Defining a Poetics of Site-Specificity: Gift Life to Create Anew

Abstract

Written from my perspective as an artist, this essay unpacks the call for a ‘free poetics’ in relation to artistic practice within the realms of aesthetics, poetics, utopian aspirations via communes, and Canadian arts-administration. Philosopher Boris Groys asserts that aesthetics takes on the spectator’s attitude of judgement, while poetics—in particular an autopoetics of self-determination—is necessary for acts of creation. With focus on BC-based collective Image Bank (Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov) and their ‘paradisal’ summertime retreat in Robert’s Creek, BC, named Babyland, this essay examines artist-run activity as a utopian experiment within the context of Canada’s post-WWII nation building aspirations, 1960s counterculture, and the evolution of state-funded arts-administration. Although Babyland can be analyzed within this historical context, Morris and Trasov themselves deny any association with counterculture, instead opting for the utopian and decentralized ethos of Fluxus artist Robert Filliou’s concept of the Eternal Network. In 2018, while researching Filliou at the Morris and Helen Belkin Archives at the University of British Columbia for a catalogue text on Image Bank, writer Hadrien Laroche discovered Babyland upon chatting with Morris and Trasov, who were there to look at their own archives; the discovery sent Laroche on a new fork in his approach. This event, a contingent of history, is an example of what I theorize as ‘the poetics of site-specificity,’ a framework of creation that only becomes self-aware through its own process, full of chance, serendipity, and subjectivity. The concept is practiced throughout the essay itself, embodied in the parallel narrative of supporting images, and in how it reaches its conclusion.

Keywords: Babyland, commune, Image Bank, poetics, utopia.

The proposition of reaching for a ‘free poetics’ is an interesting prompt to write from the perspective of an artist; my instincts first direct me to the intersectional tension between poetics and aesthetics. Poetry, from the Greek poiesis, is the creation of things, while aesthetics, aisthētikós, refers to their perception. When artwork is perceived, it is transformed from the intention of the artist to the interpretation of the audience. While contemporary cultural production includes many intermedial and interdisciplinary practices that require both poetics and aesthetics to be present, the addition of ‘free’ as a qualifier asks: what do poetics need to be freed from? Conceptually, when something is free, given away, it loses its exchange value—though economists would argue that nothing is free, as there is always an opportunity cost in what is not taken. To be free, ‘freedom’ as an ideal in no way guarantees a life without struggle, and in practice, has been used to justify many unjust things. When applied to aesthetics, conditions of access, economics, education, and class also raise the question of how we arrive at perception.

In the United States, freedom as ‘liberty’ in “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” is written in the Declaration of Independence as an inalienable human right to be protected by the state, although these pursuits ostensibly protected the right to private property, firearms, and the free market. Gil Scott-Heron's nihilistic play on the word—“free doom”—in his poem “Comment #1” (1970) comes to mind, where he calls America a ‘bastard’ who was impregnated by “a rapist known as freedom, free doom.” Canada’s constitution was created by the United Kingdom in 1867 and remained under British oversight until the Constitution Act of 1982, which included the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. This charter set an important precedence for Indigenous rights, eventually leading to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015.

These examples are framed within our North American liberal society, where freedom is written down to protect from and respond to histories of subjugation, oppression, and colonial violence. Perhaps these government documents are written within their own set of legal poetics designed to uphold Western notions of freedom and thus are the most utilitarian form when envisioning what a ‘free poetics’ might look like in practice. By ‘poetics,’ I refer to a framework created from available discourses through which a practitioner may construct a systematic logic through which they may engage their research. In “Poststructuralism, Complexity, and Poetics” (2000), Michael Dillon explains poetic sensibility as that through which experience, communicated through language, may resist “the codifying characteristic of all systems of signification and [give] rise to something else” (18). In any attempt to free poetics, to raise it up and out from the stodgy middle ground of existing discourse, there must be a competence at work that comes from “the capacity to listen into and listen out for the enigmatic movement” (18) of what could be. In what follows, I am to elucidate a set of poetics that decentres individual freedom—so neoliberal—to emphasize the necessity of a relational sort, within a collective pursuit.

‘The pursuit of Happiness’ implies having the means to pursue, move, and desire, in and amongst others who are doing the same. Through this framing, freedom is the ability to find one’s own way of relations, the possibility for new connective modalities through the rhizomatic superhighway of images, information, and encounters. Such movements occur already along established pathways of historical determination, but for the arts, it is through poetics that new constellations may form. To free poetics means to acknowledge this continuous movement, on a continuum of what is perceived as aesthetics, and what is intuited as poetics. How this looks, its aesthetics, is the result of the poetic process, a methodology which situates practice “at the edge of what it is in order to draw it into relation to other modes of formal articulation” (Brown 2017, 8). In what follows, I explore the historical and theoretical relationship between the poetic and aesthetic in Western art discourse, and use the unique phenomenon of Canadian arts administration as a means to discuss what I understand as the poetics of site-specificity through the “utopian yearnings” (Watson 2019, 21) of Vancouver-based artist collaboration, Image Bank, and how, through site-specific nature of their research, I have found a poetics of my own.

Poetics, Aesthetics, Autopoetics

Let me begin the Western historical framework of aesthetics through Aristotle's Poetics, with his concept of ‘mimesis,’ meaning ‘representation’ or ‘depiction.’ Mimesis, the re-presentation of nature, together with ‘poeisis,’ the act or process of creation, are what give artworks their emotionality, in both creation and reception. The term ‘aesthetics’ would not be used to understand the artistic act of creation until 1750 with Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Aesthetica, which would be cemented as the Western method of artistic reflection in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790).

Central to Kant’s definition of the aesthetic experience is the assessment of pleasure as beauty or the sublime through an encounter with art. In Going Public, Boris Groys argues that because of this aesthetic attitude established by Kant—a ‘spectator’s attitude’ of judgement—society has since privileged the audience over the artist when perceiving artwork. In the work of art, the spectator is assessing whether it achieves a genius that “schematizes the supersensible substrate of nature, rendering the infinite in terms of the finite” (Holmes 2017, 126). While the spectator’s attitude assumes that of judgement like the critic, the artist’s attitude must be towards the cultivation of genius, “understood as a human embodiment of natural force” (Groys 2010, 15). But, Groys argues, since mimesis is but an attempt to mimic the profound natural sublimity of life, nature, and the universe, “no work of art can stand in comparison to even an average beautiful sunset” (13)—though, this would qualify as a ‘freeing’ of aesthetics’ from any mimetic responsibility. Although this is a subjective opinion,¹ Groys states it to make the argument for letting go of Kant’s traditional aesthetic attitude.

In any case, Groys explains Kant’s position that because nature is the source of inspiration for art, art’s only function is educational, as a means to cultivate one’s aesthetic judgement and taste. How does one favour Monet over Manet within the art historical context of Impressionism? By taste, of course! For the spectator, aesthetic reflection through art is thus the separation necessary between oneself and the world in order to make sense of it, but what about the artist, one who creates these artworks fated to be judged?

On either side of the artwork stands the spectator and the artist. For the artist, this is only a temporary point on the circuit of creation and reception, as artists are also spectators of their own works, and when not making art, artists are also spectators of works by other artists. Groys echoes Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, and Hito Steyerl (just to name a few) in his assertion that “everyone is, and can be, an artist” (15). Now, with internet connectivity quickly becoming regarded as an essential service and consumer technologies encouraging content creation from anyone anywhere, everyone is not necessarily an artist but at the very least, a creator. Citing figures of the European avant-garde such as Kazimir Malevich, Hugo Ball, and Marcel Duchamp, who adopted and proliferated their public personas through a variety of media, Groys understands this poetic attitude of creation as a continuation of a “radical turn from aesthetics to poetics—more specifically to autopoetics, to the production of one’s self” (16) in order to return agency to the maker, with less concern for “its impact on the spectator” (15, emphasis added).     

The Curious Case of Canadian Arts Administration

I stress the word ‘impact’ to draw attention to the specific context of Canada’s public funding structure for the arts. With the establishment of the federally administered Canada Council for the Arts in 1957, artistic production in Canada has since been— and increasingly in recent years--mandated by the state, judged on the potential for public impact and audience engagement. In The Roots of Culture, the Power of Art: the First Sixty Years of the Canada Council for the Arts, Monica Gattinger describes the gradual transformation from a period of artistic production focused on supporting artists, arts organizations, and cultural infrastructure in the nation-building fervour of the postwar years—exemplified by Expo ‘67 and Canada’s centennial celebrations—to the rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s, from which came an unprecedented focus on ‘impact.’ Through the New Public Management approach to governance where citizens are treated as customers who with their tax dollars, buy “outcomes, impact, economic growth, and laissez-faire government policies,” the council has since needed to “‘make the case’ for its activities in new and often economically-oriented ways” (2017, 62). This evolution continues through to today, where any Canada Council assessment panel scores grants on a rubric of Relevance, Impact, and Feasibility.²

Emerging from WWII as an Allied Forces’ victor and proud of its war efforts, Canada was determined to establish a national identity that could stand proudly against its newly anointed superpower neighbour. In 1949, Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent struck the Royal Commission on National Development in the Arts, Letters, and Science, or the Massey Commission, named after the group’s chair, Vincent Massey. Over the next two years, the Massey Commission conducted forty research studies on the state of art and culture across the country, held public hearings in sixteen major cities, and reviewed over four hundred and fifty written briefs from advocacy groups (27). The resulting 1951 Massey Report responded to Canada’s “national self-esteem and introspection, renewed anti-imperialism and both enthusiasm and anxiety about the rapid spread of American culture” (Berland 2000, 16). Concluding that it was in the country’s best interest to support the development of a national culture, the report argued for federal support: “Good will alone can do little for the starving plant; if the cultural life of Canada is anaemic [sic], it must be nourished, and this will cost money. This is a task for shared effort in all fields of government, federal, provincial, and local” (Collections Canada, n.d.). It took several more years of politicking and a serendipitous “windfall of one hundred million dollars in succession duties on the estates of two wealthy businessmen” (Gattinger 2017, 20) for the Canada Council to finally be established in 1957 as a federal, arm’s-length Crown corporation with a mandate to “foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works, in the arts” (Canada Council 2024). From this point on, artists began to learn the poetics of grant writing.

For years leading up to the formation of the Canada Council, artists had advocated for artistic autonomy and “the space to pursue artistic form separate from aesthetic and cultural traditions” (17), which suited the state’s objectives of creating a national identity that would be universally recognizable as Canadian. To assess the strength of applications, juries of arts professionals were enlisted regularly to determine which proposed activities should receive funding. During assessment, juries debate at length over how well each application responds to a checklist of institutional soft skills. Does the applicant convincingly show their ability to complete their proposed activities? How does this project and artistic practice align with the council’s priorities? Today, Groys’ call for an autopoetic attitude of self-determination implies a strategic and political process of cultural production within our media-saturated world. In order to “conceal our biological bodies from the media's gaze” we produce “artificial personaes, doubles, or avatars” (15), and thus the politics of creation (the poetic) should be foregrounded over its impact on the spectator. In the current Canadian funding model, is it possible for the politics of creation to be acknowledged when grant guidelines emphasize the importance of public impact aligned with the council’s, and, therefore, the state’s strategic goals?

Delivery of Life to Art

In the binary between the poetic vs. aesthetic constructed by Groys, the practice of administration particular to the Canadian artistic vernacular has yet to be examined. Genius, when not portrayed as a caricature of “the human embodiment as a natural force” in a volatile and singular persona, but defined as the ability to “transcend the limits of [the artist’s] own particular subjectivity” (Holmes 2017, 126) to be able to “go beyond oneself and one’s situation” (Kristeva 2004, 220 in Holmes 2017, 126), is thus a relational quality situated between the unfolding of a life amongst a community of lives. Today, post-secondary art departments all teach professional practice and practical writing skills to prepare students for entry into the cultural sector. In Canada, the non-profit cultural sector is populated with the unique model of artist-run-centres (ARCs).

ARCs began in the 1970s as project spaces run by artists for artists as an alternative to commercial galleries and institutions, motivated by self-determination (the very quality of poetics), mass media communication potential, and the newly established Canada Council travel grant. In “The Humiliation of the Bureaucrat: Artist-Run Centres as Museums by Artists,” AA Bronson writes that the first artist-run-centre began in Vancouver, British Columbia, with Intermedia from 1967–1971, spawning several local spin-off spaces and collectives: the New Era Social Club, NE Thing Company, Image Bank, and others. Stemming from what Bronson calls the Canadian “bureaucratic tendency and the protestant work ethic” (1983/2022, 14), ARCs quickly popped up across the country, inevitably recreating the very exhibition and event cycle—including promotion, dissemination, and ancillary educational programming and workshops—that paralleled the very official museum world they “were supposedly trying to escape” (14). For Bronson, the contradiction (or what he calls ‘curse’) of ARCs lies in art's self-reflexivity in its approach to administration. “On the one hand, [there is] poetic aspiration and the idealization of the obsessed; on the other, empirical reality and the anti-poetic per se” (14). Over time, this parodic adoption and adaptation of administrative processes has resulted in a self-effacing professionalism that is hyper-bureaucratic in its inability to not critique itself.

Although Image Bank was not an ARC, it received its initial funding through Intermedia, and its key members would later create one in 1973, the Western Front. Founded by Michael Morris, Vincent Trasov, and Gary Lee-Nova in 1970, Image Bank was a collaborative, decentralized ‘network’ of artistic practice with utopian desires to “deliver life to art once and for all” (Watson 2019, 22). While Lee-Nova split from the trio in 1972, Morris and Trasov led the production of numerous Image Bank projects to follow, which included recurring participation and collaboration with artists Glenn Lewis, Kate Craig, Eric Metcalfe, Robert Fone, John Mitchell, and others, along with out-of-towners General Idea (AA Bronson, Felix Partz, Jorge Zontal), Robert Filliou, Ray Johnson, and Dick Higgins.³ A riff on Claude Levi-Strauss’s concept of the ‘memory bank,’⁴ Image Bank’s prolific output reanimated the historical, autopoetic avant-garde as Groys describes; not only did they exploit mass media culture and the then affordable postal system, each had a pseudonym and alter-ego: Marcel Dot or sometimes Chairman Dot (Morris), Mr. Peanut (Trasov), Art Rat (Lee-Nova), Dr. and Lady Brute (Eric Metcalfe and Kate Craig), Flakey Rrose Hip (Lewis), Can D. Man (Fone). In many ways, their lively, absurdist performances of these personaes—well documented through correspondence, photographs, events, and even a Mr. Peanut mayoral campaign—anticipated the ubiquity of social media, online networking, and the artist-entrepreneur (Gray 2021), or in today’s vernacular, ‘content-creator.’

The subtext of the group’s initial correspondence art activities was the 1968–1969 Canada Criminal Law Amendment (Omnibus Bill C-150), which decriminalized same-sex relations between consenting adults over 21 as long as they remained private. Although this was a step towards gay rights, in the early ‘70s, it was, as Morris recalls, “career suicide” (Laurence 2013, 89) for him to participate in and win the 1973 Miss General Idea Pageant. Costumes, props, photographs, sculptures, grant reports, an international exchange director, postcards, audio and video recordings, and various other ephemera amassed over the project’s duration all contributed to defining their impressive oeuvre, which has been recently activated in the eponymous Image Bank exhibition, shown at both the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin 2019, and the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery in Vancouver 2021. Does the irreverent, irrational, and campy output of Image Bank fulfil the Kantian definition of genius? That is a matter of opinion, but I will argue that what drove their eight-year collaboration and what drives the return to their practice fifty-some years later in our current moment is a particular set of discursive poetics—what I call the poetics of site-specificity.

Mao, Dot, and I

In the Image Bank monograph edited by Kathrin Bentele (2019), which accompanied the exhibition, I encountered the profoundly beautiful essay by Hadrien Laroche titled “Babyland, or Art is a Gift for Living.” Through numbered sections, the French author recounts his time in Vancouver in the summer of 2018 on a research inquiry to ask, amongst other questions: “Is there a bridge between, on the one hand, the experience of Filliou, Fluxus, and the Vancouver Western Front...and on the other hand, those of the First Nations of the Northwest Coast, in particular the Kwakwaka'wakw and the Haida?” (75). Although he had spent a considerable amount of time at the Belkin Gallery archives researching documents relating to Robert Filliou’s five trips in Vancouver between 1973–1980, it wasn’t until Morris and Trasov came to the Belkin to look at their own archives that Laroche learned about Babyland, the artists’ Sunshine Coast property. “I had found a picture of Filliou sitting on a log and holding in each of his hands a stone picked up on the beach. ‘That was at Babyland,’ they said” (70) [Fig. 5].

Any good myth should have differing origin stories. While Morris recalls how the name ‘Babyland’ came about on a day of feasting on oysters and mushrooms, where seven expectant mothers happened to be there at the same time, artist Keith Donovan attributes the ‘real’ origin of the name to the Japanese gardener Kohei Baba, who owned the land before the artists (73-74). From the point of view of aesthetic discourse, Babyland looks to be a self-aware experiment of countercultural retreat. “Partially modelled on Die Brücke’s Expressionist retreat at the Moritzburg lakes in Germany around the turn of the twentieth century” (Burrard 2019, 200), there was no electricity, central heating, or running water at Babyland; all the projects, photoshoots, and colour bar activity⁵ occurred in the summer months where the boundaries between art, work, nature, and life were reconfigured. Again, Donovan recalls,

It was a hedonistic atmosphere. Gay or bi. Sometimes straight. You have to know how to cook if you are broke. He taught me. But Michael also wanted us to work. There was always work at Babyland. One summer we grew marijuana. It was the seeds. It was to finance our first trip to Europe with Michael. Vincent was the master of the plantation: he directed the projects like a slave owner. The field was surrounded by a wooden fence and we planted an entire field of marijuana. We grew huge hashish flowers; they were beautiful; we were very happy.... There was always a lot of work. Babyland was a way of life, a meeting place, not a school, even if it was sometimes that. It was art and life. (Laroche 2019, 75)

Although Morris and Trasov themselves deny any connection of Babyland to the communes of 1960s American counterculture—they “did not buy the property to drop out, as many people who are now called the ‘68 generation were doing at the time” (Kopsa 2019, 84)—their embrace of the countryside over the city and insistence of putting their friends to work resonates with commune ideology, itself appropriated by American counterculture. Throughout the Cold War and the counterculture era of the 1960s, the figure of Chairman Mao Zedong during China’s Cultural Revolution was used as a symbol of social resistance against increasing Western neoliberalism, particularly through the New Communist Movement, and was well proliferated through mass media and high art: Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise (1967); President Nixon’s publicity tour of China in 1972; Michelangelo Antonioni’s ill-fated documentary series Chung Kuo, Cina (1972); Andy Warhol’s Mao screen prints (1972); Allan Sekula’s 1974 photonovel This Ain’t China. At Image Bank, Morris’ alter ego, Chairman Dot was undoubtedly a reference to Chairman Mao and AA Bronson’s 1972 postcard of Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai [Fig. 6], is particularly striking photomontage.

So, despite the artists’ protest, my aesthetic attitude—as a practitioner attempting to corral together a poetics—cannot help but situate Image Bank and Babyland in the Canadian cultural discourse which sought to differentiate itself from US commercialization, conceptualism, and imperialism, one that considered communes and communism within the country’s self-determination. Western Canada, particularly British Columbia, has a long history of European settler experiments in utopianism, dating back to the late 19^th-century community of Metlakatla on Sointula, Malcolm Island led by an Anglican minister, attempting to recreate a pre-colonial way of life on European (Finnish) terms (Brown 1995, 15-22). In All Possible Worlds: Utopian Experiments in British Columbia, Justine Brown outlines an impressive number of BC-based utopian projects which followed: the infamous commune cult of Brother Twelve and his Colony of Truth on an island off Nanaimo; the Russian Doukhobors in the West Kootenays; the Marxist-Leninist Community Education and Economic Development Society near Williams Lake (which evolved into a successful cooperative farm, still active today)—just to name a few. In the post-WWII years, BC served as a landing point to receive draft dodgers, communist supporters, and other Americans attempting to escape US hegemony (Belshaw 2016, 586–588; Brown 1995, 82). For Image Bank, counterculture was not their means of resistance—they were more influenced by French Fluxus artist Robert Filliou (who visited Babyland several times during his visits to Vancouver throughout the 1970s–80s) and his concept of the Eternal Network, where both utopian and decentralized, Filliou asserted that there was no more centre in the world, and no more historical dominance of a metropolis, nor the avant-garde. In Policy Matters: Administrations of Art and Culture, Clive Robertson posits that Filliou’s influence during this formative moment in Canadian art history led to Canadian artist organizations across the countries—not just in the metropolises—“to incorporate ‘centre’ in their names because they wanted to signal an inversion of centre and periphery” (2006, 16).

Image Bank’s denial of any connection to the geopolitical happenings during the Cold War can be understood as an act of self-determination, non-engagement, and utopian resistance in their time. For the artists, Babyland was a point in their decentralized network which did not follow the dominant cultural circuit. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that “artist-run culture constitutes a particular type of movement where cultural and social formations appear to coalesce” (29). Although Babyland was explicitly stated by the artists as not a summertime artist commune, Brown situates it within her book as a utopian experiment, as “a rich life for poor people, made possible by the collective” (84). But perhaps it was the summers spent at Babyland that prepared the artists for their true engagement with communal living just a couple of years later, in their collective purchase of the Western Front building in 1973. Not a summertime artist commune, but a prolonged awakening perhaps, of a collective.

The End as a Beginning

As a concept, Utopia can be traced back to Thomas More’s satirical fiction of the same name, written in 16^th-century England during the Reformation, to which More was opposed.⁶ Derived from the Greek ou topos, or ‘no place,’ Utopia  imagines a perfected man-made world  on the eponymous fictional island—dug out of the mainland by slaves and soldiers under the rule of Utopus—a harmonious commonwealth where citizens practiced self-governance, private property did not exist, and education was universal (More 1516/2016). In Joanne Paul's 2023 article, “Beyond Utopia: Thomas More as a political thinker,” she assesses that at the foundation of More’s oeuvre is the assertion that people are and should be treated equal under the unity of a commonwealth. Due to human follies such as pride and self-interest, unity is threatened by competing claims to authority, and therefore, “a single arbiter is needed to maintain unity, which More places in the collective body of the people; it is their consent which bestows authority” (2). Thus, from More’s politics, Utopia has been subject to utilitarian, socialist, communist, totalitarian, and artistic interpretations.

In In the Flow (2016), Groys brings up similarities between the artistic project and the utopian project, framing artistic installations as a sovereign space of authoritarian control by the artist where the “visitor is on foreign ground, an expatriate who must submit to a foreign law—the law laid down by the artists” (85). In The Total Art of Stalinism (1992), Groys frames Joseph Stalin as “a kind of artist whose material was the entire world and whose goal was to 'overcome resistance' of this material to make it pliant, malleable, capable of assuming any desired form” (3). According to Groys, Stalinism was, in fact, a logical continuation of the Russian avant-garde project, and the assumption of art being an autonomous undertaking towards the virtues of freedom is a 'rosy' 20^th-century Western phenomenon. Before modernism, art ’s social function had always been to confirm, “embellish and glorify power” (8). Through the avant-garde, artists consciously aspired to exercise their self-determination via mastery of material and theory to assert their poetic power over aesthetic perception and situate themselves as transformers of perception and society.

What Groys has said about Stalin could also be applied to Mao, whose own utopian communist project, until the Sino-Soviet split of 1960, was supported by the Soviet Union. Philosopher Ci Jiwei asserts that during Mao’s China, the country's belief in communism, itself dogmatic as any religion, was held in place by the promise of a utopian future—a strategy of postponement—for the sacrifices made in the ‘here and now.’ As that promise slipped further and further away through the hardships and chaos of the Great Leap Famine and the Cultural Revolution, such a strategy of postponement was reframed as a strategy of separation, adopted from Christianity’s bureaucratization of the church through a “particular mastery of this business of delay” (1994, 197). If, when and how utopia will arrive has been the quest of cultural production since modernity, an era itself relative to when and how imperialist capitalism took hold of societies across the globe— the answer to my opening question of what poetics need to be freed from. This method of cross-cultural discursivity resonates with Ursula K. Le Guin’s wordplay of “Utopiyin, Utopiyang” (2016, 195–198) in an essay written in response to More’s Utopia. Le Guin draws from the ancient Chinese philosophy of the I Ching and the Swampy Cree concept of “‘I go backward, look forward, as the porcupine does’” (171) to outline a renewed utopia for the 21st century. China Miéville, also writing in response to More, names utopia an “island logic” (3); no longer Utopia vs. Dystopia, but a radical third—an “apocatopia, utopalyse” (21). For Laroche, utopia is much simpler:

Creation is the form of the gift for living…. A life devoted to searching for the gift of life, so creative. The opposite is also true: it is because I have lost that gift for life that I write…. In the end, it is neither the work of art nor the life that is the question, it is happiness (here named Babyland or utopia) (77).

Just as Laroche found Babyland on a quest to narrativize the relations between art, life, nature, love, and the First Nations lands upon which this utopia was built in an “attempt to understand what it means to become the author of one’s own life in a precarious world” (69–70), I found his essay on my precarious quest to find the connection between the commune’s practices in Maoist China and artist-run activities in Canada. The answers to both, and any quest as intuitively personal, can be found in the poetics of site-specificity. I recognize the anecdote of Laroche’s brief meeting with Morris and Trasov as the result of a poetic encounter within and despite a highly professionalized, administrative, institutional, and aesthetical space. Here, in the machine of artistic discourse, the elitist white cube, on the publicly and privately funded university art gallery built on earth called the ‘Endowment Lands’⁷ on Musqueam territory, a photograph in a sea of photographs was seen at a precise moment.

Such is the poetics of site-specificity revealed through this mundane, passing encounter. An encounter that suddenly steers creation onto a new fork with which to gift life. Site-specificity is a condition of the process, itself always surprising; if the process of creation were ever not surprising, I would not make art, nor would I write. This poetics is what Foucault calls ‘discursive practice,’ where—using speech as an example—one chooses what is said from a range of possibilities of what one could say and still be regarded as ‘correct.’ What is said is framed within “the broader context of the plural and contingent processes involved in producing what [is said] as ‘true’” (Bacchi and Bonham 2014, 178). My autocorrect function does not like the phrase “a new fork with which to gift life,” it wants to change ‘gift life’ to ‘give life,’ but within the discursive parameters of this essay, “what is said and what is done, rules imposed and reasons given, the planned and the taken for granted meet and interconnect” (181), so I hold on to ‘gift.’

As poetics, this discursivity is precisely what makes for a ‘free poetics,’ what I am able to gift as an artist; to free poetics is to extend the agency of creation onto an unexpected, new fork, an unexpected new relationality capable of pushing ‘impact’ beyond what we currently know to be measurable. To free poetics is to return it into the realm of (aesthetic) discourse, served as knowledge to be revisited in our utopian imaginings for a better future, as the ‘here and now’ leaves much to be desired. As artists, we relinquish what we have made into the world and now must find again a new site from which to create: creativity, so precarious. Freedom, so contingent. The question of why Filliou + Vancouver + First Nations = Babyland for Laroche, and why Art + Administration + Utopia = The Commune for me is specific to one’s particular relationality to both making and perception, what we otherwise take for granted as merely a subjectivity.

Image List

Fig. 1 – Graphic (Kwan 2024) for an audio recording of the chapter, “Performance” in Tuning to Oblivion (Wei 2023), where I explore notions of freedom through performance art in the context of my time working at VIVO Media Arts Centre, and on my month-long performance art residency in Thailand, 2019.

Fig. 2 — “Acid” from Friend Poems (Wei 2021, 82).

Fig. 3 — A production still of STILLS moving image tract no. 10 (@moving_image_tract), by Steff Ling and myself, in the office of VIVO Media Arts Centre, 2021.

Fig. 4 – Still from Vater und Sohn / 父与子 / Father and Son (Wei, 2014). The full passage goes, “It's all here. On TV, in a hotel room. On a screen. I invented nothing. Data is organized to sell me an understanding of the world outside. There is no such thing as free media. Perhaps freedom is the ability to choose, but it is not free."

Fig. 5 — “Father of the Eternal Network paste-up" (Filliou and Image Bank, 1977). Fluxus artist Robert Filliou on a beach. Image by Image Bank. Courtesy of Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery Archive.

Fig. 6 — Untitled postcard by AA Bronson (1972). From Image Bank (2019).

Fig. 7 — a/ooMuhZ no. 3 (Wei, 2024).

Notes

1. On many a sunny evening I have chosen to go to the cinema over staying out to watch the sun go down.

2. While provincial government criteria are worded slightly different—for example, applications for the British Columbia Arts Council Individual Project Grants for Visual, Media, Performing, and Literary Arts are scored across the three categories of Artistic Contribution and Significance, Impact on the Applicant and the Community, and Feasibility—still, the emphasis on benefits to the public are clear (BC Arts Council, 2024/25).

3. Image Bank projects including: thematic correspondent postcard art — Piss Pics (1972) and Your Image of 1984 (1972), which culminated in the Image Bank Post Card Show (1977); the International Image Exchange Directory in the 1973 edition of FILE Megazine (in collaboration with Toronto’s General Idea); several videos (Dot Depth of Field [1970], Fire/Mirror [1971]) and countless photographs documenting the group’s Colour Bar Research at Babyland, their Sunshine Coast paradisal retreat (1972–1974); the 1971 Miss General Idea Pageant; The Great Wall of 1984 (1973); Decca Dance i.e. Art’s Birthday Party (1974); and the Mr. Peanut Mayoralty Campaign (1974).

4. In The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss writes, "The decision that everything must be taken account of facilitates the creation of a 'memory bank’” (1966, 16).

5. Colour Bar Research (1972–74) consisted of “the arrangement of an ‘endless painting’ composed of one thousand wood blocks painted in a variety of colour spectrums” which were “accompanied by nude or costumed visitors ‘on the set’ at Babyland and Lake Yogo, this endless painting was documented on film, slides, and photographs-in images suggestive of a youthful paradise where the physics of light and ever-changing colour combinations merged in a utopian vision of interpersonal playfulness and refracted possibilities for bodies and selves” (Jacob 2002, 4).

6. Utopia, viewed in context of More’s political views, was written in response to the social and political ills of the Reformation, in response to Henry VII’s separation from the Catholic Church via the “Oath of Supremacy,” aimed at giving the King absolute power (Paul 2023, 361–363). More was convicted of treason, imprisoned in the Tower of London, and executed by decapitation in 1535.

7. Established through the University Endowment Land Act of 1907 and revised by the University Site Act of 1911, which "established a lands trust to raise capital for the formation and initial operation of the University of British Columbia" (University Endowment Lands, 2024). It has since existed as an unincorporated entity with a population of 4000 people, with no mayor, or municipal government. Governed by the University of British Columbia, the Metro Vancouver Regional District and the Province of British Columbia, residential and commercial taxes are paid directly to the provincial government.

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About the Author

Casey Wei is a PhD student in Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University, Canada. Her practice-based research in filmmaking, writing, and performance is informed by participatory activities such as editing, publishing, and programming. Her practice-based PhD research investigates how the commune might be reconsidered in the 21st century via the intersections of art, social practice, and technology.

Recent works include The Zhang Clan (2024), Tuning to Oblivion: an artist residency (M:ST Performative Art, 2023), and the album Stimuloso (Mint Records, 2022) with her band, Kamikaze Nurse. Her writing has been published in Made in China Journal, The Journal of Visual Culture, C Magazine, and elsewhere. She is the Short Forum Programmer for the Vancouver International Film Festival, and part of the DIM Cinema curatorial collective at The Cinematheque.

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