The M.O.S.T. was a four member arts group consisting of Khris Soden (myself), Katy Asher, Jen Rhoads and Rudy Speerschneider, who were each individual artists practicing in different fields before the group's inception. None of the four were more than casually acquainted with each other prior to Red76's "Ministry of Small Things" project, which occured at the Modern Zoo exhibiton in St. John's, Portland, during the summer of 2003. The "Ministry of Small Things" was a warren of temporary artist studios, project space and open areas. Sam Gould, the proprietor of Red76, describes it better than I am able to: [This has been copied from the original, located at http://www.red76.com/Most.html ]
All the most important, and interesting, boring, heartbreaking, and wonderful aspects of our lives do not appear out of thin air. These moments are filled out by tiny pieces of thought, action, and reaction. These seemingly inconsequential moments, through the passage of time, fill us out and are tied into a neat (sometimes not so neat) bow to form our whole story.
What’s frustrating is that these moments and pieces pass us by most times without even a hint of acknowledgment on our parts. Similarly, the creation of art - be that book, film, photo, action, etc... - is nothing but the sum of its parts. Strangely, this seemingly obvious statement is not usually given the weight it deserves, both in art, and in our daily lives.
Which brings us to the Ministry of Small Things, i.e.; our new project.
A temporary institute devoted to the archiving, dissemination, and fostering of the process of ideas, why we make the choices we make, and, what those choices, when it all comes down to it, mean. The Ministry of Small Things is a place to put a magnifying glass/microphone on the invisible middle, on all the thoughts, fits and starts, and hair brained ideas that make up our life.
The Ministry of Small Things will be comprised of a number of parts. We encourage you to snoop around. Dig through to your hearts content. This is not an exhibit that will make sense with just a walk through. Relax and sit down. Take a walk. Clean your glasses.
In the spirit of the project, someone started organizing weekly potlucks in the large open space on the weekends; I wasn't attending these when they first started occurring, so I'm not sure who initiated it. I started coming later in the summer, probably around early August; by that time the core participants in the potluck were Katy, Rudy, Jen and Sarah and Michael. I never brought anything more significant than a bag of tortilla chips. Someone brought grapes a lot, which was nice.
The atmosphere of the potlucks were very relaxed and social; the summer was hot and the interior of the Modern Zoo could be sweltering, so we were all a little slowed by the heat, I think. Rudy had brought in some sand to the large room, and had painted palm trees and hung a hammock. I think there may have been a kids' pool used as a foot soak, but that may have been my imagination. In this informal get together, we'd talk a bit about the different projects that we were working on, and the "Ministry of Small Things" itself, and the potential for what could be done there. Rudy had deemed himself the Ministry's maintenance man, and as such, had been installing these great little sculptures that were disguised as safety adjustments; it seems like suggesting "improvements" that could be made around the Ministry was kind of a springboard for more fantastic ideas that we'd come up with. Somewhere along the way, Katy started writing down some of our ideas, taking notes on these outlandish projects that we were coming up with. I know digital copies of some of those paper plates still exist, although I don't have immediate access to them right now.
I feel like there were five or six potlucks I attended, and it was probably the last three or four that was just Katy, Jen, Rudy and me. I'm pretty sure that between potlucks, Rudy had been implementing some of the "improvements" we'd talked about. I can't remember specifics, but I do recall that some of the different ideas we'd written down had actually been done to some extent, or some version of them had been done by someone. I remember this, because it caused us to come up with bigger and crazier ideas - some of the original "crazy ideas" that we'd first come up with didn't seem so unusual any more. These potlucks were becoming more exciting, and we were all starting to become friends and having fun together.
By the end of the run of the Modern Zoo, we decided that we all wanted to keep meeting on a regular basis and maybe even work on some of the ideas we had. We christened ourselves the M.O.S.T. (at the time, an obvious allusion to the "Ministry of Small Things"), and joked that we were the "Mess of Small Things" or the "Mutiny of Small Things". Over time it was discovered that the letters stood for ourselves: I was the M, Katy was the O, Jen was the S, and Rudy was the T. We picked out our own letters; everyone came up with their top two and we discussed it - it actually worked out pretty well, everyone was satisfied with the letter that they came up with. We decided our friend Matthew Yake, whom all of us had known previously, was the dots of the M.O.S.T. - the connecting bond.
For a lot of the time period of our first year meeting together and eventually working on specific things, I have a hard time recalling exactly what we talked about, or what we worked on, even though we took meeting notes (a descendant from the paper plates that we recorded ideas on). I was having a really hard time in my personal life during 2003 and 2004, and the potlucks and the meetings with the M.O.S.T. were my high points. I didn't care so much about what we were doing so much as I was happy and energized and feeling better about myself for just being part of it. I make this point because it functions as my disclaimer that I may be an unreliable narrator, but also because it underscores something that I think was vital and integral to our future work as a group: we originated out of a process that was voluntary, informal, and most importantly, energized and fun.
I think that one of the biggest reasons that the M.O.S.T. was successful in our collaboration was because we were initially founded on this basis of being able to joke around, being able to throw out a crazy or ridiculous idea, to not be serious, and to laugh together. As important, I think, is the fact that it happened organically; we weren't four artists who got together and said, "Okay, let's work together and let's let it be organic and make it fun." We started with no intention and no construct, and to me that was hugely important. Constructs and group activities work really well for some people, but personally, if I am part of a group that is created for a purpose, rather than a group that derives a purpose from initially being a group, it feels like "work" to me. The M.O.S.T. was born out of collaboration as consequence rather than collaboration as goal.
I've noted the element of fun in our process, and also of documenting our meetings and work, so it seems fitting to talk about the four tenets of the M.O.S.T., which were : fun, documentation, intimacy and place. These four tenets came about in the same manner as our adoption of the letters: we each individually picked ideas that were important to our work as a group, discussed them, and then agreed on them. Although not specifically tied to individuals, I think I was the proponent of place, Katy represented documentation, Jen had intimacy in mind, and Rudy wanted the fun. [This may very well be a revisionist history on my part, and other members of the group can probably clarify this more].(Yeah, no way man.)
I didn't feel exactly the following way about these tenets at the beginning, but aided by hindsight, this is how I view the workings of each:
Fun: For us as a group, it wasn't worth working together if it wasn't enjoyable on the whole. Indeed, there were times that each of us was really having no fun in our work together, but taken as a whole, the experience as a group was fun and it was an important glue that held us together. Another integral element for us was that whatever work we did do should be fun for the intended audience (even if that intended audience was just ourselves). We wanted to convey serious themes and ideas in our work, but we didn't want to do it in a way that was "heavy", or a drag; part of the theory was that people are more receptive to appreciating a piece if they were enjoying it, even if they were being challenged by it in some way.
Documentation: We thought that it was important to be able to document our process and ideas, to have something that was itself a work or output of the process. I guess, to an extent, the process was the piece sometimes. Initially, this was intended to cover any performative works, so that we would have some record of performance pieces that we could share, although we always found ourselves lacking in photos and footage when looking back on completed projects. A lot of our work involved forms and other physical interactions with audience, and this serves as documentation, but also meant that the audience also became collaborators and authors of the projects. Our Misplaced Items Authority (http://www.mostlandia.com/pages/miauthority.htm) is a good example of this facet of documentation.
Intimacy: The tenet of Intimacy was one that gave me the shivers at first, I suppose, because whenever I think of intimacy, I first think of sexual or romantic intimacy, but secondly, I think of that sort of engagement with an audience that is a forced intimacy: actors breaking the fourth wall to interact with the audience, or worse, Improv Everywhere. I have a very strong belief that an audience member should only engage with a piece or an artist when there is a desire on the part of that person, rather than when there is a desire on the part of the audience. I'm getting a little off-topic here, but this is one of my greatest hesitations about the idea of social practice/relational aesthetics: you may want to engage or involve the audience, but does the audience want to be engaged or involved? Totally.I absolutely hate when the audience is expected- like they're just a tool. [Right! I think it does a disservice to the audience and discourages voluntary engagement, or as bad, puts an unwilling audience against your work.] The group's intent on intimacy, however, was one of closeness to each other in the sense of how we worked as a group, and, I think, to foster an atmosphere of inclusiveness. One of the things that we would talk about a lot was how we engaged and included each other. As with fun, we sometimes fell short of our goals, and feelings were hurt and people were over-looked, but I think that by placing the idea of intimacy as one of our primary tenets, we were more often guided back to looking at ourselves as a group of people being together rather than a group of people focusing on a goal or a product. Intimacy related to our audience as well, in that we wanted to them to feel included in our projects if they wanted to be, and, again, to extend that part of authorship to them. Our projects needed an engaged audience to be a project in the first place, it couldn't just be a one-sided piece. Additionally, [and I think you were going to include this, Jen] it was important to listen to and really include the audience/participants; it didn't work if you were being disingenuous about it.
Place: The tenet of place, to me, sometimes feels like the odd man out of the four tenets, although it was so much at the forefront of our pieces. Fun, documentation, and intimacy seem so crucial looking back on things, while place, in my mind, is kind of a tier down from those. I think what became our main consideration when thinking about place, was to ask the question of how the nature of a place (a room, a venue, a city) informed the piece, or whether the piece was even appropriate for that place? Outside of the idea of place as a physical thing, I think we also considered it in the sense of circumstance: what was our place in being involved in something? This second consideration was probably the more integral one, I think, to our functioning as a group, because we had a lot of opportunities come up that we turned down because it didn't make sense to us as to how we fit in there. In a way, our unofficial fifth tenet, "Bureaucracy", was an aspect and answer to the idea of "place"; at institutional structures like Reed College, Time-Based Arts Festival, and the Melbourne International Arts Festival, we became institutions ourselves.
Our first actual project only involved ourselves. It was called Getting to Know You and occurred about six months after we'd been working as a group. It was essentially a day long project: each of us had two full hours to present ourselves and the story of ourselves to the rest of the group in whatever format we wanted, with the understanding that that time was that person's to present. Even though we'd already been working with each other for a significant amount of time, it was valuable because it gave each person a platform to share aspects of themselves that they felt hadn't been fully expressed. I think that it was one of the best representations of the Intimacy tenet.
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