newMedia(now&&then)
Monday, February 07, 2005
PAD ++ PAD/D
//another post to -emypre- follows below.
//i'm not sure if i will [port/pipe] all of my -empyre- posts to this blog
//or not...
//perhaps only when i have further thoughts on the posts...
From: joncates AT criticalartware.net
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Current preservation discussions and resources.
Date: February 7, 2005 12:01:02 AM CST
To: empyre AT lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Reply-To: empyre AT lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
On Feb 3, 2005, at 8:42 PM, noah wardrip-fruin wrote:
>It's probably also worth mentioning the Electronic Literature Organization's project in "Preservation,
>Archiving, and Dissemination" (PAD):
>http://www.eliterature.org/pad/
crossing paths w/various projects, here is sum nfo on another PAD that became PAD/D:
"What started as a straightforward call to establish an archive of politically committed art wound up instigating an ambitious new artist's collective. A decade before the emergence of the world wide web and prior to the introduction of the personal computer, one organization of artists and activists sought to produce a networked, parallel arena in which to nurture, theorize, display and distribute creative practices opposed to, or simply desperate to be something other than, capitalist culture. [the degradations of capitalism]. It began with a meeting called together February 24th, 1980 by the art critic Lucy R. Lippard. The call itself had been printed on the flip side of an invitation for an exhibition she organized at Artists Space featuring the "many good, socially active artists no one heard of." By using the mailed invite as an organizing tool, Lippard had also transgressed her own, presumed curatorial disengagement, a point I return to below. Nevertheless, on this winter's evening, a group of fifty or so artists, writers and veteran political activists eagerly answered her call. Lippard's planned agenda was to explore ways of archiving her swelling collection of documents about art with political intent. The meeting took place at Printed Matter Book Store that was then located on Lispenard Street in Downtown Manhattan. Lippard's plea to not found another organization was quickly disregarded and the rest of the story forms a chapter [is part of] in the unknown history of collective, activist art gradually being excavated by a new generation of historians."
<---CUT-PASTE--->
Within a year of its founding PAD/D was [indeed] making art as well as archiving. It was also programming public events, networking with other organizations, and publishing its own newsletter named simply 1st Issue. (And soon renamed Upfront after it became apparent that a many issues of 1st Issue would be extremely confounding.) Along with Upfront, the group also published a one-page calendar of progressive, cultural events in the NYC area called Red Letter Days. In sum, it would not be unfair to describe the driving force behind this frenetic, multileveled activity as a desire to unilaterally reconstruct the entire, corrupted world of bourgeois art from the bottom up. As the group stated in its first newsletter:
"PAD [/D] can not serve as a means of advancement within the art world structure of museums and galleries. Rather, we have to develop new forms of distribution economy as well as art... "
(Ibid.)
To achieve this objective, the group began developing plans for an organization of even larger size and complexity: a national or perhaps even international network of like-minded activist artists working in consort with non-art, progressive activists. If PAD/D's immediate goal was to organize a highly fractured, post-68 counter-culture, the group's larger vision sought to bring into being a bona-fide counter-hegemonic or oppositional public sphere. Woven from equal parts recovered genealogies (from the PAD/D archival materials) and politically sympathetic exhibition outlets (university galleries, labor unions, community centers, even church halls), this [hoped] longed-for, counter-hegemony was, more than anything else, the feature that set PAD/D apart from other, self-organized, art collectives then or since."
<---CUT-N-PASTE--->
"All this time however, the PAD/D Archive Committee intrepidly continued working on the extensive repository of political art. Consisting primarily of Barbara Moore and Mimi Smith, they catalogued and cross-referenced hundreds of entries by hand on standard index cards. In 1989, The PAD/D Archive originally conceived as a form of counter-cultural activism in which models of politically engaged art -making would be circulated like a tactical toolbox finally found its lasting institutional home in the Museum of Modern Art Library. One of Clive Philpot's last acts before resigning from MoMA, the irony was not lost on former PAD/D members. In 1988 Deborah Wye, the Museum's Curator of Prints, organized an impressive survey of "political art" entitled Committed To Print in which the PAD/D Archives played a key research role. Nevertheless, the vast majority of work documented in the PAD/D Archives remains invisible today and forms the cultural equivalent of cosmic Dark Matter: that unknown, unseen material that constitutes the majority of actual universe. And this obscurity remains so, despite the contemporary art world's paying of lip service to "political correctness." With almost two thousand entries spanning the years 1979 to 1988 and including performance art, guerrilla actions, street posters, gallery based political art, as well as plans for an international art strike in 1969, the PAD/D Archive is a significant resource for a new generation currently rediscovering artistic collectivism. And if PAD/D was the focal point of the 1980's New York activist art scene that included such organizations as Group Material, Artists for Nuclear Disarmament, Art Against Apartheid, Carnival Knowledge and Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America, it also led to the formation of REPOhistory. In fact, not only was REPOhistory co-founded by several former PAD/D members, including Janet Koenig, the late Ed Eisenberg, Lucy R. Lippard, and myself, and thus benefited from PAD/D's organizational and networking know-how, but REPOhistory also inherited PAD/D’s Lafayette Street office space.
But as an activist organization can we say that PAD/D was a failure? Certainly as a means of repelling gentrification or of establishing an alternative realm of artistic practice it did not succeed. Yet the emergence of tactical media and new forms of collectivism over the past ten years suggest the possibility of establishing a counter-hegemonic, cultural sphere is not a linear process, just as the historical re-construction of groups such as PAD/D is part of a re-mapping that ultimately leads to questions about the nature of creative, political resistance itself.
Meanwhile, aspects of the political imagination of PAD/D remains visible today in such projects as Groups and Spaces and Nettime, as well as similar on and off-line networks dedicated to linking disassociated pockets of creative experimentation and resistance. As cultural producers are increasingly forced to choose between affirming the power of global capitalism or exploring new as well as old alternatives to it, PAD/D's legacy may become one history lesson necessary for survival."
data.src:
title: A Collectography of PAD/D, Political Art Documentation and Distribution: a 1980's Activist Art and Networking Collective
dvr: Gregory G. Sholette
as published in:
title: GROUPS and SPACES E-ZINE
edition: #0004 (Networking Part 2)
dvr: Brett Bloom
date: 2003
format: txt
uri: http://slash.interactivist.net/analysis/03/04/01/1532234.shtml
i thought -empyre- might be interested in this interconnection in relation to naming, archiving, organizational models, hystories, etc...
the full txt by Greg Sholette provides much more detail on the formation, organization + activities of PAD/D as well as providing links such as:
http://www.moma.org/research/library/library_faq.html#padd
to nfo about the PAD/D archive as hosted by the Museum Library @ the The Museum of Modern Art in NYC NY .US. this [connection/overlap] also raises interesting + suggestive ideas about operations between institutional agencies + [organizations/projects] that function as oppositional, hystorical reconstructions, self-organization + documentation...
// jonCates
edu: http://www.artic.edu/~jcates
collab: http://www.criticalartware.net
projs: http://www.systemsapproach.net/
new: http://netbehaviouralist.blogspot.com/
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre AT lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
//i'm not sure if i will [port/pipe] all of my -empyre- posts to this blog
//or not...
//perhaps only when i have further thoughts on the posts...
From: joncates AT criticalartware.net
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Current preservation discussions and resources.
Date: February 7, 2005 12:01:02 AM CST
To: empyre AT lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Reply-To: empyre AT lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
On Feb 3, 2005, at 8:42 PM, noah wardrip-fruin wrote:
>It's probably also worth mentioning the Electronic Literature Organization's project in "Preservation,
>Archiving, and Dissemination" (PAD):
>http://www.eliterature.org/pad/
crossing paths w/various projects, here is sum nfo on another PAD that became PAD/D:
"What started as a straightforward call to establish an archive of politically committed art wound up instigating an ambitious new artist's collective. A decade before the emergence of the world wide web and prior to the introduction of the personal computer, one organization of artists and activists sought to produce a networked, parallel arena in which to nurture, theorize, display and distribute creative practices opposed to, or simply desperate to be something other than, capitalist culture. [the degradations of capitalism]. It began with a meeting called together February 24th, 1980 by the art critic Lucy R. Lippard. The call itself had been printed on the flip side of an invitation for an exhibition she organized at Artists Space featuring the "many good, socially active artists no one heard of." By using the mailed invite as an organizing tool, Lippard had also transgressed her own, presumed curatorial disengagement, a point I return to below. Nevertheless, on this winter's evening, a group of fifty or so artists, writers and veteran political activists eagerly answered her call. Lippard's planned agenda was to explore ways of archiving her swelling collection of documents about art with political intent. The meeting took place at Printed Matter Book Store that was then located on Lispenard Street in Downtown Manhattan. Lippard's plea to not found another organization was quickly disregarded and the rest of the story forms a chapter [is part of] in the unknown history of collective, activist art gradually being excavated by a new generation of historians."
<---CUT-PASTE--->
Within a year of its founding PAD/D was [indeed] making art as well as archiving. It was also programming public events, networking with other organizations, and publishing its own newsletter named simply 1st Issue. (And soon renamed Upfront after it became apparent that a many issues of 1st Issue would be extremely confounding.) Along with Upfront, the group also published a one-page calendar of progressive, cultural events in the NYC area called Red Letter Days. In sum, it would not be unfair to describe the driving force behind this frenetic, multileveled activity as a desire to unilaterally reconstruct the entire, corrupted world of bourgeois art from the bottom up. As the group stated in its first newsletter:
"PAD [/D] can not serve as a means of advancement within the art world structure of museums and galleries. Rather, we have to develop new forms of distribution economy as well as art... "
(Ibid.)
To achieve this objective, the group began developing plans for an organization of even larger size and complexity: a national or perhaps even international network of like-minded activist artists working in consort with non-art, progressive activists. If PAD/D's immediate goal was to organize a highly fractured, post-68 counter-culture, the group's larger vision sought to bring into being a bona-fide counter-hegemonic or oppositional public sphere. Woven from equal parts recovered genealogies (from the PAD/D archival materials) and politically sympathetic exhibition outlets (university galleries, labor unions, community centers, even church halls), this [hoped] longed-for, counter-hegemony was, more than anything else, the feature that set PAD/D apart from other, self-organized, art collectives then or since."
<---CUT-N-PASTE--->
"All this time however, the PAD/D Archive Committee intrepidly continued working on the extensive repository of political art. Consisting primarily of Barbara Moore and Mimi Smith, they catalogued and cross-referenced hundreds of entries by hand on standard index cards. In 1989, The PAD/D Archive originally conceived as a form of counter-cultural activism in which models of politically engaged art -making would be circulated like a tactical toolbox finally found its lasting institutional home in the Museum of Modern Art Library. One of Clive Philpot's last acts before resigning from MoMA, the irony was not lost on former PAD/D members. In 1988 Deborah Wye, the Museum's Curator of Prints, organized an impressive survey of "political art" entitled Committed To Print in which the PAD/D Archives played a key research role. Nevertheless, the vast majority of work documented in the PAD/D Archives remains invisible today and forms the cultural equivalent of cosmic Dark Matter: that unknown, unseen material that constitutes the majority of actual universe. And this obscurity remains so, despite the contemporary art world's paying of lip service to "political correctness." With almost two thousand entries spanning the years 1979 to 1988 and including performance art, guerrilla actions, street posters, gallery based political art, as well as plans for an international art strike in 1969, the PAD/D Archive is a significant resource for a new generation currently rediscovering artistic collectivism. And if PAD/D was the focal point of the 1980's New York activist art scene that included such organizations as Group Material, Artists for Nuclear Disarmament, Art Against Apartheid, Carnival Knowledge and Artists Call Against US Intervention in Central America, it also led to the formation of REPOhistory. In fact, not only was REPOhistory co-founded by several former PAD/D members, including Janet Koenig, the late Ed Eisenberg, Lucy R. Lippard, and myself, and thus benefited from PAD/D's organizational and networking know-how, but REPOhistory also inherited PAD/D’s Lafayette Street office space.
But as an activist organization can we say that PAD/D was a failure? Certainly as a means of repelling gentrification or of establishing an alternative realm of artistic practice it did not succeed. Yet the emergence of tactical media and new forms of collectivism over the past ten years suggest the possibility of establishing a counter-hegemonic, cultural sphere is not a linear process, just as the historical re-construction of groups such as PAD/D is part of a re-mapping that ultimately leads to questions about the nature of creative, political resistance itself.
Meanwhile, aspects of the political imagination of PAD/D remains visible today in such projects as Groups and Spaces and Nettime, as well as similar on and off-line networks dedicated to linking disassociated pockets of creative experimentation and resistance. As cultural producers are increasingly forced to choose between affirming the power of global capitalism or exploring new as well as old alternatives to it, PAD/D's legacy may become one history lesson necessary for survival."
data.src:
title: A Collectography of PAD/D, Political Art Documentation and Distribution: a 1980's Activist Art and Networking Collective
dvr: Gregory G. Sholette
as published in:
title: GROUPS and SPACES E-ZINE
edition: #0004 (Networking Part 2)
dvr: Brett Bloom
date: 2003
format: txt
uri: http://slash.interactivist.net/analysis/03/04/01/1532234.shtml
i thought -empyre- might be interested in this interconnection in relation to naming, archiving, organizational models, hystories, etc...
the full txt by Greg Sholette provides much more detail on the formation, organization + activities of PAD/D as well as providing links such as:
http://www.moma.org/research/library/library_faq.html#padd
to nfo about the PAD/D archive as hosted by the Museum Library @ the The Museum of Modern Art in NYC NY .US. this [connection/overlap] also raises interesting + suggestive ideas about operations between institutional agencies + [organizations/projects] that function as oppositional, hystorical reconstructions, self-organization + documentation...
// jonCates
edu: http://www.artic.edu/~jcates
collab: http://www.criticalartware.net
projs: http://www.systemsapproach.net/
new: http://netbehaviouralist.blogspot.com/
_______________________________________________
empyre forum
empyre AT lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
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