UnNetworking with METHINKS at the Indyish 3rd Birthday Mess + stories + diatribe + videos

MAN last night was fun. If you came out and partied in that hot vibe with us last night for the Indyish Monthly Mess with Methinks, we salute your sweaty sexiness, bright smiles, open minds, and smooth-kneed jives.

What a crowd! What art! What sexy gorgeous jazz, brilliant hilarious dance, and film, and diabolical walls of sound!

What a total heart-warming success of a 3 year birthday party for our network:

the volunteers, performers and our intrepid producer Paul Aflalo did a friendly, kick ass job…

the METHINKS collaboration felt like peas in a pod…

Elran and I could not have been happier.

THANK YOU.

Now for a story, and I swear it’s related:

3 years ago when we had jussssst launched Indyish, I went to Expozine with my brand new business cards and was too shy most of the time to approach artists whose work I really loved so I slipped a few cards on the tables of people I was excited about and scampered away. Ever since then I’ve received emails from a Toronto-based artist named Andrzej Tarasiuk about inspired travelling, community-oriented arts projects, and yes, last night we met in person for the very first time, hugged and hit it off right away.

His work in the travelling exhibit includes a line of large canvases all documenting incredible, heroic women in history with powerful quotes like:

strong people don’t need strong leaders

- Ella Josephine Baker

You can see these bright bits of painted strength hung like clothes on a line in this video below, which I shot yesterday in that lovely, liminal time between when set up is almost entirely complete and guests are about to arrive. (A magical, if heart-thumpingly anticipatory time where you try to send out good vibes to the gods of Who Comes to Shows, and have fun with your loved one.)

Anyway, this unfolding introduction between Indyish and METHINKS and especially Andrzej Tarasiuk is funny in retrospect, and I am a little less shy now, but as Andrzej and I spoke last night (again, during the ‘tween time) we realized we share an idea about what we do that I think is exemplified by our own experience of the long slow meet.

This shared idea could be called UnNetworking. I just made it up so bear with me. (Actually I just checked and of course this was made up long before me, check out this podcast on Unnetworking by Sean Johnson and these Un-Networking events in Boston. Here is just my own take. Continue to bear with.)

Networking:

Networking has these unavoidable connotations for me of people trying to gather up eachother on a string of commodifiable connections; even if that’s not what anyone in the room is doing, events that are organized with that as the specific purpose make me nervous. It feels like there’s this pressure to hurry up and meet and impress the right people before the window into some richer, shinier, more hooked-up world closes. It’s sort of like a ticking clock, fear-based undercurrent surrounded by people telling you to hurry up and jump through. Networking is like Stargate, is probably what I’m trying to say.

UnNetworking:

What I prefer to attempt and to attend are events where a shared experience of something happening in the room around you, a change, a jolt of creation and intention, busts you open a small bit, shifts you microscopically to the left or right of your usual mind and makes you suddenly more likely to speak your reaction out loud, even to strangers around you. Ah HA Wha?! The sudden connection is short; but because it was planted in a soil super rich with artists (ie other people’s) expressions, hopes and dreams and passions on display, it is more likely to be remembered, to provoke a mutual smile of reconition at the next encounter, and to slowly, gravitationally, begin to draw your worlds together by the weight of accumulated bits of good energy between you.

UnNetworking is definitely part of what we’re up to with the Mess, and part of what’s at the heart of the dark endeavor our METHINKS collaborators are embarked on with their expedition, and part of what Andrzej Tarasiuk is all about.

A story from Andrzej: Last night Andrzej told me he has nothing against galleries, or the so-called gallery system, but he can’t escape the fact that when he was broke and (worse) heart-broken a bit about what he was making art for, he would go out and set up to draw in the street. Inevitably people would gravitate around, children would talk to him, flocks of interested Japanese tourists would buy pieces, and he still usually ends a day like that reaffirmed in a belief that art is for everyone, art belongs to everyone and magnetically connects people to it, and to each other, and that THIS is a reason to do it. Unnetworking.

This video below is what I think the pure heart of un-networking probably looks like.

These two babies came to our show last night, checked the art then rocked out to DJ Hunky Dory’s selections with sheer delight in the boxing ring.

Rocking out with sheer delight: unnetworking.

Ok, end of my post-Mess, happy, blurry, buzzy diatribe.
More photos and videos etc coming soon!