EVENTS
Our gatherings bring people together around a shared theme, creating space for thoughtful exchange and genuine connection. Each event is lightly facilitated to introduce the focus and set a tone, then opens into collective conversation shaped by those present. Group size is intentionally kept small to encourage participation, mutual listening, and a sense of community rather than passive attendance.
Next up...San Francisco - March 28
in partnership with The Nightlight Society & Bon Appetite chef Kendra Vaculin
Conceptual Scaffolding: How Art Behaves Like a Living System
“Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view - created a new thought for that object.”
So reads the editorial in The Blind Man responding to Duchamp’s Fountain. Historically tied to the controversy surrounding the readymade, the statement reframes art as an act of selection and displacement rather than fabrication. An ordinary object is removed from its utilitarian role and repositioned such that its former function collapses under a new title and point of view. Meaning, here, is not crafted into the object but reassigned through context and intention.
Exquisite corpse extends this destabilization of authorship further. It assumes that creative energy precedes the individual maker and is fundamentally distributed rather than singular. No one contributor possesses the whole; coherence emerges only after production, retrospectively. Meaning is not planned in advance but discovered through accumulation, sequence, and partial knowledge. Creation becomes less an act of origin than one of participation within a larger, unknowable process.
Animism radicalizes this logic by shifting the focus away from intention altogether. In animist frameworks, an art object can act, material can remember, and form can carry lessons and intentions independent of its maker. Form does not merely signify history; it stores and transmits what history cannot fully resolve. Art, from this perspective, is not produced as a closed object but entered into - encountered, activated, and carried forward across time and bodies.
These positions reveal a productive tension or conflict. Duchamp empties the object of utility in order to open it conceptually; animism fills the object with agency in order to restore its relational life. Both break the object open, but in opposite directions - one through negation, the other through attribution. The friction between these moves exposes art not as a stable thing, but as a living system: one that mutates through context, survives through repetition, and persists precisely because it is never fully resolved.
