CREATIVE TIME: Clayton Yan

On October 12, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts are partnering to host a live-streaming of the Creative Time Summit, an annual conference in New York that brings together cultural producers--including artists, critics, writers, and curators--to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. To jump-start the conversation in advance of the event, attendees have been asked to submit a paragraph on a keyword associated with one of the summit themes: Inequities, Occupations, Making, or Tactics. This posting is by Clayton Yan, B.S. candidate in Business Administration at UC Berkeley.

Keyword: Inequities

Associated most frequently with the growing wealth disparity in the US and the world. It’s interesting to see this especially with the spotlight recently on the US presidential elections, with a lot of flak on Mitt Romney for being a ‘disenchanted’ political candidate. It seems as though there are two different types of groups within the wealthy here in America. One group that focuses on continuing the elevated social status of the wealthy, distancing themselves from the rest of society. Their belief comes from the fact that their wealth has the ability to literally move the economy and make a splash within the country. The second group are those that intend to move their money to affect positive change within society. Those of the likes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, pledging their massive wealth after they pass away. The economic inequities that occur within our society are bound to happen due to the nature of people within groups. But it is interesting to see how we can address the growing wealth gap. The poor within society really don’t have many options of decreasing this gap. It almost falls completely on wealthy to increase or decrease the gap. 

CREATIVE TIME: Maureen Towey

On October 12, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts are partnering to host a live-streaming of the Creative Time Summit, an annual conference in New York that brings together cultural producers--including artists, critics, writers, and curators--to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. To jump-start the conversation in advance of the event, attendees have been asked to submit a paragraph on a keyword associated with one of the summit themes: Inequities, Occupations, Making, or Tactics. This posting is by Maureen Towey, TCG Leadership Fellow at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre.

Keyword: Making

I just returned from a wild working weekend with Sojourn Theater  at an unlikely location in St. Louis. We were invited to the Catholic Charities Annual Conference as their artists-in-residence – this is a convening of about 100 local chapter organizations who all share a social justice mission. For my nine colleagues and I, our goal was to interview as many of the attendees as we could and then create a 30 minute performance for their closing session that would reflect back the biggest questions and tensions of the conference. 

This type of Making is whirlwind. We conduct a day of pre-conference rehearsals to create an outline for staging that we can drop our text into once it comes. Then we conduct back to back interviews, quickly type up the notes, send them back to our writer who edits and adapts as we go. We break out and attend key sessions of the conference that will help us to understand some of the more complicated issues at the heart of the work. We learn songs that our composer is writing based on what he has heard in the interviews. We rehearse, we interview some more, we adjust the script. We tailor our work to our audience (ie: Will a room full of Catholic activists be offended by booty dancing or will they appreciate it?). We try to synthesize what we have heard. 

And then, on very little sleep, we perform for hundreds of people. We were surprised by where the audience laughed. There was visible tension as we tiptoed through some loaded issues. We saw people light up hearing their own words on stage. In the world of this conference, I felt useful in a really concrete way. For me to take my theater tools and use them in a different context like this, it is thrilling. I always forget that most people do not get to play as part of their work. Our playing is able to clarify and re-contextualize their experience. It’s important for us as artists to seek out these contexts where our Making takes on new meaning. 

CREATIVE TIME: Sara Kimberlin

On October 12, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts are partnering to host a live-streaming of the Creative Time Summit, an annual conference in New York that brings together cultural producers--including artists, critics, writers, and curators--to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. To jump-start the conversation in advance of the event, attendees have been asked to submit a paragraph on a keyword associated with one of the summit themes: Inequities, Occupations, Making, or Tactics. This posting is by Sara Kimberlin, PhD Candidate in Social Welfare at UC Berkeley.

Keyword: Translation

As someone rooted in the world of policy rather than art, I am struck by the question, posed in a post below by Dee Hibbert-Jones, of "how exactly do gestures of resistance so powerful and empowering translate into ideas of universal healthcare, social equality, fair-minded tax policies and equitable banking polices"?  The inequitable distribution of wealth, income, and access to public goods like education are (were?) central concerns of the Occupy movement.  Perhaps because of where I am situated, it seems to me that achieving any large-scale and sustainable redistribution of these components of privilege requires *making* not just critical gestures and temporary public spaces of resistance, but also engaging with government and *making* policy.

I think I understand why the movement initially resisted directly engaging with government or even articulating specific policy demands – part of the power of the Occupy gesture was demonstrating the possibility of a radically separate and democratic public space, uncorrupted by the oppressive norms and structures tacitly accepted as "business as usual" in government.  But now, a year later, I wonder if it would be appropriate to attend more directly to the task of translation from gesture to policy.  Revolutionary dissolution of government via the Occupy movement seems clearly unlikely at this point – so is it time to occupy the policy process instead?  To publicize not just private spaces, but also public spaces?  Who will take responsibility for the work of translation?

CREATIVE TIME: Shannon Jackson

On October 12, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts are partnering to host a live-streaming of the Creative Time Summit, an annual conference in New York that brings together cultural producers--including artists, critics, writers, and curators--to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. To jump-start the conversation in advance of the event, attendees have been asked to submit a paragraph on a keyword associated with one of the summit themes: Inequities, Occupations, Making, or Tactics. This posting is by Shannon Jackson, Director of the Arts Research Center and Professor of Rhetoric and of Theater, Dance and Performance Studies at UC Berkeley.

Keyword: Making

This word-- MAKING -- appears to be the most neutral of Creative Time's keywords this year.  But I think I want to use it to reflect upon the not entirely neutral factors that prompt some artists, critics, art administrators, and activist citizens to feel hailed by the Creative Time Summit while others barely know that it exists.  The requisite quips and critiques aside, this 800-person gathering--one that reaches a global viewing audience in the tens of thousands-- is an achievement for those who happen to believe that art has something to do with social engagement.  So why isn't everyone tuning in? Given ARC's remit -- to create gatherings that bring all of the arts and their allied fields into conversation -- I can't help but reflect on this question.

One answer would say that it has to do with a commitment to so-called "traditional" forms of MAKING.  Artists who have been trained in particular techniques and styles want to see those techniques and styles validated. The perception is that Creative Time asks artists to modify, expand, or re-skill in order to engage the social, in other words, to give up the skills and techniques in which they excel and which they hold dear.  How can we address this concern, or fear of being de-valued?  And how do we address it in a world emerging artists are told that certain kinds of MAKING are the key to professional success, key to a living wage, key perhaps to an art market success that far exceeds a living wage?  How can we support artists who might put their skills toward a different kind of MAKING--and ensure their livelihoods in return?

A second kind of answer would focus on which traditions of MAKING we think Creative Time artists are expanding, and which traditions of MAKING are not tracked by Creative Time's radar in the first place.  The interventions of celebrity musicians notwithstanding (Anderson, Byrne), most of the socially-engaged, public artists who appear on the CT radar come from a visual art world.  These are artists who reject or modify their relationship with a visual art world, surely, but they nevertheless know a world that has certain financial protocols--involving (or not) gallery representation, involving (or not) the selling of documentation, involving (or not) solo shows, group shows, and maybe even mid-career retrospectives.  What about artists for whom such protocols are unfamiliar, exotic, even alien?  What about artists who are told that their careers will be made at the box office?  or with copyright? or on royalties?   What about artists whose MAKING focuses on narrative, on unsettling the concept of character, or in re-imagining it means to move, what it means to listen, or what it means to inhabit a functional space?  In other words, how can we address with equal depth the techniques, styles, vocabularies, and professional networks that derive from the history of choreography, of theater, of film, of architecture, of music, of literature, and more? 

There are many socially-engaged artists out there, and they routinely attend gatherings throughout the world that focus on the social role of the art form in which they excel.   But still only a portion of these MAKERS know to tune in to Creative Time.  I think that getting and keeping their attention will require an expansion of what we think MAKING means. With an enlarged sense of who the MAKERS are, perhaps we can enlarge our sense of what we might, in fact, MAKE together.

CREATIVE TIME: Andrew Weiner

On October 12, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts are partnering to host a live-streaming of the Creative Time Summit, an annual conference in New York that brings together cultural producers--including artists, critics, writers, and curators--to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. To jump-start the conversation in advance of the event, attendees have been asked to submit a paragraph on a keyword associated with one of the summit themes: Inequities, Occupations, Making, or Tactics. This posting is by Andrew Weiner, lecturer in Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts.

Keyword: Tactics

Can the concept of tactics itself still serve a tactical purpose? One answer to this question would start by considering the extent to which “tactics” has become overdetermined in our present conjuncture. A genealogy of the term in its current sense would trace back through Michel de Certeau’s well-known appropriations of military theory to its usage in France circa 1968 around the Situationist International (as in Raoul Vaneigem’s Revolution of Everyday Life). Such a genealogy would have to account for the resonances, divergences, and repetitions linking contemporary examples (the “tactical media” of Critical Art Ensemble, Electronic Disturbance Theater, the Yes Men) with their better-known and lesser-known antecedents (the SI, ACT-UP; Muntadas, People’s Video Theater). It would have to register the persistent entanglement of what Jacques Ranciére has referred to as the two logics of critical art: namely those of autonomy (art as art) and heteronomy (art into life/politics/society/media/etc).

We should also admit that the concept of tactics is badly in need of critique. The language of tactics can be highly militaristic, which is to say it often indulges outmoded fantasies of avant-gardism, not to mention a hypertrophied version of masculinity. Tactics can be a fetish: a specular inversion of powerlessness into power; an idealization of the guerrilla by affluent Northern elites, whether 68-er Maoists or those who would claim their legacy today. Then there is the recurrent debate across the Occupy movement about whether to sanction a “diversity of tactics,” a euphemism for violence against property, among other things. People like Rebecca Solnit have thoughtfully questioned how a nonviolent collective movement benefits from breaking the windows of a supermarket; in return they have been called nasty names in anonymous online forums.

These problems aside, political resistance would seem to have to be tactical. But art? I think I know what art wants to be when it identifies itself with tactics, but it’s less clear what it might be giving away, and whether that price is too steep. In order to say, I would want to know whether tactics are compatible with blindness, intransigence, mournfulness, generosity...

CREATIVE TIME: Helena Keeffe

On October 12, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts are partnering to host a live-streaming of the Creative Time Summit, an annual conference in New York that brings together cultural producers--including artists, critics, writers, and curators--to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. To jump-start the conversation in advance of the event, attendees have been asked to submit a paragraph on a keyword associated with one of the summit themes: Inequities, Occupations, Making, or Tactics. This posting is by Helena Keeffe, artist.

Keyword: Inequities

It seems to me that one of the ways inequities stay in place is through our ability to separate ourselves from the Other. Powerful stories erode that ability. I recently watched a video interview with Edward Saïd in which he referred to Gramsci's "The Prison Notebooks," specifically the idea that history deposits in us an infinity of traces and that we should try to understand our own history in terms of other people's histories. Saïd concludes the interview by talking about the need for creativity and invention to find a solution to the ongoing conflicts between Israel and Palestine. It was humbling to hear someone whose own family was displaced by Israeli occupation remain committed to empathy as a viable path. I'm looking forward to thinking more deeply about this subject of the role of creativity in conflict resolution with fellow simulcast attendees.

CREATIVE TIME: Megan Hoetger

On October 12, the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley and the Curatorial Practice at the California College of the Arts are partnering to host a live-streaming of the Creative Time Summit, an annual conference in New York that brings together cultural producers--including artists, critics, writers, and curators--to discuss how their work engages pressing issues affecting our world. To jump-start the conversation in advance of the event, attendees have been asked to submit a paragraph on a keyword associated with one of the summit themes: Inequities, Occupations, Making, or Tactics. This posting is by Megan Hoetger, CSLB student and critic.

Keyword: Creativity

Joseph Beuys is remembered as having claimed that “everyone is an artist.” For years, in the imaginary conversation going on with him in my head, I would respond “well, everyone has creative potential.” What, I wonder today, was the distinction I was drawing there? Moreover, why did it matter to me so much to draw such a distinction? What, in other words, was the difference between being creative and being artistic? I still don’t know that I have an answer to these questions and I cannot even say with certainty that there is a difference, but I came to understand that the identification of the artistic (the artist) was contingent on institutional and market forces; in other words, built into the ways in which “Art” comes to be identified and defined is an inequality, as system marked by inclusion and exclusion. The artistic, for me, was a closed system with clearly delineated positions whereas creativity (the creative individual) was something more free-floating, related to our “mental imagining” and, to cite Elaine Scarry, “the way other persons become visible to us…the way we make ourselves (and the originally interior facts of sentience) available to one another through verbal and material artifacts” (The Body in Pain, 22). At stake in both the artistic and the creative are ethical issues around representation, the act of representing (or not), and the ways in which the object produced (whether a mental image or plastic thing) does and does not manifest the non-object state to which it refers. What can the creative offer us, though, that artistic cannot? Are they simply two parallel but discrete systems that I have conflated? What is their relationship?