good call on recognizing what lil five points is nowadays. not a place to be weird (seeing how when something notably “weird” happens, they reject and ridicule it) but a dive of consumption. this stuff should be happening in lil five all the time. it is a wasteland of community engagement and you dont exist there unless you came to shop there. maybe someone will hold a fundraiser for some benches and the square can turn into a cultural melting pot as opposed to a highway of shoppers.

Thanks for commenting, April!
I guess, to be fair to L5P and the neighborhoods surrounding, the problem can be, to some extent, globalized. One of the overarching sentiments today is that you can “do good” by buying things and there is a lot of marketing that deploys that sentiment.

For example, Toms Shoes. If you but one pair of Toms Shoes, we are told, someone in the developing world gets a free pair. What does that tell you? That you are being charged more than twice the value of the shoes, plus profit. Or Ethos Water. This is the worst, really, because the number one killer in the world today is lack of access to clean drinking water.

There is nothing emancipatory about buying things.

I remember Little 5 Points as it was in the 80′s, just as I remember Wicker Park, Chicago in the early 90′s before it became a shopping complex. In both cases, dissent (or at least, earnest expression) was effectively commodified. Does this sort of gentrification lead predictably to real estate boons? artists move into failing neighborhoods for cheap rent, attract those who wish to attach themselves to the scene. A few years later none of the artists can afford to live there (unless they operate retail outfits) and the original residents are long gone. It’s a weird phenomenon.

I love to see writing that is supportive of the arts, but also truly critical in pointing out positives and negatives. Esp. like: “But I contest that this kind of thinking is flawed: Isn’t this determination that there is such a thing as “everyday life,” and then that there are “events” that exist outside it, already a position leaning towards giving up on possibility?”
I have a lot to say about the confusion of situationism with relationalism, which I decided to finally weigh in on here: http://goo.gl/rGOSZ

In a conversation a few months ago I was essentially laughed at for mentioning the possibility of anarchy as a mode of existence. The above mentioned instance of the guy in the (ironically day-glow yellow) construction vest shows why even public art is actually privatized and oppressive. Real freedom, real democratic art, and truly interactive/relational art (i.e. the way it is Romanticized by so many,) would allow this guy to get as wild as he wants, possibly even taking over the ‘show’/spectacle. But the powers that be (with their need to own/control something) denied him that right. [Please note I am speaking radically, and actually do feel he was being more oppressive in his rude gestures towards the dancers. Thus the idea of democracy and individual rights becomes complicated as shown in my blog.]
In many ways I worry if art should only exist in private spaces and not pretend to be public sites of freedom.
I’ll stop now, but this is a hot topic for me…

Thanks, Matt, for your comment. Perhaps I did not state clearly enough that there is a difference between reporting what happens at an art event and critiquing what happens in an art event. A critique requires that the critic be open to the possibilities present in the art and my task is to then share my understanding of how I was affected. In reading your comment I feel I didn’t adequately communicate that. It seems I also should have more clearly articulated that the purpose of doing an installation in this public space is to bring into focus the lack of public space as a place where we circulate ideas; this loss has been obscured in the background. Note that I’m not saying “ignored” because that would imply that people were aware of something and were choosing to not respond.

Political actions are aesthetic actions in so far as they make visible what has been occluded in the “business as usual” mindset. In contrast to politics there is policing. This is perhaps why, Casey, certain modes of anarchist living are untenable: politics rarely happens, generally what we have is policing, not politicking.

MLK, Jr. was a politician because he got people to see American society (and specifically people of color) in a way that had been obscured and backgrounded in the name of “business as usual.” Politics rarely happens because it disrupts the order of things.

This is why the cops tell the public to, “move along, there is nothing to see here.” To be made visible is to provide an encounter with a face of a sort. Faced with what we see, it is hard not to be moved to respond, and this is the possibility of political action.

Anthony, you bring a solid question here and I hope that this police/politics dynamic offers some explanatory power as to how it has become the case that “art” and “artists” are now blue chip investments. That dream of the revolutionary avant-garde, of the artist as messianic figure bringing the message of a better world just on the other side of the grand project, has been fully integrated into the flow of global capital.

Here, Casey and Anthony, then we see the value of the interstice: as Marx (and Bourriaud more recently) use the term, an interstice is a space that exists un-integrated into the dominant modes of capital exchange. As I think Stallings and gloATL are pointing-out, our task is to foster these microtopias, not in total resistance to the dominant framework of our time. Instead, as David Graeber states in his pamphlet “Fragments” (http://www.scribd.com/doc/91679/David-Graeber-Fragments-of-an-Anarchist-Anthropology) sometimes the dumbest thing we could do is raise that black flag and start slitting throats, sometimes should allow the officers of the State to have their dignity and go to their offices and sign some documents from time to time.

Thanks, BPJ!
The scholarship will bear-out my description, though. Atlanta’s first suburb was Inman Park, so named because of the trolley that went from Five Points to what became known as Little Five Points. At this intersection was located a marketplace to service the “park-like” neighborhood of Inman Park. L5P was an Atlantic Station from the get-go.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of great things happening in the neighborhoods; those organizations you mention are wonderful. There are great people doing important work in the area. But we should acknowledge that “non-profit” is only a tax status. These are businesses designed to not make a profit, that’s all. Being a nonprofit doesn’t mean that you’re in the business of transforming the social order. Transforming the social order is what art, at its best, can inspire in us.

It’s a great thing, having folks invested enough to analyze and comment on both dance and Little 5 Points. Thank you, all. I enjoyed Paul’s article and the responses.

I felt compelled to chime in, but some disclosure seems required. I live in Inman Park, a few doors up from L5P, and I founded and run the Community Music Centers of Atlanta, including the L5P Music Center. If that is not enough to suggest I am either informed or extremely biased, I also have two daughters (16 and 18 years old) who dance with gloATL. After ten years of very rigorous training at the Atlanta Ballet, my daughters left the world of ballet because they were motivated and inspired by Lauri Salling’s vision, and because, frankly, they wanted to be engaged in dance that more closely reflected their own artistic, political, and philosophical convictions. (There was a definite point of departure for them, dancing in “Madame Butterfly” and feeling completely frustrated telling the story of a subservient woman who destroys herself for an unworthy lover, without space in the script or dance for critique of the confining gender paradigms that lead to the woman’s suicide.)

Only my sixteen year old daughter danced with gloATL in L5P this summer, and she can be seen in several of the pictures in this article. More to the point, my daughter was one of the dancers who was approached by the drunk man in the neon yellow jacket. I think a couple of key points are missing from the commentary by Cynthia Bond Perry (I read her review) and in this discussion. I’d like to go on record with those since there is something to be gained in discussing both gloATL and Little 5 Points.

First, gloATL always encourages the general public to join in when they are dance making. Having seen most gloATL performances, I can tell you the results and outcomes of this invitation and engagement vary. In L5P, the drunk man participated freely until he crossed a boundary most any reasonable person would consider necessary to enforce. He was free to dance with glo, to “upstage” glo, to talk to glo, to instruct glo, to sing to glo. He was left more or less free to gawk and sexualize glo dancers– an interesting aspect of the entire evening, the read of the dancers as objects of erotic desire, and not participants in an aesthetic act. Casey’s blog comment suggests “power” stepped in, as if the intervention were an indication of something unjust or unfair (?), or that the intervention were not the redirection of a kind of unwieldy and brutish male power the man displayed and exercised. (I’m not sure if that was the point, so I apologize if I got this wrong, but I didn’t read the situation primarily along class or racial lines– I read with gender based power in mind.) The intervention (and I was not one who did intervene, although I was ready) happened because the drunk man became physically threatening, and it appeared he was preparing to touch the dancers, after already making what most anyone would consider overly aggressive comments.

My question : can anyone name another performance scenario in Atlanta, either “high art” or commercially driven art, traditional or experimental, where such “interference” or especially attempts to touch without invitation wouldn’t be met with expulsion from the event at the hands of “security” (likely armed) or worse, a trip to jail? I think keeping the scale of spectator intervention in mind is necessary for a fair critique or analysis of power at gloATL’s performance in L5P. The drunk man was simply blocked from touching and from remaining too close to the dancers he had “threatened.” And isn’t this ethic something we expect in “daily life,” that we each have power over our bodies and the right to decide who touches us, when they do it, and how they do it? I’m glad this basic human right was in play during the gloATL performance in L5P. I’m not a Marxist myself, but I would think even a Marxist would agree. And I was impressed by the restraint used in the restraining of the drunk man. It struck me as very subdued and humane. 9No punches, pushing, or aggression, really just redirection.)

More importantly, in addition to perspective on how male power was blunted– the man was distanced and then free to go about his evening–, something more important is missing in the critical descriptions and discussions. There was a follow up encounter with the same man, about 45 minutes later in front of the Variety Playhouse. After the scene in front of Criminal Records, the man followed the dancers to the full ensemble grouping that occurred under the Variety Playhouse marquis. Once there, the man once again danced, shouted, sang, talked to the crowd, though he stayed a bit further from the dancers than he did earlier. What was interesting, and in my opinion, full of potential and very revealing of the “mythical” Little 5 ethos, as the ensemble came out from under the marquis of Variety– a revered performance space–, one of the gloATL dancers approached him, in a kind, non threatening, honestly subservient position, on her knees! (I have the picture, and would post here if I could.) This second encounter struck me as quite remarkable in and of itself, but especially in light of the previous scene. A dance company bringing grace to the streets of Little 5? Lovely. Could we ask anything more of arts and artists? Could there by anything more in keeping with the myth of L5P?

I think this second encounter should inform any critical understanding or reading of the gloATL performance in L5P. You’ll have to indulge me a bit, but it is one aspect of the evening that would leave me to entitle a review of the evening “gloATL: raising the Lazareth that is L5P”

PS> To misread or caricature the evening as an American Apparel catalog is also to miss both the beautiful formal elements of the evening and the really playful material, namely a blurring of the lines or a rich “dialogue” between between mannequins, dancers, shoppers, spectators (folks who came to see glo, not to shop), the “paparazzi” that always follows glo about, human forms on murals and in cars whizzing by the scene on Moreland, for example. Such humor and such funny and elegant lines. All of this provides an interesting set of possibilities beyond the events with the drunk man and not something I really look for in a catalog or normally while shopping. For me, though, the lines and dialogue are still “glowing” in the neighborhood, and I would hate to think it was only in my mind.

and in case you’re wondering where we might look to prove that gender performances are taught and reinforced in our everyday lives, take a gander at this collection of popular advertisements from not all that long ago: http://www.howtobearetronaut.com/2011/06/vintage-ad-sexism/

Thanks for your kind words, Phil.
I’m listening to your Bloomsday recording on your site, Phil, and I wonder if you’ve met Ian Bogost over at GaTech? He’s also a Bloomsday enthusiast (http://www.bogost.com/blog/bloomsday_on_twitter.shtml). Maybe a conversation could come from that?

Thanks for reading and commenting, Emma!

It seems that glo’s performance in this place has really touched several of us in a significant way.

I wonder if there are people from that time in the 70s and 80s that would be interested in giving a talk or two about that time?

We could, perhaps, arrange for something like a panel discussion?

I know that there are a lot of active folks in the Atlanta area that would be interested to learn more about these people.

Also, since I work in the L5P Community Center, I am really interested in hearing from the folks that were involved with The Great Speckled Bird (http://www.greatspeckledbird.org/history.html) which was Atlanta’s counter culture mouthpiece during the Vietnam Era.