I am starting this string in response to our discussion about the format of the group during our meeting in mid-July. First, I'd like to re-state the mission that's on the Multipoint tab of the website for Small Wonder Foundation. Multipoint is an artists' working group for professional level artists who are interested in exploring the nature of cultural production in contemporary times. It is an egalitarian group with one or another person taking an administrative role (this may shift as projects arise) that facilitates meetings and logistics, but all participants have an equal status and decisions should be made based on consensus, which involves negotiation and understanding (a more difficult tasks than majority votes).
It is possible to provide critique for current work or discussion about the direction of work, but it is really about sharing ideas, pushing our notions of what it means to make art, write, criticize, educate, etc. in today's cultural climate. This can involve a variety of directions.
I'd love if we could exchange a little about how this type of group might resolve conflict, engage with a variety of communication styles, find links and generate the unexpected out of all this.
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I have made strings on some of the topics I have noticed arising. Please add new strings for ideas you see developing or post questions you have about what can/will happen within Multipoint.
i particularly love the idea of pushing our notions of what it means to make art, sharing those ideas and ...generating the unexpected out of all this!
since i'm usually quiet in groups so this is a stretch for me. i do best in intimate situations, one on one. but i'm going to push myself to engage more. i may appear to act aloof and indifferent, but i'm truly excited about our group and what we're doing.
20 July 2007 20:26
Re-reading my original post, I wanted to expand on the notion of exploration. I don't think this means sort of knocking our heads together once a month or doing a lot of self-congratulatory navel gazing (which is what it sort of sounded like I was suggesting, I think??).
I believe exploration entails getting at ideas through discussion but also through work, proposed projects/adventures, disagreement and debate, examining the possibilities for communication both amongst ourselves and with the rest of the world, too.
Eventually we all want something material and practical to do/make related to any discussion. As Sharon mentioned last week, (paraphrased) sometimes you have to feel your way through a vague notion you have of the idea and your groping reveals something deeper that you can push more consciously.
I would say that I have been thinking of a self managed artist group to be me making work which I open to being influenced by our group discussions. I think of showing the work regularly as feeding the discussion.
I would say that I'm more directly focused on developing what I think of as "personal" work than what you describe in your posting April. Perhaps this is because it is a big shifting of gears for me. I have been working exclusively as a commercial artist for about 5 years now. So making work without a customer requires reconnecting to a different creative practice.
I think that my personal needs require me to try to make a very direct immediate transition into art making.
I think in our last meeting I may have made it sound like my expectation was that the group is solely for critique. I definitely don't think that but I do think that finding a way to use showing work as discussion might be the most interesting discussion of all.
I think it's wonderful to be focusing more directly on making creative "personal" work. It takes a brave soul to concentrate on such an endeavor.
Multipoint does have a specific purpose as defined on the website and hopefully further articulated here. It is an element of the Small Wonder Foundation and it is a structure in which certain collaborative-type creative/ cultural pursuits are manifest.
It certainly would (hopefully) feed the individual group members' work and help it expand, evolve, and develop. It also needs to be about itself (the group that is); otherwise it is not true to its structure. What gets accomplished or doesn't get accomplished within the parameters of each meeting, each stint of groupness will certainly vary depending on the interests of the members.
I am looking to expand the boundaries of contemporary culture. I want to do something really significant here. It means the individuals must get the support they need to advance their work. It also means the working group functionality needs to have equal priority. That is the challenge!
Collaboration is a way to make these connections and then break them and then make them again through work, discussion, relation, mistake, disagreement, denoument, uncertainty, exploration, experimentation, fear, confidence, and on and one. It's leaning on one another through work, through thought, through collision, through growth until an incredible web of relation and lines of flight that criscross and connect is developed. Each person's individual experience of this is different and valuable and does not need to be anything predefined. The nature of it is perhaps a bit more like PS's mucuous and film (from the pastpresentfurture post) than like any kind of root system or architectural representation that we might have envisioned or been delivered of before. It can contain many things and it can discard others depending on the conscious of the collaborators. Musing along, please add.
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