Tools for Conviviality or I love you when we’re together. I hate you when we’re apart.

“Are you left handed?” These seemingly-innocent words rolled off my then boyfriend’s mother’s lips to devastating effect during our first meeting: a home-cooked meal at her Connecticut seaside house. She asked, no doubt, out of curiosity, but also out of the nervousness caused by presenting a somewhat-formal meal to her son’s new girlfriend—something, I later learned, that was quite foreign to her. So when she asked me if my brain favoured my left hand it was an attempt at conversation, however weak. I stopped for a moment to think about the way I threw a ball and then said “No. Right.” “Well you must be ambidextrous then,” she shot back with a lightening reflex in her signature abrupt, conversational style, “because you’re holding your fork in the opposite hand.” I was mortified. Then and there at the charming shipbuilder’s cottage of my new boyfriend’s parents, with the ocean gently lapping at the shore before us, I realized that I didn’t know how to hold a knife and fork properly. 

I managed to choke my way through the meal by sneaking peeks at how everybody else at the table gracefully pinned down their meat with their forks while elegantly sawing off small pieces with their knives, and how with measured civility they brought each bite to their mouth and slowly chewed. I copied as best I could, somehow making it through the meal to dessert. 

Now, I can tell myself that this wasn’t my fault (and, by the way, I have since learnt to use cutlery—both the continental and american styles—thanks to homemade etiquette videos on YouTube). My problem was, I wasn’t raised that way. (I also wasn’t taught to set a table.) Forks tended to double as knives in my family and, to my recollection, we never learned how the food should get from the plate (we at least had those) to the mouth. In my childhood home having food on the table was a value, not how to eat it. 

This anecdote illustrates, I hope, how tools for conviviality (i.e.. a knife and fork to share a meal) also can be tools of separation. Tools (which can be many things, from social skills to objects of utility) are all fun and games if everyone knows the rules, codes and jargon and if everybody is socially equipped to play. But these same tools can also be sources of humiliation, oppression and even murder as “Tools for Conviviality,” the Power Plant’s summer group show demonstrates. 

        “Here,” the Power Plant’s official write-up says, “contemporary art is offered as a tool with which to propose alternate tactics.” And the show’s artists—Abbas Akhavan, Raymond Boisjoly, Geoffrey Farmer, Claire Fontaine, Kyla Mallett, Swintak / Don Miller, Reece Terris, Oscar Tuazon, Ulla von Brandenburg, Franz West—offer work that, taken together, explore the gamut of how tools can be used socially. The tool-use axis includes every thing from goofy fun to the stuff of violent nightmares, both real and imagined, a range that makes “Tools for Conviviality” brilliant. On the utopia-dystopia continuum, curator Melanie O’Brien has staged what Bruno Latour might call a thing-politic or an object-orientated democracy, where matters of concern call the shots through makeshift assemblages, which inevitably disband and reconfigure themselves in relation to other concerns with other partial resolutions.[1] “Tools for Conviviality” shows us how rapidly quirky, fun or for-the-good-of-all ideas can become their opposite, using the same line of argumentation, the same proofs. 

       What does this tell us? For one, things are unstable. Thus, social structures must continually respond to change, and individuals must constantly interpret and respond to their environments with their tools. It also says something about human nature: that the same people capable of niceties, kindness and love can be backstabbers, liars, and murderers. We would push a friend into a mud puddle if no one was looking in order to get what we want or, worse, just because. It is only a matter of situation (timing, social statues, political mood, rules of etiquette) that a tool aids conviviality and not oppression. 

Many recent anthropological studies have shed light on the nature of human violence. For example, archeological digs have revealed alarming numbers of human bones with cracks caused by heavy blows, as well as a consistent history of mass massacre from the beginning of the human species. 

      Violence isn’t the exception. We walk a very thin and grim line when we talk about utopia. (But isn’t that one of the big lessons learnt from the 20th century?) What kind of better future can we dream about, if not a utopia or a good-for-all society? My answer, if it can be called that (it’s more a thought to think on), is the alternate title of this composition, which summarizes how I feel about my love life in particular and about human nature in general: I love you when we’re together. I hate you when we’re apart. If we take this sentiment as given, can we still dream and how? And what adjustments and provisional tools need to be considered? * **

[1] Bruno Latour “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik: or How to Make Things Public” Introduction to Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy catalogue of the show at ZKM, MIT Press, 2005.

*I also had a good look at Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich, which informed my response although I didn’t cite directly from it. 

**We are especially excited about this show for the Swintak / Don Miller connection as Sagan will be participating in this year’s Don Blanche artists’ residency and presenting “Scavenger’s Colour Field” on Labour Day weekend.