Rogue Warriors

Talking with Slought Foundation's Aaron Levy about its first annual Award for Rogue Thought.

by Megan M. Erwin

It's hard to pin down exactly what the aims of West Philadelphia's Slought Foundation are. After all, the storefront-based organization has hosted events ranging from experimental music to jazz. to art, poetry, film and symposia. Perhaps the best summation is that Slought experiments, pushes boundaries. Coinciding with the Modern Language Association's convention here this week, Slought is giving out its first annual Award for Rogue Thought which began as a "critique of the too-friendly mutuality of the contemporary prize economy," but also seeks to foster and laud extreme creativity by. We sat down with Slought's executive director and senior curator Aaron Levy to find out more about this award and its inaugural winner, Catherine Liu of the University of California, Irvine.

City Paper: Was this award a goal for Slought from the beginning?

Aaron Levy: As a cultural and curatorial organization, meaning one concerned with how works of art and ideas are produced and emphasized and exhibited, we've always been interested in which practices receive support and are made available to a larger public. And we're very interested in the way that artists and intellectuals disseminate their work and the way institutions partake in that process, and laud or celebrate certain practices as opposed to others. It's often so complicated and we wanted to investigate that hands-on. We're interested in participating, and by that, critiquing, using an economy that has nothing to do with practices at all; it's an industry of sorts.

CP: Why "rogue thought"?

AL: Creation is something that is so difficult, and we think of it as a moment of expressiveness, you think of an artist who just throws some paint on a canvas, but in actuality to really make a creative gesture is to make a strategic gesture and that isn't something you just do without training and close reading and strategic thinking. The mark of a rogue is that however famous or visible they are for their work, they continually chart new courses at the moment of finishing... they keep cultivating experiments, that in a certain sense diverge from what they've done in the past.

We wanted to devise an award, which we've done so seriously, but we wanted it to be marked by a sort of ironic concern and interest in the way that awards disseminate, and how they're issued. In another sense, it's an award for rogue thought, but in a sense Slought has been fashioned by ourselves and in relation to other organizations as a rogue organization. This award is particularly suited to the type of organization we aspire to be.

CP: And the recipient receives your full catalogue of publications and...

AL: Nothing monetary!

As a nonprofit institution, with very limited financial resources, we try to ingeniously find ways to collaborate with artists and intellectuals, but by the virtue of our name, we're often misunderstood or misconstrued as having significant financial resources. We're trying to play with that given that most foundations issue awards, and we're a foundation in name. At the same time, it's an award without monetary value, because as an organization that has prospered, with a certain visibility and cache, the organization does carry value, maybe not just monetary, and that's just one of the ways we're interested in exploring what value does an award convey, and what value does one from a rogue institute convey. The type of discourse that we've tried to create is succeeding.

CP: Does this event coincide with the Modern Language Association convention intentionally?

AL: The MLA is meeting again in Philadelphia, and is the professional organization for humanities professors and those working in disciplines such as English. The idea is that we would organize an event on the occasion of that, given that the purpose of that organization is to confer value and recognize certain forms of value and professional success, so we thought why not, on that very occasion, create a rogue award for somebody who has created a different pathway, culturally, intellectually, academically.

CP: In light of your detailed mission statement, and the listed criteria of the award itself, how did you go about choosing Ms. Liu to be your first "rogue thinker"?

AL: Her work is interesting on a number of tones, [it] spans a number of disciplines, and that's where we begin to respect her work immensely. Her expertise is very wide ranging, and is also a novelist. She has this amazing erudition and range of scholarly and artistic expertise that we were amazed by. We've worked with her in the past, and we understood through any basic understanding of an awards economy that they're often given to insiders, members of their [the foundation's] own circle. Through her work, she's been part of the organization, and she's an insider.

CP: What is the main statement you're trying to make through this dialogue about prestige?

AL: It's an award we wish we didn't have to give. This goes fundamentally to the heart of what we're trying to say. Why should we be the ones, as a 4-year-old organization, however ambitious and productive we may be, why should we be the ones recognizing crucial and informative and necessary scholarship? Why isn't that something that other, established institutions are embracing?

CP: Is there anything the average person should know about this program?

AL: That it's not just for intellectuals and those in the academic community. That it's an accessible dialogue. And that the wine was provided by Penn's English department. It'll be a good time.

The Slought Foundation's Award for Rogue Thought will be presented Fri., Dec. 29, 6:30-8 p.m., 4017 Walnut St., 215-222-9050, www.slought.org.