Dedicated to the Memory of
Tony Vaughan
1947-2008
Poet, Painter, Musician, Co-Author and Beloved Friend and
Ted Milikin
1951 - 2005
THE ELEMENTS OF
THE ELEMENTS OF
A
A
NEW
NEW
EXISTENCE:
EXISTENCE:
An Urban Space Probe
An Urban Space Probe
into the fifth dimension
artha Senger, poet, social clairvoyant, action artist, nonprofit housing developer, alchemical new science philosopher and scholar, is also a revolutionary activist. She has been a personal inspiration for at least two gen-erations of artists, politicians, youth and social activists. Her list of accomplishments make her an important cultural leader. Founder of the G2 Institute for Integral Aesthetics, development team coordinator of the Goodman2 community art/live/work complex, radical facilitator and trouble-shooter for the defense and evolu-tion of the original Goodman Building in San Francisco, California, Martha is an insightful futurist. She says: “We need a rebirth of passion — not as charisma but as wis-dom and shared desire.” Her ability to name precise distinctions and see and illuminate inherent connections and relationships in social phenomena has informed and challenged my life and those of some of my closest friends for decades. Martha, together with numbers of others, including lawyers, city planners, architects, artists and community activists — a constellation of individuals — formed a nexus to succeed in the task of rebirthing a famous community of artists.
Martha says: “The artist has abdicated his responsi-bility. The artist has got to remake the world. The artist has got to take another role besides that of being solely an image-maker.” A profound
Introduction
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researcher into possible less restrictive and more equal worlds, Martha talks about evolution and radi-cal economics as being “...a mystiradi-cal concept. It’s participatory, but not in the way you can predict. Experiments are very important. The Greens have made immense steps towards the elements of a new existence. Ecology, new physics, appropriate tech-nology, anarchism. But these are still too simplified. You cannot talk about something in a dogmatic way. Poetic dialogue is necessary.”
In the late autumn of 1990 I was invited to do a series of dialogues with Martha and write them up for Vox Magazine. We held our conversations in a number of different cafes, over lunch and after work. At the time, the non-profit ArtSpace Development Corporation occupied an office near the corner of Valencia and 16th Street in San Francisco. The arti-cle for Vox was duly completed, but much of the interview material went unused. At the time the Goodman2 project was still in blue prints and get-ting final approvals from The City. Martha had been working full-time on this, it seemed to me, forever. From time to time she and I had collaborated on a number of projects: a film, a group of performance pieces, participatory art/poetry events, fundraisers and committee work. In 1990, the following conver-sation seemed well ahead of the times. I did tran-scribe the tape. Then I put everything into a box.
The following years saw the miracle accomplish-ments of the construction of the Goodman2 commu-nity art/live/work complex which took advantage of economical funding strategies, fifth dimensional architecture and considerable community organiz-ing. A group of artists was chosen by lottery and
Goodman2 opened 1995 on Potrero Hil, San Francisco. Photo: David Baker Associates
moved in, including five artists from the original Goodman Building.
At the time of this writing, Goodman2 can consider itself an embryonic community — it hasn't yet reached the level of engagement hoped for in this interview.
Many of us see the building and the entire
Goodman2 project as the development and launch of a new kind of vehicle that Martha calls an urban space probe. A powerful resource for a long time into the future.
This interview, partly edited from the tapes we
recorded in September, 1990, and partly expanded to include new material, some as fresh as to incorpo-rate a bit of her thinking during the present time, winter, 2007, shows the apt, resonant, wildly beauti-ful way Martha puts forth a body of ideas, scholar-ship and poetry, uniquely her own, but also repre-sentative of a universal, revolutionary movement.
Tony Vaughan, January, 2007
Interview
Tony: Why is it so hard to create meaningful dialogue in our society today?
Martha: Because our whole mode of existence is so split. So deeply pathological. That's the basic fact. How to depathologize our lives, this is the real ecological task. To do it, and this is Murray Bookchin writing in his
for God's sake, let us look at the processes of nature! But in these times there has been a radical displace-ment of the process of living, of the purpose of living — which is to live experimentally, and to fully actualize the potential, the real potential that everybody has. Every-body is uniquely creative. We have to deconstruct the partition between the artist and the non-artist.
Tony: What's causing the pathology?
Martha: The walls themselves — the dominant, hierar-chical structures — are the barrier to any kind of authen-tic existence. The authenauthen-tic life that only comes from small, self-determining groups. Complex groups.
Complex because they're interconnected at many levels and have control of their own environments. But we've now got to the incredibly dangerous thinning and simpli-fication of life — of human relationships. There's a phrase I think Lewis Mumford used. He said we are “down-building our complexity.” The entire culture is building. And as this happens, complexity is down-graded because it is factored out. Then entropy and dis-order set in, and if this trend isn’t consciously reversed, we’re headed for what Gregory Bateson called an evolu-tionary cul-de-sac.
New ideas come out of people not being falsely separat-ed from one another and from their work. There are two major areas of separation. Of course, the issue of a per-son being divorced from the process and product of his or her own labor goes back to the Industrial Revolution and the rise of capitalism ... to the beginning of a labor force that is alienated from its own work. That's why I feel that live/work is such a — and I've used this term really thoughtfully — a revolutionary idea.
Tony: Today’s world is primarily centered on immersion The complex
in the world of corporate fashion, corporate design, get-ting a good job, being obedient to authority. Not social evolution.
Martha: But culture could be sharing meaning, not just trendy information. Sharing the wealth that we, as human beings, offer each other. That's a free-flowing kind of process where subject and object no longer are opposed to one another. Then we move into a synchro-nous stream of knowing and being. Ecologists and other systems thinkers have also ferreted out over the last couple of decades the whole notion of an organism as being — the whole universe — as being recursive— self-organizing. All these findings in ecology and new physics simply corroborate the intuitive understanding of people, especially artists, of all time. But power struc-tures everywhere disallow the bottom line conditions for true freedom or culture to arise with their ‘iron cage.’ That's what the sociologist Max Weber called it.
Tony: Culture defines our values and our labor. Sometimes it can work the other way around.
Martha: We're still in the grips of that Puritanical notion that you work — you labor — (this is Lutheran) — you labor to achieve your salvation. Any departure from that — the whole guilt around it in the obsessive notion of work as labor — is what we're still in. It's such a subtle thing. Because of it we don't have any comfortable notion in our culture of what work is. We need a redefini-tion of work. And the artist's work is... you know I’ve just been going back and reading Marx again. Early on in his writings — the whole nut where he was coming from was the exploitation of labor. Because he understood work as being the identity of a person. And that capital ripped that off. And sucked a person dry of their very identity and essence when it stole their labor for a wage and turned it into a dead thing. Which mysteriously Informal meeting at the
into a fetish! A substitute object of desire whose spell we still haven’t broken.
Tony: What about the will to prestige, power and wealth in our culture? The superstar musician, painters, novel-ists, etc.?
Martha: If you and I devoted our efforts to making money and not making art, we’d be rich. But that’s not our goal. It’s not hard to make money. If you're into mak-ing money, that’s what you make. You make dead mat-ter. But it takes leisure to live a life — to pick up the rhythms. It takes time, you have to live it before you can do art about it. Too often artists look at what they are producing as being a product to put out there rather than being radically aware — in almost a Zen sense — only more formal — that their life is a protohuman life. It’s these lives the world needs to see — not the products. Forget the products. What is life? What is existence? Joseph Beuys talked about art as social sculpture — about democratic connectivity and process being the
sine qua non of creativity.
This almost leaps ahead of the radical truth of what is a philosophical question. Before we can solve any prob-lems we have to find out — what is the problem of being human? And what is human? Is there a design in
nature? What is the place of history? Of mind? And work? If we're to go beyond postmodern irony and pas-tiche we must re-ask ourselves these questions —
questions about the possible form of a new way of life — or we're heading for a new dark age.
I remember Marcia Kimmell talked about the Goodman Building being ‘all stars.’ Everybody who lived there was a star. I think one of the things that frightens people Berkeley Barb photo by
away from the notion of community is that it's going to average everything down. But the experience of the Goodman Building was just the opposite. In fact Sartre said “The group-in-fusion is the resurrection of free dom.” So the notion of community is for the sake of community — but it comes about through empowering each individual’s own expressive needs. The eros of the interchange is so alive — so wild...
Tony: Wild?
Always speaking from the deepest place. Whether one was being pissed off at somebody — or at some situa-tion. But working through all that we phased our thinking.
Tony: One of the important points you make is that the power found in collective participation can also deepen the individual person. We cannot have a profoundly indi-vidual, democratic person unless the overall situation, the group, the community, neighborhoods, personal relationships are deepened.
Martha: A good example of such a person would be Niccolo Caldararo, who lived in the building during the time we were beginning to organize ourselves. Nick was, without question, the charismatic visionary who was responsible for inspiring a loose assortment of artists to rise up as a group and resist Redevelopment’s takeover of the building so it might become a vehicle for our liberation, and the liberation of others. It was Nick who led the group to incorporate itself as the Goodman Group, Inc., secure legal defense, and then work with our attorneys to build a case against eviction and reloca-tion as individuals and our right to be relocated as a
group based on the collective nature of our work and our
first amendment right to assemble! Then it was he who first moved to ‘liberate’ the storefronts — the first event was a free film festival — and turn them into the neigh-borhood art center they became. Nick had been a student of Paul Goodman at San Francisco State. He wrote the following in an early in-house communication: “We've saved The Goodman for the present and plan to use it as our base to turn the tide of creation versus destruc-tion in our community. It is a classroom without walls. Our tools are culture, and humanity is gasping.” Another quote I have here is from a manifesto he wrote: “We see ourselves as politically or socially aware artists.
As art is both an expression of culture and of intellect, of origins, environment and individual experience — we cannot ignore our place in society, nor evade our responsibility to effect the march of events in our time. As artists are students and fabricators of culture, so we must protect the positive value of the creations of the past and forge the vision and the arrival of the future.”
Tony: You gave me a list of quotations to look at. One I found very interesting is what the experimental/experiential architect Paolo Soleri says: “The return to nature is about the opposite of what it is pictured to be. It is the rediscovery of congruence between the part and the whole.”
Martha: Yes. And without it the structure of things — the evolutionary vector in fact — falls apart. Which is what our explosive materialism is causing to happen. According to Soleri — and in this he's in agreement with Teilhard de Chardin — evolution is a complexifying process that synthesizes parts into wholes — a spiraling movement that compresses, complexity emerging as entropy gets cut away. This process continues until we get the message of how it happens — how it's struc-tured and our role in the process. At this moment, of seeing and synchronizing with it — and with the image of unity or wholeness that keeps it turning — the evolu-tionary curve will double back on itself and shift to a higher state — to the harmonic convergence Chardin predicted.
But despite this radical shift in “how knowing is done”— that's Bateson's description of this new epistemology — the old dualisms hang on. The top down order — the patriarchy — is so fearful of matter — of chaos — that it continues to repress difference as it has for centuries. So it continues on its linear path — repeating the same thing over and over — disallowing anything that would A gathering to plan
extended community use of the Goodman Building funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. Photo: Ted Milikin
Artist Byron Hunt at his studio at the Goodman Building
upset that equilibrium and cause it to reflect or, God for-bid, deconstruct. So they keep what doesn't conform from coming together, from forming itself. By blowing it up in ever increasing bits. In wars — and on Wall Street. To show how this vector of evolution could be put back together Soleri built Arcosanti — an architectural experi-ment in the Arizona desert he designed to rebuild com-plexity. A ‘thick ecology’ that would situate individuals within a rich mix of things and events that could reco-here what at the system has split apart. Which is what the original Goodman did too.
Tony: Goodman2 will be a descendant of the original Goodman Building. The original Goodman Building really served the entire San Francisco arts community in multi-tudes of ways with its theater, studios, galleries, print shops and the many art and educational programs resi-dents created to serve The City. As an artist, I found many resources there. Even more important, I discov-ered that I was valued as a resource. During the last 20 years, the many freely evolving arts communities such as the Goodman Building have been destroyed. Could you talk a little more about this?
Martha: We lost all the old Western Addition in the sev-enties. The Fillmore district there had been a very alive community and neighborhood. Besides homes there were drugstores, delicatessens, cafes, bars, churches, small businesses — jazz clubs. I remember one in par-ticular — Minnie's Can Do. There was that rich fabric. It had developed slowly — rich connections — the com-plexity that's basically the stuff of human culture. Until urban development came and colonized it. Residents were literally ripped out and scattered willy nilly — ‘relo-cated’ — how I hate that word! — to hopelessly sterile housing projects that were really just barracks. Built for A view of the Victorian
façade of the original City and County of San Francisco.
photo: Ted Milikin
Original resident Ken Richardson teaching a children’s theatre class at the original building.
one reductionist function without a clue as to the rich environment — the diverse ecology — that people need just to survive, let alone flourish.
So instead of tearing them down like’s starting to hap-pen, I suggest working with residents on how to enliven them. Like turning units that have been boarded up into shared work and cultural production spaces that could generate income and culture at the same time. Like recording studios. Or training and production spaces in video and electronic media. Or an on-site jazz club or restaurant. A bakery maybe — and food producing gar-dens. Plus a library and meeting areas. The possibilities are endless. And potentially — possibly even profoundly — renewing.
It boggles my mind how environmentalists can talk about restoring habitats for wildlife when the urban habitat of humans is so degraded and in such dire need of resus-citation! How blind we've become — and distracted! by all the unreal glitz — the phony signs.
As to artist's live/work spaces — there was the famous Monkey Block that was torn down in the sixties to build something quite the opposite — the Transamerica Pyramid. Later other artist's projects like Project One and Project Two also got lost to non-arts development. Then in the seventies the International Hotel became the focus of a famous housing struggle. There, too, people managed to really poetically express the magic of the community they shared and how their lives in that large building were able to function on many levels. Like the Goodman Building, the International Hotel had many storefronts and served a wide community. It was an important living system and culture. Torn down in the late seventies it was a real tragedy.
Over the years these habitats for artists became an obstacle to the system because they were living exam-ples of communities that didn't need products, they didn't need commodities, they lived simply and had their own creative and cultural wealth. And most annoying, they occupied buildings that could be ‘developed’ more prof-itably. So bit by bit they were destroyed, the artists evict-ed and the buildings convertevict-ed or knockevict-ed down — struggles that were very similar to the Goodman Building.
By pushing low income artists out of The City through high-end development projects — you lose an entire strata of human consciousness, which is access to the visionary. That in interaction with other different perspec-tives is a very healthy mix for The City. But if you eradi-cate any level of the mind of a complex organism like a city you drive it crazy — literally insane.
Tony: Evicting the subjective. That's what you talk about.
Martha: It's evicting half the mind of thepolis. So there is not an opportunity to discuss just what our needs are, our aspirations, or our ability to plan together to con-struct our cities so they meet buried agendas, dreams that have been pushed down by the veneer of civiliza-tion. Without those multilevel dialogues you've just basi-cally got the left brain talking to itself. Gregory Bateson is brilliant on this. He says what's deadly is cutting the circuitry of the mind — the circuit that connects the brain's conscious knowledge with the unconscious knowing of the body. And that we must restore this ‘pat-tern that connects’ — which he defines as beauty. Something we actually saw happening in a very drama-tic way in the public dialogues about the Goodman San Francisco Bay
Poster by Goodman Building
photo: Ted Milikin.
Building. Because they brought into the public arena not only the expression of our subjective needs but the whole City’s in the process! In looking into why we didn’t want to lose the building, we looked into our own psy-ches to see what the building provided in terms of an environment for a full kind of all-stops-out living. People came to understand that and to resonate with why we wanted to save the interior of an old residential hotel. As one landmarks commissioner said: “This building is alive!” So it gave us a chance to really talk abut it in detail. And through our public hearings and press
accounts of the issues over the years others in The City, including the bureaucracy, got to do the same. We artic-ulated needs that have been kept out by the walls that separate the different functions of life. We were speak-ing from this deep place. Got to see and weigh the very different values that were at stake in our struggle. In making these comparisons I saw we were moving against entropy — by creating a more complex struc-ture in people’s minds. Rebuilding true significance in a realm of empty signs.
Tony: That’s why so many people got involved. Not only those who lived there. But others. We participated.
Martha: Which points to a notion of the political that’s very different from the usual cynical assessment,
because the political was transformed for us into the cir-cumstances — the medium really — for articulating an alternative reality and defending it like we did at hear-ings. Which turned these encounters into a true polis.
What we were doing was theater on a public stage. That was the idea behind the installation I did in our storefront windows —The Goodman Building is Art Engagé.
Tony: I also remember many spontaneous group activ-ities, art actions, symposiums, poetry readings, perform-ances at the building. A whole summer project for youth. Life there as an adventure of creativity and community development.
Martha: You remember that after Redevelopment got control of the building the five commercial tenants in the storefronts moved out expecting it would soon be demol-ished. So we turned them into galleries, and workshops, classrooms and rehearsal spaces. And a theater that over the years housed several great companies.
Building artists — painters, sculptors, actors and writers — worked on productions in the theater making sets, doing lighting and writing scripts. Plus as you know the whole time we were creating strategies for saving the building. Getting it declared a City Landmark, then placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Getting hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to do repair work that the Agency just kept turning away. Plus having a feasibility study done with a grant from the NEA that they later gave a prize. And of course during this time we formed Goodco — our own nonprofit develop-ment corporation — that put a plan together to buy and rehab the building. We even got a grant to retrofit the building with alternative energy systems! And amazingly, people’s art work flourished through all this — with support from the Group which met every Monday night for ten years! It was this that kept the whole thing sane and centered throughout the incredible mix of activities and changes over the years. It was the Group that provided the self-ordering of this experimental chaos — the meaning vortex that sorted Photos of the Goodman
Building storefront the-atre.
photo: Ted Milikin
through and analyzed the total flow as it happened. Integrating what people felt should be kept and discard-ing what didn't fit or work. New ideas and solutions
poured in and out in an astonishing and coherent flow. We had hit on a formula for recohering life. That’s why we fought so hard to save it. And why when we lost it we've worked so long to come up with a similar form in the hope it will create fire again.
Tony: When I first met you in the early 70’s you were working on a project: Aaron Apocalypt: Acts Of Passage. Part of this project involved driving a flatbed truck
around and through The City with a musical/poetic per-formance going on. It was about some murals ...
Martha: It was a protest connected with the destruction of several extraordinary murals in a black church in the Western Addition that was bulldozed by the Redevelop-ment Agency. At the time it seemed critical to call atten-tion to this fact. To see the storyline that ran through the economic and political rationales alongside the spiritual/aesthetic value of these murals. To connect their destruction to the fragmenting of our lives seemed to be a very important piece of cultural information.
Tony: As an activist you've been very involved in these issues for a long time. You were even arrested during the eviction of the community at the International Hotel.
Martha: I was the only person arrested at the
International Hotel. It was a kind of fluke. The radical community there had put a human bodyguard around the hotel of about three people thick. Starting at around midnight it remained for many, many hours. The sheriff’s deputies didn’t arrive until about 3 a.m. I had gone back Photo of bulldozing of
to the Goodman Building to get a little sleep. Byron Hunt heard on the radio that the deputies and riot police had begun pulling people out of the building. I got up, called a cab, and got within two blocks of the International Hotel. There was a police line all around the building, the whole block. I attempted to run through the police line. They grabbed me and told me I wasn’t allowed to go in there. So — when their backs were turned — I tried to run through again. Then they arrested me. Picked me up bodily and threw me into the back of a paddy wagon. I thought many more would join me. I looked through the bars at the hotel. I thought I could see flames but they were searchlights. I could hear cops yelling. I thought they were arresting a bunch of people. But no!
Tony: The officials chose to beat up people instead — but not to arrest them. So you were the only one they arrested.
Martha: I was the only one out there. Finally they took off and drove to the Hall of Justice. I remember the truck went down into the basement. I could see through the bars there were all these tables lined up around this big room. Officials were all sitting at the tables with papers and lights were on in this kind of dark room, waiting for a whole bunch ...
Tony: But you were the only person?
Martha: Right. It was really very funny. They came around and opened the back door to the paddy wagon. I stepped down and raised my fist and said “Victory to the International Hotel!” And everybody cracked up! I was processed. Charged. Information was taken down. I went through this line by myself.
Tony: I saw a filmclip recently. The police really attacked. They were very violent. But they didn't arrest anybody else.
Martha: The reason they didn’t take them in was they didn't want to fuel a long protest. It would have kept the struggle alive and created martyrs. As it was they only had one. Jerry Roberts of The Chronicle was the only person from the press who knew I had been arrested. Then they dropped the charges.
Tony: This brings us to the obvious question about how you experienced the long-dreaded eviction from the Goodman Building, an event that threatened to happen at any time over a span of 10 years of your life. The eviction in 1983 was something in the back of all of our minds, those of us who lived there, had lived there or believed in the project in one or many of its facets — would this eviction ever happen, and if it did, would it be violent or peaceful? Would the community relocate in a satisfactory way?
Martha: I made a short 8mm film on the eviction that showed the press conference, the trucks hauling peo-ple's things away, a photo of me in front of a door they axed when they came through the building to clear it out with our poster still hanging on it — you know the one with the fisheye photo of the building that Ted Miliken took with a bunch of us gathered out in front. They washed away the “no eviction” sign we’d painted on a window overlooking Geary Street. In my film I said: “they erased our words but they can't erase our deed — it is etched on more than glass.” With only a few hours to get our things out, I packed all my things into boxes and took them to one of those storage places, then went to Margo St. James’ house in Marin where I camped out in Martha Senger speaking at
the eviction. photo: Maya Cain
Members of San Francisco Redevelopment Agency at a hearing on the Goodman Building.
her yard for several days — then moved into a room behind Marcia Kimmell’s theater on Mission Street where I stayed for about a year. Though, as I think of it, I never really left the building at all because it remained alive and well in my imagination and of course we con-tinued to dream about it, and fight to get it back from the developer legally. You remember he was the art book dealer/developer the Redevelopment Agency designated to develop the building after he'd co-opted our NEA study and architectural plans — promising to work with us. It demonstrated a low cost, low impact way to save the building. We had financing committed from The State. But the Agency didn’t want our ‘more with less’ prototype. So they turned us down and gave it to this for-profit developer who got a five million dollar HUD subsidy for literally eviscerating the building — a ‘devel-opment’ that split the Goodman's wholeness into priva-tized apartments — atomized parts. It was an incredible injustice. And a terrible waste of scarce housing subsi-dies on a project that didn't need them at all. Allan Temko, the architectural critic who'd helped us get land-mark status wrote: “Now that the building is to be saved, are we to lose everything we fought for?” Don Terner, who was head of the State Department of Housing said to reporters at our eviction ceremony — “This is crazi-ness. You are watching madcrazi-ness.” Lawrence Ferlinghetti was there. And Sheriff Hennessy. And the Mime Troupe with its drums.
But they'd had to evict us because our struggle and the values it raised had started a protest movement that grew in the end to thousands. So the Goodman had to be sealed off and our fluctuation damped before it
spread any further and undermined their controls —their grids on The City 's soul. This orgasm of expansion San Francisco Mime Troupe
supporting Goodman Building residents at time of the eviction.
photo: Maya Cain
Martha Senger talking with poet — laureate Lawrence Ferlinghetti at the eviction.
has rightly been called the hyperreal — where insides are strangely disappeared and only facades are saved. Such is the bureaucracy’s resolve to disallow any uncon-ventional development. Over the past three decades over 80 percent of the black families have been forced from their homes in San Francisco's Western Addition with promises of relocation are still waiting. This is urban renewal as black removal. And removal now of nearly all the City's low income residents — including its artists. Because we’d been promised a half million dollars from the State if our nonprofit development plan was accept-ed, The City gave us that amount to acquire another one. We tried first to find an existing building but none had the complexity we were looking for so we decided to build from scratch. With two housing wizards at the helm, Brad Paul and Steve Taber, we found additional financing and partnered with a market rate developer we knew and trusted and his architect to build Goodman2. It had to be structured like a torus to allow for an open evolution of ideas. As I’ve said it was the vortically shaped movement of meaning in time I detected in our dialogues that drew me away from painting to what I've come to call ‘aesthetic bootstrapping’ — a double-spiraled form I'd first seen in a dream in the sixties then read about in a book I’d found on Polk Street called
The Geometry of Meaning by Arthur M. Young — and
now was seeing dramatized in our collective action. If you sever the connections that make up such a com-munity and relocate the people individually out of their entire fabric of meaning and put them in isolated units...
Tony: It's a refugee camp… Primordial torus interpreted by
mathematician Charles Muses as a chronotopological structure. Sketched by Martha Senger in a dream state
Martha: It’s a concentration camp. A one-dimensional, mechanical grid. So now the notion of re-uniting living and working together with all the other rich levels of the potential of existence is a great challenge. An eco-logically urgent challenge. And this is what I see
Goodman2 as being — an opportunity for a different kind of shelter — one that integrates people in a natural-ly social, spontaneous way through integrating living and working. Immediately, if you allow expression of the mul-tidimensional aspects of a human being to thrive, you're going to have an incredible kind of richness of experi-ments because it is the nature of human beings to inquire into what’s possible, led by their own aesthetic need to explore. So what’s needed is a kind of alterna-tive structure that will allow natural processes to occur. And shared meaning to unfold.
In fact I did a doodle that contrasts these two structures — one based on the Cartesian grid and the other on the vortex sphere. The first as you see justifies the present top-down, patriarchal order with its repressive material-ism — and the other the self-ordering from below that artists know that feeds on the random — which chaos theory has shown isn't really random at all.
Instead it’s a rich potential wholeness we can unfold if we enlarge the context of what we’re doing or looking at. As Katya Walter explains in The Tao of Chaos there’s a
third living term within the differences that seeks
comple-tion in a fourth term — a new sense of wholeness that raises things — be it a conversation, dream, or conflict of any kind — to a new level. This cohering movement is centered in a hidden fifth dimension where its unity lies. Bucky Fuller called it the vector equilibrium — where Goodman Building
these pulsing thought rhythms are synchronized and then unfold through the dodecahedron — a ‘rubber-donut jitterbug’ that looks and acts suspiciously like a torus!
Tony: Now you're talking about creating a whole new building — a really complex development — on Potrero Hill, on a site, an old railroad tunnel, a little piece of open space, a parcel of land many on The Hill want kept undeveloped, for the price of $500,000.
Martha: About the open space issue, nobody argues against the importance of preserving open physical space. But we also need other kinds of open space — spaces to experiment and reconnect the functions and relationships that have also been destroyed by commod-ity culture. So to isolate and to reify one aspect of the whole we need to restore is very anti-ecological. About the development cost, the new building will cost several times that amount but because of other subsi-dies we’ve added — including one from the Redevelop-ment Agency for the Group’s relocation — it can provide spaces that mix living and working at affordable prices. This is in contrast to typical housing developments which often cost a lot more but provide only a single domestic use. It’s supposedly the American Dream — the single family dwelling and all that goes with it. But there are reasons why that’s becoming a thing of the past — it atomizes and disempowers people. With the break-up of traditional families and the general atomiza-tion of society, there's a need now for people to rebuild communities. And thus to rethink housing. Really begin-ning with the residential hotel — which the Goodman Building was — we see a compact kind of structure that Goodman2 architectural
responds to a whole spectrum of needs and uses. It allowed individuals to have a community and to share things. As Soleri said, compactification is where it’s at if there’s to be a future.
A fascinating aside — that's actually very much to this point — Michio Kaku wrote in Hyperspacethat beauty and compactification are closely related in higher dimen-sional space — and that we're in the process of being drawn into it in what he calls a dialectical shift from
quantity to quality.Though we can’t see it because it’s
curled up inside what we see as space and time.
Tony: I also read this book by Michio Kaku recently, the one you just mentioned, and the interesting thing is he says that, in advanced physics, there is a more and more accepted concept of dimensions beyond the four dimensions we ordinarily think of. And these other
dimensions are an essential part of creating our physical reality. And maybe even beyond our physical reality. How do you see his study and research here in relation-ship to this discussion, to the issues of an artist’s life as you experienced it at the original Goodman Building?
Martha: Physicists are finding they can finally unite relativity and quantum mechanics in higher dimensional space — a ‘theory of everything’ that wasn’'t possible in 4d spacetime.
mind to circle around in — to unfold the meaning of what I see. Whereas arotational symmetry — the pentagonal symmetry of five-dimensional phase space — feels just right!
Roger Penrose — the Oxford mathematician and a true genius — has developed a quantum gravitationaltheory of everything he calls a ‘twistor structure.’ Like Arthur Young’s torus and Bucky Fuller’s ‘rubber donut’ except wih an arrow visibly through it, it looks to me like a hieroglyph of evolution. And spookily like a monoprint I did years ago I called ‘cross section of how’!
In his theory there’s a third world of ideal form that underlies the worlds of matter and mind. An objectively real world of truth, beauty and goodness — like Plato’s though evolving rather than static — as we unfold its patterns of wholeness into the world we actually cause the quantum wave function of the universe to collapse into physical reality — increasing knowledge as we reduce mass and entropy — just as a sculptor chips away whatever’s obscuring the ideal form she sees.
Tony: Or like the process of a poet. When you write one poem, the next poem, perhaps, is a reaction to the first.
Martha: Right. You deepen — and compress. You edit out what’s not needed.
Tony: You are only alive if you deepen. If you just repeat yourself on a one dimensional level, there is a kind of a death. We all go through that at certain points of course.
Martha Senger monoprint: ‘cross section of how’
Martha: But to envision poets continuing to be poets, painters continuing to paint, filmmakers continuing to make films, at the same time they might come to recognize that they can create, in addition to their art works, the physical conditions for a different form of life — by the same abstracting process. This is the process I call ‘aesthetic bootstrapping’ though its really just art becoming conscious of itself as the underlying reality and abstracting out whatever obstructs the flow of beauty and freedom. We had a glorious hint of it at the Goodman Building and it’s kept me working to understand — and create situations that can nurture it — ever since.
Tony: A lot of what we are talking about, too, is ‘reconstruction’. Bringing in something new. The whole outlook of the past few years has been basically ‘deconstruction.’ And ‘entropy.’ That things are diminishing and diminishing. That nothing new gets built. Now you’re talking about a process that actu-ally is building something mysteriously.
Martha: Like I’ve said, it basically involves making aesthetic judgements as you’re affected by something then imagining how to reconstruct it to bring it into synch with that new perspective. Beautybeing the guide here. As Derrida said in a rare reconstructive moment — I’ll read you the quote — “The whole system that has its sights on beauty supplies the course, deter-mines vagueness as lack and gives sense and direc-tion.” A re-formative process he called ‘economime-sis’ it mimes the actions of physics — which he saw as divine — in its unfolding of beauty. Which is a pretty elegant summary of aesthetic reconstruction — of the mysterious building you detected.
The Goodman Building’s great fourth floor studio and skylight.
photo: Ted Milikin
Tony: How will Goodman2's design reflect this and what many of us learned at the original Goodman Building?
Martha: The Goodman Building was compact in the sense that Kaku describes. I think that's what gave it the feeling so many got from it that it was more than physi-cal space. So many things happened there at so many levels. Like the gold that was rumored to be hidden in the newel posts that we'd search for late at night. And the skeleton in the elevator shaft! The curved staircases all the way up to the fourth floor. The long dark halls — like veins — that connected it all. The stained glass win-dow at the end of the long hall on the second floor. And the drawing of Gandhi that hung beneath it. And the bul-letin boards outside the kitchen where announcements were made and messages sent back and forth.
Not to mention the graffiti on the wall of the third floor bathoom! Each space was so unique. Like Billy’s with its secret compartments. And Tom’s with its great swing and narrow lofts — like cat-walks. The back deck with everyone’s plants. And the theater rehearsals held there — Michele and the Witches of Lillith — and Kenny’s productions of Brecht. Or Paula hosing down a canvas! And the guillotine we'd built to celebrate Bastille Day that was never taken down. Then all the other action that flowed through the building after we opened the storefronts. Talk about living theater! All compressed in this higher dimension — in a way that let each thing be its own yet part of a whole. Always open and unfinished. And flexible...
Tony: Is this evolution?
27 Interior shots of
the Goodman Building
Martha: Truly. Which actually started with the building’s many different uses over the years. Though it was origi-nally built in 1860 as the two-story townhouse of a wealthy hat merchant, it got massively remodeled after the earthquake and fire — with five storefronts added at the street level. And a huge skylighted studio — really as you know right out of La Boheme— on the top floor. Later it morphed from rooms and apartments to com-mercial offices. Then finally after World War II — when it had become run down — to artists’ live/work studios. Janis Joplin lived there in the sixties. And the conceptual artist Terry Fox. Also Wes Wilson who made those clas-sic psychedelic posters. Then the wider connections that came with developing the storefronts. Plus later when we began our battle to save the building there was a constant flow of supporters. And the press. And other groups we’d connected with. So this is how it became so complex — so much more than merely physical space. The new building — Goodman2 — is based on this idea of a complex system. Of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. Each individual studio will have a small kitchen — unlike the Goodman Building where we all used the same one. And there will be a central meeting room where residents can talk and plan together like we did at the original Goodman Building. I think of this as the building's vortex or self-organizing center. Plus we plan to have a theater and other community use spaces. In fact that was why we didn’t settle for an existing building but spent all these years to build our own. So it could have a theater. And shared production space. A media center we're thinking that could connect the theater and the live/work studios with the community outside the building. The goal, again, was — is — to create wholeness.
I call Goodman2 chaos architecture— a poststructuralist
structure that has a center but one that’s not static but dynamic and evolving. It could also be thought of as a
reconstructivehabitat because it’s intended to conserve
meaning as well as materials and energy. So Goodman2’s intended to be, as the original Goodman Building was, a ‘thick ecology’ like Arcosanti, that coheres what’s been fragmented.
Heidegger said modern thought since Plato has served to ‘enframe’ reality and shut out Being. And that the task of artists was to “liberate the open and establish it in its structure.”
That’s an even broader view of Goodman2’s design. We've based it, like I’ve said, on the reflexive geometry of the torus — the process structure I learned about from Arthur Young and saw manifested at the original Goodman Building. So Goodman2 will be the first building, to my knowledge, that’s ever been designed around the torus — and the first that’s been intentionally designed to make room — open space for — a higher dimensional life.
Tony: Today in the alternative culture there seems to be a powerful interest in reclaiming and liberating the individual and group psychic forces. The psyche contains vital information. And the psyche is also a collective phenomena. But perhaps not only collec-tive — or, maybe colleccollec-tive in many different ways.
Martha: Yes, a quantumcollective. Some physicists, as we’ve seen, compare the wave function that describes the quantum field to the score of a dance — a rhythmi-cal unfolding of wholeness and beauty that’s reflected in the flow of the collective unconscious. So if your vision Fisheye photo of Goodman
Building by Ted Milikin Drawing of torus from The
Geometry of Meaning by Arthur
is coming from any less deep a source than your arche-typal imagination you’re not making that connection — bringing this wholeness into being.
Tony: How does the individual ego work here?
Martha: What we're talking about is a different under-standing of what an individual subject is in light of post-structuralist thinking — there's really no such thing as an individual ego. It’s an illusion. As Gregory Bateson said — let that go! Let the individual ego dissolve.
Poststructural philosophers agree that the primary malaise of our era has been due to the rising up of the Cartesian ego out of the collective psyche which is the underlying real. The psyche’s repression through conscious, dualistic thinking has caused the death of nature — both psychic and physical.
Tony: The contemporary will to power is more like the will to dominate — dominate no matter what the circum-stances, no matter how unscrupulous the individual has to be to achieve control over others. This is in direct opposition to the ecological sense that power comes out of wisdom, symbiosis and honest generosity. Where are we going with this paradox?
Martha: It’s being resolved through embedding our separate egos within a transindividual consciousness, the symbiosis you suggest. Gregory Bateson would say that what you and I are doing right now is a meta-logue of ideas — it doesn’t belong to either of us. It's a self-acting Idea. It's the Idea that’s real rather than the individual.
becomes co-extensive with the universe. This constitutes
a singularity of subjectivity that's greatly at odds with the technological singularity that's being touted now. Because our shared aesthetic sensibilities will shift us beyond clock time to the subjective timing that's implicit in phase space, or hyperspace, which, as Michio Kaku told us, is highly compactified — a state he relates to beauty — and to the simplified laws of nature he sees operating in higher dimensions.
Tony: This brings up cosmos, which is everything, including time and evolution, as well as space, inner and outer, and sensibility.
Martha: Speaking of cosmology I just read that Stephen Hawking has come up with a formula that avoids the
singularity he’s been predicting -- the catastrophic moment when the laws of nature -- of physical space and clock time -- are expected to break down. Instead he now proposes -- like Kaku -- a transition from one form of space to another -- a shift that reconfigures matter into a more coherent geometry. And time - clock time that is - becomes space - which Kaku has described as the
subjective timing of phase space!
As Hawking describes it mathematically -- “the transition probability this provides for is a wave function with some other matter content m2 in a geometrical configuration g2 that has the form T(m2,g2).”
What a mind boggling coincidence the building we named G2 on account of its having been modeled on the original Goodman Building - which I’d experienced as having a cohering toroidal geometry - should appear as the
transition formula that avoids a catastrophic collapse! Which is uncannily like the configuration artists achieve in an art work - reducing content to form through their
imagination. Which is the faculty Kant claimed to be the root of time that’s now also being identified with dark matter and causing it to expand!
Thus nature is an artist - creating higher symbolic forms of meaning and life via radically evolving geometries like the evolution now from the sphere which can be seem as ‘g1’ to the ‘g2’ vortex sphere or torus. Identified by Arthur Young with the photon - the quantum of action, light and intelligence - that in turning in and out on itself reduces
entropy as it expands meaning and wholeness, he said the evolutionary moment has come for a return to the light and “becoming cause.” And as he made clear in The Geometry of Meaning, there’s only one true escape from the wheel and that’s to “turn around and go the other way.”
Tony: Is this the ‘aesthetic phase shift’ I’ve heard you talk about?
Martha:Yes. And it depends on our actually enacting
this quantum wholeness - this true Real - like we did at the Goodman Building. Like that pink center emerging from the little painting you gave me and my new neon sculpture - that quintessence - it’s emerging right now out of chaos and will pop into the world when we synchronize with it.
Swirling around the vortex of an evolving shared vision of wholeness in spaces that are ‘open to Being’ and subvert the dominant order like G1 did, I also see it emerging as a trans-art movement - a 5-dimensional abstraction I call ‘Neo-Vorticism.’ Radically deconstructing the Vorticist art movement in England in the 20’s that celebrated the explosive dynamics of the machine - their journal was called BLAST! - Neo-Vorticism both expands and contracts at each fractal turn of our toroidal actions,
Quintessence
Neon & Silk Screen on Canvas Martha Senger, 2009
drawing back in all we’ve objectified and reclaiming the dark matter - the ‘m2’ of our collective imagination - as we act symbolically together to reconstruct and re-occupy the world.
Tony: Are we on the edge of a new era?
“We see ourselves as political or socially aware artists. As art is both an expression of culture and of intellect, of origins, environment and individual experience — we cannot ignore our place in society, nor evade our responsibility to effect the march of events in our time. As artists are students and fabricators of culture, so we must protect the positive value of the creations of the past and forge the vision and arrival of the future.”
angel out
the world we live in is sliced in two art over here ostensibly holding heaven but in fact holding form in exile
the alchemical angel caught in a closed circuit
while life (poor life!) is left to dangle over there
still dazed by the disjuncture done by the measuring minds of the 17th century
who rendered everything everlastingly present & everything totally lost
the holy held in obeyance entropy naturally reigns
“open the poetry door” said tony “onto the world” said i
the world waits for the actual act the one with the form of immanence imprinted in perfectly legible hieroglyphics apparent at once as our true being
what must come is some new praxis an aestheticized engagement with no opening or closing night and no stage
except the one outside the door & holy primordial time
finally filled with an ecstatic quantum/cum gnosis choreographed by the collective postconscious
the point is
patterns in a painting point beyond themselves onto a possible world
we must let the angel out
Copyright 2008, Martha Senger The Goodman - 2 Press Edited by Tony Vaughan
"In 'Urban Space Probe' we see a San Francisco artists' community fight to save their holistic live-plus-work habitat. They manage to 'deconstruct' the bureaucracy's linear blinders. How? With living theater that reveals the rich indigenous culture being destroyed by redevelopment bulldozers to impoverish and marginalize the City's once-magnificent brocade of artistic life.
This is a real-life 'edge of chaos' adventure. As such, it serves as a model in the wider world struggle to save indigenous cultures from the ravages of linear-blinded 'development' and
globalization. This sounds a clarion call for the evolutionary phase shift it so dramatically predicts, describes, and enacts! How? By recognizing the mysterious & sublime Other that beckons if only we can synch, as these artists did, with the hidden creative order in chaos!"
Katya Walter, Ph.D.
