TAC in Christchurch

Hi all,

This post relates to our discussion of re-membering TAC, and setting up individual TAC centres in other parts of the country. As sole member of TAC in Christchurch I have obviously been thinking a lot about the potential of setting up a similar group here. As a preliminary step, I have been talking with a number of people who I thought might be interested in being part of something, and in the interested of not being exclusive to people I know, I also got them to extend the network and ask other people around and about if it would be something that would interest them.

After a couple of months of testing the feeling on the ground, I just don't think that there is enough interest here to make TAC worthwhile or beneficial in any way. There just doesn't seem to be enough people who are interested in the idea of collaboration or testing the possibilities of this paradigm.

Another reason for not instigating a TAC in Christchurch was also because I'm not sure that I would have enought time to create recruitment packs and go through the setting up period, which would take quite a bit of energy. I didn't want to get involved in something down here that I wouldn't be able to properly facilitate from the development period which would be important for the group. I'm also probably going to be leaving Christchurch in March which would be a factor as well for the group.

I would still like to involved in TAC and would like to contribute as much as possibly to the Wellington group, although I realise that this is increasingly becoming unfeasible for quick decision making and action-taking on projects. So, once TAC in Wgton has recruited some more members I guess we can assess the situation further and see how our diasporic TAC members can work with this group in the best way?

At long last...Two-fold documentation shots

TAC goes tweedie with Dr Bacharach

Meeting up with Sondra Bacherach was really fantastic! Made me and Liz miss our discussions where we were all together as a group.

She wanted to know:
How we got started, we talked about the everynowandthen project beginnings.
How we made decisions, the consensus process, and how we worked out our times of non-agreement…

Sondra has looked at groups here and overseas. She specifically mentioned gilbert and george and the marukis. She said that as a philosopher, their processes were of lesser interest to her as she thinks through collaborative artistic output. This is because the artwork, in those cases, are the works of multiple individuals, yet each plays their own part – with the Marukis for example, each spends time on a painting before handing it over to the other.

Was interested in the nature of collaboration and the idea of a “true collaboration” as distinct from a role taking scenario where tasks are divided up and completed individually as part of a larger project (eg film crews).

We spoke about how we are a collaborative group formed to work collaboratively to explore, experiment with and test collaborative processes and structures. Sondra thought that was pretty neat and quite philosophical.

Also works collaboratively with her Marsden Grant fellow developing their ideas and writing together – understands the difficulties of long distance communication. She encouraged us to think less as a place based group and try new methods of communication such as skype conferencing.
Talked about the role of communication and our understanding of it as a part of the art that we make (process model).

Sondra said she’d like to meet with us again, later in the year, and is excited about the potential of either working with us or pickin our brains in the future.

Paula and Liz

Flow chart frenzy! 1week decision feedback

Here is our formatted feedback - double click to view.
Taccers please do a close reading because there are some (mostly minor) discrepancies in understanding between members and it would be good to arrive at an overall consensus.
Can we please also feedback further to the suggestions to resolve how best to use "1-Week Decisions".
p.s. Hope you like your designated colours!

Shedding light on collaborative common ground, a book review

Above image: PAD/D: DEMONSTRATE!, installation of art made for public protest, Chicago (circa 1983).

This is the second installment of my quest to harvest relevant tid-bits from between the pages of Temporary Services’ new artists’ book Group Work. The trials and accomplishments of past collaborative and collective activities can offer a lot in the way of cautionary tales and models of success. This group has got them both.

New York collective Political Art Documentation/Distribution was established to archive an amassing collection of ephemera from art/political actions and events but snowballed into something much larger. Temporary Services’ Brett Bloom conducted three interviews with four members of Political Art Documentation/Distribution (PAD/D); Gregory Scholette and Janet Koenig were interviewed together and Jerry Kearns and Barbara Moore were each interviewed separately.

PAD/D was sparked into being by writer and activist Lucy Lippard, in New York’s East Village in 1980. Lippard had been collecting up a bunch of posters and other documentation from the preceding two decades of political art activism, mostly through donations from the artists themselves. At the time the art institutions were largely ignoring socially engaged art so, in the spirit of self-organization, Lippard called a meeting to enlist help with the creation of an archival resource. Jerry Kearns recalled turning up to the first meeting after “seeing a leaflet stapled to a pole”, he describes Lippard’s continuing involvement in the group as contributing a “Leadership of doing”.

So told, this was a period of many collective activities, both locally in the East Village and in the US scene in general. Because of this Lippard was interested only in creating a resource - not in forming another group. However, after the first couple of meetings the artists became frustrated with such administrative documentary tasks and started to get excited about the potential of the group as a site of artistic/activist production. It seems like this kind of self definition and direction from amongst the members so early on really continued through the group’s lifespan. These energies meant the group were both prolific and divergent in their output.

While the documentation team became an autonomous entity within the wider group, largely left to their own devices, PAD/D grew to become an umbrella organisation for a diverse range of activities. These spanned from the initial archival project to a reading group that “kind of mutated” into an anti-gentrification project, the publication of a leftist cultural events calendar and a newsletter to distribute the contents of the archive — to name the few ongoing projects mentioned in the interviews.

I thought it was interesting to note, and of some relevancy to the TAC situation, that as the group became larger the structure of PAD/D became more hierarchical. In their first year of operation consensus was used, after which they moved to majority voting. Jerry Kearns explained “We tried to make power transparent within the group. But we also tried to avoid the endless group therapy sessions that consensus decision making often leads to”. I think one of their most interesting achievements was developing a system to deal with their growth. To keep communication and opportunities open a system was instigated whereby people proposed new projects to the group to gauge interest and gain support. In order to keep a track of all the activities there was a regular event called “Second Sundays” where members spoke about their on-going projects. PAD/D was a real large-scale group, something hard to imagine happening in a Wellington context.

It seemed like there was quite a struggle over keeping the organisation centrally located. A steering committee was formed to oversee the activities of the project-focused sub-committees. At times, although the steering committee conceptualised themselves as advisory, this caused uneven power relationships to arise. Gregory Scholette recalls that “As time went on PAD/D became very structured … to the point where there were elaborate flow charts about how you submitted a proposal to the group”. Long-time PAD/D member Janet Koenig argues “It was no longer Democratic, at that point, at least to my mind. ‘Democratic centralism’ is nearly an oxymoron”.

Despite differences of opinion PAD/D managed to hold it together through some challenging events. Koenig and Scholette were part of a reading group that was accused of trying to create a faction. Scholette explains the initial motivation for the splintering: “Some of us felt that we didn’t have enough theory. We didn’t feel like PAD/D had really thought through these issues of art and society very deeply”. During a big event that PAD/D had organised, designed to bring together other counter-institutional groups into a mega coalition, Scholette circulated an essay that he had written which mounted a critique on PAD/D. Crazy times. Luckily, the group had “a very strict structure for dealing with problems” and after an initial period of tension things settled down and people realised that the reading group was generating valuable resources for PAD/D.

One of the great things about this article was the way the different perceptions and experiences of the group are communicated through the discrepancies in opinions between the separate interviews. This group and its structures were formed from a collective desire to honour and continue the legacy of activist/artistic activities from preceding decades of political and social change. They did this through making a place for the materials that were left behind and, more importantly, through keeping the practice of collective activity alive and functioning.

Throughout the interview with members of “Political Art Documentation/Distribution”, in Temporary Services’ Group Work, there is mention of the other many and varied organisations that influenced their group – both in terms of its structure and its ideology. I haven’t really even gone into the specifics of this. There are a heap of touchstones for TAC in the stuff above, it has been great to read about some of the common threads and I hope it’s been informative for you, dear reader.

The first book review installment, which is about General Idea, can be found here: Group Work artists book review
An article on PAD/D written by member Gregory Scholette can be downloaded in pdf form here: A Collectography of PAD/D