I work part time in the Gallery doing day-to-day projects, developing independent programming, and helping to chart the future of the Green Lantern by co-organizing long term fund raising plans and the like. Some of the programming I’ve been planning includes: the formation of an Essay Club, gathering a Library of Radical Arts Administration, and establishing a Participatory Culture Showcase within the Gallery.

Holon is the name that’s been given to this residency. It’s something of a fateful coincidence that the experience which brought me into contact with the meaning of this word was my own time running an experimental residency program. At this time last year the collective Carnal Torpor stayed in the basement of the storefront space I co-managed with my collaborators in InCUBATE (that included Lantern Projects Gallery Director Abigail Satinsky). On a website Carnal Torpor created to advertise and explain an event they put together at InCUBATE, they define holon as “a term used to denote something which is both a part of a greater whole and a whole unto itself.” The structure of the residency program resembles the structure of the holon in that I, as the resident, am both “a part of a greater whole” (in my capacity as an employee of the gallery) and “a whole unto itself” (by virtue of the programming I will be organizing myself).

I should say, before you get the idea that we begin each day of work here at the Green Lantern with a salutation to The Most Verdant Prince of the Equinox, that invoking an academically marginal and, well, crunchy word like “holon” is not a thoughtless process. Although I grew up listening to my parents’ music of the sixties and seventies and have a couple aunts who went to Woodstock, I never developed a serious reverence for a hippie worldview. In fact, the popular music of those two decades that I’ve always identified with the most has been that of cynical smart-alecks (Elvis Costello), sentimental individualists (Todd Rundgren), and whip-smart humorists (Harry Nilsson). It’s been the same with the art of the period, the dry developments of conceptual art have always interested me more than the juicier developments in performance, video, and other media.

However, around the time of Carnal Torpor’s residency at InCUBATE, my attitude began to change. Whereas before having my astrology chart interpreted seemed like a silly idea, it suddenly began to seem reasonable. Maybe it was a symptom of approaching the end of my time in graduate school. Even so, I think it’s important every so often to attempt to strike a compromise with ideas and practices one normally wouldn’t value, to timidly dip a toe in the chilly water outside one’s own comfort zone. What won me over to Carnal Torpor’s work, which willfully and skillfully employs concepts and aesthetics from far outside most people’s comfort zone, is that their enthusiasm was paired with a humble awareness of just how outlandish they might seem. It’s not that they inhabit both positions at once by way of jaded irony. Instead, they treat all sides seriously and respectfully.

Along with this wisdom came the discovery that a lot of artists of the sixties and seventies that I had previously admired for their dryness were in fact more than they might seem at first. Lee Lozano’s amazing notebooks are simultaneously self-help journals and high (sometimes literally) conceptual experiments. Beyond Allan Kaprow‘s most goofy Happenings is his writing on the notion of the “un-artist” whose art-centric identity biodegrades into the ecology of everyday life. Adrian Piper is deeply committed to the practice of yoga. Paul Ryan, a member of the pioneering media arts group RainDance Corporation, wrote about “sacred chreods,” human evolutionary processes that could be addressed in encounters with video art (the images peppering this post come from Ryan’s essay “Sacred Chreods” in his book Cybernetics of the Sacred). Rather than discredit these artists’ work in my eyes, these bizarre dimensions have only made it more interesting.

All this is to say that I hope to sustain an enthusiasm for doing the not-so-obvious thing over the course of my residency, to keep an eye out for meaning and interest not only in my part, but your part, their part, and our whole. Not only did I learn the meaning of the word “holon” from the guys in CT, but I also found a model of expressive humility to maintain throughout this project.