Events

Summer 2009

SITE-BASED PRACTICES
a workshop led by David Buuck & Jessica Tully
Marin Headlands Bunkers
Sunday June 21, 11am-2pm
co-sponsored by the Headlands Center for the Arts

Please join writer David Buuck and artist Jessica Tully for a site-specific workshop at the former military bunkers in the Marin Headlands. We will explore a wide range of methods and practices related to site-based writing and art practices, including several on-site exercises and experiments. This workshop is designed for ALL levels of interested writers and artists, to explore how we engage place, site, environment and the political histories therein as writers, artists, and citizens. We will discuss and explore writing and research techniques as well as much more performative and embodied strategies of site-work, so be prepared to try new ways of thinking, moving, and working!

David Buuck is an alumni artist in residence this June at Headlands Center for the Arts. He is contributing editor at Artweek, and teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute. Recent publications include The Shunt (Palm Press)and Buried Treasure Island, a guidebook printed in conjunction with an installation and audio-tour by Barge (the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics).

Jessica Tully is a conceptual artist working at the intersection of culture
and politics. From hip-hop water ballet to a rock opera of live
construction equipment to voter education drives, her site-specific
performances, videos, drawings and campaigns are set within socially charged public spaces. In 2008 she debuted a new stencil series and walking tour entitled Syndicate commissioned by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for the Bay Area Now 5 triennial exhibition.

Note: We will meet at the Headlands Center Dining Hall at 11 for
introductory remarks and head out from there. We will arrange for
car-pooling to the site for those who need it. There will be optional
pre-workshop readings. Bring notebook, camera, sunscreen and/or hat, outdoor shoes, layers for cold, etc. The Marin Headlands is home to several former military installations, including the bunkers, the Nike Missile Site, and the current home of the Headlands Center for the Arts.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/24889946@N08/sets/72157618977407766/
$40 general public / $30 students and members of Headlands Center for the Arts and/or Small Press Traffic.
Class is limited to 20 participants.
Sign up online by using paypal from sptraffic.org
or make arrangements through email at smallpresstraffic@gmail.com

Conceptualism and Craft
with K. Silem Mohammad
CCA San Francisco Campus
Monday through Thursday July 6-9th
Time: 6pm-9pm

This four-day workshop will begin by examining and rehearsing various techniques central to Conceptualist poetics, broadly considered so as to encompass appropriation, transcription, and other versions of what Kenneth Goldsmith has called “uncreative writing,” as well as the deliberately awkward and expressively debased gestures associated with Flarf. We will then look at these techniques in relation to older and more traditional notions of craft: can there be coherent criteria for craft-based evaluation of texts written using blankly conceptual or intentionally “bad” methods? Do any of the familiar aesthetic categories still apply, and if so, how?

K. Silem Mohammad is the author of three books of poetry: Breathalyzer (Edge Books, 2008), A Thousand Devils (Combo Books, 2004), and Deer Head Nation (Tougher Disguises, 2003). His work has been featured in numerous journals and anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2004, Bay Poetics, and A Best of Fence, as well as the forthcoming Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf, which he is co-editing with Sharon Mesmer, Nada Gordon, and Gary Sullivan. With Anne Boyer, he edits the poetry magazine Abraham Lincoln. He is Associate Professor of English and Writing at Southern Oregon University in Ashland.

$125 / $100 students and members
Class is limited to 20 participants.
Sign up online by using paypal from sptraffic.org
or make arrangements through email at smallpresstraffic@gmail.com

Oakland A's /Detroit Tigers Game
with Bill Luoma
CCA San Francisco Campus
Monday through Thursday July 6-9th
Time: 6pm-9pm

In the spirit of the Basketball Aritcle by Meyer and Waldman and Yo-Yo's with Money by Berrigan and Schiff, we will spend some time working on the body of baseball & poetry. Or just poetry since that encompasses baseball.

*Note* Scholarship admission is available for those who need it. To sign up or get more information by emailing Samantha Giles at smallpresstraffic@gmail.com.

$40 includes admission to the game and a baseball to take home/ $30 students and members