David Robbins – An Imaginative Elsewhere
“All the time, though, my sensibility pointed toward and yearned for an imaginative Elsewhere. I became increasingly dissatisfied with the narrowness of art as a formulation of the imagination. This will sound preposterous to many people, I’m aware, given that art offers and represents extraordinary behavioral freedoms, but in “making art” I found an ultimately enslaving formulation. How so? In art, you can do, yes, anything you want so long as you’re willing to have it end up as art. That isn’t real imaginative freedom, in my view. Inquisitiveness of mind will carry you past art, and apparently I love inquisitiveness of mind more than I love art.” – David Robbins [emphasis mine]
Sunday Soup Houston – InCUBATE – SKYDIVE – Saturday Free School for the Arts
Saturday, April 4th 2009
I’m doing a talk with InCUBATE at the Saturday Free School for the Arts in Houston, TX.
“Saturday Free School for the Arts will offer a range of skill shares, lectures, and workshops. It is a fluid structure where teachers become students and pupils can become teachers. Members of the community will be invited to teach and may also propose seminars. In the tradition of free schools, the Saturday Free School is an ever shifting and open collective of artists and participants, who gather together at the Skydive, a contemporary arts space in Houston. Saturday Free School for the Arts remains responsive to the interests of its participants. Through a community of artists Saturday Free School offers freedom from expensive and immutable educational institutions. Saturday Free School for the Arts provides workshops, classes and skill-shares at no cost to it’s participants.”
Sunday, April 5th 2009
Sunday Soup at SKYDIVE. Nancy Zastudil and I are bringing InCUBATE to Houston for Sunday Soup Texas style.
“SKYDIVE utilizes an open and collaborative model for producing its programming. A group of artists, curators, and other professionals function as Advisors to help create shows, invite artists, and collaborate in the mission and programming of the space. Participants in SKYDIVE will be invited to Houston for a sustained number of days, previous to the exhibition to make their work, interact with the Houston community and see the sites in Houston and surrounding areas.”
Michael Stickrod – He Said She Said – Review
Our current show at He Said – She Said featuring Michael Stickrod received this nice review.
Slacker – Leisure – n.e.w.s – Stephen Wright
FYI:
An online slacker summit will take place from 1/2-1/6 at n.e.w.s.
Cutting Slack
By both slacking off from the imperative to work and, symmetrically, deliberately abstaining from leisure, slackers embody a fascinating – and for the productivist majority, infuriating – performative paradox. Slackers don’t “just” slack off; they go at it full-tilt. Performing laziness – that is, the studied and ostentatious practice of doing not much – is all-consuming. But is it subversive? Does it have seditious potential within a regime of productivism? Can it be decreative, obstructing the reifying thrust of the “creative” industry and class with their “artistic research projects”? To answer these questions in the affirmative is to imagine that slackers might come to constitute something of a political community, however slack. But, as Randall Szott has asked, are communities formed by slack not also bound by slack, that is, to entropic collapse without even really working at it? Or can they, martial arts-style, lackadasically harness the surplus force of the productivist adversary? Over the course of this weekend forum, we will ride the slack tide to consider these questions. In suitably slack fashion.
The moderator will be Stephen Wright.
I’ll be the “special guest.”
Confirmed participants include:
Brian Holmes – Continental Drift
Chris Carlsson – Nowtopia and Processed World
Andy Abbott – Festival of Pastimes and http://www.andyabbott.co.uk/
Katherine Carl – NAO
Sal Randolph – http://salrandolph.com/
Hideous Beast – http://www.hideousbeast.com/
Many more T.B.A
Please contact me if you’d like more info on how to join the conversation!
Lebenskünstler 
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