Three ideas for the artist-(inter)activist to imagine doing something with:
FREE TEACH
Developed in conjunction with a public library or some other institution that wishes to promote the ideal of the educated and empowered citizen, this program would involve a small group of self-appointed “experts” in various disciplines and trades (from studio art to plumbing, political science to nursing — their qualifications would be secondary to their ability to be convincing, compelling, entertaining) working together to develop on-demand lectures, PowerPoint presentations, chalkboard talks, reading groups, freestyle strolling classrooms, and regular rousing orations delivered at the request of one or more members of the library-using public. Let’s say somebody wants to understand where all our water comes from, where it goes, and how it gets from here to there and becomes clean enough to drink in the process. Another somebody read The Da Vinci Code and wants to know if there’s any art historical truth behind all that Mary Magdalene hoo-ha. Another somebody would like to know how a free search engine like Google can be worth however many billion dollars. One evening, twice each month, those who feel they can rise to the challenge do their best to do so. The program would encourage participants to do real research and bring back the ancient arts of oratory and off-the-cuff think-speak that are so integral to the health of a republic. It would be a poetry slam with a bibliography and footnotes and without the pressure to rhyme. It would be a performative event dedicated to the conviction that there is nothing you can afford not to know; no particular subject that you can safely dismiss as irrelevant to one’s way of being in the world. It would carve out a time and a place in which to make use of one another as a collective mechanism for informing, energizing one another about what one does know that another does not know. It would invent a playful and committed practice/pastime of free public teaching and learning.
IDEA BANK
An online archive for good ideas of all sizes and kinds for those involved in any creative practice or discipline, the idea bank would be a space for open-source idea sharing and hijacking, where those with more good ideas than time to enact them can post their objectives, plans, methodologies, hopes and stratagems, and those browsing for inspiration can find it, together with some of the tools to put it into practice. This idea bank would be local to begin with — in that its network would begin with a greater concentration of users in Maine, and presumably the projects and outcomes that would make use of and contribute to the bank would have some direct or indirect relation to this particular place — but it would almost immediately open up to include, intersect with, draw from and open to users and contributors anywhere. How to fix a decidedly local problem? Ask globally.
Related:
Letters to the Portland editor: September 29, 2006, The new nomadology, Retroperspective, More 
- Letters to the Portland editor: September 29, 2006
War is art
- The new nomadology
We tracked Smith down to find out how the first summer unfolded.
- Retroperspective
Rare are the instances of true interdisciplinarity in exhibitions of contemporary art-moments where disciplines meet, mix, and couple to produce offspring that belong to neither field and set off on their own in search of even wilder mates.
- Anarctic
Having found their way to the threshold of the great Kansas plains, the conquistadors quickly lost it again.
- Smells like free spirit
Encountering Charlie Hewitt’s work for the first time, at his Farnsworth Museum retrospective, was like meeting someone from the neighborhood where you grow up long after you’ve grown up.
- Unheimlich maneuver
This weekend the Bates College Museum of Art unveils the cryptozoological community’s most highly esteemed artworks by a Wyeth family member, living or otherwise.
- Free beer
There are certain works of art in the face of which the critic must simply bow his head and weep.
- On the table
“PASS•PORT: identity in the information age” was the theme of this year’s DesignInquiry.
- Arms of the ancients
The success of the television show Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader? has made it clear to us just how much knowledge and spiritual vigor gets lost after one hits one’s climax at roughly the age of eleven.
- Homeland insecurity
As the tank runs dry on 2006, I’m filled with a warm fuzzy feeling.
- Cribs, the despot edition
Home is where the heart is. But if you’re a heartless dictator, home is where the hideous ersatz pagodas, caged leopards, room-size shoe closets, and bizarre bathroom appliances are.
- Less
Topics:
Museum And Gallery
, Saddam Hussein, Kurt Cobain, Mary Magdalene
