SERIES NARRATIVE

We throw everything away. Plates, cups, cell phones, bottles, bags, clothing; items which could easily be reused, recycled, or repurposed. Arguably, as a result, we are conditioned to consider our own thoughts, ideas, and concerns - even our relationships - just as disposable. We drop concepts for other newer prettier ones before the original has a chance to take hold and flourish, becoming something new and separate from our initial intentions, and stronger for it. Surplus goods and surplus knowledge can be viewed not only as cultural poles in a disposable society, but as a metaphorical springboard for the possibilities inherent within all of us. What are we going to do with our “trash?” What life can it lead after its proposed role has been fulfilled? In an increasingly invisible society we are each a consumer, creator, and clearing house for knowledge, just as much as we are the receivers, producers, and disposers of material goods.

In this knowledge based, often startlingly ephemeral, consumer culture the realization and management of our ideas and concerns manifests as political will. All too often this strength goes dangerously under-utilized. Collectively we all benefit from a cyclical economy of knowledge, economically, as well as socially and politically. When we are told that the material goods we consume are limited to a single, one-time-only use, limited to a single purpose or function and none else, we are bound and beholden to others, forced to consume in excess rather than create and hybridize from the world around us. Similarly, when acculturated to believe that for one reason or another our thoughts and concerns are somehow limited, or lesser than, those of others, when our ideas are regimented towards set ends and means, we are intrinsically put at a disadvantage intellectually and socially, and in turn, politically. The repurposing of ideas, the expanding and agitation of them, much like the repurposing of more tangible physical materials, is infectious and generative. Like the many-headed Hydra, a good idea set free, fractured from its origins, spawns another, and another still. No matter how one might like to kill it, codify it, capitalize upon it, it cannot die, it cannot be stopped.

Surplus Seminar acts as a convergence for ideas generated within Red76’s initiative Flying University. It is a means of gathering people together to imagine, agitate and activate the ideas that reside all around us and within us. Surplus Seminar activates a series of projects which, often, take the form of ad-hoc schools interested in the investigation of surplus knowledge as a mirror image of surplus material: ideas which all too often find themselves going under-utilized, to the detriment of the whole. In fields, bars, hotel rooms, restaurants both legal and illegal, the projects that come together for Surplus Seminar aim to generated discussion on many topics, while providing a unified platform to consider the means, activation, and implications of sites of learning that are democratic and horizontal in nature.

In our unstable and ephemeral economy ideas alone increasingly serve as the major bedrock for monetary growth and future zones of social and political convergence and capital. Very easily, and extremely aggressively, these zones can become marginalized, compartmentalized to continue an economic system built upon the creation of top-down hierarchical structures. The collective activation and inventive re-use of ideas, therefore, becomes politically necessary as almost never before. Open thought, the sharing of skills and knowledge, and the generative growth which develops from those activities, encourages a horizontal system of benefit, while simultaneously providing a space available to us all for inclusive learning and expansive new possibilities for what tomorrow can be. Surplus Seminar, with AAA at its core, acts as a laboratory, experimenting with what that future can look like through the shared, generative utilization of ideas.

COMMENTARY

A Conversation with Red76

A Conversation with Red76 (Sam Gould & Gabriel Saloman) Conducted by James Voorhies (Curator, Bureau for Open Culture)

(This conversation is also available in PDF form through the catalog for the exhibition, Decent to Revolution)

James Voorhies: Can you describe Surplus Seminar and how it came to be conceived?

Sam Gould: The interests of Surplus Seminar are to create a site of convergence around the idea of how we create knowledge, or more appropriately, new ideas. Much of the thrust of this involves notions of how our experiences with the world around us create our knowledge base, and much of that comes from the re-purposing of existing ideas to create new ideas. In a society which preaches the gospel of individualism and intellectual property rights this is a tricky subject, as people feel like their ideas are their own, to be bought and sold, even though the whole of human experience tells us otherwise.[1] So with Surplus Seminar the goal is to converge from time to time around the world with the initiative—which manifests as a series of smaller projects with similar interests at heart—to create an atmosphere that both visualizes, actualizes, and seeks to discuss how we can reuse existing knowledge, much like we would existing physical materials, to create new ideas and new platforms for the discussion and creation of those ideas.

In terms of the nuts and bolts of the process, it was conceived like most Red76 projects are often conceived. I’ll have been working through some idea in my head for a little while. Probably I’ll have written some form of supplementary, or arch-narrative, text that serves as a guide for a variety of ideas and concerns that I’m coming up against at the time. From there it depends on the weather, the environment. What usually starts to happen is that, from this arch-narrative, a variety of individualized projects begin to manifest. Often the individual projects will start to take shape in conversation with other Red76 collaborators, like Gabriel Saloman, or Zefrey Throwell, Mike Wolf, or Dan S. Wang. I’ll have the beginning of some thoughts on means of engaging a set of concerns and, over the phone or through some form of correspondence, or over a beer I’ll initiate a dialogue about it. In tandem I’ll start seeing things—films, books, news stories, the actions of others—that begin to inform what I’m interested in engaging. Often I’ll be hunting down books in thrift stores and used shops to find titles that inform what I’m after. Often these books might seem far afield, but as a cosmology—at least for me—they start to form a syllabus for future action. To a lesser extent I’d include other forms of a media, as well as other projects in this grouping, but it usually comes down to the printed form—books and scattered publications—that serve as an inspirational hub. For me they serve as containers for the projects core interests. The content within is there to commingle with the ideas that begin to generate after I start talking with Gabriel,[2] or whom ever it might be at the time.

With Surplus Seminar in particular I’d been concerned for a quite sometime with notions of ad-hoc educational spaces. Those concerns had manifest in a lot of projects that we’d done over the last ten years, but they weren’t often at the forefront, or explicate. They were subtexts to the larger apparatus. But starting with a tour that we did of former Eastern Block countries in early 2004.[3] I started getting very interested in ideas of parallel education, things along those lines. This interest is due in large part to my learning about the Flying Universities that were created in many of the Soviet controlled countries and were facilitated by ousted professors to serve the students who were interested in continuing there classes, or just even scholarly proximity, to their old teachers.

The year after we took this trip, at the invitation of Ola Stahl, I went back to Zagreb, Croatia to take part in a project that the group he was a part of at the time, C.CRED, was initiating. It was over there that I started toying with this thought of the deconstruction of the historical Flying University as a project for pedagogical, aesthetic, and sociopolitical interests. But, as with a lot of projects that Red76 eventually gets to doing, the idea sat on the back burner for about three or four years before we got moving on it. After we finished Revolutionary Spirit—which lasted from January of 2007 to November of 2008 I took a little time off to think over the project and the ideas it brought up, as well as things that remained undone or unresolved. So, from there our conception of the Flying University began.

So, to follow this logic, Flying University is the arch-narrative, and Surplus Seminar carries many of that narratives concerns within it, as a vehicle towards a convergence—or possibly more appropriately an accident—of those ideas.

James: Would you describe specifically the components of Surplus Seminar—YouTube for Social Politics, Pop-Up Book Academy, Anywhere/Anyplace Academy and TMF Co.? How are they connected to and informed by one another?

Sam: The general plan that governs each iteration of Surplus Seminar is that there is one core element, which is Anywhere/Anyplace Academy (A/AA), and the other elements shift depending on interest and environment. What ties all these elements together is that they share a notion of knowledge and ideas, the space of consideration between us, as content to be reconfigured, re-contextualized. The desire is to take these projects as vehicles to consider how we can create new spaces for learning and discussion, and the creation of knowledge, through what we have around us. This element exists as a parallel conceptual narrative to the content at hand and the thematic narrative of each discrete project, such as the YouTube School for Social Politics, or Pop-Up Book Academy, for instance. Another important thing to point out, and what drives our interest in continuing Surplus Seminar, is that we see it as a model, and that as a model it will react to its environment differently in different sites. Surplus Seminar in Columbus is going to be different from Surplus Seminar in Chicago is going to be different from Surplus Seminar in Buffalo, etc. The available surplus—the people, their interests and skills, the actual physical surplus—acts as a player within the forming narrative of the project. You can't know how it will turn out in the end because you haven't done it yet. That experiment, or improvisational element is vital.

So, before I describe some of the Columbus elements, let me describe A/AA, as this project really serves as the underpinning for them all. Everything emanates out from the daily considerations that take place on the site of A/AA.

For each manifestation of Surplus Seminar we choose an area to act as a construction site for A/AA. We’ll meet there each morning a number of days each week and stay there for a normal workday. The idea is that the construction site serves as a classroom. Through the combined skill-sets, interests, and desires of the people who show up, and the application of those skill-sets, interests, and desires towards physical material that is donated or scavenged from the surrounding area, we collectively consider the question, “What is a school?” Equally as important is the expansion of that question to, “What is a school here; for us, for the people we know, as a response to the immediate area around us?” And from there it’s pretty simple. You wake up each day, make yourself a thermos of coffee, put on a proper pair of shoes, and head to work. You look around you to see what’s available—discarded shipping palettes, old two-by-fours, doors, window panes, beer bottles, sheet metal—and you begin to discuss with one another how you could recontextualize this material together to create something new out of it, something that would be conducive to collaborative learning, to a site for question, to film screenings, lectures, reading, silent individual thought. The project, as a process, is wholly experiential in nature. It is horizontal as a format rather than top-down, or hierarchical.[4] Each person looks around them to see what’s available and confers with the others to consider its use. In this sense we’re utilizing the act of A/AA as the beginning of the meme for all the projects—how can I apply the ideas around me to the desires within me? How can I utilize this content into something new that represents the world around me, rather than just absorbing it indiscriminately? So, with that in mind, we’re not talking about anything new, of course. We’re trying to promote and make plain the very nature of learning, which tends to be happenstantial, collective, anarchic, occurring and manifesting continuously through association.

Fairly explicitly this conceptual narrative is the core of the YouTube School for Social Politics. The application of the project is very simple—as any really successful project of this nature needs to be. We commission artists, economists, writers, politicians, historians to compose clips which they’ve found on YouTube as the building blocks towards the creation of what we call an essay. As a narrative conceit the illusion to writing is important. By composing these clips into a conversation with one another, glued together with the assistance of a video forward spoken by the author (these videos being very similar to response videos you might find on YouTube) you’re able to visually describe how we create texts.[5] Ideas don’t come out of thin air, no matter how much some might like to pretend that they do. We take from the world around us, we manipulate the ideas that interest us and provoke us, we piece this information together, and by our own personality, by our own point of view, these discrete bits of information, by association, create a new whole. This process continues over and over again, continuously morphing, exponentially. In a contemporary sense I think this is an extremely important idea to consider in regard to a networked society. While seemingly simple, maybe even juvenile, the process of the project—using YouTube as just one example—aims at discussing how we create new ideas, how knowledge manifests through anarchic associations of seemingly disparate data. It’s through the association of content that new ideas form, and if these associations are further and further deemed as explicitly proprietary we are quite literally killing our ability to create for the sake of a few dollars for a mere few people.

Pop-Up Book Academy (PBA) utilizes these ideas in a somewhat less explicit way. The project manifests as a traveling bookstore. Within that bookstore resides a school that uses the printed form as a vehicle to discuss sociopolitical histories and ideas. Each session is discrete: a new “professor” facilitating each class on a topic of interest to them, the divergent elements of each class topic all being tied back together through the narrative of the printed form and the social histories that they document. We sell books—sometimes food and drink as well—at each session, the purpose of this being the creation of a publication fund.

Red76 for a number of years now has been producing a publication called The Journal of Radical Shimming (JRS). It began as the print-arm for a two-year long project called Revolutionary Spirit, which took place from 2007 to 2009. After that project came to a close we decided that the value of the JRS hadn’t dissolved, so we decided to keep it running. Its publications such as the JRS that act as catalysts for many of the discussion that take place at PBA sessions. The JRS is never sold. It is distributed internationally through a hand-to-hand network. It is dropped off in coffee shops, bookstores, on doorsteps, in anonymous mailboxes, on subways seats. So, we sell books as a means to create a fund to help produce the JRS. As well, when we are able to sell enough titles to amass more than we need at the time of production, we distribute funds to other publishers and artists as a means to help produce other publications which share the interests of PBA and the Journal.[6]

James: Red76 gathered quickly a significant circle of participants and interest in making Anywhere/Anyplace Academy (A/AA) and the other Surplus Seminar activities. It was as if you had filled a void. Why do think this was the case? What was the appeal and draw?

Sam: I’ll apologize in advance as I’m about to go off on a bit of a tangent,[7] but one that I think is really important to make light of, as it often isn’t discussed I feel. For us, from project to project, the number of people involved on the ground fluctuates wildly. Sometimes this is by design, and other times it’s just a fluke. In this regard it’s difficult not to view a project as unsuccessful when it doesn’t gather a critical mass. But in my definition of this type of work those number are, relatively speaking, fairly meaningless. Interest and enthusiasm are far more important than size. And size (or more accurately, participation) is relative at that. As a counter notion to the critical-mass approach to socially engaged practices, I see the work existing in ideas, and those ideas are manifest in countless ways as a means of expanding and deconstructing each projects inherent ideas and interests. For us this notion tends to manifest in the forms of social gatherings, lectures, networked communication, publications, and any form of media that makes sense to the interests of the ideas at hand. Oftentimes second-hand knowledge, myth, or gossip play key roles in the furtherance of the projects interests as well.

The misnomer of socially engaged practices is that the work exists on the ground. I disagree, strongly. That numbers game turns the work into marketing and less about aesthetics and knowledge and cultural production. With quantitative values you’ll find artists miming institutions, who mime the concerns of foundations, who mime the concerns of the market, and further so down the line. They need to see a profit somewhere, and if the work doesn’t have an object to sell, then mass appeal seems to take the place of salable goods. I think the promotion of this mentality, though obviously understandable if not acceptable, is really damaging to future cultural workers influenced by work occurring now, and in the past decade or so. While, I feel groups like ourselves, or Temporary Services, Center For Tactical Magic, LTTR and so forth, play a non-quantitative game, there are plenty of artists and groups out there who adopt a more quantitative approach. I can’t stress enough how damaging I feel that mentality is towards the values I see as most beneficial to the work. It presents a false measure of success based on quantifiable involvement rather than strength of participation or concepts. How many people engage in any project is meaningless in relation to the persistence of the ideas and concepts at hand and how they play out, not over a defined period of time like a month or so, but over years, decades, or more. How the ideas, because they were engaged in defuse, anarchic, and unusual groupings, play themselves out and become new and different through engagement and understanding over the long term is far more critical than if two hundred people showed up for group choir practice or a free yoga session together. Alright…so I’m going to stop being cranky for now.

James: What you bring up about the emphasis on attendance numbers is a good point and I believe extremely prescient. I agree with what you say about the use of only numbers as an inconclusive means to evaluate the quality of a project. I believe this is where granting and donor sources and their ways of determining the success of socially-engaged practices have not caught up to understand the nature of the work. In fact, at the Bureau for Open Culture it is an issue we face right now with reports due to the various sources that gave funding for Descent to Revolution. The recorded number of people who physically attended activity over the course of the two-plus month run of the exhibition is about one-third of total attendance for past exhibitions that have taken place inside the gallery in a less dispersed, less event-focused form. So, because these practices, for now, must fit within the evaluative structure of granting and funding sources, how does the institution and the artist qualify for reporting purposes the shift in participants’ perspective, the newly gained awareness of ideas, the relationships established with artists, and thus the intangible, long-term trajectories set by these projects? It is an economy of cultural and image production in which the number of hits on the website and the number of clicks at the entrance are the stalwarts of evaluation and the quick and easy messaging relayed to donors. This is a concrete and important subject because without funds projects do not materialize and artists do not make a sustaining livelihood. Additional thoughts?[8]

Sam: That notion of quantity over quality is so prevalent. You can't escape it. The more people involved the better, content be damned. I'm not sure what one can do about it. Keep pulling away, I suppose, and just do the work. But the question of making a living, in that regard inevitably rears itself to the surface. I do think that there is a chance to begin to change that, and it is through public conversation along these lines which urge a long and more direct process—by foundations, etc.—to engage with the actual work, rather than numbers on a page. That would be a big obligation for them, but it should be. Why else disperse all the money if you aren't interested in really looking into what it is you are promoting? Well...this could get ugly...maybe this is a conversation that needs to take place all on its own?

While I’ve tried to distance myself as much as possible from the notion of the importance of the number of participants on the ground in any given project what happens in these social situations is obviously important as it’s a large part of what we do. The social portions of the projects take up a large percentage of the action, and therefore are seen as the dominant theme of the practice. In this light we all prefer to nurture people into the process who feel inclined to do so. This involves actually listening to people rather than trying to tell every soul in the world about what you’re up to like some second-rate used car salesman.

With Surplus Seminar I think we had the best of both worlds as it did seem like, as you mentioned, we filled a void of some sort.[9] I’d argue against our having too much to do with that. The general nature of the city, the surrounding community, the urban infrastructure, etc., all play a huge role in any project. They have to be considered at length in determining what you would like out of the project you’re about to tackle. With that said though, I suppose we must have done something that existed outside of what was already there on the ground. I’ll give us some credit. To break it down I think that our choice of placement for the construction site for A/AA was very important—as we’d discussed prior to the start of the project. And the proximity of the storefront, which you chose, and where we held so many other aspects of the project was also extremely important. It being so close by let the activities at A/AA easily continue, while not piling them on top of one another at one site. Along with all this the nature of introduction to the project, as always, was vital. As with so many of our projects it involved a variety of overt promotion, and willful subterfuge. In this regard, people knew about it and came to check it out. And those that were really intrigued became invested, or allowed themselves the time to consider it at more length, which allowed us to take more time to discuss our concerns with them.

So, though tons of people came in and out of the project(s) during our tenure within the exhibition—and they all seemed to gather something from it—there really was a core group that took to the ideas and ran with them. These folks became the core engine of the project for me, and they really only numbered about seven or eight people in the end. But even with only that many people I’m hard pressed to consider this project as anything but one of the best things we’ve ever accomplished in the last ten years as an outfit.

There’s more to be said here that is very specific to the time, place, climate, and individuals involved with this iteration of Surplus Seminar. In all honesty there was something extremely emotional about it that is hard to define. There was, for me, an emotional honesty that, maybe, hasn’t existed for us before in other projects. This isn’t downgrading past work, as much as accepting an inevitable progression and consideration of what’s important to you, a maturity of sorts in finally accepting a somewhat secret willingness to do things poorly in defense of a good idea. A willingness to open things up, agree and promote that we—vehemently—do not possess answers, but are converging to question. We, as artists, possess considerations, not dogmas.

James: You use the word listening in your response. While, yes, Red76 had, as you say, seven or eight core participants (you call them builders) for Anywhere/Anyplace Academy, the number of people attending the YouTube School for Social Politics, Pop-Up Book Academy and TMF Co. sessions gained not only in numbers but in the kinds of responses, the depth of the conversations, and the discussions in the days that followed. CCAD professors commented on the quality and intensity of engagement and interaction their students made at Surplus Seminar activities. I’m glad you used the word listening here because it reminds me how many people in Columbus commented on the way you, Gabriel, and Zefrey listened to them. It seems so easy, so basic. But, in a culture of look at me, this is mine, I can do this, the other half of the act of conversation seems to take more often a secondary place. Could you say more about listening and the other ways Red76 “nurtured people into the process,” especially with regards to specific moments or situations in Columbus?

Sam: In regard to the topic of listening, I can't stress it enough. One thing that isn't discussed enough—at least critically, though it is somewhat minimally in academia—is the notion of socially engaged work as practice, as methodology. Possibly this is out of a belief that considering it this way would be to devalue the relationships that form? I think that's absurd. For me, and many people I admire within this line of practice, there has been a direct effort to critically consider how one engages public interaction for a variety of situations in relation to people, places, and a myriad of environmental concerns. I'm hard pressed not to have the topic come back to pedagogy and education though. For me so much of this work is creating collective learning spaces in public. As a facilitator of that space I need to really listen[10] or else it's just proselytizing. I'd argue, though, that preaching is a huge factor in a lot of projects that I see that couch themselves in this idea of social or dialogical practice. More often it seems it's people wanting to tell people things. I'm interested in telling people things, certainly. That's why we're all collaborating on these works. But I'm equally as invested in listening, and that is also why we're organizing these projects. I'm there as much to receive as I am to give. I'm seeking to create models that I find lacking, that I desire. If I'm not willing to act in the way that I'd like to be received, the work is not only disingenuous it's also faulty. And this is possibly another area wherein the question of quantity over quality comes into play. From the outside you can say certain things, make visible certain signifiers, that direct people—often those not directly involved—into understanding what you'd like to do. But, with that said, it is not what you will do or can do. The real challenge of this work is seeing it outside of the history of text and image, and realizing that those aspects are only two sets of values in an arsenal of many. To really engage projects along these lines you have to openly, and without hesitation, encounter the intangibles.

James: One of the many things I appreciate and value with the way Red76 approaches a project is the willingness and ability to respond to the conditions presented, to understand the environment and the moment. Red76 adapts to make those conditions work for the overall intention. From a curatorial perspective, it’s really quite wonderful to experience this willingness especially given the variables and unpredictable qualities that are naturally part of socially engaged practices.

Sam: I’m glad you brought up the idea of improvisation. It’s a key aspect to my practice, an aspect that I think is vitally important to this type of work in general, and one that is somewhat outside of the culture of more traditional fine art, and gallery models. I feel comfortable saying that this area of interest is also the case for Gabriel and Zefrey as much as for myself. But I’ll let them chime in about that.[11] It’s something we’ve discussed in the past, but never publicly.

The idea of the artist as finite entity and all knowing, able in advance to recognize the outcome of their desired piece, is extremely alien to me. I also think that it is a ridiculous myth. A myth that many artists themselves adopt and labor over, at times promote. In regard to the more improvisational methods of Red76 work, I think some people—depending on where they are coming from—see them as a sort of amateur-ness, or naivety. But my take, and the cultural histories that I’m working off of, treat those ideas entirely differently and with a lot more respect. In this regard culturally my interests, and training in some fashion if you will, are coming far more from music, specifically the traditions, methods, and histories of jazz, blues, and punk and rock and roll music. Though I’ve played in bands, and continue marginally to make music, what I feel like I’ve inherited most concretely from these art forms and cultures—by way of reading, listening, and varied forms of participation—is an understanding of a culture adept at call and response, active listening, and improvised (though highly nuanced and methodological) modes of reaction to people, environments, and situations. It’s something that Red76 members all discuss when considering aspects of projects. We think about the situations we’re getting ourselves into and how we might engage them, how we’d feel if things went one way or another. But when it comes down to it, on the ground, in the moment, anarchy reins supreme. What you can do is plan, not for outcomes to take place, but for means of reaction and response to types.

James: Does anything come immediately to mind that changed during your month-plus time in Columbus from its original conception? Also, thinking specifically about experiences in Columbus and the folks who engaged with Surplus Seminar activities, what, if anything, occurred that might affect future iterations of Surplus Seminar elsewhere?

Sam: I’m not sure that there was anything in particular that comes to mind as far as Surplus Seminar in Columbus is concerned. The way I look at it is that each day you are working, to some degree, on the fly. You plan as much as you can and then you go out there and see how your preconceived notions jibe with the lay of the land. There were some projects that we planned on doing before we arrived in Columbus, and then when we got there it just didn’t seem to make sense to do them. In particular The School of the Unconscious (a project that was planned to debut in Columbus, and one that we hope to get off the ground in the near future) fell by the wayside, and Parcel Platform, which is an autonomous staging area for lectures, talks, performances, etc., that we planned to build as a counter-point to A/AA. That didn’t get off the ground either, and I think for good reason. As the work began to reveal itself while we were there the idea of building Parcel Platform seemed superfluous, so we decided there’s no reason for us to do it now, and that we can put it on the backburner for another time and another place where it would be far more appropriate. It’s hard to be comfortable with that type of decision-making. Especially within a culture that prides itself on control and the aforementioned myth of the clairvoyant artist. It’s easy to read that as not getting work done, being slack or lazy. It took me a long to get to the stage wherein I could comfortably disagree with that assessment. But for me, now, it seems as if the completion of projects—when in your heart-of-hearts you know that they aren’t needed to make the project whole—seems like waste, something entirely unnatural to the notions of the project at hand. In the end the effort that it would take to do it would take away from the whole of the project. The only reason to complete it would be a belief in some sense of maximalism, a roundabout form of gluttony.

With this in mind, negation is only one form of this method of improvisation. There is also so much that gets added. This process of addition is in constant dialogue with the negation of certain elements of the projects in full. I feel like our projects have gotten so much more nuanced as time has gone on and we’ve played around with the environment and added elements on the fly in response to what we were feeling, thinking, and doing at the time, rather then fascistically attempting to keep to a model of what we thought the project was supposed to be. This all gets back to some methodological ideas that I’ve formed over time, as I’ve mentioned, in regard to how these projects work most successfully. You create strong frames for what people are supposed to experience, legible forms for the public to enter that are easy to understand, they adopt cultural signifiers that are recognizable and easy to understand. Once they enter this space though, what’s inside is—to some degree—up for grabs, though colored by the narrative the frame is cloaked under. The space then turns into a vehicle that they need to learn how to drive. We are there to help them along the way, to facilitate the idea behind the narrative of the project, to coach them in how to drive on their own.

James: Red76 established a platform examining models of education within the framework of an institution of higher education? How do you believe that situation affected the outcome of Surplus Seminar?

Sam: I think it was a really good foil to work within and alongside an existing educational platform. As you could argue, fairly easily, that the project is a base for experimentation having an educational institution as its host made perfect sense. While I didn’t see it, and we didn’t plan the project as a critique (though that did come up a fair amount with certain students), the institution was able to work as the control within the experiment with Surplus Seminar as the variable. In this sense we were able to compare and contrast certain ideas and means of engagement, along with how things might manifest when pedagogical frames are more transparent or non-hierarchical. I think this worked out really well since so many of the people who got involved were students at CCAD. They were able to traverse back and forth between their day-to-day educational experience at the school, and this project which offered a educational platform for them to consider what they might see as parallel outlets for ideas that they were already engaged in, or even ideas which were alien to their daily educational lives at the school. It all seemed like a really positive relationship to me: for us, for the students, and for the school.[12]

What I find funny is the ability to see Surplus Seminar as oppositional, or a critique of higher or organized education. We were asked to initiate elements of the project at a Pacific Northwest college, which will remain nameless. This was supposed to happen in the spring of 2010. After having just finished up with you and the Bureau for Open Culture and preparing to do another iteration of Surplus Seminar at The Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis in the summer of 2010, we were interested in doing a smaller more fluid version of the project with this college. It seemed natural to continue the momentum. So we offered this idea up and just received a horribly shocked response in return. Really horrible and seemingly pissed off in all honesty. I was really floored by the reaction. It was odd to experience this coming off of what had just occurred at CCAD through the Bureau for Open Culture, as the people associated with this college—students and their advisors alike—were, by all accounts, insulted by our proposal to them. As if we were attempting to blow up the college and all that they’d worked for. I have neither the desire, nor the technical know-how, to blow anything up. But I bring this up as I feel that for some people the idea of offering up alternatives to the norm, or even a friendly space to critically engage how we act and react within the norm is inherently a threat. I’m fairly boggled by this approach. It seems to me to be blatantly anti-intellectual at heart not to constantly consider how you are working through problems and to be open to self-assessment. My understanding of this approach I’m interested in and used to is—while not always devoid of criticism—so far from what I would describe as oppositional.

James: I can see how on the surface an interpretation of Surplus Seminar as a critique or opposition to the educational institution might be made. However, it is difficult to understand why such negative reaction to the work and resistance to creating a platform for discourse about these structures.[13] By stringently making boundaries within which ideas, concepts and actions remain unchallenged or simply not discussed, creative and intellectual pursuits are, of course, stifled. When you and I initially talked about making Surplus Seminar part of Descent to Revolution, I was excited as I felt it was an ideal match with concepts explored in the exhibition as well as with the Bureau for Open Culture’s situation within an academic institution. Surplus Seminar is also in concert with the practices I’ve been working through with programming. The exhibitions have an underlying interest in power structures: aesthetics, spatial, corporate, urban, art, etc. I am interested in the affect the institution of art makes on the experience of art, not only socially-engaged practices but also on more traditional presentations inside the gallery. And, in some ways the programming challenges that influence. Descent to Revolution has that challenge in it. I feel Red76’s Surplus Seminar generates the kinds of conversations and experiments about the current practice and effectiveness of educational institutional frameworks—and those should be encouraged. It is about carving out an intellectual and physical space to create a discourse about what currently exists, the limits the institution possesses, and the possibilities of transgressing the limits so a sense of permeability remains continually alive, continually porous.

You mention the people associated with the nameless Pacific Northwest college—students and advisors—were insulted by your proposal. This is interesting to me and helps to take the conversation back to your experience at CCAD. Red76 did make the project at an academic institution in the Midwest, a college that has as strong tradition of object-making and painting and not a significant experience with socially-based practices or conceptual art. What were some unexpected positive and negative realizations you had in regards to the faculty, student and administration response to Surplus Seminar? How did those realizations affect the shape Surplus Seminar took?[14]

The non-hierarchical structure is a prevalent aspect of Surplus Seminar. It is a salient difference between Surplus Seminar and organizational structures of educational institutions like CCAD and countless others. However, given that Red76 conceptualized, programmed and maintained a schedule of activity for the various components of Surplus Seminar, could you describe more how a non-hierarchical theory was put into actualized practice?[15]

Sam: It’s never cut and dry setting up spaces like we did for Surplus Seminar. Our goal is absolutely to create a flattened space, a horizontal space available for questioning. Over time the ability to create those spaces has become fairly methodological, while maintaining, as I mentioned earlier, a purposeful degree of call and response to the work in the field. It requires a lot of consideration. My take on it is that to create these spaces, while not being the only way, the best method we’ve come upon is to create a frame for participants to enter that is familiar and easily accessible. A copy shop, a bar, a construction site, any of these things are gesturally and visibly familiar to people, to the point of non-questioning. The point is, though, you’re never going to get it quite right. If it’s a copy shop it is going to be a weird looking copy shop, if it’s a construction site it’s going to look like a somewhat unprofessional one. This familiarity and hint of messiness or deconstruction allows possible participants the comfortability and agency to enter the space on their own terms. What needs to be done from there is to promote this notion of the horizontal and the non-hierarchical as much as possible, and in this sense, give the participants the tools to begin deconstructing the false and missing interior narrative. As long as you have these strong frames what goes on inside, no matter how anarchic, works for your purposes as long as the goal is to be looking, considering, and proposing ideas within the space rather than to the space.

James: And, to leave it here, what are the artistic, political and/or pedagogical histories that have influenced the development of ideas for Surplus Seminar and how do you see it within these legacies?[16]

There have been a lot of past histories that have informed our methodology in this way, though none really that I can point to directly that I feel serves as a sole, linear, parent to what we are interested in pursuing. It’s not a direct line. That said, researching sites like Home, Washington (Est. 1886), which is one of the Pacific Northwest’s oldest anarchist/free love planned communities, has been of great benefit. And, as always, the juxtaposition of various forms of media, to a large extent books, plays a huge role in our work. Finding bits and pieces of past histories, biographies, discrete projects and the communities that engaged them has always been an energizing tool for us. In this sense, getting back to CCAD and our work there in particular with Surplus Seminar, and to a large degree the VDC Copy Center which we worked on with you in 2008, everything seemed to fit fairly naturally into place. Maybe this is because the history that we find influential and feel our work is informed by tends to be fairly disheveled. As we’ve been able to refine our practice over the years this dispersed nature in regard to influence has been really helpful in that wherever we may be, whoever we may find ourselves working with, the conversation is varied and can fit in people’s interests and opinions more often than not, as it’s coming from so many different points of reference. And that’s the point. That’s why it’s of benefit to set up these sites the way we do. It’s not proselytizing in that way. It’s not shouting out slogans or trying to indoctrinate people. Though we have our concerns—and we’re going to discuss them, vigorously—our main desire is to set up a space where those concerns can be joined by the concerns of other. That space in-between, wherein a third stream of insight can develop, new and different from our interests and the interests of those that join us, that’s the space we want to create, and that’s the space we feel is most vital.

**Footnotes - **Italic text

[1] Gabriel Saloman: Good ideas are a commons. To lock them up and prevent them from making their way through the world is like letting food rot, boarding up an empty home or burning a library. If it wasn't for the precarity of our lives under Capitalism we wouldn't care whether someone extrapolates from our work, collages it, refines it or even steals it out right. Our ego be damned (because credit is only worth something when with it comes with material rewards). If every artist could feed themselves, house themselves and continue creating their work would any but the most fearful or vain care if their work was re-purposed, copied or appropriated?

[2] Gabriel: Sam called me up and said "I have an idea for something that I want to do in Columbus with James—I want to create an underground bunker and grow potatoes above it." From there months of emails, visits to Portland and Skype calls ensued with Sam and I constructing, deconstructing and at times demolishing dozens of initiatives. As is often the case with our collaborations Sam initiated the project thematically and established various formal concerns which all of our subsequent ideas worked within. Often I feel as though my role is to push Sam to be more clear in concept, or to address political and theoretical problems I perceive in his initiatives. Sometimes I lobby for more aesthetic labor and sometimes I simply take Sam's ideas and attempt to build them into a tangible form. With my own initiatives Sam pushes them to develop a more rigorous narrative, a wider platform or else to add poetry if it seems that it's lacking. On the ground, as facilitators, our roles are much more similar, but this describes the ways in which more and more Red76 projects have developed. I imagine it is similar to some degree with other members of the collaborative.

[3] Gabriel: This was one of the worst projects we ever did. It's also one of my favorites. I highly recommend that anyone sharing a beer with Sam and I ask about this trip. I'm considering making a musical based on it.

[4] Gabriel: A/AA doesn't begin with an end, thus making the building a means. It has goals and potentials, but these are defined ultimately by the participants. Other than the frame of a "schoolhouse" and the suggestion of a methodology of "utilizing surplus,” there is little else that is predetermined. The Diggers, anarchist hippies from San Francisco in the sixties, used to have a stock answer to the often asked "Who's in charge here?" "YOU ARE!" A/AA borrows from that approach in that whoever shows up determines the next course of action, the qualities of the work, and within a collective and consensual framework must decide what it will become.

[5] Gabriel: A critical element not mentioned by Sam is the screening of these essays and the discussion that evolves from it. Most of our projects attempt to exist in multiple platforms that inform and support each other. So while these essays participate in the hyperlinked social space of the Web, through among other things blogs, URLs and YouTube itself, there is also a physical manifestation of the project. In Columbus we held screenings of these essays, often with the authors providing an introduction in person, substituting for their video version. Following the screening Red76, the authors and those attending the event engaged in a conversation. These conversations not only "complete" the project, they indicate a way of intervening in web-based social spaces and creating physical world parallels. Without judging the merits of virtual social networking, I believe that people absolutely need to address the diminishing realm of physical social relationships and how that is affecting our Social Relations.

[6] Gabriel: Conspicuously missing from this survey is TMF Co. and Levine's Market and Meeting Place. Briefly, TMF Co. or "Teach-a-Man-to-Fish Company" was an experiment in creating a market that not only discourages future consumption, but also turns the act of commercial exchange into a pedagogical tool. Essentially we attempted to create products for sale—journals, kim chee, infused vodka, etc.—which contained in their packaging instructions for creating the same product on one's own. Ideally the package would contain some of the same tools one needed to create their own variation on the product. The goal was to never have a return customer. Most of the materials were comprised of second hand, salvaged or gleaned materials, emphasizing the theme of surplus and suggesting the value of locality as opposed to the mass market. Within the context of a provisional TMF Co. shop we invited people to offer skill shares, revealing their own personal narratives and interests through the offering of their knowledge.

Levine's Market and Meeting Place was a school in the form of Speakeasy where in different forms of the marketplace were created simultaneously: barter, trade, black markets, grey markets, free boxes, gifts and traditional monetary exchange. Levine's asks us to ignore the typical definitions of value and propriety imposed by capital and the Law by allowing people to determine between individuals what a thing is worth and how it ought to be exchanged. Levine's was a sort of parallel project to Surplus Seminar that included thematic elements of Surplus, Pedagogy and Alternative Marketplaces, but situated itself intentionally as outside of the specific realm of the Descent to Revolution exhibit and CCAD.

[7] Gabriel: As pertinent as this tangent is, I feel obligated to try and address elements of the question that Sam passes over in some ways. James refers to a "significant circle of participants" and I can't help but assume this implicates the unity, collectivity and social bond that seemed to develop from the project. Though primarily composed of less than a dozen students, and to some extent gallery staff and school faculty, it was clear that the project was of deep importance to these participants. There was little incentive to be involved other than the satisfaction of the experience and yet the continuity of participation and the devotion expressed through it told me as a facilitator that a chord had been struck. The project had "failure" built into its narrative, whether that meant non-participation or deconstruction—both of which took place. The goal was to "do" and in that act see what would manifest. That a genuine circle formed, one for whom the project clearly was significant, makes other quantitative considerations seem moot.

[8] Gabriel: I think this is an example where the Artworld's complicity in Capitalism is perfectly problemitized. Capitalism is amoral, no matter what Milton Friedman may say. It has no obligation to consider the spiritual, emotional or even material effects of its impact on the world unless they can be quantified as some form of currency. This is the crisis facing everything in too-late Capitalism, from the University, to climate, to food security. If art doesn't want to be resigned to a fate determined by numismatics it has to continue to push back. I think this is what makes Descent to Revolution a remarkable show. Its location in Columbus, its proximity to the G20 and its timing in the arc of the current financial crisis makes these unaccountable gestures a significant critique to the total absorption of culture into commerce.

[9] Gabriel: It was often expressed to me by participants that Surplus Seminar, and Descent to Revolution in general, represented a meaningful change or addition to the discourse and experience of art-making in Columbus. Perhaps the project filled individual "voids" but I can't help but identify a different alignment of need and fulfillment. Red76 projects are always an attempt to respond to a perceived need, or at least to offer a potential form of engagement and practice which could play a meaningful role in the world. What they lack too often is meaningful engagement from outside of our inner collaborative. This void was filled wonderfully by the students, artists, teachers and others who participated in Surplus Seminar. Perhaps we (along with the Bureau for Open Culture’s hard work) simply created a platform that earned that level of engagement. I can't help but feel that we were in part just lucky to have such wonderful collaborators available for this project and willing to fill our own voids.

[10] Gabriel: Our work becomes more successful when we begin dissolving our roles as initiators, or facilitators, and become participants, indistinguishable in the moment to all the others who are there. The degree to which I believe we have accomplished our goals is the degree to which we disappear. Of course, our investment in the project, our privilege to be there and be heard, our access to resources and the nature of some of the financial and cultural capital that is produced by the project means that we can almost never become truly equivalent to other participants. That said, in the course of enacting the project the space can be flattened and to listen and be receptive is a critical tool. I'm here to learn, to become more, because making art is not about becoming an authority but rather opening to what you don't know.

[11] Gabriel: I'm not interested in being in control of a situation. My desire is to see capital letter, circle "A" anarchy in action. Not as a program but as a lived experience which by its demonstration changes consciousness. When Red76 provokes a situation, no matter how gently or indirectly we do it, we're asking questions and admitting a vulnerability. In that space, others can step in and help form what is to occur. From this place I'm afforded an opportunity to respond and witness in a way I can't have anticipated. That is a Liberation. Improvisation, and it's cousins Play and Mindfulness, are essential to being a liberated person. You can't impose that condition, but you can enact it and by doing so encourage others in the world, or the room, to respond.

[12] Gabriel: I think this speaks to the fact there are (currently) limits to what can be done without the resources or even the methodologies of institutional education. Sam and myself both have conflicted histories with our own personal engagements with Universities and public education. It's not a coincidence that we would rather build a schoolhouse out of garbage than lecture in a class. That said, it was easy to see how well our notions and explorations of potential educational structures complimented the more traditional structures of CCAD. Certainly I sensed an attraction to Surplus Seminar, from students and faculty both, that alluded to a sense that this was a free space that inverted if not subverted many of the imposed conditions of a Bauhaus School arts education. Yet it truly existed parallel and could easily be understood as a compliment as much as a critique of the Institution.

I can't help but think of the occupations that have been occurring on University campuses, in particular in California. These students seem invested in the potential of an institutional education—why else would they fight for it. What they're demanding for in many ways is Agency. The ability to direct the course and outcome of their education. Divestment from forces that place economic or social judgment upon what they learn. I think it's a similar desire that drew people to Surplus Seminar.

[13] Gabriel: I think that everyone is implicated in any critique of Capitalism, Institutions and Social relationships because we directly and accidentally act as part of these forces. As a student or an administrator, when asked what would you be without this institution in its present form (a paraphrase of the premise that A/AA suggests) you are asked to face an existential crisis. What is a teacher or a student without a school? While some will find it liberating to investigate that premise, others see it as nihilistic. In Vancouver, where I'm based, Aboriginal people here are still fighting for sovereignty. They have very little support from most Canadians, to say nothing of the Government. Part of the challenge is that Native Sovereignty asks people living in the heart of a western civilization to imagine their whole national identity disappearing, history being subjectively re-positioned, and the re-distribution of wealth, power and social status. All the while, everyone is implicated in the Colonial project. It takes courage to give up privilege, even if it is only in the form of a platform where-in this is imagined to take place.

[14] Gabriel: I'm somewhat embarrassed to admit that I had next to no negative experiences in relation to CCAD. Its administration, teachers, students, security, the Bureau for Open Culture and its staff—everyone directly connected to the campus (with the pointless but notable exception of maintenance) was supportive, considerate, and good to work with. Certainly there were many people who did not engage but their absence didn't alter the project in a way I perceived. At times I was disappointed that more people from the general Columbus community didn't come to investigate. Perhaps being aligned so closely with a University gave less license to people who were not connected to that institution.

[15] Gabriel: My friend Graham Sheard bought me a coffee when I returned to Vancouver. He'd been following the A/AA blog and he apparently admired it quite a bit. When I asked him why, he said "There were groups of people... doing things.... together." I can't think of a better way of describing a non-hierarchical project. "Groups of people" implies that it is not about the lone individual but about a collectivity, and is thus permeable and can expand and contract. "Doing things" is very different than witnessing, or any other more passive role. There is activity and some form of labor. Positioned next to "groups of people" it suggests that there is not a separation between roles, an audience and performers, but a communal kind of activity rooted in participation. "Together" means that there is interaction and exchange. A classroom where everyone is at there own desk, or terminal, or lab describes students that, while in proximity, are not together. As the conclusion of the triad, it speaks explicitly of exchange, interchange, and transmission as a further degree of group activity.

[16] Gabriel: This kind of question is almost too tempting. A list of a lifetime of influences and pre-figurations comes to mind, but it's too much. I will point out that we attempted to begin such a discussion in the form of our A/AA blog, with references to William James, the Book of Tea, etc. Perhaps I'll mention a few less obvious considerations. One would be Gone to Croatian: Origins of North American Drop Out Culture, edited by Ron Sakolsky and James Koehnline. Less the actual text itself than how it manages to overlap concerns of mine regarding enacted Utopias, communal life as a method of survival and resistance, and the ambiguity between facts, fictions and fantasy. Home, Washington, which has been a subject of research and activities for past Red76 projects still has a profound influence on our current work I would say. An anarchist commune that survived for decades in the remoter parts of the Puget Sound, they had a remarkable attitude towards the importance of education, publication, autonomy and above all curiosity. In the middle of the woods, in a hand built hall called Liberty, people from the community regularly gathered to hear lectures from preachers and cross-dressers, Wobblies and poets, vegetarians and theosophists. Perhaps the one text that really struck me in the moment right before I came to Columbus was Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times. His role as a participant in society as a worker, a criminal, an authority and a tramp was constantly undermined by his obliviousness to the structures of power he was supposed to be subservient to. Chaplin allows others to play in their roles only to the extent that he might eat and have shelter, and eventually fall in love. Something about that movie resonated for me throughout my time in Columbus.

DOCUMENTS

With the help of master "junkboat" builder, Dylan Gauthier (Mare Liberum / The Free Seas), the Columbus, OH Surplus Seminar crew transformed a staircase, found in a nearby alleyway, into a (extremely heavy) boat that we set sail on a nearby lake.

s(o)s temporary from dgoats on Vimeo.

COLOPHON

Editors: Sam Gould & Gabriel Saloman

Collaborators: Dylan Gauthier, Mike Wolf, Courtney Dailey, Zeffrey Throwell, Bill Daniel, Sarah Peters, Waziyatawin, Ola Stahl, Cassandra Troyan, James Voorhies, and others.

Institutional Collaborators: Walker Art Center, Columbus College of Art & Design