved in this theory of risk with his concept of “The Workmanship Of Risk.” Pye argues that workmanship deals with any kind of technique or apparatus in which the quality of the result is not predetermined, but depends instead on the judgment, dexterity and care which the maker exercises as he works.4

Risk-taking in art can be like purchasing a mystery egg; it requires a leap of faith, like the

debate about whether or not to buy magic beans off an old woman you pass on the road. It’s something that seems intriguing, though you have no guarantee that the result will live up to the sales-pitch. In buying into such a promise, you take a risk. Buying, here, is not strictly monetary. It could just the same be an exchange of time or energy. Collaboration, in its most preliminary stage, is very much like that swap; there is no guarantee that it will work out in the end. But, for whatever reason, it seems worth making the trade. Perhaps you have an assignment and are forced to collaborate to receive credit. Or maybe you’re trying to smooch your potential collaborator, so you go into it as an attempt to woo them with your dashing sensitivity to the world. Whether or not you buy into the value of the mystery egg is ultimately a matter of selfish interests and incentives.5

Risk-making is the juicy fruit.As artists, we can partake in certain pre-determined aesthetic freedoms (as contradictory

as this appears). We can challenge what is understood about the physical world, and influence the will of an individual. We build risks from scratch. Without meaning to, like partners in crime, we can urge you to participate in so-called atrocities;

bathe in the bliss of banality;sulk guiltlessly in the sorrows of another;love as though impregnation were not a bother;live as though a paradox were enlightenment.

Collaboration is wonderful for this reason; the artists involved are both maker and

viewer simultaneously. The duality of process-presence allows for a more outward form of

5 That being said, is it now possible to release collaborative art (and social practice, for that matter) from the shackles of altruism? It seems unlikely. Music is one discipline that has managed to escape this reductive blanket. Musicians have worked collectively for centuries and are rarely ever questioned about their moral agendas. This is why we can say with the utmost confidence that given the skill, any artist you encounter would rather be a rock star. In the con-text of this essay, this issue is both here and there, but there simply isn’t the space to discuss its many contentions.

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decision-making than what normally goes down in ‘the artist’s studio’. The profundity of col-laboration lies in its potential to embrace variability, contra-finality and finality. In concept, it is a messy practice with unfortunate cultural baggage. In process, it is a wonderfully vulnerable form of aesthetic thinking. Creative communion thrusts the individual into dialogue with the piece as their partner embodies it. Perhaps collaboration is best understood as immediate influence, rather than something that lingers only to later slink into your sense of intuition.

The concepts brewing in HAT draw upon a rich and complicated tradition of art practices. Their rhetoric has proven useful here because it garners an acute awareness of what consti-tutes collaboration, really. Each and every person who has been involved in the production of this book has influenced the projects themselves in some way. Their willingness to engage in these collaborative experiments have allowed us to explore questions that are both incredibly exciting and predictably dull: what happens when the duration of artistic expression extends across weeks and miles as two people mail an envelope of unfinished drawings back and forth? How do a landlord and her renter picture love in the community? How might two close friends work together to make their even closer friends cry?

When it comes down to it, we are certainly not looking to write the ‘best practices’ handbook for collaboration. Instead, HAT asks its readers to reconsider the many forces of co-operation that are constantly at play. It offers a particular vision of collaboration, one that recognizes the juicy and unbounded potential in surprise. It will be up to the future artists, the-orists, scientists, educators, critics, students, administrators, CEOs, entrepreneurs, puppies, kittens, mommies, daddies, and babies to examine, challenge, and build upon these ideas in the pursuit of understanding the world around them.

-Kendell Harbin and Logan Hamilton Acton

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Allen, Felicity, ed. Education. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011.(The Whitechapel series is full of gems! These books are documents of contemporary art compiled by MIT press. We would especially recom-mend these other titles: The Studio, Failure, Design and Art, Participation, and Situation.)

Chan, Paul. The Shadow and Her Wanda: Story and Pictures and Footnotes (strictly for Children). London: König, 2007.

Chan, Paul. “The Spirit of Recession.” National Philistine. 2010. <http://www.nationalphilistine.com/>.

Dissanayake, Ellen. Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes from and Why. New York: Free, 1992.

Flanagan, Mary. Critical Play: Radical Game Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2009.

Kaprow, Allan. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Ed. Jeff Kelley. Berkeley: University of California, 1996.

Lethem, Jonathan. “The Ecstasy of Influence.” Editorial. Harpers Magazine Feb. 2007.

Nixon, Mignon, ed. “Conversation with Eva Hesse and Cindy Nemser.” OCTOBER FILES 3 (2002).

Ross, Stephen David. Art and Its Significance: An Anthology of Aesthetic Theory. Albany: State University of New York, 1984.

Shannon, Joshua A. “Claes Oldenburg’s ‘The Street’ and Urban Renewal in Greenwich Village.” Art Bulliten 86 (2004): 136-61.

If you or your mommy, or daddy, or baby are interested in further pursuing these concepts as they have been put forth in contemporary theory, please see this list of suggested readings that we’ve found useful while wandering through so many different ideas.

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Do you remember how I approached you to start this word game?

I think we were talking one day in the computer lab, on a slow day. You must have had the idea for it just then. I didn’t know if you were wanting to brainstorm title ideas or if it was more impromptu than that.

I remember presenting it as a sort of joke. I thought of it at once as a funny way of figuring out the title to one’sthesis project. But I always remember very sincerely want-ing to play a word game with you.

That sounds right.

It’s a straight forward task. Anyone could devise this impromptu game method. I wonder how much of your interest in playing with me had to do with you knowing me. Would you have approached this the same way if a random person was inviting you to draw?

Knowing you, I had seen how text features in your draw-ings and other work. There’d often be some serious pun-ning. Sometimes there was a use of dialect, malapropisms, regional phrases, and casual English. In addition to that, I’ve edited a lot of your papers before and we’ve often talked about more academic styles of writing. So I knewthat on the one hand you had an interest in the fun and breezy use of language, and on the other you were alsoserious about how it would be included in your project. So it seemed that with the drawing we could have it both ways.

At the time I was constructing words that seem really in-fluenced by Don Martin comics. In his narratives, all these insane things are constantly happening to the characters: they’re being folded over into paper airplanes, run over with steam rollers, eaten by giant spiders, etc...every action has an original sound effect with its own internal logic and language. For example, “Klort” would be the sound of someone’s head being knocked off their shoulders and splashing into a vat of molasses.

I knew that sort of silliness would be rewarding to work with if we could stick to the page and loosely follow thegrid for structure.

I recently read an essay by Liz Kotz called “Words To Be Looked At” wherein she mentions the effects of pairingtext and image. She cites the use of captioned images in advertisements as well as artists like Robert Smithson who often use text in their work. She talks extensively about contextualizing images through text. It’s such a common, almost obvious, technique. Having taken it for granted for so long, it was intriguing to see someone pickapart its function. I wonder what sort of relevance that might have for our drawing.

The pairing of image and text? You could argue that for as long as there have been images there have been titles to go with them. Although, they likely served to affirm the interpretation of the image rather than tweak or change it.

So, our only system of order was taking turns holding the pen. And there was no rule stipulating how long a turn lasted for. Passing the pen was sort of the prime mover to our game. It created a call-and-response method, wouldn’t you say? Whether it was choosing to respond by ignoring your move or directly engaging with the letters you put down.

Yes. I believe at first we had explicitly agreed to only draw a couple of letters at a time. But then I noticed in some places one of us would put down a word that finished itself. At other times an entire phrase might form and a drawing would encompass it. The call-and-response eventually came to be creating the whole field or milieu. In the middle you can see more crossing over and piece-by-piece building.

It feels a bit like a well-composed board game. Take “Chutes & Ladders”, for example. Rather than conglom-

erating the visual components all to one quadrant of the board, it spreads evenly throughout it.

Similarly, a good game of “Scrabble” reaches all across the board. As our drawing went on we definitely startedadding whole words as compositional or atmospheric elements.

Since we approached this as a search for the book’s title, I feel a lot of the moves I made were in an effort to find

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that “right” word. Though I had no preconceived notion as to what it might be, I was certainly pushing towardsdiscovering it. Did you sense that at all?

I sensed it in as much as we repeated those complementa-ry terms or gestures. If you remember, you originalsettled on “Funch Base” as the title.

Right. That was before I had really fleshed out what this book would become. I had drawn all those little circlesaround the two words, like lights in a vanity mirror, per-haps subconsciously convincing myself that was the title.

But that was only the starting point.

I think people sometimes make an unconsidered or un-aware investment in a blank page. And, having promptedthis particular game, I wonder if I created a more pressing anxiety for us to share.

That’s possible. A person sitting alone with a blank page might not feel as pressured as two people who set out tomake a drawing together. In the case of this drawing, the stakes weren’t very high. The duration of the exercise wasn’t time I had mentally given over to accomplish some-thing great. So when it was done we both felt comfortable having a laugh and going

on with our days. Though, revisiting it now and seeing it imbued with the energy you have put into this project, itbecomes a lot more valuable. It’s heartening to see that a quick exercise can become decidedly important.

Indeed. Approaching it as an experimental exercise proba-bly had a lot to do with our treatment of the page, aswell. It certainly wasn’t a huge venture. Another thing I noticed was how little we communicated with one another while drawing. Specifically in regards to the composition of the words. We discussed the quality of our days at length, but paid no mind to the forming arrangement. At best, our design dialogue consisted of an exchange of grins when one of us would do something clever or particularly satisfying. That’s another example of how the composition literally grew itself.

I suppose if we had plotted some preliminary words around the perimeter of the page, instead of placing them at random as we progressed, the words might have laid out more like paths of desire.

Do you even consider this a drawing? Would you treat it like one? Place it in a frame and hang it on the wall?

I’d say so. It was constructed in that way. Although, there is some element of listening at play. So perhaps it’s a poem.

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Well, we’ve never read it aloud. That might be revelatory. I imagine it sounds a lot like a sound poem of Hugo Ball’s. I consider it a drawing because we made it in a manner that resembles approaches to drawing I have taken in the past. That is, this sort of tacit and tactful ‘move-making’ method. Chess drawing, sort of. Eye contact is an integral component of this.

For it to be more of a poem than a drawing it would need a clear beginning and end in its visual reading. It’s hardfor me to conceive of a poem that sits like a field, in the way that this does. I could see it as a performance whereintwo or more people are shouting these terms out in unison. It’s a poem for more than one voice, at least (unlike Hugo Ball’s).

It seems important that these are onomatopoeia. If some-one assigned you to draw strictly in onomatopoeias, itmight look like this. I probably learned there even was such a thing when I was in fourth grade and I have reallytaken them for granted ever since. I’m just now realizing that they are an incredibly powerful linguistic tool. I’m notsure how well they translate as drawings.

Like a ‘Klunk’. How does one draw that a sound is itself?

Our drawing might fail to do so.

Do you ever feel inclined to work with words that are neither an essay nor attached to a drawing? Do you want to write poems?

It’s something I enjoy doing, but I probably don’t scratch that itch nearly enough. It may have something to do withthe fact that writing tends to be more of a solo act than other creative endeavors. Any project I’ve managed to finish either happened out of physical necessity or because a collaborator was expecting something of me. Sharing a creative goal motivates me first and foremost.

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Nate E l lefson

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So, you sent me this series of unfinished drawings by way of Austin, Texas. I opened my mail to find what was essen-tially an envelope full of marks and black blobs attached to a note that said “help me finish these”. It was a long time before I took a stab at them. They looked so content sitting on those six pieces of paper. But eventually, after looking at them long enough, I felt I needed to disturb them. And after doing so I sent them back for further alterations. I have made drawings with you before, but nothing like this. Can you remember the first time we made a drawing together?

I think the first time we drew together was in one of our studios over the summer. We were both sitting at a table and drawing on the same piece of paper at the same time, maybe. I’m trying to remember...

Well, if I had to guess, I’d say I probably walked into your studio with a piece of paper and some drawing utensils. Then I would have sat down in front of you and put some pencils near your hand, without saying anything. I can safely assume all this because that seems to be my usual style of initiation.

Yes. I think it’s an admirable initiation strategy. I picked up a pencil or two and made a few lines.

Thanks. So that’s sort of what got it all started?

Yep.

I didn’t just walk into your studio because you were closest.

I’m glad to hear it. But I wouldn’t blame you if that was the case.

I got the feeling that your drawing language might easily be translated by mine. Or at least they might be from the same region, as far as languages go.

Yes, maybe cousins or something. We both use a sort of cartoon-influenced dialect to talk about things that maybe are not so cartoony in reality.

Indeed. There’s also something about the call-and-response style we had going that felt somewhat cartoony. It had the same cadence as a comic book might have, only this was played out in real time. Perhaps it was more like a Saturday morning cartoon. Those rely a lot on causality. So, a mouse finds some cheese, the cat gets blown up by the mouse, the cheese gets covered in blood and the mouse feels regret. Maybe not in that order, per se.

Right, that’s an interesting way to think about it. As if there’s a narrative happening in the process of drawing. Except that the narrative is without order. Thinking about that in terms of an endpoint for a drawing is also pretty interesting.

We were sort of pushing toward an unknown goal...like a blind mechanism where our hands were just set in motion and our marks provided each of us with cues and thus inertia. What do you mean by “endpoint”?

Something more like building a machine on the page until all of its parts are there. And maybe it has a few extra parts, but decoration is not so bad.

Well, these are certainly odd machines. Almost Rube Goldbergian (except not so mindless because their func-tion was a tacit one agreed upon by the sentiments of two individuals, rather than just a complex spectacle of pulleys and baskets).

Right, it would be disappointing if they had some sort of function. I don’t mean that in terms of art vs. design or anything. What I mean to say is that if there was a precon-ceived anything I think they wouldn’t have worked.

Would you say they did have a function in that they al-lowed us to communicate...at least for the duration of the time it took us to make them...because the machine was not just what we drew. It was also the page, the pencils, the table, and our proximity to one another.

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...a drawing made by taking turns, slowly, over a great distance.

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I can see that. The drawings are a conduit.

Most definitely. I was also heavily responding to your style of mark-making. Even mimicking it at times. Which normally is a big no-no in the art world, but, in this setting, seemed really appropriate. Your dense black strokes can sometimes resemble chess pieces or mysterious characters navigating an unknown playing field. I quite liked that about them. They seem almost autonomous. And, being like chess pieces, I felt like I was engaging in a similar game when I drew with you. Something...tactful. So, as a strategy of sorts, I chose to make my pieces look like they belonged on the board with yours.

Yeah, that’s definitely something I felt too. Much like one would in a chess game, I was trying to anticipate your moves. Of course, those would, in turn, change the moves/marks that I made. It’s kind of cyclical I guess. I also like the idea of mimesis that you brought up, where through the process of drawing togehter we (maybe) become a confla-tion of self and other.

Could you expand on that?

Through collaborating in this way, especially drawing together in person, one draws/acts in a certain way. Those manners then start to be affected by the other person’s drawing/acting. So there’s a building cycle of imitation and response in which the drawers’ practices get closer to each other. Even if only for the duration of that drawing.

Agreed. On another note, it frustrates me when people dog on collaboration by accusing it of being “merely an instance of taking turns.” There is so much complexity to the back-and-forth reciprocal act. And I’m not talking about balance, or a fair return as much as expectation and surprise. Rather, expectation vs. surprise. Specifically how those tensions can synthesize into something really interesting. But I want to go back to what you mentioned about

“making moves.” I think that notion is what made this series of mail drawings a real game-changer. By mailing these lines back and forth, there is little room for sensing a reaction or how to make the next move. When two people sit down to work on a drawing simultaneously the results are dramati-cally different than what would come of a drawing made by taking turns, slowly, over a great distance. The rules of the

game become more nebulous, and the players more aloof. And it’s almost impossible to take any sort of position of leadership or dominance, which would otherwise naturally emerge when you put two people in the same psychic zone. That really had no way of happening via the US postal ser-vice. Unless the mailman/woman were to decide to co-opt our drawings...

There’s definitely a difference. There’s also the speed of working...I think I looked at the drawings a lot more when we were mailing them back and forth.

That’s funny. I think I looked at them less. Or maybe I felt less invested.

Did you work on them right away when you got them?

No.

I definitely had them popping up in my mind over a few weeks (months even?) and would maybe flip through them on occasion. Not having to act so quickly seemed to change their nature.

Well, it felt like less of a game, for sure. But also like more of a surprise.

Yes. I was very surprised with what I got back. Also, it is exciting to get mail.

They sort of turn into memories. Memories you can touch. It is certainly strange for two people to share that sort of thing. Of course, their piece of that memory is not identi-cal to the memory of their collaborator.

Right, translation problems.

Or translation solutions.

One in the same?

Well, I say that because I feel like making drawings with you has given me this really powerful impression of who you are that would be totally different in my mind if we were to have stayed in contact over the phone this whole time.

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That’s interesting. How so?

Well, I’m certainly not going to say I know you really well. However, I do feel really familiar with your mind’s eye. And, although I can’t predict it (nor do I wish to) I think I can

‘get it’ or somehow know something from it.

Well I feel the same way.

So in that sense it’s a solution. One can’t explain the function of their mind’s eye. That would be like telling someone what a banana looked like by feeding it to them while they were blindfolded. But you can exemplify it through art-making/art-appreciating.

For sure. I definitely think that’s why we make things and call them art. I guess I was thinking of translation problems just in terms of language.

Right. On a similar topic...I dislike the usual comparison of art to language. I think that gives people the impression that art is one of many languages, like Spanish or Polish, when really it is a different communicative thing altogether. Art is dealing with a different criteria of ideas and senti-ments that we can’t always think about by using whatever language our interior dialogue speaks in.

Totally, what a bummer it would be if art had to function like language. I agree that a lot of times it is expected to function like that, in terms of things being read symboli-cally to mean something specific. It really can ruin the fun with art. Even the idea of meaning is caught up in language, though. Yikes.

Or maybe postmodernists are just too caught up on language. When I start thinking about this I begin to wish I

spoke a second language. That way, I could know what it’s like to think in another language and be able to assuredly explain how it’s not the same as thinking in art-thoughts...

Me too, I was always very bad with learning languages. I tried Russian and French, neither stuck. Or I was lazy... I don’t even remember the source of this, but I was reading (or listening to?) something about a writer I really like, Donald Barthelme. Someone was discussing how his ap-proach to writing was to think about it in terms of holding two things together in your mind to see what happens between them.

That’s beautiful.

I agree, I always think of that when I start to get too caught up in making work that is ‘cohesive’.

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Samantha Freese

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I’d like to first say how appropriate I think it is for us to have started this quilt together on the floor of your apartment. Floor time, as in the thing I do when I am having a mini crisis and sprawl out on your floor, has become a really comfort-ing force in my life. Starting this quilt down there, I felt like I was already in my zone. Ready to kick some fabric booty.

Having never made a quilt before, I rented some documen-taries on quilting in hopes of getting myself up to speed be-fore we started working. It featured an incredibly detailed history while also incorporating some rich contemporary commentary. On top of that, it exposed me to a teeming market I had no idea existed. Antique shops are apparently teeming with folks who have a discerning eye for folded up and dusty blankets of gold. It seemed to me like quilt collecting is secretly very cut-throat. But maybe that’s not such a secret...

So, stepping into this new medium has been pretty excit-ing for me for a number of reasons. Could you recall how we started this project? I heard you were looking to generally collaborate with people for some sort of project, and you had just returned from a summer fellowship with all these great drawings. They were these wild shapes and lines that floated all around the paper without much sense of orientation. I was interested in starting a new project and remember thinking,

“Kendell’s drawings would make an awesome quilt.” So far, so good.

Right. I guess I could say drawing is my usual medium. And I know you’ve focused on drawing quite a bit as well. How did you get into quilting?

Well, my great-grandmother was a quilter. We’ve always had a lot of her quilts around the house, though they’re all pretty old and ratty now. At least 70 years old. It was really interesting to me when I was a kid to think that someone had made all this…stuff. So, I was introduced to the actual idea of quilting at a pretty young age. I also grew up in a bunch of different churches, and pretty much all of them had quilting circles. For me, quilting has always had an association with community and tradition, I suppose. In school I took a fibers class that taught knitting and quilting.

I knew how to knit and liked the idea of getting credit for something I was already doing in my spare time. As the class went on, the quilting part became much more interesting. At the time, my work included a lot of ideas about houses, homes, and neighborhoods. Quilting, as an expression of community, seemed like a fitting medium.

Speaking from experience, I think people who are unfamil-iar with quilting tend to be surprised by how conceptually complex a quilt can be. I imagine that’s largely because of its history and what it has signified, throughout American culture specifically. It’s this huge symbol. In some sense, I feel that by quilting I’m somehow tapping into that importance. You know, all the great clichés come to mind, about how an individual is a thread in the fabric of life, and patriotism weaves us together. The medium is such an easy target for disparagement or dismissal by young people. But there is something really true to the notion of it connecting people.

One of the things I like most about quilting is that it’s such a community-based activity. It’s hard to make an entire quilt by yourself, especially before sewing machines. A quilt is so much work for one individual.

So it’s collaborative out of necessity?

Yes. Although that’s not why I like it, strictly speaking. I’m the kind of person who loves to simply sit around a table and talk. And quilting means sitting around a table and talking, plus having something to do with your hands. And I think that’s amazing.

I really enjoyed the part of the documentary that talked about the Gee’s Bend quilts. Compared to your common crazy quilt or highly skillful master quilt, they seem really minimal and paired down. And yet there is so much to them emotionally. I imagine they really reveal a lot about the spirit of Boykin, Alabama in the 1930’s. The people conducting the video interviews talked about how all you had to do was look around Gee’s Bend and you’d find where the quilters got their inspiration; every crooked door or piece of siding on a house held a pattern of its own. What was created in that neighborhood was really telling, even though the quilts don’t appear narrative in the

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traditional sense. So, I have to wonder, what is the imagery of our quilt telling someone?

I’d say there’s definitely a gem or two buried in that. I think it’s a relevant concept, as silly as it sounds. Picnicking is such a social activity, and though it was certainly not an activity invented by Americans, it is pretty indicative of

the leisure we enjoy. To take this back to my great-grand-mother, one of the quilts we have of hers was a picnic quilt. She had made it for a bed, but by the time it got to us, it had become the quilt we kept in the back of the car and used whenever we had picnics in Forest Park in St. Louis, where I lived when I was a little kid.

Imagery wise, so far, it contains motifs that I’d say are more traditionally yours...that brightness of vacationing and general lounge-ry. And that feeling of being surrounded

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When we first started it we had been jokingly calling it

“The United States of Picnics.”

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by comfort will likely grow as I introduce my hand into the stitching. So I say the title still stands.

Well, there is probably a reason why we both found pleasure in that humorously derived joke. It’s indicative of a sort of thinking we have in common. Home, vacation, ex-treme comfort, color patterns, shared meals, giant ketchup bottles, ghost seeds being exorcised from a watermelon...

While I formed a lot of these shapes myself, I did it very specifically with us in mind. It holds a lot of joint potential energy. I’m excited to see how you’ll stitch back into the negative space. I never would have put my drawings into quilt form had you not said, “Let’s make a quilt.” I don’t have the patience for this sort of work, but I feel motivated to do it now because I want to make something with you. On top of that, I am really bad at sewing and have a low tolerance for partaking in activities I am bad at. But I am so glad it’s happened. There are so many conceptual prob-lems I have had with drawing and image-making, because I always just want to make images that are objects…very flat objects. And people would always ask why I don’t just make my drawings into sculptures…I always thought that was a vexing question. I suppose it’s natural to see something which appears somewhat animated and want to put it in the real world. But there is a reason why I made it a drawing and not a sculpture. The fact that it can seem animated without really being so is great. So I have some-times had a hard time getting people to read my drawings as objects…really flat, but objects nonetheless.

And so a quilt seemed the perfect way to reconcile a lot of those ideas. Because it’s a flat thing that is made to stay more or less flat. Yet you treat it like an item, not an image. A quilt is like a two-dimensional plane you can interact with. It’s brilliant.

Well I’m pretty happy to hear you say that. My immediate reaction to your drawings from last summer, which involved so much dimension and layering, was recognizing or seeing quilt logic.

A quilt is defined by the stitching of multiple layers together, correct?

Yeah, a fabric collage.

Do you think we will have this thing ready by next winter? I’m sure it will only get colder…

I really look forward to swaddling our future children in this. We could mail it back and forth on alternating winters. A quilt, being so collaborative in nature, could easily be-come an article that links a friendship together, or at least records one. The act of missing someone always manages to tie itself to an object—an item of nostalgia—and what a great thing for that purpose. Although, maybe nostalgia is an unhealthy pathological state.

A quilting circle, in my experience, has always been orga-nized by a church. The idea is that one person will create the design or quilt top and then bring it to the circle and everyone else will work on it. For a large quilt, you ideally have a large quilting frame. People gather around this frame and quilt as far as they can reach. Sharing the labor of creating a quilt has a long tradition. I once read a book about a mother who set up a quilt by the front door, and she had a rule that anyone who passed it had to put in a few stitches before leaving the house.

That sort of touches on an idea I’ve been mulling over throughout the duration of this project: shared working is not always consensual. But quilting tends to be more of a willfully participatory activity because it’s such an invest-ment. It requires a great deal of patience and attention to de-tail, and you have a predetermined goal that is literally laid out in front of you. You really know what you’re signing up for when you sit down to make a quilt with someone. So if you feel you’re not the type to enjoy that activity, you’re not likely to engage in it. But other collaborations, specifically the more amorphous art collabs, tend to be more open-end-ed. You sometimes find out the skills you can bring to the table are not needed, or maybe you just don’t work well with the other person involved. Problems tend to arise when you aren’t sure what’s expected of you. For that reason, your story about forced stitching seems really peculiar and hilarious. It’s hard to think of any other quilting scenario being so… Although, maybe nostalgia is an unhealthy patho-logical state... could you explain what a quilting circle is? I remember you mentioning that a while ago.

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Coercive?

Yeah...what if you put ten mortal enemies in a room and forced them to quilt together? I suppose you’d end up with a lot of bloodstains on the fabric. Seriously though, that’s something quilting really has going for it. You can more or less expect that everyone working on the quilt, because they chose specifically to make a quilt, will still enjoy each other’s company by the end of it.

Truly, many aspects of our life are collaborative. But the collaborative element tends to only be highlighted in cer-tain instances, according to intentionality. Administration in any office, for example, is a very collaborative orga-nization. But, because your individual responsibilities are predetermined rather than being fluid, I suppose people simply see it as a job within an even larger organization.

Creative acts tend to allow roles to emerge or reveal themselves…because they are so open-ended. When you set out to experiment, you give yourself more space to grow (or grovel) into one another’s strengths. That’s certainly apparent with this project. I don’t know how to sew. And you do. And every time we meet up to work on this quilt you have to re-teach me how to tie a knot to the end of the thread…you think I would have figured that one out by now.

It’s become a satisfying opening ritual.

So, could you talk about how this more solitary activity differs from previous collaborations we’ve embarked on? In contrast to the Grey Ghost Horse collective, for example, where we tried to coordinate massive events and installation exhibitions with a high attendance. This is a whole different ball game.

For me, it’s a very different mode of creative expression. I was really into GGH work...well, kind of tired of it by the end…but it was great to be part of finding our group groove when we finally did. But coordinating so many different working individuals, determining who was doing what, was really stressful for me. And, now that we are done with GGH, I don’t know that it’s something I would dive into again. This, on the other hand, is a little quieter.

It’s a closer collaboration, and much less frantic. With GGH I felt we were always trying really hard...

To do…what exactly? We didn’t even know! It really did make it frantic. I think that’s what I loved about it.

Right, I liked that about it too. But it was too stressful. I think this is, in general, much more my speed. It’s nice to have a specific goal and a reliable person to work with. We can count on one another to sit down and get it done.

Our roles are very clearly defined in this. You teach me logistical things, I cut some shapes, we sew them together, and it’s all great news. I don’t know if you see yourself as a teacher in all of this, but I definitely consider you one. I come in here and sort of feel like I’m an apprentice or pupil and you’re instructing me on the right way to do things. And I don’t mean to say I think you’re authoritative or condescending, or any of the negative aspects of expertise. You seem to be tolerant of the fact that I really struggle with simple skills that are necessary to knowing how to sew. The pointy end goes in the fabric.

I kind of see it that way. It’s not like I suggested this project because I thought, “Kendell needs to know how to quilt.” I wouldn’t say I enjoy teaching you, but I certainly don’t mind. I don’t consider you not knowing how to sew to be a drag. But, since we are making this together, teaching you becomes a matter of practical responsibility.

Well, I appreciate that you are sort of an expert on this. Or at least to the degree that I, as a novice quilter, could perceive you to be an expert. It’s very reassuring.

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The experiment went like this: we would approach people in public parks and plazas and ask them to tell us how their day was going by means of a short interpretive dance. Sit-ting back to back, I would describe their dance to you and you (sitting with a computer on your lap) would then use those adjectives to inform the creation of an interactive digital artifact. So, for example, if I used the term ‘jittery’ to describe somebody, you might program a triangle that vibrates every time it’s moused-over on the screen. This was a tricky task because these little bits of live and reac-tive geometry were generated entirely from code that you typed up on the spot.

Looking back on it now, do you think it was successful for you?

As a way to study motion, specifically, yes. As a means of studying people? I’m not too sure. I think most people we approached or recruited were really reluctant to dance.

People did pretty much what you’d expect them to do.

Exactly, we asked people to “dance their day” and what we got was this really stiff, robot pantomime sort of thing. Except for that one woman who we caught by the fountain, she did the funkiest dance of all. But, since you had your back to me, you didn’t see any of it...

It definitely fails as a social engagement which, I suppose, was my original intention. In hindsight, I see that as not being all that relevant anymore. What we were doing was really not of service to anyone but ourselves. We would ask random people to dance their day, and I can’t imagine it was in any way cathartic or useful for them. Dancing your day just makes you feel weird.

So, now I consider it successful for a really different reason. Describing motion and dealing with the disconnect inherent to that is really fascinating. And when you amplify that by having to describe it through a code, the gap only widens.

Right, the language doesn’t exist for that task at all. Certainly, we can describe motion, but in the language of code, those terms are really lacking.

The challenge for me was to create representational kinesis. Giving a digital thing a sense of physicality when being touched. An easy example is the iPhone. You can scroll and swipe and it operates in a way that seems to obey gravity, friction, inertia, etc. It creates a definite feeling which produces a physical effect in the mind. You treat the object as though it’s something real, rather than simulated. Kinesis is just a word I use to describe those effects. When I talk about creating ‘good’ kinesis, I’m getting at an idea of believable physicality. Simulating touch in an extra-sensory way is a challenge because it’s derived from the rather rigid language of code.

With this project, things were even more complicated because we had to describe both motion and emotion at once. Often, you’d give me these qualitative words like

‘happy’ or ‘giddy’, and they didn’t exactly describe how a person might be moving. So we ended up working in a strange, vague space that left a lot of room for differing interpretations. You were translating a person’s emotions, according to your perspective, and I would then translate your observation into some kind of abstracted motion on screen in hopes of capturing a physicality (which, personal-ly, I’m not sure I ever did).

It certainly was a weird test. I consider the experimental aspect of it really important. There were the given controls, inherent to this weird process we devised, but other than that we didn’t restrict ourselves in any extreme way. We left it pretty open-ended and vague.

It’s not an experiment in the scientific sense.

Right. What it most revealed to me was how constant, reciprocal, and truly two-way any sort of communication is. In a given conversation, there is no true dead space. While someone may be silent in the process of listening, there is so much going on in between the words that are spoken. Being cognizant of what’s being discussed is ultimately going to lead to an internalized interpretation that affects your next move. With this experiment, our responses tended to be somewhat performative as we thought to ourselves, “How much authority do I want to employ here as I interpret their words?”

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A similar discussion often comes up in the realm of games. Are you familiar with “Conway’s Game of Life”? In the game, you have a grid of tiles. And each tile is either on or off, and on every turn of the game it checks the orientation of its neighboring tile. If it has too many of a certain tile it turns off. Another number might turn it on. It might stay the same. What you get is these rapidly changing images whose change is based on what the individual tile knows about its environment. Through these very simple rules, weird properties can emerge from the system. A common reaction, for instance, is a ‘runner’, which consists of five tiles in a row that will fly off in some direction as the changing patterns impose themselves on the playing field. It’s not a randomized program; it has a static set of possible reactions. But predicting what it will do would be extremely difficult because the algorithm is quite complex. It’s a cellular automaton, a rule/reaction-based occurrence. Much like our project. The three people involved acted like cells with a number of potential variables for change. I think the experiment was more about us as semi-predict-able tiles. There is a social logic in that...but this project was not much of a social intervention, as you may have originally intended it to be. It was a way to address this thing people have called ‘conversations’ but through the absence of any actual conversation. It expressly set up a situation where effective communication would inevitably fail, and in a very public and exposed manner.

By asking people to reveal emotions they wouldn’t otherwise show in a public setting, I think we, as the initial interlocutors, sat in a pretty protected position...since we had no expectations, it would be difficult for us to embar-rass ourselves. Yet, as it all took place in this really open and exposed playing field, I did feel a bit under pressure. As I described a person dancing, if they felt I was misinterpreting

them, they would start doing something different in an attempt to compensate. Not only was some random person giving us five minutes of their time, but they were also dancing in front of us. I sort of felt like I owed it to them to describe their movements to the best of my ability.

Perhaps a better social experiment would have been if you asked them to start dancing and the description you provid-ed me while it was all going down was totally off point. You could have lied to me in order to see how they might react.

Of course...the best social experiments involve lying. At least, if you are Jamie Kennedy they do.

The point was always to fail. To see where the gaps were. Because of this, I find it difficult to say whether this project succeeded.

I don’t know that it can fail or succeed. Our objective was tossed into this weird no-man’s land from the get go, be-cause we didn’t expect anything of it. And yet, I was seeking to accomplish something...

So, then what’s the point?

We didn’t have any expected learning outcomes, per se. If you looked strictly at the animations as the final product, then your role in all of this would be like a technological tool of some sort (because you are a programming wizard and I am programming illiterate). Collaboration can sometimes become outsourced labor in disguise. But I don’t think that was what was going on here. In this experiment, I couldn’t control you, the tool, entirely. I could guide you somewhat... but as a living paint brush I was going to have to give into your inevitable interpretations and misinterpretations. And you, as an active listener, would have to do the same for me.

If one of us was removed from the equation, we could have produced a similar result, I suppose. But the visual product was not our main concern. Without my role as the sight-seer and descriptor, you would have just be plein air program-ming. Strictly observing. I provided you with terms to intake and translate. So then the question is, did we need the third person? Could we have just sat battleship style with our laptops, you at the ready and me describing the motion of

It expressly set up a situation where effective communication would inevitably fail, and in a very public and exposed manner.

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var xd:Number, yd:Number, d:Number;

var xs:Number = 0;

var ys:Number = 0;

stage.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME,ef);

function ef(e:Event):void {

mc.x += xs;

mc.y += ys;

xd = mc.x - mouseX;

yd = mc.y - mouseY;

d = Math.sqrt(xd*xd+yd*yd);

xs -= xd/d;

ys += (mouseY - mc.y)/10;

ys *= .99;

xs *= .95;

mc.graphics.lineStyle(1);

mc.graphics.drawCircle(mc.x,mc.y,100);

bitMappin();

mc.graphics.clear();

}

var i2:int = 0;

var n:uint = 0;

var tempBitmap:BitmapData=new BitmapData(1050,600,true,0x00000000);

tempBitmap.draw(mc,new Matrix());

var bitmapHolder:Bitmap=new Bitmap(tempBitmap);

addChild(bitmapHolder);

function bitMappin():void {

i2++;

if (i2 >= 0) {

i2 = 0;

tempBitmap.applyFilter(tempBitmap,tempBitmap.rect,new Point(),filter);

}

tempBitmap.draw(mc,new Matrix());

//tempBitmap.copyPixels(tempBitmap, new Rectangle(0,0,700,500), new Point(0,7));

bitmapHolder = new Bitmap(tempBitmap);

}

var _n:Number = 0.9;

var off:Number = 0x80;

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var filter:ColorMatrixFilter = new ColorMatrixFilter( [

        1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 

        0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 

        0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 

        0, 0, 0, .99, 0] );

var filter2:ColorMatrixFilter = new ColorMatrixFilter( [

        n, 0, 0, 0, off, 

        0, n, 0, 0, off, 

        0, 0, n, 0, off, 

        0, 0, 0, n, off ] );

var xd:Number, yd:Number, d:Number;

var xs:Number = 0;

var ys:Number = 0;

var n:uint, n2:uint;

var temp:*;

stage.addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME,ef);

function ef(e:Event):void {

o.x += (mouseX - o.x)/5;

o.y += (mouseY - o.y)/5;

//xs *= .9;

//ys *= .9;

xd = o.x - o2.x;

yd = o.y - o2.y;

d = Math.sqrt(xd*xd+yd*yd);

if (d < 100) {

o2.x = Math.random()*700;

o2.y = Math.random()*500;

}

o.x += xs;

o.y += ys;

}

/*

making a pizza

srving pizzas

hands moving to multiple places

scratching

*/

var lst:Array = [mc0,mc1,mc2,mc3,mc4,mc5,mc6,mc7];

for (n=0; n<lst.length; n++) {

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some video off YouTube? More importantly, who exactly is the third person anyways? Me or the dancer?It certainly helped me learn how to work with you. When you take a moment to step back and assess why you enjoy working with someone or why you want to get the hell away from them, you create a sort of mirror. You force yourself to reflect on what resources you might offer one another.

Had we not brought in a dancer on which to focus our psychic energies, we may never have felt the need to reflect. The social veil we put over this activity was something that really just incentivized us to work together more effectively. By feeling like we owed our volunteer something it raised the stakes ever so slightly. I think it made us more consider-ate of one another.

So it was successful in that you learned to work with me? How does one work with me?

I feed you candy and you do what I say.

You never gave me any candy. I’m still not sure what I gained from this.

Do you feel you learned how to work with me?

Yes and no. At the outset, I had some vague ideas about what working with you would be like. We might call them

‘untested hypotheses’. As the project went along, these ideas were put to the test. I guess those starting ideas were accurate? We never had any big falling outs or altercations. It’s practice in working with another person, in collaboration; however, working with you in particular makes more sense than working with some random stranger—we were working with similar ideas at the time. I didn’t gain anything specifi-cally related to you, but I was able to encounter an emergent property of the two of us. That is, the sort of ‘thing’ that occurs when we are in collaboration. It’s a weird thing that doesn’t exist anywhere else but in our brains.

It’s certainly difficult to picture. I suppose a game of tele-phone like this tends to degrade by nature.

I enjoy how so much is lost in the translation of these strange, moving, interactive animations into still images in

the context of HAT. It feels as though another layer has been added to our game of telephone. Information is lost as you describe the dancer, information is lost as I describe your description via code, and information is further lost as the book describes my description of your description via image.

What I got out of it was an exercise in struggling against fu-tility. This project specifically prompted me to have a weird alternate experience. As far as a mode of making, there were a lot of restrictions. It had to be done in a short amount of time. It has to be a theme that is being generated in the mo-ment. I imposed on myself the restriction of coding it from scratch right then and there. It’s impossible to accomplish much in that setting.

To some extent, it might seem as though we were just creating obstacles on top of more obstacles. But adding in that unknown person, that agent of unpredictability, I think created a scenario that was pretty true to life. It was messy, awkward, and difficult to describe for a number of reasons.

I want to point to the weird bench we built. It was part of the initial conception of this project, and was really important to you. It created a common object for us and acted as a literal way for us to ‘get on the same level’. Additionally, it project-ed an identity for our joint effort that subtly informed the strangers we approached.

Perhaps it even legitimized our approach and made people more willing to be part of the experiment. The bench was a binder. It hybridized our skills. Not to say I have astounding people-reading skills...

We basically built a CatDog...opposites that don’t neces-sarily oppose one another. We were both engaged in an intake/output process, but using very different modes of representation. I used basic language. You used interactive animations. Does a human-art-CatDog have much value? I don’t know. I suppose it depends on how you present it to the world.

In the moment of interaction, I think the strangers we asked to dance probably cared very little about the bench, if they noticed it at all. But, as one of many points of foci in a curated and well-presented project, it probably symbolizes

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something more. Paired next to the final interactive anima-tions and videos of our dancers, it might seem more obvious.I suppose in that sense this project was a sort of ‘social inter-vention’. We inserted ourselves into an atypical form of con-versation and began to appropriate meanings and interpret feelings (though with little emotional investment; it wasn’t a therapy session). Comprehension demands intervention. It can’t be avoided. What I think we have failed to recognize until now is that the appropriation of meaning is going on constantly and is, ever so slightly, affecting all that we do.

This seems to come back around to your idea about invisible social networks. Through this slight social intervention, we were able to illuminate this subtle effect. It’s so slight in fact, that we’ve managed to overlook it throughout the majority of this conversation.

That term, invisible social network, is something I picked up from the artist Harrell Fletcher’s website. It’s a good term. I think he intends for the term to point out unproclaimed communal bodies. Although, with my use of the phrase, I think I’m talking about something even more imperceptible, something interpersonal...a network created through some sort of multi-channelled exchange.

Do you think we have a need for exchange?

Totally. Exchange has been a point of interest for mankind since at least 600 BCE starting with the ancient Greeks. And it’s from that need that we come to understand value and contemplate what it might be. We have a desire to know if an exchange is ‘worth it’.

But, I suppose in contemporary art discourse, the concept of exchange and all that it implies has become somewhat of a beaten horse. By now, exchange for its own sake probably seems overwhelmingly superficial. But perhaps it is more informative than we realize. It can be a good way to under-stand what exchange is, in and of itself.

Does this project function as a way of illuminating ex-change?

Yes, because (as this conversation has exemplified) it shows you how unclear making a trade can be. How it doesn’t go untouched. It gets fondled and filtered on its way to the other person.

It’s an entanglement.

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Collaboration can sometimes become outsourced labor in disguise. But I don’t think that was what was going on here.

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I am not entirely clear on how we came up with the idea of making a piece that paid homage to the corner of our kitchen. However, I do recall you suggesting we collaborate on a piece for an upcoming exhibition. And so this installa-tion came to fruition. It’s not a direct recreation (scale and representation weren’t really a concern) but it is certainly indicative of an important spot in our apartment. The spot in our kitchen where we can scam off the distant internet connection of the school, right beside the window and the sink. A drum stool and a silverware drawer on which to rest your laptop make the perfect corner office. It’s a beautiful spot deserving of a monument, of sorts. As a shared space within our home, it seemed appropriate that we make it to-gether. How do you feel about how we went about making this thing?

As soon-to-be graduates busy with finals and whatnot, I feel that the collaboration was bumpy at times and a bit too open-ended. But as we see the object now, I am quite pleased! I wasn’t thinking so much about the na-ture of our collaborative efforts, rather the objective we had to reach. This was very clear to us as we had a date it must be finished by.

Even when it was just an idea it still had a clearly defined end. I don’t think the BFA exhibition was the sole motivator...Even if we didn’t know exactly what it was going to look like, we knew what parts needed to be there.The show just provided a timeline.

We knew the arena in which it would be viewed, the rules we had to play by. There was no doubt about how this thing would operate, or that it, at the least, had to be there.

Right, it didn’t experience the identity crisis that so much work often does. It is definitely an installation, an art piece. But there were some outside forces that influenced its com-pletion. The BFA show demands a certain level of quality and professionalism. Knowing that, I have to say I wouldn’t enter into this sort of collaboration lightly.

Ya, we both trust each other, and know each others’ work well enough to feel confident that it would work out in the end...perhaps too confident. But yes, we had faith in the thing.

However, I doubted it a lot at first…making it in parts was unusual. I am accustomed to working with a singular object in my studio. The object before you is always in its final state at every stage of the making, arguably. With our piece, I was judging how I felt about it based on its parts rather than imagining how they would function on the whole. A lot of those parts are pretty rinky-dink, but you have to consider the space that it’s in, that clean space. I wasn’t projecting during the making of the objects, and I tend to judge a work based on my immediate physical response to it. On top of that, we were under a lot of stress in school while trying to complete this, but (like I said),we had a sort of unspoken mutual understanding of how it would play out in regard to our other responsibilities.

Were it not for the fact that I was making this with you, I think the experience would have been a million times more stressful and unpredictable. Our familiarity with one another plays into this, big time—the obvious aspect being that the piece is about us living together. It is a segment of this shared space in our house.

I wonder what the ‘common ground’, being the collabora-tive product, of people who didn’t live together would look like. What would those two people visualize and how might they relate? I know you and I had some discrepancies in how we wanted to represent certain aspects of the construction, but since we have both spent so much time there together, those differences weren’t very extreme.

Yep. We had a clear image in our minds that we knew wasn’t going to be identical, but we could expect them to be pretty close. I have an impression of what your general aesthetic is, as you have with mine. Since reaching a visual median was easy, I can more readily appreciate the thing in itself and what it signifies in our apartment.

Knowing each other so well and being able to imagine and work on it together made things go smoothly. However, this familiarity, or perhaps comfortability, also limited the possibility for surprise which is what, I think, makes a collaborative artwork a successful experience for its partic-ipants. Other than perhaps yielding an interesting product for others, of course. We were working pretty confidently, with little conflict. While collaborative conflict might be

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unpleasant, it may also create a more interesting result in the end, for the participants and the viewer.

You know, it was almost too easy. But it was a lot of fun, and I don’t see anything wrong with that.

Well, I guess we never set out to learn something about that corner or our relationship to it, or even about one another. But that’s an excellent point: how valuable tension in collab-oration can be. Those tensions, when actualized, synthesize into this unpredictable thing.

Or a compromise may never be reached, and the project would end negatively, to varying degrees!

What sequence of tensions would you say you are most at-tracted to? Coming in contact with issues and yet being able to resolve them in some way? Or working with someone you

have complete and utter confidence in? Or resigning from the creation completely because of personal differences?

It depends on the circumstances. This also relates to my in-dividual practice in that sometimes it’s very clear as to what I need to make. As was our project. Then I have to make compromises with what I expect in the material and my own abilities. But there’s also another way of working, wherein the final product is not so predetermined. Going into that, if something doesn’t work there is room for reinvention. You can work right through something and even start over completely, but this willingness must be shared in order to work in a collaborative effort. With our project it was very clear what we needed to do…

But in another scenario, one shouldn’t underestimate the value of a mediating factor.

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Creating rules for ourselves that we aren’t permitted to betray could be very productive. During the making of the BFA piece, we were rationalizing every little detail. Maybe we intended to do one thing, but settled for something other. At times, we justified a lack of precision or fol-low-through by crediting it to the shabby construction of the referent. And this seemed fair, because everything in our apartment actually is a little askew. But what if we had someone or some quality of a space that we could not fool or dissuade?

It seems like you’re imagining these rules specifically with the act of collaboration in mind, not so much with pro-ducing art in general...I feel like this piece didn’t call for a restriction. Nothing needed to be super clean, or sharp, or square, because for whoever remodeled and painted our apartment, it seems like anything goes. This piece is very much a celebration of the dilapidated-ness of this weird attic pocket that we live in...

Beyond that, the way we treat the space, the character it withholds.

But there is a craft to mimicry, or at least an attitude of precision I prefer to adopt when attempting to recreate an experience. Everything is a detail. On the other hand, may-be we should have had a few drinks before getting to work.

Well, if we lived in some recently constructed suburban home where everything was crisp and clean, recreating a piece of our kitchen would necessitate very different materials and considerations. But if we were a couple of kids living in the suburbs, I can’t imagine we’d have wanted to make this in the first place.

Given our everyday experience here, as it has accumulated over two years (and just being at school, living the some-what dirty and clumsy life of an art student) if we were to duplicate an architectural firm-office-kitchen, we’d have to change our whole way of life! This piece came so easily, and in some ways became a snapshot of our quality of life during this time.

It’s also important to consider that this is a snapshot of two different, yet intertwined, personal narratives. In the

process of building it, those narratives intersected in a very literal way. For example, I’m sure at some point when we were making this thing I questioned some of your structural decisions. Asking why you were going to put a hole here instead of there, why something was big or small, rough or smooth...I don’t know if that is a matter of fusing our visions or reminding you of what we had tacitly agreed on beforehand.

Those issues deal with the necessary pragmatics of its form. The height of a cabinet or length of supports are what determined whether or not it would stand on its own. In some instances we really needed one another’s input. Otherwise, it would have failed in its construction.

Well, we came to conclusions about certain dimensions and surface issues through intuition alone. We both have a similar sense of intuition. Our ideas were already so close, it didn’t take long to match them up. I think that was one of the most rewarding things about doing this, for me. Seeing how fluidly you can work with someone because of familiarity. There were times when we were construct-ing part of this simultaneously and it really flowed. Two people going at one thing, each with different tools in their hand doesn’t always work. I’m talking about the little de-tails, like if you have to lift a piece of wood a certain way to clamp it and it needed a support on the other end before you can drill into it...when we were working on this in the woodshop, without even asking, you knew exactly where your hands needed to be at every moment.

It was really pragmatic. It made things easier. On the flip-side, I see it as a more valuable experience to do a similar project with someone who I am not familiar with, or who is dissimilar to me. That would be a greater learning expe-rience for both participants. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have done this, but as a collaboration I don’t think it was a lively, artful experience. The art is in the object, not so much in the experience of its making. Obviously creativity was in the air, and we were able to communicate non-ver-bally. But the experience of collaborating wasn’t rewarding in the way that I think a collaborative art would want to be: in the collaborative engagement. Maybe I am assuming too much.

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I’d agree. A collaborative art is something that places most of its value in the experience of collaborating and less in the object that was made, if there is one. That’s what I am most interested in.

That being said, out of all the projects I have completed thus far, I have probably learned the least with this one. I’m sure that wouldn’t be the case if we tried to make this at the beginning of our shared living arrangement...at this stage in my life I largely embark on a project because I explicitly want to learn something new. This I did just because I knew it would be fun, no matter what.

An issue I have in participating in a collaborative artwork is that I may be going into it with a preconception of the experience as art, therefore reducing its potential to artificiality. Authen-ticity is an important factor in a collaborative work. By that I mean that the participants are having an authentic experience wherein the meaning unfolds during rather than being implied at its beginning. Again I think of a third element that will take the experience out of your hands, other than your personal interests.

If you go into collaboration explicitly to gel with someone, to show how well you can decode each others’ working methods, a lack of authenticity might become a problem and maybe cause the piece to fail.

Or engaging with another person with the expectation of having a unique shared experience, regardless of the object. Maybe that diminishes the power of the work. I’d be judging it while it’s happening. In order to be interesting and valuable to me, it needs to evolve organically.

When creation is a one-way channel that never begs you to stray from you intention or reflect on your activity, it results in something completely different than when you’re interrupted or questioned along the way. That can be dangerous or even boring.

Right, there’s no valuable experience there. You’re totally conscious and dominate the product; the most you can take away is a pursuit of technical craft.

That’s very much how I made work when in high school. Draw-

ing a person with glasses, bright colors, and good hair was a blatant objective. I wanted to make it as realistic as possible.

You knew what you wanted it to look like.

Yep, and I will either accomplish this representation or not. There is no room for me to even be willing to compromise because I couldn’t fathom the possibility of art revealing something to me.

I’m always watching myself for that. Using that willing-ness, you may make something you are really pleased with and you want to do it again, but you must remember the process that provided you that reward in the first place. A subject, or interest, is a necessary component in an artwork and this willingness is something other, at

the least a catalyst preventing you from falling into habitual procedures. Having conviction or inspiration is important, but so is the willingness to obliterate that if necessary.

Prescribing yourself creative free-dom is crucial, as contradictory as it may seem...

With our piece in particular, how do you feel about the way that freedom unfolded? I know at first we were both pretty unsure about it and thought it would look utterly ridiculous

Having conviction or inspiration is important, but so is the willingness toobliterate that if necessary.

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Having conviction or inspiration is important, but so is the willingness toobliterate that if necessary.

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before all the parts were together and the lighting was set. But once that happened we discovered these accidental gems. Like the way the reflected light from the projector drowns out the source, and so it looks like this fantastic illusion wherein a styrofoam screen is actually radiating light. It has somehow managed to trick a lot of people. They’d walk up to it and ask where the projector was when it was sitting more or less in plain sight. I don’t think we could have done that on purpose.

For sure, I didn’t anticipate the activation of the space through this false projection of light from the

computer. It is so important in creating that atmo-sphere, which hovers between a real and artificial space so well, I think.

It’s a fantastic metaphor for art. It emanates light, rather than receives it. It activates you; you are not the one who activates it. That holds relevance to our light source being a computer, a person’s conduit to all the information in the world. You sit with your hands on the keyboard and all this knowledge pours out onto you. I’m sure almost

everybody has hunched over a computer late at night and felt like they were sitting in another realm, largely

because they’re immersed in its light and information.

That phenomena is one of the reasons why movies are such a profoundly impactful form of art. They take you to another place in a way that a painting almost never can.

There was something nice about the screen dis-playing our screen recordings of typical computer

usage: checking your email, reading a blog, watching a video, checking your email again. If someone sat

down in front of it and spent time with it, they might feel as though they themselves were controlling the device, as we have so commonly developed this form of muscle memory. You’re captivated by the screen and it has a certain control over you. I saw people in the gallery staring at it, completely enthralled. Yet it displayed the most uninteresting things.

It’s easy to stare deeply into the window of the internet. You browse ceaselessly until you find a little gold star you didn’t necessarily know you were looking for. Running images of us ‘surfing the web’ seemed to push people into that same self-induced, trance-like state.

Susan Buck-Morss wrote an essay titled “Aesthetics and

Prescribing yourself creative freedom is crucial, as contradictory as it may seem...

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Anaesthetics” in response to Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”. She talks about how in modern society the visual and technological stimuli throughout our general field of vision operates as an “anaesthetic.” How do we begin to digest such a mass of stimuli? Perhaps the only way of perceiving this abun-dance of readily available media is through an impatient superficial lens, perpetually jumping from one thing to the next. How often do you find yourself scrolling through information online that you aren’t even interested in, while you are supposedly working on your research paper or filing your taxes?

Well, that notion is very telling in relation to our title, Business vs. Pleasure. Personally, those are two things I have become incapable of distinguishing. In theory, they are somewhat in tension with one another, yet they manage to synthesize in a rigorous studio practice. The title is so fitting. When you asked what we should call it, I was think-ing about the ‘professional practice’ lectures we attended where they talked about what is or is not tax deductible. Supposedly, if you drive from home, the mileage doesn’t count as a business expense, but if you get into your car directly after exiting your home office, you can write it off. The stipulation here is that your home office has to be X feet or rooms or whatever apart. I remember we began jokingly asking about whether or not our kitchen office constituted a legal home office. Then there’s also the spin-off of the cliché question, “Are you doing this for business or pleasure?” It’s my hope that those things can be one and the same in my life.

We sit down at the computer to handle some business, but we might also just be cooking food or watching stupid videos on the internet. That’s how I initially read it. It seems appropriate for a number of reasons. For a student especially, can one’s passions reach such a point of intense scrutiny where he or she is no longer interested in them? business and pleasure—they don’t always mix.

Putting in the drawings as the last part ties it all together. Our personal business, you could say. Admittedly, it was a duty I shirked for as long as possible. Since we made them separately, it was easy for me to put it on the back burner and not feel guilty...

Either way, I consider them a crucial element. They help you understand that corner as an implied space that exists somewhere in the world.

They feel really awkward to me. I’m glad they are there, but they seem too bulky, having too much of a presence. We could have made the panels shallower, and maybe even a lighter tone. My particular drawing feels unresolved as well. But, being promised to the piece, the opening recep-tion demanded it be done. I still have a lot of issues with it, but the drawings work in providing a sort of ambiance because they are not scrutinized as individual drawings.

I know what you mean. So when someone expressed interest in one of them I was pretty surprised. It never occurred to me that somebody might be attracted to that as a stand-alone work of art.

It’s the only part that reads very explicitly as an art object, arguably. If we hadn’t painted the panels a color other than white they might not have connected to the piece. They almost function as a clue to our identity as well.

Each drawing acts as our singular presence both in the work and in our apartment. My panel is a signifier of who I am. I created this semi-sloppy quasi-minimal image of the dishes I never do, but always feel guilty for not doing. And it was constructed in the way I usually make work. A simple collage of cut paper from old prints I had no desire to keep intact.

With your panel, it’s painted a color of particular signifi-cance to you and is in dialogue with your current studio practice. I’ve noticed you responding to the influx of crime in our neighborhood…this painting of our kitchen window, with the creep in the corner, reflects how often our house has been broken into. So there’s that. Plus, the window drawings are something you have been doing since we moved into the apartment...I’ve always associated them with you.

But with this particular window painting there is a major shift. First off, I’ve placed this shadowy figure creeping in on the window with a direct narrative intent. My other pieces are less overt in their function. I also painted the

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window from memory, which accounts also for the major shift in subject. I think that is where my imagination really fails: I am not that illustrative. I am interested in respond-ing to a phenomenon or subject and how the tools I am using offer potential for recreating that experience.

Speaking of tools, I really enjoyed watching you invent the faux silverware for the big drawer. Much like our silverware drawer/desktop, things in there are pretty dusty and disorganized. I imagine that pile of utensils is pretty un-appetizing to guests in our apartment...it’s pretty chaotic and therefore easily represented through this intentionally naive method of making tools. That’s where I saw you employ the most creative freedom. Typically, a tool is an answer to a question: I need to fit this peg in this hole so I invent a mallet. Our tools felt more like questions. We

were inventing things that could argue their own use.

Right, and they could float between forms—is it a spoon or a knife? It is definitely the scale of an object that belongs in my hand, but what does it do? I was really excited making a few of the objects, but I did feel that I rarely broke the barrier to something truely creative. I realize the potential to be inventive, but I don’t think I ever got there. The re-ward in something physical like that, like building or paint-ing, lies in giving it time and seeing it develop. Arriving at something you couldn’t have planned for is exciting. For example, the double-ended shank/spaghetti strainer con-sisted of a wooden dumbbell shape with a bunch of nails shot into both ends. I could never have conceived of that. It was exciting to arrive at, and maybe whoever encounters that object receives that same sense of discovery.

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There’s a lot to be said about the contents of that drawer.

Yeah, I find that the scale of the tools lends itself to an in-terpretation that a painting or drawing cannot. The subject and way in which a painting is made can be so removed from one’s common tactile experience, and this was some-thing the tools could speak to. My screwed-up painting sensibilities were applied to common objects such as sil-verware. In that sense, perhaps they were communicated much more effectively than within the context of painting. They were disrupting the familiar without abstracting it beyond comprehension.

I’d say that’s what our piece manages to do on the whole. For us as well as those people seeing it in the gallery. It becomes this spot that is at once both strange and familiar. An office that is also a kitchen that is also an art piece. All three are places where you and I can share ideas in some fashion or another.

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Phyll is Ray-Taylor

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One day, we ran into one another in the driveway and we got to talking about some of the projects I was working on at school. As our conversation expanded, you started talking about something you had been working on that instantly grabbed my attention and, frankly, caught me a bit off-guard. I remember you pointing to this small pile of wood beside your truck and saying you were going to use them to paint signs that said ‘love’ on them and later post them up around the city. You continued talking about materials and paint and I stopped you right there thinking to myself, “Wait a minute, you want to paint signs that say what!?” Prior to this conversation, we had not said more than ten words to one another about something other than the rent. I guess that’s not so bizarre because you are my landlord, but I quickly realized that our dynamic needed to change.

You wanted to paint signs with the word ‘love’ on them. It seemed like a very simple message, and yet it held this complexity of possible meanings, especially when shared. The idea really piqued my interest.

Everybody seems to use the word at one time or another and some never take it beyond their personal circle. I think love can be expressed just through smiling and warmth. And I don’t see it as much as I’d like to in the city. I some-times see Jerry Springer-type material...people yelling at one another...road rage…cars always want to be on my bumper. I think it’s the absence of love that causes people to be so aggressive. It’s my hope that an almost subliminal message of love might encourage people to do a good deed here and there.

So it sounds to me like your definition of love comes down to good ‘person skills’. With the way this whole event unfolded, that sort of love and trust was necessary from the get go. I’m glad that we could plan this sort of thing together. I remember looking at the little pile of wood you gathered and immediately understanding that you cer-tainly had the mission, but faced not having the resources to do it with. Being both a woodshop technician and a member of a school organization that often paints commu-nity murals, I knew I had access to most of the things you were missing. It wasn’t long before we figured out that we could make this simple gesture become a real event in the

neighborhood. So we got to planning and came up with the ‘Community Love Fest’. The focus of this gathering would be a love-themed-sign-painting-backyard-bbq that provided anyone who showed up with with free materials to make a sign on the spot, plus a meal prepared by your husband and grill master supreme, Larry.

In two or three meetings, one of which I’m pretty sure we had while sitting in your truck, we decided that I would fig-ure out the supplies and you would coordinate all the food. I’d invite my people, you’d invite yours, and we’d both try to spread the word to as many folks in the neighborhood as we could. After that, we worked pretty independently to do our share of the preparation.

I remember when I came home from school the day before the event, as I walked onto our corner I could see a little green sign staked into the ground. As I got closer I saw a few more sticking up out of the grass. You had scaled up the posters I made and turned them into yard signs. And then I noticed the pennant flags hanging in the trees and connecting our two houses. And then even more signs all over the yard. I was blown away. I didn’t know what to ex-pect when I mentioned we might consider decorating our shared backyard. Coming home to that made me happy as a clam. That’s when I knew you were in it to win it, as they say. How do you feel about the way it all turned out?

I am the type of person who does everything down to the tiniest detail. Having put in all that effort with those little details, when the festival first got rolling and it wasn’t very busy at first I felt a sense of disappointment. But then people started coming in from all over and it became this buzz. After that I realized it wasn’t about the numbers, it was about the participation and the excitement and the understanding of what was going on. There could have been ten people there, and so long as they were excited I would have been happy. I got so excited, in fact, that I forgot to give my initial speech about why we were hosting the ‘Love Fest’ in the first place!

Well, even without the speech, I think people were inspired quite a bit by their surroundings. People had the opportunity to create something they might not normally have the means to make. Sure, they could have bought

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paint and brushes and started making a sign out of their own volition. But when you don’t have those materials on hand you don’t always think about their potential use. When you make it really easy for someone to express an idea, it comes out in this wonderfully uninterrupted and fluid way. It was a way for us to turn love, and just general positivity, into a no-brainer.

I know what you’re saying. I also think at times that I don’t have a sense of creativity that is comparable to the next person. But over time I’ve learned to take risks and chances. I’ve had a lot of projects gone awry. And I’ve paid for them. But I have since changed my philosophy, because those failed experiences have only made me more willing to take risks. Making the process feel easy and fun probably allowed people to be more expressive and have a little more creative freedom.

Since there was a decent balance of artists and non-artists in attendance, I think the inspiration was able to pass

back and forth. People were coming up with ways to paint those signs that I would never have thought of. Those individuals without an art background took to the materials really fast because the general spirit of the operation was pretty free-form. There were some wild painting methods going on and a lot of open experimentation. Especially with the kids. One girl was so determined to learn how to screen print that day, with as little assistance as possible. She must have been about seven years old. She was real gung-ho.

Can you talk a bit about your original motivations to make these signs?

I believe love can be unconditional. Making these public signs seemed like a great way to make it an accessible message for anyone. As a Christian, I often refer to the example of Jesus. He was a figure who treated everyone with respect. He mingled with people of ill reputation and often got into trouble for eating with tax collectors and other ‘less desirables’ in the city. Strutting around

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as a member of the upper echelon was never his thing. It comes down to not giving people the nose, or the stiff neck. I see that happen on occasion in the Christian community and all over, really. It’s not a great example of supposedly unconditional love. When I’m having a hard time sharing that sort of feeling, I pray the Lord will help me become a more loving person.

Well, the world has become rather dog-eat-dog, so to speak. I think this might make people subtly see one anoth-er as enemies, and as a result, you can feel more competi-tive than loving, even if just in the back of your mind. Daily love has become somewhat forgotten. Or it’s been turned into something else entirely.

I feel a bit ambivalent towards holidays, for example. They can sometimes be superficial. Thanksgiving rolls around and people are thankful for a day. Christmas is uplifting; you think of Miracle on 34th Street...its a gay time with bells ringing and all that. New Years quickly follows. Valentines day can come and go. It all feels like an on/off switch. In reality, love should be continual and not just set aside for special occasions.

Celebration is weird that way. It can isolate an idea or feeling. What I liked about the ‘Love Fest’ is that, although it was a one-day event, it was sort of like a holiday with side effects. People shared a lot of positive energy that was then transferred into these signs that’ll spread throughout the city. The message lives on as long as the signs are up.

And giving is not always about the tangible. The intangible can be powerful too. A simple smile goes a long way. It can become overwhelming, almost infectious if it’s all around you. Although, I realize that’s not everybody’s thing.

We have a lot of hate going through our city. And you hear more about that than outbreaks of love. Fires and explosions are a more predominant topic these days. People can’t help but talk about bad news. I sometimes hear ministers on the radio talking about ways to curb violence. Of course, I don’t mean to knock any efforts to curtail crime, but they’ve held candlelight vigils of all kinds and yet crime continues. I think, along with those efforts, if people were to better communicate the message of love,

that might make for an impactful combination. It’s such an under-publicized message. I know of an international televangelist who lives in St. Louis, Joyce Meyer, who started a campaign called the Love Revolution. I was really inspired by that and hope to take a similar grass-roots approach to this. If people can watch an idea spread and grow, it can be quite powerful.

Both good and bad energy have a way of spreading...

I know not everybody stands behind this kind of thinking. I don’t expect everyone to like my approach. That’s life. But it doesn’t overwhelm me or deter me from spreading or promoting love. Some people might get on their band-stand and ask, “Who do you think you are?” But I think I’m strong enough to stand against that. The Lord gives me the strength to keep moving forward. I don’t believe that nega-tivity is the way of the world. And anyone can promote the message of love, ministry or no ministry.

It seems to me like you do this work because it’s just in your nature. I don’t think you’re trying to save the world. You just want to pass on a message that means something to you.

Feeling that sort of positivity can be like a relay race. Some-one runs and climbs through a rough and mountainous area only to pass the baton on to you. So now you have the baton and you know you’ll have to face similar obstacles to carry it to the next person. I like the idea of passing something on. Passing good things to people is important. On hot summer days I try to offer people as many rides as I can. It’s as simple as that. Love can be as simple as helping someone plant a bed of flowers, or getting a stranded family out of the rain during a storm.

As I’ve been reflecting on our project, I realized one of the most important forces that moved it forward was this strange sense of mutual trust...a trust I had never consid-ered or even noticed before.

I’d like to believe I’m a good tenant —I pay the rent on time and refrain from throwing wild parties—and so, without meaning to, I suppose we built up a feeling of reliability. When you and I first came up with the idea for

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It’s such an under-publicized message.

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the ‘Love Fest’, we only met a few times before the day of the event. One of us could have been majorly slacking on our responsibilities and the other wouldn’t have had a clue! I could have totally bailed and ruined the whole event by not showing up with my half of the preparations. Yet, we each took a leap of faith (which maybe didn’t seem so big at the time) and trusted the other person would pull through. And we did.

You’re right. You know, I remember when you first moved in we were negotiating the rent. I was a little unsure of you...but I don’t hold grudges, and now I feel pretty certain we can work together effectively and with consideration.

Our relationship did start off on a strange foot...

Starting something like this can be like drilling a hole. You start with a drill bit and piece of wood, but you can’t get any-where unless you take a nail and make a little pilot hole. But once you’ve got that hole…bizzip! It goes right through. And sure, maybe it doesn’t work because the wood is bad. Or maybe you need to fine-tune your drill, change the speed, reposition yourself. It’s a lot like how I think about spreading love in the community. With the right mindset, love can become abundant and universal.

I think the diverse attendance at the festival is a testament to that. We brought in the random group of students from the art school down the street, the people from your church, and the unexpected passersby from our neighborhood. And everyone encouraged one another to wiggle a brush around in some paint and throw it on a piece of wood or plastic. I had gathered all the free paint and scrap wood from a number of local recycling facilities and sign shops in Kansas City. Since most things were cheap, reused, or donated, you weren’t ever at risk of ‘messing up’. There was always more scrap material or paint to cover something up with. It also allowed anyone who made a sign to easily keep their work. And if they wanted to gift us with the sign they could leave it with you to find a permanent location for it in public spaces throughout the city.

I’m planning to put one of them at the intersection of 63rd and Indiana. That’s one of the routes to Swope Park, it’s usu-ally really busy. My friend who owns property there asked me to put up a sign for her with rhinestones on it.

Oh right, the tiny reflective pieces! Those were such a hit. People were gluing them all over their signs.

She told me she loves bling.

Who doesn’t?

It was awesome to see people from all over the neighbor-hood wander in to see what was happening. We all met neighbors we didn’t know we had, plus a number of people who wanted to help the project go even further. You had been planning on building an entire outreach organization around this message right? It looks like this event was a great jump-start for that sort of ongoing endeavor.

My job can sometimes restrict me from furthering these initiatives. Working full time only gives me a few hours to work on projects like this. I have people lined up waiting for me to help them install their signs. I want to put up one or two signs on Friday and/or Saturday when feasible. All in good time…I want to hit the Thriftway on Main Street and give them a sign. The thrift store at 39th and Troost, St. Vincent’s, has one up in a glass display case; a shopper asked me what it was about and I explained it to them. Somebody from my job even asked if I’d help them host their own ‘Love Fest’ at their church.

Well, come summer we can work on that together. I think the event went really well; I’m glad we could help each other make it happen. Surely, neither one of us could have done it alone. I’m especially grateful for the help from the Artplay organization at school. Those volunteers really brought a lot of energy to the crowd.

I hope I’ll be able to start acquiring donations to be able to make more signs with. What would you think about putting a donation jar by some of the indoor signs? It might promote the cause as well as allow us to purchase materials to make more.

That sounds great. I like the idea of giving people the choice to fund more signs if they want to see more around. Let the community take part in the project’s sustainability...

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Naomi O ’Donnell

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These are video stills from a performance night we called Madame Pflumm’s Evening of Operatic Achievement.

The idea for this event was concocted over the duration of a four-hour car ride with no particular destination in mind. I remember driving through rural Kansas talking about art and thinking of a way to unite our interests in performance, theatre, and absurd set/prop construction. And then we crossed Pflumm Road. Perhaps we were struck by the empty expanse of fields and farmland. Or maybe boredom with the exterior landscape bred interior uneasiness. It’s hard to say. Either way, there was a definite sadness floating around the inside of our car that needed to be made a star. And so we built a spotlight.

I remember you came up with the idea of asking those invited to “prepare a musical selection that embodies your current emotional/philosophical state.” We are pretty fortunate to have a close group of mutual friends who will subject themselves to just about whatever sort of bizarre activity we invent.

I expected the result would be a bit like ‘theatre camp’, except one night only and with more raunch, booze, and emotional breakdowns.

That’s what we set out to do…we should probably do it again.

What we set out to do didn’t exactly happen. But we still did something.

It has stuck with me. The memories of that night are fairly vivid. And I can’t remember most things, so when you remember the intimate details of your friends performing something six months ago, that’s significant.

We wanted more people to be there originally, did we not? That fact that it ended up being four close friends made it a very different ball game. There were no random attendants despite our efforts to acquire some. I guess we didn’t make that strong of an effort.

Well, we invited their girlfriends...

Do you think that would have made people open up more or less? Everyone seemed quite at ease through the duration of the evening.

It’s tricky. I can say that our actions felt more or less prede-termined. While it didn’t feel rehearsed, we also weren’t in a position to surprise ourselves. In that sense, I think it’s a pretty good personality test. We asked people to choose a song that accurately reflected their emotional state, which was hopefully at one extreme, and embody it by co-opting someone else’s creativity.

So Amos shows up with this garageband medley, a calcu-lated performance, and little dialogue. And that was just a different way of experiencing Amos as we may already conceive of him. Same with Matt, who came with a broken tape player and naturally executes a Tom Waits number.

It felt like everything remained true to our projected per-sonalities and there weren’t many moments of great reveal. Regardless, seeing anyone deliver a number is touching to me. More so when it’s unexpected.

I suppose the night was more or less one big leap through a giant mood ring. Someone jumps and you all watch with interest (feigned or sincere) to see what color it turns.

But the color around its rim was so much brighter that night. So, it’s not that it wasn’t worth doing, it just wasn’t cathartic or revealing in the way I originally hoped.

The casual nature of the whole thing seemingly promoted a mindset that converted sadness into something more manageable. So, what if we had the same group but had prepared a stage in a much more elaborate manner, working on it really far in advance in an effort to transform your apartment (where we always intended on hosting it) into something unrecognizable? Do you think that would have changed the way that people performed?

I don’t think I could have performed well in that scenario. If there was more of a spotlight, I would have froze. I can’t speak for how others would have responded to that...perhaps some would have thrived if we did this in a huge auditorium.

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I’d like to also push this past karaoke. This was reasonable groundwork, but pressing monologues or costumes would have helped people step out of the ordinary. Character-based catharsis!

Again, setting has an effect there. Walking into a home, a familiar space, immediately puts a perimeter around your actions. It limits how far from the ordinary you can step.

Right, you are always conscious that you are in someone’s house. It belongs to them and you are a guest. So a stage would have helped remove the notion of ownership or the familiar.

I remember that not long after the Evening of Operatic Achievement, you told me about a neighborhood-wide performance in Australia that involved a traveling audience...could you touch on that briefly? It seems like a relevant solution/alternative. Right, ‘Minto:Live’. It was an advertised event in 2011 put on by the Campbelltown Arts Centre. It was open to anyone and if you wanted to participate you would wait on your front lawn for the audience to come by. It might start with a daughter in costume dancing to a song of her choice, then her sister comes out to join, then her dad. It needn’t be grounded in any technique or particular style. Everyone was taking pictures and gathering around the performers; you could slip out and move on to the next lawn without judgment. It was entirely optional whether to perform or remain a viewer, and both determined the length of their engagement with the idea.

That would probably be most important, if we were to take this out of an apartment and increase the audience. In this instance, we did force participation in some sense, so for it to have happened in a home seems really vital. Some people want more, some less. Personally, I would have liked to find a way to shed that self-conscious block.

I had a professor play a film for our class that involved characters frolicking around and wooing one another with an assortment of flute ballads. Toward the end of the film the main character asks the viewer questions, and that convention hadn’t been used once up until that point, so it

was sort of a surprising element. I think it was meant to make you empathize with the main character’s inability to charm the girl. When it was over my professor started talking about the ‘fourth wall’, a theatrical term I had never heard before. It represents the idea of an imagined wall between the stage and the audience that allows viewers to “overhear” the goings-on of the play. It has since become a recurring topic in almost all discussions about theatre I’ve found myself a part of.

So, in talking about a performance that is always on the move, or a theatre in your apartment that doesn’t clearly delineate where the stage ends and the seats begin, it seems relevant and really interesting. It can sometimes be really cheesy or really effective.

The ‘fourth wall’ has been invading my artistic experiences lately; Madame Pflumm is the perfect exploratory vehicle. She would be undeniably cheesy and simultaneously effec-tive. So much of my interests are overly sentimental.

By cheesy I mean poorly done. I’ve experienced perfor-mances where actors tried to eliminate the fourth wall in an attempt to connect with their audience, but it mostly made you wish you could be far outside the context of the play. At a certain point you just want the person to stop interrogating you and get off your lap.

I wonder what Madam Pflumm would have been like had we rehearsed her more. Our idea to make her a joint role, performed by the both of us simultaneously, was pretty last minute. But I liked it. We had intended to materialize this figure who wore something which vaguely resembled a gypsy-circus-ring leader. That we did. But she was also supposed to be a brutal and indifferent coach who explicitly wanted to see her students cry. In that regard she left dis-satisfied. Although, I admit to tearing up at a certain point... almost.

I appreciate you working with me on this, it was a magical night! I am not a born collaborator so this was a leap of faith. As you wonder what Madam Pflumm would have been like if we rehearsed her more, I am wondering what it would have been like if one of us had adopted full responsibility

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for the role. Working with people in that way is awkward for me, so I immediately want to divide tasks. Even though this project is one of the more interesting things I did this year, I struggled with my natural resistance to being a team player.

That makes our reflection on these different roles that we assumed seem especially worthwhile. When we naturally fall into a role or responsibility in the midst of a project, we don’t often think about what we are doing or what we are forcing, or even what we are inadvertently forcing somebody else to do. One can easily overlook their partner’s needs or preferences in the heat of battle. I can’t say I recall you ever stating you’d rather have done the project by yourself, but I realize I may have outright assumed you wanted to do this together. I suppose that’s not surprising to me now. Never-theless, had you told me you wanted to run the show, I don’t think I would have been offended.

Of course, we’re at the point in our friendship where my complaints run like water and you’re a fabulous sport at re-membering rainboots and having a good time with it. That’s something that never occurred to me during the conception, but in retrospect I see why the evening felt out of my hands. Discussing possibilities with you is a joy, but once an idea hardens I need a particular aspect of it to execute. Create a character, construct a stage, choose a location, be creative in the details. When we embrace togetherness for its own sake in order to do something pragmatic I’m immediately disengaged.

The amount of freedom you need to give up in order to be collaborative in some respects frightens me. You are forced to acknowledge the importance of collaboration when it comes to pulling off larger projects. When I make work by myself it tends to be a quiet thing in a corner, begging interaction but remaining still. But when you and I work together, all our friends show up and sing us songs, a refreshing change. I’m trying to find a good medium heat for the collaborative salsa of my practice.

In the realm of friends and peers, the roles of shared labor tend to be somewhat hazy. It can turn into one big scary grayscale. Certain people choose to really embrace that lack of distinction.

In my experience that shared haziness slows rather than opens projects up.

Really?

Yeah. In our post-grad printmaking collective. for example, the eight of us worked collaboratively for two or three years but no one was able to step up and claim ownership of the project, delegate tasks, or be affirmative. We stepped up, down, and ultimately away.

Well, I imagine that had a lot to do with the general ethos of the collective (Grey Ghost Horse). It originated as a myth that existed only in the mind of Matt Gladson, ‘The Original Propagator’. It seemed like everyone chose to go along with it, in the way you would with an inside joke you don’t entirely understand, and after enough time believing, it became a real thing. The problem was, like any ghost, it couldn’t possess definition, walls, shape or size. So when the collective acquired a studio space in which to operate, it was contrary to the spirit of the whole arrangement. If it’s not ‘real’ to begin with, you can’t put it in a space. Going back to the peer group…since getting these projects done was never a job, we seemed to have the freedom to float in and out of whatever roles we chose. Our duties could remain wonderfully nebulous if we pleased. In the professional world, if you’re trying to create a music video for example, there is a paycheck involved and an amorphous music video is not exactly an option. The expected out-comes are much more concrete. Would you be comfortable working collaboratively in that sense?

I think that’s ideal. Removing the notion of a reward, anyway. Basing decisions on paychecks or recognition isn’t really a sustainable artistic philosophy. Given that caveat, having a group rally around a goal and trade some element of inde-pendence to ensure its fruition seems like a small sacrifice.

Well, you and I certainly have our own working methodol-ogies.

Artists who feel compelled to pursue projects, make books, put together community events, and stage non-traditional performances are the type I’d like to be surrounded by. It’s

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a matter of feeling more comfortable attending rather than supplying entertainment. Dance, theatre, and film fuel the motivation to create still objects that are poised to funnel back into those active spheres. Yet, something about calling our experiment complete feels dishonest.

I’m glad you reached out and invited me to this project.

So if we did it again, especially having discussed all this, could you see yourself coming straight out and making necessary demands for a collaboration? Or would you say nothing and simply feign a pleasant and cooperative mood? I wouldn’t want you to feel like you have to fulfill some need I have for working in groups. I’m fine with people doing their own separate tasks.

It’s something I want to be a successful working method, but it’s just not. And I feel comfortable saying that now. I don’t want to compromise for the greater good just yet. Being honest about the conditions in which we can embody our ideal creative selves is just as complicated as concept or medium.

In the Evening of Operatic Achievement, I’m glad that giving people the choice of what song to sing was a sufficient guideline. All this said, I would have nominated you as lead-er and not departed from my comfort zone so completely.

I can be more bossy if need be.

Would putting you in charge be counter-intuitive to the whole collaborative venture?

The thing about collaboration is that there are so many ideas and definitions floating around it. One could reduce it to a simple notion of shared labor if they so chose. People seem to vie for a ‘successful collaboration’ without really knowing what that entails. Putting a value judgement on shared efforts is certainly not a bad thing, but it distorts your perspective of the work at hand. You could collaborate on an effort to make one another miserable, for example, but I wonder how the success in that is measured. How do you know when you have sufficiently pissed someone off? Sim-ilarly, collaboration doesn’t need to be a matter of balance. Not everyone needs to have the same level of happiness or

invested-ness in order for a project to get off the ground. There can certainly be director and assistant roles. Say you wanted me to be the director—all you had to do was ask. Say you wanted me to be the assistant…I may have done that. And that’s specific to my interests.

We understand that in our personal practices failure is a prerequisite. Before you accomplish the manifestation of an idea, you’re going to miss the mark. It is going to be un-balanced, and you accept that. But the problem with these collaborative projects, I’d say, is that we attempt them once and if they fail we don’t try again, they’re just over. So for us, it would have made sense to treat this as a rehearsal, rather than a one-night extravaganza. That may have allowed us to determine whether or not we need more people or an ele-vated stage or additional lighting. This project of ours never reached its ideal form. These small experimental projects tend to lack resolution. Maybe that’s the reason behind you making this book.

Yes, though I don’t think I have been looking for resolve or answers in any of these endeavors. I essentially set out to test the waters. That sounds exhausting to me. I suppose that’s a testament to a difference in our personalities. I would have preferred to do one project over and over again, rather than start this variety of projects. Like publishing a newspaper without editors.

Well, I am looking at the bigger picture.

So you’re interested in planting seeds for now?

Yes and no. One plants seeds in order to grow something. And for me, that growth is a lifelong experience. I feel like I have engaged in tons of casual collaborations over the years, but until now I’ve never stopped to analyze my role within them or why they did or did not work. So that’s what I am doing here. I might choose never to do certain projects again, but I might feel the need to revisit some.

What do you think would have happened with the project had we been able to discuss all of these ideas beforehand? It’s not often that you are given the opportunity to approach

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Those 1,000 potentials are as attractive as they are mute points.

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a project with hindsight, or contemplated experience. In the ad hoc creative world, most people don’t walk into a collaboration and state outright what their strengths or pref-erences are, nor do they have time to feel out what those are before creating something. Those things tend to unfold parallel to one another, and in some instances it’s too late.

For that reason, it’s hard for me to see this event as a final product. I’m a bit embarrassed by this work in progress, so I’m getting defensive in discussing it. Those 1,000 potentials are as attractive as they are mute points. Well, that’s not to say we can’t revisit it. I want a do-over! Leaving it at this state feels easy. Had I been more insistent about moving forward, I think you would definitely have been responsive to that. At the time, I didn’t think about it as a project that had potential to grow. I treated it as a one-hit-wonder. It feels like we went on one date that was really pleasant and had great potential, but then we never called each other afterward. And now, we’ve run into each other at a grocery store six months later and we’re all like ,“Oh, hey, how have you been? It was great hanging out with you that one time. I’m sorry I never called you.” “I had a great time too, I’m sorry I didn’t call you.”

Admittedly, I was more concerned about us working togeth-er than I was about Madame Pflumm. I was so focused on collaboration for its own sake that I let our project slump. I also didn’t take it seriously enough. It was like I had no clue we were even on a date.

This is like being in a “What constitutes a date?” episode of “Seinfeld”...

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Stephen Kent

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S : K

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How would you describe The Good Great Boys and Girls Brigade to a camper interested in joining? It is arts, outdoors, and shenaniganry all bundled up into one afternoon and stuffed inside whichever context it pleases to place itself within. You and I had never worked on a project together before this. Do you remember how I approached you about performing as a camp counselor in the brigade? Yes, I think we had a quick conversation over the salad bar at lunch. What do you think this faux camp within a camp was demonstrating? I think it was highlighting the slight ridiculousness of the situation you, and I, and everyone else found ourselves in. We were at a dreamy utopian art camp on the edge of Lake Michigan that gracefully veiled its true provocative nature under the guise of a greater institution. The Good Great Boys and Girls Brigade project reminded the participants of a summer arts and crafts camp that one might have attended in their more formative years. In its parodic form, it circled the participants’ experience back into the realiza-tion that they might be in the same childlike situation, only one comprised of all adults. Camp Counselor Cindy, my alter-ego for the camp’s du-ration, led the few events that happened. How would you describe her personality? Cindy was a type a, Midwestern, go-getter, singular vision. How do you think someone might describe your counselor persona? Camp Counselor Sid is kind of slow and spacey…had a hard run-in with acid in his near past. You performed that persona with skill. I want to say I was surprised to see how easily you slipped into character. But you spent a good portion of the summer up until that point proving you had a few tricks up your sleeve. Have

you had much experience with acting? No, I don’t particularly like it but if I can blow whistles at people, sign me up. The dialogue put forth by the counselors was almost entirely improvised. Do you have much experience with improv, specifically? I think everything is improv at some level. So, yes. Do you think these ‘counselor’ characters would have been the same had they been scripted? The audience was wicked difficult sometimes, they became improv actors just as much as the counselors. There’s no way to have a script when the audience has as much autonomy as we let them have. I wasn’t expecting people to play along as much as they did. Those unexpected campers/victims really ran with it. At a certain point I was really following their lead and forgot my original intentions. While camp was ‘in session’, how much did my actions influence your own? Do you feel Sid was responding to me or Cindy? That is to say, were you responding to the cues of the director or the lead character? I think I took on Cindy’s cues, mostly. I really had no idea what was happening, or how I should behave, or even what the goal of the project was. After I realized the whole thing was so malleable it was downhill from there. It seems like the only constant—or source of structure—was the outfits. I remember a not-so-strict uniform was maybe the only key component in the original conception of this project. Or at least it was the only planned feature I really followed through with. I knew I wanted both coun-selors and campers to wear a ‘standard G.G.B.G.B. ascot’: the mark of an adventurer! Once the campers came to the dock and put on their ascot, they started really playing a role. Most people gave us fake names and acted like the eight year-old version of themselves. Wearing the ascot and being instantly deemed an official camper seemed to imply, “I can do/say anything I want, all adult behavior

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is irrelevant, and all bets are off.” It seems like a camp uniform, or any uniform for that matter, can be used pretty effectively to delineate self, position, character, role, etc. in almost any situation. As a counselor, I think uniform was important. We all knew the participants fairly well and it would have been impossible not to break character without hiding behind some thick-lensed sunglasses and a red cap. It also made us fulfill your stereotypical camp counselor fashion stan-dard right off the bat. I can’t tell you how great it was to ignore people afterward (out of uniform) when they called me Sid…it made sense. I didn’t look like him anymore when I was out of costume. Did you have any reservations about participating in this project before putting on the counselor uniform? Yes, I did it for the uniform. What do you suppose our campers expected from this event? I think they expected more of a thrill/performance. It was kind of this wonderfully mediocre event that left people quite confused and more open to honestly participating. Did it seem like I expected much of you as co-counselor? I don’t think you expected much…just to be enthused. Would you ever participate in a project like this again? I think I would, especially if I didn’t know the audience as well. Then I would be able to really get into character.

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...and now for the bios, boys and girls

Kendell Harbin : CHIEF OF HATS

Kendell wears many hats, but this Kansas City resident can usually be spotted standing on her head in the name of art. At the age of 10 she hosted a talk-radio show. The broadcast featured tape recordings of eaves-dropped conversations mashed with samples from the one CD she owned , Disney show tunes. Only her immediate family tuned in.

log

an

Ha

milt

on

ac

to

n : ED

ITO

R SU

PREM

E

Logan Ham

ilton Acton is an artist interested in creating a positive and

compassionate life full of risk in the ongoing process of m

aking mean-

ing. Along w

ith his art practice, his creative goals consist of spending his life exploring the w

orld with his radiant partner, Stefanie, and their

adorable cat, Kili.Pat

ric

K d

ra

Ke

: L

EAD

DES

IGN

ER

Blon

de s

ince

1991

, Pat

rick

Dra

ke is

the

son

of a

vege

taria

n bu

t enj

oys a

lmos

t eve

ryth

ing

on th

e m

enu.

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na

te

elle

fso

n :

FEA

TU

RED

CO

LLA

BO

RA

TO

R

Nat

e El

lefs

on is

an

artis

t cur

rent

ly b

ased

in A

ustin

, Te

xas.

How

man

y dog

s/10

dog

s!!

sam

i freese : FEA

TU

RED

CO

LLAB

OR

AT

OR

Sami Freese is a w

riter, artist, museum

guard, and internet and know

ledge enthusiast. She is probably taller than your m

om. She w

ants you to know

that she says “like” like, all the time,

loves to lie on the floor, and has a minim

um of

forty tabs open at any given time, som

etimes in

multiple brow

sers.

ian snyder : FEATURED COLLABORATOR

Ian Snyder was originally a fictional character constructed for the purpose of this book. What began as an exercise in parody, however, quickly become a toxic fascination. I began to imagine what Ian might look like, who his friends might be, what he would wear. I began to dress as Ian Snyder. I began to talk as Ian Snyder. I was slowly losing touch with who I, Ken-Doll Hairpin, was. Ian Snyder began to consume me. I need to take fast, drastic action. I found a stranger on the street and paid them in weekly in-stallments to pretend to be Ian Snyder in my stead. Thus far, my dark instinct toward masquerade is mitigated. I only wonder for how long.

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PH

yllis

ra

y-tay

lor

: FEAT

UR

ED C

OLLA

BO

RA

TO

R

Phyllis Ray-Taylor, having lived in Kansas City since the 3rd

grade, is a genuine product of the KCM

O school district. To-

day, she is an education coordinator at the Upper Room

Child

Developm

ent Center. O

n her off-hours she is a beautification practitioner and a proud thrifter w

ho turns trash into treasure on a regular basis. She lives w

ith her husband, Larry, and together they oversee the O

ak Street rental properties.

na

om

i o

’do

nn

ell

: F

EAT

UR

ED C

OLL

AB

OR

AT

OR

Tran

sfor

m yo

ur li

fe in

to a

rura

l ret

reat

toda

y!

Your

art

is o

nly

as g

ood

as th

e th

ings

it in

trod

uces

you

to.

Cel

ebra

te C

hrist

mas

in Ju

ly!

darlyn fincH KuHn : FEATURED WRITER

Darlyn Finch Kuhn is a writer currently based in Orlando, Florida. By day she works at Brad Kuhn & Associates, LLC, a public-rela-tions firm. She is the author of two poetry collections: Red Wax Rose and Three Houses (a collaboration with husband Brad Kuhn).

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fredericK Vorder-bruegge : FEATURED COLLABORATOR

Frederick Vorder-Bruegge rides trains in the moonlight and pets his doggie under the sun. He hails from Graceland, TN, or roundabouts that area, where he used to paint paintings with carpet hairs mixed in. His recent work is less furry and more criminal.

taylor Wallace : FEATURED WRITER

Taylor Wallace, born in Anchorage, Alaska, is a photogra-pher, poet, performance artist, and musician residing in an apartment situated on the heart-attack-of-post-structuralism of a moniker, ‘Oak Street, Kansas City, Missouri, 64111’. He came to find himself pursuing a B.F.A. double major in Pho-tography and Creative Writing at the Kansas City Art Institute through severely serendipitous circumstances, and has made money with disparate examples of jobs such as residential painting, freelance photography, vineyard harvester, handy-man, and nearly auditioned for an adult film web series.

tea

l W

ilso

n :

FEA

TU

RED

WR

ITER

Teal

Wils

on w

as b

orn

in th

e So

uthw

est,

mov

ed to

the

Mid

wes

t. Sh

e is

a V

irgo,

yea

r of

the

hors

e. S

he is

a lo

ving

sist

er, d

augh

ter,

and

mot

her (

to o

ne b

ig d

og).

She

has

a d

egre

e in

Pr

intm

akin

g fr

om th

e K

ansa

s City

Art

Inst

itute

. Sh

e en

joys

flav

ored

toot

hpic

ks a

nd a

rich

ca

bern

et sa

uvig

non.

steP

Hen

Ken

t : FEA

TU

RED

CO

LLAB

OR

AT

OR

Stephen Kent was raised in Pennsylvanian suburbs

from the m

id 80’s through the 90

’s until the early 20

00

’s when he attended university to learn how

to be an artist. A

fterwards, he m

oved to Philadelphia. H

e currently lives, works, eats, sleeps and som

etimes

reads at Cranbrook A

cademy of A

rt, located in more

suburbs, where he is about to com

plete his Master’s

of Fine Arts. H

e will be m

oving to Berlin shortly.

H A T S

H A T S O F F

Edition No. 200

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