[echo] Let's remake the world III, YNKB/Copenhagen, 22 - 24 Februar 2008

[m. chevalier]

http://www.ynkb.dk/eng/2008.shtml


Let’s Remake the World III
Seminar and Workshop 22-23-24 February 2008
I YNKB
Baldersgade 70. st. tv.
2200 København N
Phone: 0045 35851037 – 0045 20613173 – 004560810218

This is the third event in a series initiated by the
Library of Radiant Optimism (Brett Bloom + Bonnie
Fortune) and YNKB, which started in late 2006 with The
Radiantly Optimistic Poster Show! exhibited at YNKB,
December 2006, and at Messhall, Chicago, June 2007.
This exhibition was followed by a seminar in Messhall:
What We Know of Our Past - What We Demand of Our
Future, January 18-20, 2008.

We are inspired by the groundswell of optimistic and
visionary activities in the late 1960s and early
1970s. We are interested in this time period and the
massive counter-cultural movement it produced in the
face of international political and social turmoil. We
find ourselves in a similar global environment of
unprecedented crises, and we are wondering how we can
make visible and cohesive the currently existing
activities. Is there potential to add to the
optimistic histories of past activism with our own
movements? This project seeks to not only create a
discussion about the place of optimism in the face of
war, environmental devastation, and global capitalism,
but to examine how optimism can help fuel positive
change in a realistic way. 
We are all participants, no listeners.

Schedule
The programme is subject to alteration

Friday, February 22

14:00: Let’s remake the world III, Introduction by
YNKB

14: 30:
Claire Pentecost

16.00
John Jordan
I tend to swing between two ways of feeling and
thinking around hope. One is critiquing hope in the
way that Derek Jensen does when he writes about giving
up on hope because it restrains our agency, ( see
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/170/
). The other is looking at hope like Rebecca Solnit
does in her fantastic little book "Hope In The Dark"
where she sees hope in the unexspected nature of
history, in the fact that history is always ready to
be made and that the best act of hope is to act in the
present moment with no expectations of consequences ..
she echoes Ursula Le Guin a bit who wrote.."In order
to speculate safely on an inhabitable future, perhaps
we would do well to find a rock crevice and go
backward...With all our self-consciousness, we have
very little sense of where we live, where we are right
here right now."

17: 00
Sarah Lewison
Performance : Land Access to Which is Denied No ONe
(1970)
A reenactment of the appeal case of "The People of the
State of California vs. Lou Gottlieb" in which
Northern California resident Lou Gottlieb defended his
Constitutional right to deed his land to God.
The event is presented by Sarah Lewison with special
guests 'playing' members of the court, and will be
followed by a discussion of this historic case and its
implications.

In 1969, Lou Gottlieb was facing a State-ordered
injunction against letting people live on his 31-acre
ranch, home of the legendary Morningstar Commune, so
he signed over the title of his property to God. His
motivation was both complex and simple: an
attempt keep this land open for all who needed it and
loved it, in perpetuity.
He saw in this act an opening for remediation of the
earth and of human relations.
The court case that followed was a fascinating and
sometimes comic effort on behalf of the State
government and the court to deny Gottlieb's claim
without having to examine the concept of ownership or
deny the existence of God.
Gottlieb wrote, ..."if land is held as a source of
profit, that opens a certain pattern of reactive
behavior which is very well-established..... How
really should we live on the
earth when we are not concerned at least with this
tiny, little pilot study with maximizing the net?"
Reading is about 40 min, followed by discussion.

19:30
Dinner: YNKB Folkekøkken

2100 -22:00
Music by HavblikAudio

 

Saturday 23 february

10:00 Coffee and bread

11:00 Brett Bloom
The Library of Radiant Optimism for Let’s Re-Make the
World gathers how-to publications borne out of the
massive counter cultural groundswell in the late 1960s
/ early 1970s of people who wanted to take apart and
re-assemble the broken world they inherited.
Activists, citizens, designers, artists, radicals,
housewives, environmentalists and others worked
together to challenge received notions of women’s
health care, the built environment, authoritarian
political and social structures, and the impoverished
imaginary of everyday existence. My talk will focus on
the books from the Library and by extension the
different forms and areas of resistance that they
encapsulate.

12:00 Michel Chevalier
"unlimited liability"—a firewall against art-market
cooptation, and resulting (de)mobilizational effects.
In 1969 Lucy Lippard wrote, "the artists who are
trying to do non-object art are introducing a drastic
solution to the problems of artists being bought and
sold so easily, along with their art (...)."
In the Summers of 2006 and 2007, I tried to provide a
less drastic, but in my view more precise, response to
the influence of commercial galleries and collectors
(not to mention their obliging "critics" and curators)
on art production. I opened a shop that sold
inexpensive art-multiples under the terms of contract
that stipulated that no purchaser could have more than
€50,000 in assets, subject to penalty in case of false
disclosure.
I will briefly present the Hamburg context of this
project, 'unlimited liability', consider it in light
of Marx's critique of the commodity form, and try to
summarize the media resonance and mixed reactions this
project had.
http://targetautonopop.org:

13:00 Lunch

14:00-15:00 Kirsten Forkert
Title: Solidarity as both a necessary and elusive
concept
My starting point is that one important way of
countering cynicism, defeatism and opportunism (I see
each as them as all closely related) is through
creating forms of solidarity. I'm not saying that a
concept such as solidarity doesn't have to be reworked
and reconsidered, especially if it is going to be
useful for artists in any way.
However, I'm also concerned about how easily it is
dismissed as unfashionable, outmoded and even
unthinkable in certain contexts.

In my talk, which is based on my research on artists'
working conditions, I will speculate on how we can
both imagine and enact forms of solidarity in a
neoliberal climate (where entrepreneurialism is seen
to be the only form of political empowerment),
recently marked by the rapid expansion of the art
market (with the associated values of competition and
meritocracy, and the entrenching of conservative
definitions of the artist's role). What are ways of
working together and supporting each other? How can we
learn from the successes and failures of past
initiatives?

15:00: Keith Stern-Pirlot
Control is freezing the world’s becoming, thereby
fixing us and everything else on this planet so that
ALL can be manipulated in whatever ways fuel the
autonomic system that, ironically, doesn’t even
benefit its chief functionaries. But with the bursting
of the global credit bubble, we may be at a watershed
moment in time. Not since the 1930s has capitalist
“society” faced such a serious economic crisis; and
with crises, opportunity and change often follows.
This presentation will explore some ways that Life can
escape the kingdom of clones so as to give rise to the
new.

17
Short Statements: (All participants must prepare a
short statement: 10 minutes each)
Mette Kit Jensen/RACA
YNKB
Learning Site
Kristine Ask
Nis Rømer
Copenhagen Free University
Public Globality Gardens
Parfyme
Jamie Stapleton
Other participants?

18:00
Discussion for a Joint Statement

20:00
Dinner Artist and Musician Michel Chevalier

21:00 – 22:00
Music: Peter Dacke


Sunday 24 February

11:00
Workshop
Turning the joint statement into action. Bring
materials.

13:00
Lunch

14:00
Workshop
Turning the joint statement into action. Bring
materials.

19:00
Dinner by Claire Pentecost

20: Music: Henning Frimann og Elisabetta Saiu



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