Dexter Sinister, The OPENING PARTY

[open-reading-group at o-r-g.com]

Dexter Sinister, The OPENING PARTY

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Dexter Sinister
Just-In-Time Workshop & Occasional Bookstore
38 Ludlow Street (Basement)
New York, New York 10002
Tel +1 213 235 6296 / +1 917 741 8949
http://www.dextersinister.org

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David Reinfurt and Stuart Bailey invite you to The OPENING PARTY
Friday June 30 2006, from 7pm.

It will include the launch of 3 publications,
Dot Dot Dot 12, Will Stuart's Tourette's III (Black Rainbow)
and Notes for an Art School (bootleg),
accompanied by Alex Waterman on cello
and the spirits of Christoph Keller.

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At the beginning of the 20th-century, Ford Motor Company established the
first widely-adopted model of factory production. Breaking down the
manufacture of a Model T automobile into its constituent processes and
assigning these to a sequence of workers and inventories, significant
efficiencies could be realized. This Assembly-Line approach utilized
increasingly specialized skills of each worker on a coordinated production
line as the manufactured product proceeded from beginning to end. Large
inventories, skilled laborers and extensive capital investment were
required. Design revisions were expensive (if not impossible) to implement
and the feedback loop with its surrounding economy was largely absent.
Complicit with its early-Capitalist context, manufacturing at this scale
remained necessarily in the hands of those with the resources to maintain
it.

By the mid-1950s, Toyota Motor Corporation of Japan began to explore a
more fluid production model. Without the massive warehouse spaces
available to store inventories required for an Assembly-Line, Toyota
developed the Just-In-Time production model and inverted the stakes of
manufacturing. By exploiting and implementing a fluid communications
infrastructure along the supply line of parts, manufacturers, labor and
customers, Toyota could maintain smaller inventories and make rapid
adjustments. A quicker response time was now possible and products could
be made when they were needed. All of the work could be handled by a wider
number of less-specialized workers and design revisions could be made
on-the-fly without shutting down production and re-tooling. The result was
an immediate surplus of cash (due to reduced inventories) and a
sustainable, responsive design and production system--smaller warehouses,
faster communications networks, responsive and iterative design revision
and products made as they are needed: Just-In-Time.

It isn't difficult to imagine a correspondence between these two models
(Assembly-Line, Just-In-Time) and contemporary modes of print production.
The prevailing model of professional practice is firmly entrenched in the
Fordist Assembly-Line. Writing, design, production, printing and
distribution are each handled discretely by specialists as the project
proceeds through a chain of command and production. Recently,
laserprinters, photocopiers, page-layout softwares, cellphones, and word
processors have split this model wide open. A project might reasonably be
written by the publisher who begins a layout and works with the designer
who commissions a writer, and sources a printer that will produce fifty
copies by Wednesday.

In the basement at 38 Ludlow Street we will set up a fully-functioning
Just-In-Time workshop, against waste and challenging the current state of
over-production driven by the conflicting combination of print
economies-of-scale (it only makes financial sense to produce large
quantities) and the contained audiences of art world marketing (no profit
is really expected, and not many copies really need to be made.) These
divergent criteria are too often manifested in endless boxes of unsaleable
stock taking up space which needs to be further financed by galleries,
distributors, bookstores, etc. This over-production then triggers a need
to overcompensate with the next, and so on and so on. Instead, all our
various production and distribution activities will be collapsed into the
basement, which will double as a bookstore, as well as a venue for
intermittent film screenings, performance and other events.

There is a certain sense in which we are wholly involved in metaphor and
in which a small construct such as this--local to its context and wholly a
one-off--may show some value also as a model, which will then be a model
of address, of attitude and approach, rather than one of outcome or
consequence. I do not want to strain its credibility further than that. In
a more diffuse way, the same might be said of a small workshop. I hope
however that by veering so alarmingly between the general and the
particular, and between the realms of metaphor and practicality, I have
suggested to you that every technical possibility has a wider equivalence,
and a positive need to seek relationship with its neighbours. There are
many roles for your own future workshops, and I hope you will occupy them
with devotion, intelligence, and high good humour. Good luck with your
inheritance!*



* This paragraph borrowed from Norman Potter's Models & Constructs, Hyphen
Press, London, 1990