Your brain in lights RG ReSolutions at the Map Room and beyond BY CHRIS THOMPSON
	THINK SMALL RG ReSolutions’ exhibition/workspace was at the Map Room through Sept 1 | check out phase two at www.rgresolutions.com

RG ReSolutions’ project "Think Small," co-founded by artists Adriane Herman and Yumi Janairo Roth, is a think-bank workshop designed to invite people to pose problems that plague them, invite other people to help them resolve those problems, and facilitate these resolutions in a sensitive and thoughtful manner.

To date they have successfully resolved a few important problems. One involved getting a severed street sign replaced on York Street. Alas, one visitor to the Map Room, where "Think Small" was headquartered, noted that the city’s makeshift job of bolting the new sign to the old base, while well-intentioned, would mean that anyone who chained a bike to that sign could lose it to an easy theft — remove the bolt, lift the sign, and voila. So to this second-order problem the visitor himself proposed a second resolution, which so far seems to be doing nothing but good (except to thieves): He posted a sign warning would-be bike-lockers not to trust their bikes to that sign.

At the Map Room, one could "take-a-problem," choosing one or more of several problems collected from various people with various gripes; "leave-a-problem," opting to write a short record of a particular problem and leave it in case a potential visitor might elect to tackle it; or "resolve-a-problem," proposing a means of addressing a particular problem posed by someone else.

Here is one scenario, rife with interesting problems, involving one visitor’s experience of the project, narrated to me by one of RG ReSolutions’ ReSolutionaries.

This guy walks into an art gallery expecting to see some art and sees what looks like a waiting room instead. Something’s awry. There’s a woman who doesn’t look like any artist he ever saw, with red horn-rimmed glasses and a specially made field vest. One pocket with a notepad and pencil, another with a cell phone, everything in place, but for what?

She’s cataloguing, itemizing, doing things with files, papers, and pencils that on the whole look like the contents of any old office, maybe his. But the contents are arranged just sensitively enough that he thinks, maybe not.

She reads a carnation-colored sheet of A5 paper: a form marked "Problem Number 031" (the case of the severed sign), one side of it thick with tiny-font text that he can’t make out and the other with illegibly bubbly handwriting. There’s a glow of something hopeful and earnest about the whole scene that is like neither any grid of cubicles nor any art gallery he’s ever seen.

So the guy says to her: "Isn’t this an art gallery? I don’t see any art," at which point the story could have gone one of two ways.

Version 1: Revolutionary. The revolutionary — we all know the type, one among many ready-made avant-gardists who think that art is what makes the world owe them something — responds by telling the guy that the only thing keeping him from seeing this as art is his own blue-collar ignorance or bourgeois shallowness. In responding thus, the revolutionary creates a problem, but thinks it’s someone else’s problem, so, at this stage in the scenario and indeed henceforth until a drastic change in the way such artists imagine themselves, this problem, which the gallery visitor is forced to share, is rendered insoluble. Outcome: the guy leaves, the revolutionary imagines he’s scored one for art and got a toehold in the version of art history he believes will one day be written about him. Assessment: Poverty, squandered resources, failure on all counts.

Luckily RG ReSolutions is not an outfit of revolutionaries, but ReSolutionaries. Which brings us to . . .

Version 2: ReSolutionary — the version that really went down. The ReSolutionary knows that solving problems is a dead scene, and that resolving them is where it’s at. To her way of thinking, the term "resolution" implies two varieties of addressing a problem: (a) the prefix "re-" implies that a satisfactory way of addressing such-and-such a problem once existed, perhaps even at the very moment that the problem was articulated as a problem, and that the task is to revisit the context in which the problem first appeared but to do so in the face of the demands of the present; (b) the associations with focusing a camera, sharpening up details in a pixilated image, and generally cutting through the fog of any visual experience come into play when "resolution" is used as a way to frame a problem and its response. For example, perhaps "resolution" doesn’t make the problem disappear as if by magic, which is often what we long for, but rather permits one to perceive it afresh.

So in response to the guy’s statement, the ReSolutionary says with a mix of Midwestern cheer and adopted Yankee good sense: "Well, since you’re here, why not come have a look at what we’re up to?" Outcome: The guy stays, reads all about one of someone else’s problems, and then leaves. The ReSolutionary permits herself to hope that he might come back with a solution to that problem, in person or by email. Assessment: Richness, open possibility, a success-in-potentia, like any problem, no matter its size.

Chris Thompson can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com