Meeting Minutes - 15/1/07

Finished minutes for meeting on Monday 15th Jan

Adgenda whip - Tom
Notes – Liz
Catering – Paula, Liz and Roar

Adgenda:
- Wallspace: need and purpose
- Hosts: how to bring them on board
- (Wo)manning the trolley
- Acknowledging Tyree and self identification
- Entitling the trolley
- Trolley update
- One liner pencils
- 100 words
- Flowcharts
- Thursday night working bee and meeting
- Materials budget
- Turning the criticality on ourselves

Alex sent her apologies, general comiserations: Paula will keep in contact, update & refer to blog.

Wallspace: need and purpose.
Decided that yes, we do need wallspace for collating and displaying audience feedback notes. General discussion on how audience would be encouraged to write their responses on notes: Tac to start the activity (lead by example), more ‘examples’ created fresh each day by gallery hosts, favourite past responses recycled and positioned around the gallery on audience barrier floor markings (don’t cross the line, be well mannered but active in distribution).

Hosts: how to bring them on board.
Andie to ‘drip feed’ info to the city gallery hosts about tac and the project as a way of cueing them into the concerns in manageable chunks . We decided it was important to contact hosts personally as soon as we could put together a good description of the aims and concerns of the project. We decided the best way to do this was a meeting with the hosts in the board room, tac supplying food (each bringing a plate), on Tuesday the 23rd – 5 or 5.45 – to confirm. Andie to check with Heather and email hosts in reciept of go – ahead.
Although there was some suggestion we could tack (!) ourselves onto the end of the walkthrough it was generally agreed that the distinction between hosts turning up because they are required to (walkthrough) versus because they are interested (tac meeting) would provide a way to differentiate those who are (personally) interested from those who are not. A separate meeting would also provide a distinction between the standard institutional blurbage and our intentionally more critical venture.

(Wo)manning the trolley;
It was agreed that we would all be present for the first weekend of Prospect, hanging around the trolley, painting our nails and getting the critical responses off to a healthy start. We discussed what other ‘high traffic’ times there might be, such as weekends in general and the symposium weekend in particular, and decided to arrange for a member of tac to be present during these times. Mel to post symposia timetable on the blog. Tom to make availability diary for filling out at next meeting.
It was noted that we were waiting to hear back from Heather re the stationing of a host in the west wing and their possible facilitation of the trolley.

Acknowledging Tyree and self identification;
We talked about Tyree’s request to have her labour and skills acknowledged, which opened up some questions about how Tac wanted to acknowlege ourselves (and the distinction between fabrication, construction and cabinet making). It turned out that there was a discrepancy in the groups perception, some thinking that Tac was going to remain anonymous and others thinking that we were going to identify (name) ourselves. We talked about what it would mean to be anonymous, agreed that anonymity wasn’t an important goal to persue and that we (and our work) would operate with more disgression by us remaining identified. We compared this choice to the that of the et al collective, and discussed how direct comparisons would be drawn between our choices because of the curatorial neighbouring of our two works. Mel described this difference, rather eloquently, as ‘many attempting to be one rather than one attempting to be many’ and we all ohhed and aaahhhed at her. We decided to make a flowchart comparing our work to et al’s and add it to the trolley.
Through that discussion we, somehow, arrived at the decision to acknowledge Tyree for construction (her pick) and Tac: [list of our names] for conceptualisation.

Entitling the trolley;
We debated the current idea: Contemporary Art Mobile Response Unit. General positive response, Melanie suggested dropping contemporary art and Liz (ah - I) said I liked it because it comedically connoted an emergency service like the police or ambulance. We decided to take it home and try it out on our friends.

Trolley update;
We updated Andie on the changes to the trolley, namely the stripey canvas instead of the umberella. We were concerned the umberella was making a suggestion that the audience needed some kind of shelter and protection from the scary art exhibition, and felt the canvas was more like a stall, more festive. We also covered our decision against a banner because of the desire to be more suggestive and less prescriptive.

One liner pencils;
We decided on printing pencils with slogans on them to sell in the multiples cabinet. Slogan ideas included;
- have you tookin a lookin?
- language at me
- Fear no Art
- TAC it on
- try not trying so hard

100 words;
We checked out the draft on the blog – thanks Andie- and worked through a few concerns including:
- the aim to expose & challenge the limitations of the institutional framework rather than the curatorial voice or the format of prospect shows
- the provision of an environment (physical and social) where people will feel comfortable and open about sharing their responses
- the desire to provide a means for audience responses to be physically present alongside the standard curatorial narrative and develop into a conversation between many voices
- a chance for this conversation to potentially widen the scope and diversity of comprehension
- the provision of a place to pause, sit and be

We made some headway but decided it would be faster to work independantly and blog it. Cut off for contributions and feedback is 10pm on Wednesday night after which Paula to edit and Andie to pin on hosts notice board.

Flowcharts;
We did a check in on how everyone was feeling about the progress of their flowcharts. General agreement that seeing everyone elses attempts, with their different approaches, content and designs was very helpful and would make subsequent flowchart making easier. We talked about the success of;
- using phrases like yuk! Relax! Try not trying so hard! as a good way of lightening the tone and taking people out of themselves
- andies design layout for its comprehension
- leaving gaps for the audience to fill in their individual responses

It was decided that we would stick to the origional plan to include one flowchart from each tac member so that the diversity of design and conceptual formats could be represented.

Thursday night working bee and meeting;
To be held at the boxing church workshop Thursday night. From 6pm. Sian mentioned there were lots of great fish and chip shops in Naenae for getting dinner at. General appreciation of Tyree’s discovery of the trolley width versus door width. Sian to spray canvas for Paula to carefully craft canopy stripes.

Materials budget;
($400) needs to cover:
laminator (Melanie to research)
uphostery pins
pencils (Melanie to research)
ribbons & pins
coffee grinder (Tyree koha)
Bunnings materials ($104.51 on Liz’s credit card)
Paint ($34-8[?] on Melanies credit card)

Turning the criticality on ourselves;
Sian talked about the importance of keeping in mind the origional aims of TAC – to be self critical of the means and processes of our collaborative activities. She suggested we document our beginning, developments and current processes and create an archive of them. General agreement and interest in making a folder with the history of the association and further reading in it for potential inclusion on the trolley. No decision on who to action this (!)
Liz (me again) suggested the need for a document stating the values of TAC, the functions of the members and an auto biographical statement on our individual contributions which could be supplemented by other members. Sian exampled her boss’s habit of writing something like ‘I will always believe wholeheartedly in what I say until I change my mind later’ on the board during meetings as a possible value.
Melanie talked about her desire to keep some information (such as this ‘internal admin’) closed to public access to provide an intrigue factor and we decided to keep the autobiographical discussion (and potentially our values and member functions? Mel can you clarify?) within an email only circulation.

Phew! I hope that’s covered everything, I rekon this meeting went really well, we kept to time thanks to our nights whip Tom, and the adgenda was completed almost within our 2 hour timeframe aim. Yeah!!!