What possibilities for political transformation can be opened up through imagination, fantasy, and art? Can the left create instrumental change or is the game rigged? This week artist and writer Jacob Wren considers these questions, as well as ideas about the artist as political activist and the balance between egoism and conciliation in collaborative projects. “Sometimes I think that the secret ingredient in art is art. Another thing that has come to the forefront of my mind over the years is how little room for art there is in art; how much of the structural and institutional ways of thinking in and around art keep out what I think of as art. For me art has to be something where you don’t know everything about it when you start. What I’m trying to do when I make work […] is discover something that I’m not entirely able to articulate.” – Jacob Wren Wren, Jacob, Polyamorous Love Song, Toronto: Book Thug, 2014.

Artist, writer, and educator Pablo Helguera discusses the integration of art and life and the dialogue that occurs between an artwork and the outside world. He considers the beginning point of artistic investigation and describes his latest project: a book about aphorisms for artists. Join us as we reflect on the human desire for continual learning and the possibilities of artistic collaboration. The secret ingredient in art: “I thought about my mom when you asked me that, mainly because my mom is a great cook. She learned cooking like a lot of people do – through experience. And it’s almost impossible to get her to tell you how she cooks this or that. It’s almost like a magician where you don’t know how she managed to do it. I think this is the trick with asking for a formula for making an artwork or a project. There’s no secret ingredient. […] What I would say is it’s all about bits of intuition and a massive dose of experience. Knowing what to do with what you have.” – Pablo Helguera Helguera, Pablo, Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook, New York: Jorge Pinto Books, 2011.

This week we talk with Steph Yates, a Guelph-based screen-printer, videographer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist about the relationships between music and art. How has the dialogue between the two disciplines developed over time, in various places, and in her practice in particular? Yates discusses the aesthetic and conceptual choices in her music and art, grapples with issues of identity and gender, and talks about what it’s like being a female lead in the music scene. “I think for me the secret ingredient is the thing that you can’t know until it happens, the thing you can’t catch, the mistake you didn’t know you were waiting for until it arrives. It’s just sort of the way things fall and then you see it. Maybe you think of it as fate or chance but you can’t direct it.” Jarmusch, Jim, “My Golden Rules,” MovieMaker, January 22, 2004.

Art collective Fastwürms enacts witch positivity, working class aesthetics, and queer politics through their multidisciplinary practice that includes video, installation, and performance art. The duo, Kim Kozzi and Dai Skuse, discuss queerness, distopias, the biological world, and the act of imagining alternate models. What can be gained through negotiating collaboration, shared authorship, and ways of working that resist capitalist culture? The secret ingredient in art: “’Do what you will, harm unto none’ is our motto. Love is the law. It comes from love, it comes from light, always.” Halberstam, Judith, The Queer Art of Failure, Duke University Press: 2011.

Preuzmimo Benčić was a video project by Canadian artist Althea Thauberger depicting a decommissioned factory in Rijeka, Croatia, occupied by 70 children ages playing the roles of its former workers who have re-skilled as artists. The Benčić Youth Council, a group of young people who learn about and create culture in the city, which takes its name and protagonists from the video, provides the context for this discussion of how children can gain agency in planning cities. We discuss models of education in relation to early learning experiences. Weaving in the voices of some of the Youth Council members, we talk about the theories of the Toronto-based collective Mammalian Diving Reflex, who works with their youth wing, the Young Mammals, as an organizational and art-scene succession plan. Consider how involving youth in shaping the places and processes of our shared life is not only part of a life-affirming model of education, but also a contribution to clearer and more meaningful decisions for all of us. O’Donnell, Darren. “Toronto the Teenager." In UTOpia: Towards a New Toronto, edited by Jason McBride and Alana Wilcox. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2005. (November 6, 2013)

Omnichordist, multi-instrumentalist, record label executive (Label Fantastic), mother, bus driver, instigator of Golden Throats Karaoke, and youth DIY music savior, Jenny Mitchell talks about living a life grounded in music. Having started The Barmitzvah Brothers at age 15 with co-conspirators Evan and Geordie Gordon, Jenny reflects on the specialness of youth musical creation prior to the self-censorship that an adult self-consciousness can instill. Her mobile recording studio The Golden Bus aims to bring DIY culture to young creators in the city and offers a platform and training for the many different ways to make music. “The secret ingredient is yourself. You’re the filter, you’re how it’s all coming in, it’s being filtered in through you; you’re adding your piece to anything that has ever been done. That is the only constant in all artistic practice.” - Jenny Mitchell

Shawn Van Sluys discusses the non-supernatural sacred in relation to artistic practices. He identifies the sacred as the source of new meanings, a genitive creativity ultimately rooted in the great and deep vibrations of the earth, which Shawn calls the “first metaphor.” Hear about Ursa Major, Robert Bringhurst's polyphonic mask for singers and dancers centered on the sacredness of the bear in many civilizations. Consider how art can help us reckon with the three flaws of humanity: mortality, groundlessness, and insatiability. Reflect with us on green spaces as the darkness between the stars of a constellation, setting ourselves in relation as retrieving ourselves, and the way we warm knowledge in our bodies. Bringhurst, Robert. Ursa Major. Kentville: Gaspereau Press, 2009. Certeau, Michel de. “Walking the City.” The Practice of Everyday Life. 3rd Revised Edition ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. (April 30, 2014) Joudry, Shalan. Generations Re-Emerging. Kentville, Gaspereau Press, 2014. Reines, Ariana. Mercury. New York: Fence Books, 2011.

Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol of the Rotterdam-based artist collective Bik Van der Pol discuss their approach to art making in relation to the social geography of Sudbury, Ontario. In preparation for their event-based art project Between a Rock and a Hard Place—11 outdoor concerts in 11 different locations—the pair engaged their senses to take in all the elements around them with the intention ‘not to work with a site specifically, but to make a site specific.’ Imagine the artists on hand and knee, washing the rocks stained by nickel smelting, peering deep into the trembling meteor vibrations that created Sudbury’s unique geological endowment, with all of its economic, environmental, and social consequences. Bik Van der Pol connected the rocks and the environmental situation of the city to the city’s burgeoning vibrant music scene. How do you acknowledge the connections between the land itself and the creative energies alive there? “Art is a focus point, or point of departure. It’s something that brings hopes and expectations to a focus point for imagination, and then spits it out back into the world again. It generates a different view on what you think is reality. As an artist you try to do something according to your own experience, finding a solution, a moment to see things differently, to have some sort of impact. It’s both for yourself and for others.” - Bik Van der Pol

Today we hear selections of a talk given at the Guelph Black Heritage Society on December 13, 2015. Performance artist, choreographer, and poet Tanya Lukin Linklater speaks at an event by People of Good Will, a collective seeking to reimagine the underground railroad as a living history and a metaphor culture determination for immigrants and culturally diverse people living in Guelph. Tanya presents her experience as an Alutiiq woman experiencing other people’s art works, such as Janet Cardiff’s 40 Part Motet and Layli Long Soldier’s poem Grass. Also listen to Duane Linklater’s take on an Indian section of his record collection and how we categorize.

This show combines threads of different spools to affect a powerful audio wake-up call. Chock-full of rad new music that will shake out the cob webs out of the attic, in this episode we talk about failing as a style and way of life, as the orbital path of creativity itself. We talk about power imbalances as a human sickness, feminist killjoys, the burden of proof on marginalized voices, the loss of memory as a power outage. We spin a few hat tricks of transcendent tracks (and did you know that the expression “hat trick” originates with Guelph’s former junior hockey team, the Biltmore Mad Hatters?). Davis, Lydia. Almost No Memory. Farrar, Straus & Girous, 1997. (Nov. 19, 2014) Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books, 1995. (Dec 3, 2015) Doyle, Jennifer. Hold It Against Me: Difficulty and Emotion in Contemporary Art. Duke University Press, 2013. (January 14, 2015) Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011. (November 19, 2014) Queyras, Sina. M x T. Toronto: Coach House Printing, 2014. (January 14, 2015)

Visual artist and Métis curator of the White Water Gallery in North Bay Clayton Windatt reflects on the false divide between artist-run and community centers on the one hand and high art and contemporary theory on the other. Community art can be as excellent as high art and also most responsible to local reception and understanding of that work. Re-conceptualize the image of the artist as a solitary studio genius and think through the collaborative development model, especially in the context of Indigenous art within a neo-colonial context. Join us in reflecting on Glen Sean Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks, resilience, and transformation. “The secret ingredient in art is insight, intention, the will that you put into things. If it’s done with intention and they try to have an emotional response from the audience, then it’s going to be successful. Intention can serve as a space, a container, for things to happen within.” - Clayton Windatt Coulthard, Glen Sean. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. University of Minnesota Press, 2014. (May 15, 2015)

In the age of the selfie, where we make private moments public through an image or video, what does it mean to think through video’s own body in relation to the bodies that it presents? Using Laura U. Marks’s text Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, we talk about the material nature of analog vs. digital video and consider the specific sort of physical mediation offered by each. Might analog formats contain a more direct relationship between content and form? Has digital video given up its body in the sequence of 1s and 0s? Think about how early video artists interfered with tape in order to accentuate its body, digital rot and disappearance, the definition of affect, FHITP, ASMR videos, and protecting ourselves from the digital body by tuning off our screens an hour before bedtime. Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (May 14, 2015)

This show delves into the false stereotype of the “Model Minority” and what it means from a radical perspective. Hear us discuss Gendai Gallery’s year of programing around Model Minority, which was recently published as a collection of texts and art projects by PS Guelph. The book forms an alternative history, probing the way we imagine the model minority citizen in Canada – those of immigrant communities who have succeeded to a relatively high degree within the neoliberal economy. Edited by Chris Lee and Maiko Tanaka, the book explores how such stereotypes of the successful immigrant conceal differences and specificities of particular struggles. Reflecting on the role of the icon by presenting counter-narratives and tracing different alliances, the book plays with the idea of what an alternative role model can be. Chak, Tings. “Remembering Absent Histories of Chinese-Indigenous Solidarity.” In Model Minority ed. Gendai Gallery. Guelph: PS Guelph, January 2015. Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013.

Scott McGovern, Program Director of artist-run centre Ed Video, has just returned to Guelph after spending the fall in Paris, France with his partner Jenn E Norton and their daughter Edie McGovern Norton for Jenn’s Canada Council Residency. Hear his take on what it means to be a Canadian artist abroad and getting cred back home, his upcoming partnership with Parallel Oaxaca, travelling with Toronto’s Jennifer Marman and Daniel Borins, SOMA in Mexico City, and Art-Athina in Athens, Greece. Reflect on Kelly Richardson’s work The Great Destroyer, a work he recently curated at the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre. The project partially takes place on Ed Video’s portable exhibition space, the 20 stackable units of Christie Digital MicroTiles, on which play forest scenes from Algonquin Park interspersed with paintings from the Group of Seven accompanied by the Australian mynah bird, imitating the sounds of its forest being destroyed. Ed Video recently lost their downtown exhibition space. What new opportunities for collaboration and branching out internationally present themselves with this change? “From 2006 onwards, I stopped using humour as the entry point and started to using beauty, to seduce the viewer into the work. Humour was too specific and some viewers were not getting beyond the joke. With beauty it was easier to create a psychological space where the viewer is invited into luscious looking imagery and allow themselves to experience the other sensations too. And this tends to make longer works too, that seems to go on forever, like moving paintings. They’re larger, so that the viewer feels like they could simply step into the work.” - Kelly Richardson

What are the risks in cracking open binaries? Is community engagement akin to using a copper wedge tool, simultaneously changing the pryer, the pryee, and what is being used to pry? Delve into boundaries, thresholds, doorways, and outskirts with Montreal-based artist, curator, art historian, and critic Mark Clintberg as he encounters Guelph’s post-industrial terrain with a flâneur-type strategy to urban space. His tailored workshop with the Boarding House Arts Incubator Residents, Public Scenes at Twilight: Shadow Economies, explores the city at a time of transition and ambiguous onset, of change in atmosphere, and shifting uses of space in the search for forgotten sites and anti-monuments. Consider the importance of embodied engagement with the place of art, consciously avoiding “parachute” curation, and sitting down to tea as the ultimate way to get to know ya. “There is no one ingredient, there has to be two: risk and hope. Without risk or challenge, there is nothing worthwhile in it. And potentially that risk can turn into disappointment that the project didn’t go as I wanted it to. I’ve been thinking a lot about disappointment and looking at it as a positive value. If you have disappointment, then it means that you are striving for something that is even better. Hope is important too, for what the next project will be. I need to be able to be able to imagine my way into a second, third, or fourth work. I want to see each work as a window into the next work, the opening tool into the next work.” - Mark Clintberg

Making books fresh like pour-over coffee? Publication Studio (www.publicationstudio.biz) is a network of 13 tiny publishing houses in which books are made one at a time by hand, envisioning the productive work of bookbinding to be more like a bakery or coffee shop than a factory. Hear PS co-founder (with Patricia No) Matthew Stadler talk about the art of economies, multi-scalar assemblages, plus N.E. Thing Co., and Anne Focke as precedents for PS. Think through the nature of hegemony with Jean Beaudrillard, the shared imagination a book creates over time and space, Fuse Magazine and the Ladies Invitational Deadbeat Society, and learn about how you can visit Guelph’s very own Publication Studio at Silence (46 Essex St.), on any given Saturday afternoon. Baudrillard, Jean. The Agony of Power. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2010. (December 3, 2015)

Socially-engaged artist Paul Chartrand discusses his work Kokedama: A Fragmented Garden at the Niagara Artists Centre in St. Catharines Ontario. Hear about the political side of houseplants, spider plants, staghorn and boston ferns, morning glories, and succulents: these green guerrillas that rebel against the concrete jungle and accelerate the reclamation of the city by nature. Consider plant balls as new communities and red wigglers that munch on constitutional documents in this artist’s search for nature’s self-renewing propulsion in the face of the stagnating structures of urban systems. “There’s not necessarily one miracle ingredient, but it definitely involves the ability to reflect on one’s own personal circumstances and the issues that surround that in order to create a meaningful response. Offering that to others in way that sparks conversation is the best thing an artist can do. Art is almost inevitably a self-portrait.” - Paul Chartrand

Liesbeth Bik and Jos van der Pol of the Rotterdam-based artist collective Bik Van der Pol discuss their approach to art making in relation to the social geography of Sudbury, Ontario. In preparation for their event-based art project Between a Rock and a Hard Place—11 outdoor concerts in 11 different locations—the pair engaged their senses to take in all the elements around them with the intention ‘not to work with a site specifically, but to make a site specific.’ Imagine the artists on hand and knee, washing the rocks stained by nickel smelting, peering deep into the trembling meteor vibrations that created Sudbury’s unique geological endowment, with all of its economic, environmental, and social consequences. Bik Van der Pol connected the rocks and the environmental situation of the city to the city’s burgeoning vibrant music scene. How do you acknowledge the connections between the land itself and the creative energies alive there? “Art is a focus point, or point of departure. It’s something that brings hopes and expectations to a focus point for imagination, and then spits it out back into the world again. It generates a different view on what you think is reality. As an artist you try to do something according to your own experience, finding a solution, a moment to see things differently, to have some sort of impact. It’s both for yourself and for others.” - Bik Van der Pol

Education is too often an automated process of preparing the learner to become a part of the neo-liberal capitalist economy. Paolo Freire calls this a transactional process of education, where learning is “deposited” into students, who are empty receptacles. In Lecce, Italy, a group of artists and cultural workers are gathering together to create an ongoing collaborative platform to educate in a different way. Free Home University’s Alessandra Pomarico talks with us about what happens when we live together while learning, and how we can create collective intentions for shared living, both with each other and with the earth.

This week we dig into writing and artists. We first introduce a hand-written letter to co-host Alissa from artist Pablo Helguera and discuss how the handwritten letter can tug at one’s heartstrings and trigger our imagination. We examine the work of Helen Reed, artist and editor of Art Criticism and Other Short Stories, in which Reed as gathered artists and writers together to write fan fiction on other artworks and their makers. The work is a playful approach to critical writing about art work, as many writings (particularly in the Canadian context) do not engage with the works content in a critical way. We see examples of fan fiction about Bas Jan Ader and Canadian artist Kent Monkman’s elegant alter-ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle. We finish by looking at Shawna Dempsey and Lorri Millan’s work in Bedtime Stories for the Edge of the World, reworking traditional bedtime stories to be more queer and feminist. Artists are finding narratives and reintroducing them to us for an embodied response. How can short stories and letters approach art in a new way? Dempsey, Shawna, and Lorri Millan. Bedtime Stories for the Edge of the World. Winnipeg, Manitoba: Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2013. 144. Reed, Helen. Art Criticism and Other Short Stories. Portland: Self Published, 2011.