A research event by
Temple Crocker
&
Ric Royer
Fall 2003
Contents:
1 Project Abstract
2 Essay on Haptactics (Royer)
3 Pen Palism Manifestos (Royer/Crocker)
4 Gift-Exchange, Ritual and Community (Crocker)
5 Art as Gift vs. Art as Commodity (Royer)
6 Collaboration Response (Royer)
7 Collaboration Response (Crocker)
8 Haptactics Index
9 Bibliography
1
Project Abstract
To discover a mutual interest on which to develop a research project, Ric Royer
and Temple Crocker sat in Royer’s attic discussing issues, aesthetics,
and practices that were of personal concern. Locating the intimacy in art and
the art in intimacy was a topic they considered important to explore in an art
world that seems to follow the impersonal current of the modern business-driven
world. Their feeling was that life needs more art, but also that art needs more
life.
The research event included a distribution of postal assignments, a dinner,
a site-specific interactive installation, and this research paper. Some of the
areas of research that were followed during the process of the project include
gift-exchange rituals, mail art, site-specific art, contemporary poetics, economics
and anthropology.
The process that began in the attic was eventually completed there with an installation
that included relics of the postal exchanges, ritual paraphernalia, dessert
and other related elements that unified the various threads of the research.
The final presentation took place on December 9, 2003 at Ric Royer’s apartment
in Baltimore, MD.
2
Haptactics to Pen Palism
By nature of its practical intentions, I shouldn’t be referencing haptactics
in this paper at all.
I formed the idea of haptactics [a coinage fusing haptics, acts, tactics, and
possibly tact, hap or happenstance] as a response to issues that became important
to me while involved in community of poets in Buffalo. A topic of frequent debate
was over the generosity of contemporary poetics. Some considered most contemporary
experimental writers to be exclusive group interested only in the aggrandizement
of the importance of their own work; others found the narrowing of audience
through language and reference to be a unique form of communication in a unique
community of creators. One side argues that there is a complete lack of generosity,
while the other argues that it is a rare practice of true generosity in the
arts.
I never found myself securely positioned on either side of the polemic. Though
I tend to agree that the academic poetry scene is overly political, notoriously
incestuous and cliquish, I found something very vital in thinking about creative
acts as adhesive for keeping a small reliable community together.
Does intimate art tend to ignore the masses and favor a small elite group of
initiates? Or is it that the masses tend to ignore intimacy all together as
reality becomes more and more dictated by media promoted standards of generality
and impersonality? This dilemma inspired me to explore ways of creating art
acts instilled with a humanness that could serve as a valuable currency in a
small yet vital community. What seemed important in these actions was that they
did not additionally ask to be published, marketed, or otherwise documented
for means of advancement. This aspect of self-advancement through the ranks
of the art world by exploiting the “generosity” between one person
to another seemed to me to be a contaminate in the equation for a true philanthropic
network of artists.
It reminds me of Frank O’Hara’s idea of Personism-
“While I was writing I realized I could use the telephone instead of writing
the poem, and so Personism was born… The poem is at last between two persons
instead of between two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death
of literature as we know it. ” (Caws 592)
I imagined an art form that concentrated on strengthening existing relationships
and instigating new ones through direct invitation. Its small scale relies on
its thoughtfulness, noticeable energy, and individuality to offer an alternative
to the market-minded project. This reduction of editions increases the individualism,
giving a pulse to an object by having it refer to the thoughts and actions (labor)
that produced it. It gains a certain value from its lack of reproduction; it
is unquestionably made by human hands and therefore provides presence that reproduction
cannot. It can be useful in creating environments, dialogues, and other positive
social interactions. Therefore, no matter what form it manifests itself in,
it is always performative.
I’ve recently identified connections between liveness, as defined by Philip
Auslander, and certain impulses for haptactics. His vision of liveness grows
from Baudrillard’s concept Simulacrum and Simulation, which argues that
our “mediatized” culture bases its reality on images of simulation-
flat, impersonal simulation (Auslander 24-26). Auslander, in his book entitled
Liveness, focuses on the status of live performance in such a culture. In reading
Auslander, I realized that haptactics also address the important issue of live
performance as an endangered event. Ideally, it does so without being enslaved
to a singular discipline; it may manifest as an object, a performance, or as
literature, but it will always be alive.
Haptactics as described thus far has its obvious market consequences: it’s
a gift-exchange situation that counters logical business procedure; it puts
no prominence on authorship, and fails to conform to a singular discipline (this
does not mean it’s multi-disciplinary, but anti-disciplinary). The topic
of gift vs. commodity and paradox of a career in anti-career aesthetics is further
elaborated on in part 5.
The first project to grow out of the idea of haptactics was a literary project
called Ferrum Wheel of which I was founder and co-editor. Ferrum Wheel is a
handmade magazine crossing the aesthetic and one-of-a-kindness art-books with
the activity and awareness of zines. Each issue came out in original editions
of 50 that included the work of 10 to 15 artists. After each issue was made,
I would put out a smaller “half issue” comprised of three artists
and only 25 editions. The curious characteristic about these half issues was
that the three artists published in the issue were in control of where to send
the 25 issues; they provided me with eight names and addresses each and I kept
the last one for archives.
In the same spirit of challenging the potential for what a magazine, or an artwork
can be- how direct and personal can it be, I started transferring the energy
of the half issues into haptactics projects not connected with Ferrum Wheel
.
Following Ferrum Wheel, haptactics projects included hiding poems in library
book; a performance installation; a phone-poem project; and the current Pen
Palism movement that is modestly bouncing around the nation.
For a complete project chronology, please refer to the haptactics index at the
end of this paper.
After discussing the concept of haptactics with Temple, we realized that it
was closely related to the art and intimacy subject we chose to explore for
our research assignment. We expressed interest in working together on the next
manifestation of Haptactics, and after a couple discussion sessions in my attic,
Temple and I decided on creating a faux art movement called Pen Palism [see
Pen Palism manifestos in following section for more info]. In the tradition
of mail art, Pen Palism exploits a large-scale system (the postal system) to
support the intimate exchanges between its participants. In his book Networked
Art, Craig Saper calls this activity intimate bureaucracy and proposes that
“these artworks invent a gift-exchange community involved in a more intimate
sense of transactions that we usually consider impersonal.” (Saper x-xi)
In considering itself as a movement, Pen Palism puts its “stamp”
on acts of communication as a new legitimate art form, reflecting the same sense
of humor as O’Hara’s Personism. It’s also related to the work
of Los Angeles based postal artist Madam X who will make you an official member
of the human race if you join her Human Being Society . I shared with Temple
some mail art literature including writings of Anna Banana and Ray Johnson and
she responded the same way I did when I discovered the massive underground movement,
“I’ve been doing mail art for years and didn’t even know it.”
The first phase of the Pen Palism project was to recruit other silent collaborators
to send pen pal missives to fellow students in a class. Temple and I had our
own selection procedures (I selected two colleagues who were not able to participate
in my AntiMatter event; Temple chose three colleagues from San Francisco with
whom she collaborated in the past.) and we contacted our pen pal instigators
by sending them hand-made packets with instructions, the Pen Palism manifestos,
and a letter with information on their pen pal targets. We also asked our collaborators
to supply us with a small gift to be given to their pen pal during a gift-exchange
ceremony.
When that part of Pen Palism starting moving on its own- a process that included
the discreet work of distant pen pals and invisible postal workers- Temple and
I moved to the second phase which included the production and stealthy distribution
of Pen Palism material. We chose the concentrated space of the Towson Center
for the Arts so that we could note the effects of the hidden Pen Palism scrolls,
booklets, postcards, and coin envelopes. These curious hand-made proclamations
encouraging postal interaction and other personal communications were also sent
around the world to our friends and acquaintances of various status of closeness.
The final part of the Pen Palism process was a site-specific interactive installation
that we would rather think about as the site of a gift-exchange ceremony. Since
we conceived the idea for the project in my attic, we figured the attic was
where the last part of the project should end up as well. It tied together the
many aspects of the areas of research that were followed in the project: it
displayed the Pen Palism process and materials, it included collected data from
research on potlatch, and integrated gift-exchange rituals from various cultures
into our presentation.
The installation experience was preceded by a meal prepared by Temple and myself.
My contribution to the dinner was significant because it is the only thing that
resembles a “family recipe”; it is a spaghetti sauce that my mother
taught me how to cook when I was a teenager. This five-hour minimum sauce was
on the table for most thanksgivings and Christmases, prepared either by my mother,
my sister, or myself. Temple put her research into the oven, baking a “Twelfth-Day
Cake”- a cake that was linked to a Medieval set of rituals that was performed
to celebrate the winter solstice. In the historical version of the cake, a bean
and a pea were baked into the cake to determine the choosing of a mock king
and queen for the festival. In our version, the person who found the single
grape was crowned king for the night.
Serving dinner was not at all an extraneous part of the presentation; instead
we considered it essential. It completes our response to the initial objective
of exploring art in intimacy/intimacy in art by providing the balancing intimate
component: on the first floor (the dinner) we attempt to put the art into our
casual intimate encounter; while on the upper floor (the installation) we attempt
to put effective elements of intimacy into the art.
3 Pen Palism Manifestos
Pen Palism (Royer)
In second grade or so, my teacher passed out little cards to our class. Each
card carried a name and an address of a complete stranger to contact with the
intention of beginning a relationship maintained through personal letter writing.
This was our introduction to the workings of the postal system, and an introduction
to the idea of “Pen Pal.” The card included instructions and suggestions
on how to write a letter to this mysterious somebody- in my case, it was Mikal
from Winnipeg.
The strange thing about the assignment, strange at least to a grade school scholar,
was that it wasn’t a requirement. This was new: a classroom exercise to
be completed only IF we felt like it. We could take our unique project home,
make personal letter writing a hobby even, write to as many people as our little
hearts desired. We could dedicate a great amount of effort in creative correspondence
with friends and stranger, but we wouldn’t be graded for it.
Curious to the possibilities, I wrote away to the mystic land of Winnipeg. But
as early pen pal disappointments seems to go, I never got a response from Mikal.
Apparently he wasn’t required to write back. This was not only my first
lesson in mail, but also my first lesson in human interaction: it’s not
a requirement.
At first we learn about it as a way to contact strangers. But pen pal has a
dual nature, and eventually I understood the more useful aspect of pen pal:
to keep in contact with those familiar yet removed from us. Those around us
flit and drift, as we flit and drift from those around us. Yet we can continue
to give them bits of our daily, weekly, yearly experiences and maybe prove that
we are in fact living a life because someone is keeping track of it. Vice-versa,
archiving each other.
How much energy is required to sustain thought and action towards all those
who have affected us, influenced us, made us? In spite of it all, pen palships
and similar activities of direct, personal, creative communication, become increasingly
relegated to something below scholastic consideration, below art even, and into
the inconsequential status of hobby.
I’m growing with you. older. And I’m feeling the pressure to lose
interest in the extraneousness of hobby. ugh. Feel it? What seems increasingly
required as adults is more general, more prescribed, less and less individual.
Imagine a thoughtful missive as the primary currency in a human system driven
by an economics of interpersonal exchange. Now increase your capital.
Pal palism is a movement towards a non-market practice supported by the vital
thread of communication between a survivable audience of you for me and me for
you.
Pen palism says we don’t need an art and a literary practice that is isolated
from real communication, expression, and experience. It brings art and creativity
into the places that deserve it more than elitist galleries, and stuffy literary
circles. And pen palism isn’t restricted to acts of the pen; these works
and thoughts of art can be wrapped in ribbons and handed to you, whispered into
your ear, performed in your kitchen…
This pen palism is no longer a matter of distance either, keep in touch with
those far away or just touch the person next to you.
Pen palism counters friendtropy and the flattening the diverse relationships
of our lives into lists on paper or missed mists of memory.
Pen palism finds the art in intimacy and the intimacy in art.
It can get quite impersonal and general out there, interact with humans and
make it a requirement.
Pen Palism (Crocker)
To receive something by post is to receive something that has been handled.
The letter or package carries with it not only the obvious message in written
word or the sentiment of a gift, but the hidden messages from the body of the
sender: the fingerprints, the sediment of breath, the oils of the hands, the
saliva it takes to seal an envelope.
To receive something by post is to receive something that has a history and
transcends geography. The artifact bears the visible and invisible traces of
some place else. When the recipient handles it a sensuous transmission of information
occurs. Pieces from one place gathered together and transferred to another bring
with them the vibration, the smell, the essence of its origins.
One day something is felt – thought – written – and sealed in an envelope. This sentiment in material form travels – maybe in the coat or bag of the writer for a few days – the time it takes to find a stamp – then a mailbox. Now the message is in suspension. The writer waits and imagines the moment of reception. The letter is opened perhaps at the breakfast table, on the bus, or on the sidewalk next to the mailbox at the end of a long day. Although the letter has already become an artifact from a moment in history, for the receiver, the sentiments expressed retain a sense of immediacy. The truth of the original moment of expression is intact regardless of distance and time.
5
Art as Gift Vs. Art as Commodity
Gift and Commodity relationships have been a topic of debate in social sciences
and economics for nearly a century. Marcel Mauss, Bronislaw Malinowski, and
C.A. Gregory have all done extensive field research within indigenous cultures
operating with pre-market gift-exchange economies. With the exception of a brief
mention in Marcel Mauss’ landmark book The Gift, the position of art in
gift and commodity systems is hardly given much mention.
What I have noticed is that the studies done by Mauss, Malinowski, Gregory focused
primarily on cultures with “primitive” economies (not yet developed
into market economies) that feature a creative art that is still integrated
within their culture, i.e. not a separate “field” of art as commodity.
The idea of art for arts sake did not exist in these cultures. So in these studies
there was no mention of how art functions differently in market based societies
versus non-market. It’s interesting to notice how these cultures have
changed as well, for example Malinowski’s fieldwork with the Trobriands
took place in 1915; sixty years later an increase in tourism drastically changed
the function of their art production and even led to the construction of a Trobriand
art museum and luxury hotel!
Using the definitions provided by Gregory in his book Gifts and Commodities,
characteristics that oppose gift and commodity are as followed: Gift exchange
economies are generally and an “exchange of inalienable objects between
people who are in a state of reciprocal dependence that establishes a qualitative
relationship between the transactors.” According to Mauss, these societies
operate using gifts that create social relations. Whereas commodity exchange
is “exchange of alienable objects between people who are in a state of
reciprocal independence that establishes a quantitative relationship between
the objects exchanged.” (1982, 12)
These two types of cultural systems of transaction shows a focus on rational
object measurement in commodity economies, whereas in gift or non-market economies,
the arbitration of worth must be established by an intuitive sense of what the
gift is and what the equalizing obligation must be. Theoretically, this sense
perception of social exchange may become less acute in cultures heavily saturated
in commodity evaluation and exchange.
Regarding art, it’s something that has been pulled from our natural efficacious
motivations and put on sale. It’s a combining of conception that “art
is separate from both conditions of origin and operations in experience”
(Dewey 362), with the sneaky way economic system strongly influences our experiences.
For many artists, myself included, there is an underlying feeling that an artist
is doing something that is subversive by nature or something that is an alternative
to the cold corporate structure and the status quo. But it seems so difficult
to truly know if our practical actions are congruent with our theoretical intentions,
and whether or not these actions actually counter our oppositions, or support
them.
What seems promising is that there may be a niche to be found in commodity cultures
that can one function in a truly individualistic state of human affairs, and
possibly that niche is a type of art or at least a practice that carries with
attributes of creative expression whether or not it can be called art in a traditional
sense. I would propose the irony that in this ideal situation it could just
as easily be called a marketplace as it can be called art. The promising aspiration
is a matter of re-humanizing business through art sensibility instead of believing
that art cannot support and/or be supported by exactly what artists often feel
they are detached from, or even rebelling against. As The Who song “Happy
Jack” playing in an SUV commercial reminds us, even our anti-corporate
counter-culture is fostered for generating sales.
The ideal niche mentioned above brings back the community reinforcing features
of archaic gift economies: the intimacy in gift, emphasized social interaction,
the meaningful relationship of “thing” or object to people. The
meaningful object relations would be an effect of what Maori call the Hau, or
the spirit of something given. This translation of objects into non-matter through
ritual is particularly in contrast to that which generally occurs in general
economies when the substance of a creative gesture, action, or performance is
extracted to create commodity. In an art form based on a system of human economics,
the creative event is the only currency.
The question that arises from this (and a question that I’m frequently
asked) is how one can survive in a market-based culture with an anti-market
aesthetic? For me, a more intriguing question is how often does an artist actually
fund his/herself directly through their art? There is a difference between making
money from your art and making money from a trade- the painter may be okay with
being a docent in a gallery or the filmmaker an usher in a cinema, and some
may even consider this making a career with “their” art, but how
often is it that an artist makes a financial surplus from the exchange of his/her
unique products or services? Is the granting of money to a project from the
government or any other institution really “making” money from your
art? Even some of the most successful artists are found teaching in the classroom
making their money from an educational institution and not through their art
outright. I do not site this as a judgment, but to express my own confusion
with the problematic semantics. It leads me to wonder about what an artist does,
what an artist is taught to do, and what an artist thinks he/she is doing as
a member of society.
Personally, I’m interested in what art can be an alternative to: impersonal
bureaucracy, circuitous economics, the effects of a hyper-commodity capitalism.
I feel my responsibility is to find how I can turn art into a refreshing human
service to myself and those I affect whether or not the art it creates makes
money directly, indirectly, or at all.
I guess there is more youthful idealism left in me than I would like to admit.
Notes on Collaboration (ROYER)
I was very excited by the idea of working with Temple on this project for many
reasons. Most immediately, the class exercise of doing a “collaborative”
project already puts an emphasis on the fact that people are working together
to create a project; working with your life-partner makes it even more apparent.
For me, the meta-project within every collaboration is the process of the collaboration
itself. In working with Temple, I was more sensitive as to how she was feeling
about how the process was going, more attentive to making sure the work-load
was equal, more aware of being able to provide support for each other, and more
concerned for her satisfaction with the project. In other words, for me this
project highlighted the human interactions involved with any collaboration including
power balance, sensitivities, and communication.
Temple and I carried into the project the same understanding of the importance
of open, honest communication that we have in our relationship.
One disappointing aspect of this project was that I became noticeably stressed and impatient because of time constraints. I’m not one of those believers in the idea that irritation creates the pearl; rather, I believe that if I want to be stressed out, I’ll get a real job. I never felt stressed during the AntiMatter process even though I was dealing with 40 artists with various needs. I certainly didn’t want to feel stressed during my collaboration with Temple, especially since my stress could add to her own stress. I feel my stress came from the fact that I hadn’t organized the process schedule as much as I should have.
Because of my openness with Temple, I was able to discuss deeper, more personal
connections I had to our project. I felt a closeness to idea of examining the
cultural and/or community rituals (in this case specifically rituals that accompany
holiday observance, i.e. Christmas) in order to customize them into rituals
that have more personal significance. It was very personal in that it started
me thinking ahead about how I can provide myself, my partner, and my children
with rituals that are both bonding and reflective.
As far as the life span of this project, for me the question I was concerned
with wasn’t can this art project go beyond the classroom, it was can this
go beyond an art project.
Haptactics Chronology
The first haptactics event was a game for eleven people. Eleven poems were hidden
in library books in the Buffalo Public Library where I was employed at the time.
I then sent the eleven people, all personal friends of mine, a letter modeled
after the library request response form. This letter informed them of the title
and page in which to find the poem that had been slipped into the book.
This first haptactic was very simple, but because of the response I received
from the recipients and my own excitement with the event, I decided to continue
experimenting with the idea.
The second haptactics was an interactive performance installation that took place as part of a group art show at Buffalo’s SoundLab gallery. The installation was more like a scavenger hunt; Audience members were given a card upon entering the gallery with a checklist with nine variations of the word touch. Nine corresponding areas were hidden throughout the gallery that audience members were to interact with in order to check it off their lists. The final station was a stamped and self-addressed postcard with an attached inkpad. The instructions at this final station were to fingerprint the postcard and put it in the mailbox located directly outside the gallery. I later sent touch-back response letters those who had mailed me their fingerprints. This haptactic event was successful in both creating an intimate art experience for a general audience, as well as creating an opportunity for more personal interactions to take place in a less Artistically framed context.
The third edition of haptactics was a phone-poem event. Thirty people were sent hand-made invitations to call me and receive three poems to be read over the phone. The invitations provided dates and times to call in for their poems as well as instructions for carrying on additional conversation if they so desired.
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