Community Connections
Festive Experience as Continuity and Innovation in Community: Configuring Joy and Meaning through the Treeline Stages at the Annual Pickathon Music Festival
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Clive Knights
Diversion Design/Build Studio is a student-led creative experiment exploring the rich experiential qualities of music, architecture and landscape through the design and realization of temporary celebratory spaces, in particular a 1000-person outdoor music performance venue called the Treeline Stage at the annual Pickathon Music Festival every August at Pendarvis Farm, Happy Valley, Oregon, USA. The initiative deploys two core strategies in the design and installation of these full-size festival structures the temporary diversion, use and return of standard industrial materials, and, the temporary diversion of human experience from the mundane to the festive, the latter being one of the three key dimensions of the capacity for manifesting beauty identified by Gadamer alongside play and symbol. Pickathon has been at the leading edge of a growing number of arts organizations committed to the idea that collective gathering around the arts, particularly festivals, need not require an enormous carbon footprint if it engages thoughtful design. The Pickathon story, now in its 20th year, involves a constant re-thinking of the way materials are used and how consumption can be minimized, such as banning bottled water. Its founders continue to insist upon a creative agenda in all aspects of the event, thus inspiring a crucial conversation between the sustainable and the poetic. Using the example of five unique Treeline Stage designs, this paper argues for the continued relevance of festival experience for human meaning, where an ethics of making and material responsibility lies at the foundation of the possibility of community.
The Micropolitics and the Invisible Dimension of Portuguese Artist Collectives
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ermida Raquel
In these last two decades it can be observed a clear tendency among artists to work collectively. This is a cyclical phenomenon that can emerge in moments of political and economic uncertainty, as stated by Grant Kester. In Portugal a similar tendency has been noticed. However, the lack of a historiographic mapping of these collectives shows an evident need to undertake deeper research on the field in order to question the ratio essendi for a proliferation of artist collectives in some particular moments. Considering the concept of artistic common, the research aims at clarifying the role played by knowledge, language, codes, information and affects in the process of communication between the elements of a group and the production of the artistic work. What kind of semantic the dialogic basis of these collectives allows them to create? What sort of knowledge is produced when working collectively? Is it possible to speak specifically of a “savoir-faire artistique?” If so, can it make us reconsider the way of making art and the idea of art itself, when produced collectively? If the common is the biopolitical condition for life and democracy a form of life in common (Antonio Negri), is it possible to think a collective as a space of freedom where singularities can coexist, while suggesting new forms of sharing and producing the common? The research intends to determine whether art collectives have the capacity to reinvent the concept of democracy and be a transformative force of everyday action.
The Artist Precariat : Art in the Age of Hyper-gentrification
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mary Kosut
In New York City, the most famous, historic neighborhoods have at some point been home to painters, writers, musicians and cultural provocateurs. SoHo, Harlem, Washington Square park and the East Village were pollinated (not colonized) by artists. We value these places because they were sites of creative production and cultural experimentation; artistic laboring brought them to life and made them matter. Today these neighborhoods are landscapes of consumption, colonized by urban development that caters to the tastes and the wealth of the 21st century consuming class. Artists are still in New York, but are forced to live and work under conditions that are increasingly inhospitable due to sweeping structural changes that leave less privileged cultural producers scrambling – always on the run. Running from landlords, student loan bills, crummy credit scores and a profound feeling of powerlessness. There is a darkness. Some call it neoliberalism, the billionaire economy, hyper-gentrification, or global post-industrial capitalism. Whatever the label, the social contract is shattered. How can artists make it in an era of extreme wealth and widespread precarity? We may be coming to the end of a period where being an artist is synonymous with being urban. To quote Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, “Without artists in many ways the city will be without life”. Artists are essential to the cultural landscape of the city…We need artists for New York to be New York.” Drawing on a five year ethnographic study, I explore artistic precarity in 21st century New York City.
