ASPEN ART MUSEUM
MAGAZINE
40
Aspen Heritage
in gestures, in spaces, in objects and in relationships with others. If you took that as a roadmap for how to organize something like this, you’d start to move towards a more interesting place. Just the act of getting up and relocating to another space changes how you in- teract. It also creates a richer embodied experience. I recently created a five-day work- shop in Austin as part of a performance festival. Each day happened in a differ- ent location with a different mode: a participatory talk; a meal where people gathered outside at a restaurant; a walk along the river; a karaoke party; and a cookout where everyone prepared food together. EK It slightly reminds me of a friend of mine, the brilliant cultural critic Judith Williamson, who had a fantasy about doing a design history conference where you’d arrive at the venue and they would say, “There is no conference. Do exactly as you please.” But coming back to Aspen, if it were to happen now: what can possibly justify everyone flying in? PK That’s an even better reason for it not to be frontal presentations because nobody needs to experience that syn- chronously. Even in teaching since the pandemic, many people I know no longer spend a session delivering a presentation or bringing somebody in to give a guest lecture. They have that presentational part recorded, share it with people be forehand, and then use the time together for discussion. To justify meeting in person it requires maximizing what can happen in the room that’s unexpected, in the moment, responsive. Bringing different people together is really important. If it’s all going to be the same people who already know each other, it’s not worth it. At most symposiums or gatherings you sit at lunch and just meet somebody and talk with them. Those things are almost accidental. They’re seen as being positive by-products but they’re not intentionally designed. You’re not maxi- mizing those opportunities. EK The most successful thing I’ve done on those lines was a conference I attended in Svalbard with a perfumer. We had two scents and we were going to divide the conference in half depend- ing on which they preferred. We had quite preordained ideas about what that would mean. Instead people just gave us extraordinary stories about their memo- ries of smell—long anecdotes about their childhoods. People spoke in a completely different way. It was quite surprising because our whole idea of neatly dividing the conference in two and somehow setting up an opposition just went out the window. PK That sounds great! What is important there is that you were attuned enough or the organizers left enough space that you could respond. To quote adrienne maree brown in Emergent Strategy [2017], she advises, “Less prep, more presence.” I’m paraphrasing, but she goes onto say something like, “In any group of people in a room, there’s a conversation that can only be had between those people in that room. Your job as a facilitator is to find that conversation.”
EK In Aspen in 1970, they swapped their name badges, which actually looked quite interesting. I thought it was weirdly simple and great. PK A lot of the things they were do- ing resonate so strongly now. And in fact if you did them at a conference today, they might still seem out of the ordinary. These activities have become the province of corporate team building exercises where you have specific for- mats for interacting, but actually, I think that sometimes we do need to introduce protocols like this. Otherwise there’s a tyranny of structurelessness, to use the phrase from ’70s feminism. It’s really important to have structures that can open up different kinds of dialogue or dialogue between people who wouldn’t talk otherwise. EK Can we discuss the fascinat- ing section at the end of Eli Noyes and Claudia Weill’s short film about the conference when Reyner Banham, as chair of the closing session, tries to rally the attendees into a consensus. Presumably that was a conference tradi- tion to conclude with consensus and a set of action points shared by all. I was wondering how you feel about that, because that obviously was not what the 1970 participants wanted, and I don’t think we’d look for that in a confer- ence today. PK Conflict is important. It’s neces- sary to be able to sit with discomfort, particularly at the moment we’re in now, politically, socially—thinking about ra- cial inequality and injustice. In 1970 they expected everybody to agree instead of accepting that given the range of people in the room, disagreement was a given. Having multiple opinions being heard, and not trying to streamline it to a single solution is sometimes the most meaning- ful approach—keeping contradictory ideas in a container at the same time. EK I guess the idea is you need con- sensus to create a solution. They clearly believed that you cannot move forward without that. Can the conference achieve anything if the members remain funda- mentally opposed? PK I think it’s essential that a con- ference or a gathering makes space for truly different things. It sounds as if in the next edition the organizers took up many demands of the 1970 confer- ence, including more participatory exercises, games and ideas well outside design. As Alice Twemlow points out, the radical challenge of the 1970 confer- ence was absorbed by the next one. In my mind, though, hybrid solutions are almost always more resilient—even in a decision-making process. If one set of people are nominated top-down, other people are nominated by their peers, other people might be nominated from a bottom-up open call, then you end up with a more interesting grouping. EK How would that manifest itself physically—thinking of a design solution? Was the tent a problem? PK Yes. I think the tent was trying to make everything happen in one place. We have the designers, we have corpo- rations. We come into a tent, we all come to a shared idea. It’s an optimistic, idealistic mode of democracy that you can debate these things out and you’re all going to agree at the end of the day. I just don’t think that’s the way things work. Have you read The Extended Mind [2021] by Annie Murphy Paul? Its basic argument is trying to debunk the notion that thinking happens in the brain. It shows how thinking happens in the body,
Above Local Aspen Flora. Courtesy: The Aspen Art Museum
that model that’s worth reviving? Could you recast all the agents and somehow revive the conference? PK The question that immediately comes up is: would it be specifically a design conference, given the ways in which art and design are so entwined with each other now? EK But, in fact, even by the end of the 1950s it was already becoming much broader, including philosophers and sociologists and the like, and later members of the avant-garde—people like John Cage who appeared in 1966. They’d already pushed that boundary. PK You’re right. Maybe that bound- ary was more porous in the 1950s and became less so in the ’70s or ’80s. EK That also makes you think about cycles, because people talk now about blurring the boundaries as if that’s something new. I always think that boundaries are hardened by capitalism. If people are buying stuff, they want to know what it is and sud- denly the boundary hardens somehow. But let’s try and imagine what Aspen would ideally be if it were re- vived now. What format would it take for you? PK An example close at hand is the experimental symposium in Washington DC called “How Can We Gather Now?”, for which Asad Raza and I served as co-artistic directors. The question that it posed came out of the work I was doing during the pan- demic to try and create experimental
participatory Zoom events juxtaposing multiple modes—conversations, semi- nars and readings, but also movement, mindfulness, dance and karaoke. In Washington, I brought an inter- est in different modes of communication and scales of interaction—the indi- vidual, two people, the small group, the whole conference, to create intimacy, belonging and connection in commu- nity. Asad brought the idea of activating all of the senses. EK Was the aim just to gather? PK It was to learn about gathering and to practice forms of gathering. A generous exchange between strangers. And that seems to have been a motiva- tion behind the original design confer- ence too. Conferences are places where there is “content”—people are sharing specific ideas—but they’re also as much about the participants just being there, together. EK In a way, it’s almost the opposite of a meeting in that there is no agenda. PK The goal is that people meet each other and develop an agenda or purpose together through that en- counter. At a conference, relationships are formed and continue to develop. The symposium becomes a proxy for creating more diverse forms of com- munity moving forward. It’s important to hit different modes of presentation or interaction to engage with a broader constituency. It’s not a one size fits all format.
Prem Krishnamurthy is a designer, curator, author and educator. He is based in Berlin, Germany, and New York, USA.
Emily King is a writer and curator. She lives in London, UK.
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