BARGE: Detouring the Everyday a Talk/Performance/Workshop with David Buuck

Thursday, March 24, 2011
5:00PM to 8:30PM
Room 5417


@ CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue (@ 34th Street)
free! open to the public!

BARGE – the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics – has organized several (de)tours, actions, and installations in and around the San Francisco Bay Area, investigating regional sites and spaces that are underrepresented and overlooked in more conventional touristic, commercial, & socio-political notions of place and publicspace. BARGE’s various projects draw from artistic domains such as performance art, experimental poetry, site-specific art, and psychogeography, in order to investigate the pressing political issues of environmentalism, surveillance, gentrification, and ongoing struggles over public space. Using photographs, performance documentations, writing, and performance, Buuck’s talk will guide usthrough a wide range of artistic tactics for writers, artists, and activists to think critically about the politics of contemporary space and writing.

Workshop: For the workshop, Buuck will lead an intensive seminar of collaborative writing, using a wide range of methods to help participants critically and creatively engage the urban environments we live in. Working with techniques drawn form the fields of documentary poetics, geography, conceptual and site-specific art, and
others, participants will work together to move from creating a set of inquiries to the investigative modes of research and writing that might help extend their work off the page and out of the classroom, into more direct encounters with urban histories, politics, and the experience of everyday life.

David Buuck is a writer and artist who lives in Oakland, CA. He isthe founder of BARGE, the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics, the author of The Shunt (Palm Press 2009), and the editor of Tripwire, a journal of poetics. From 2003-2009 he was contributing editor at Artweek, and since 2007 has been board president of Small Press Traffic, a literary arts nonprofit based in San Francisco. He teaches writing at Mills College and Bard College, and works as a freelance editor and critic.