Proposal: COLOR THEORY COMMUNICATION TRANSFERENCE: People’s Park

(notes towards an unrealized project, probably inspired by my upcoming teaching gig at UC Berkeley as well as ruminating on the 40 year anniversary of the radical events of 1969)

The work will be a simple "billboard style" display with digitally-printed color flyers pinned to it that are based on a "color-averaging" of an actual public billboard found at People’s Park in Berkeley, CA.

I’ve been exploring the visual "leftovers" of Berkeley’s radical history to see how iit’s ideals translate from 1969 to the present day. Aside from the headshops, hippie tie-dye stores and cafes, it’s a pretty weird mix of old-age radicals that look like they’ve seen better days and college students who look like they couldn’t care less about politics. Berkeley, like San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury, has become a bit of a Disney-ification of itself with bumperstickers, tchotchkes, Bob Marley t-shirts, and dreamcatcher vendors. It wears the markers of radicality but seems quite content to be it’s own tourist caricature as well.

Where do the politics reside today and what does this visually look like, especially if the public becomes inured to the caricatures? People’s Park was a rallying cry for students against the University back in 1969 and now it looks like a sad, almost dangerous and derelict place. History somehow still is embedded in the park but the connection seems tenuous, more of a memory than an actuality.

Creating a visual approximation of the public postings found on the billboard in the Park removes the specifics but asks the viewer to in some way fill in the blanks as to what the message holds for the present and future. Are they radical flyers? Are they spiritual posters? Are they business cards for services? Rave flyers? Emptying an image may also perhaps grant it some space for a new type of content, one that is imaginative and perhaps more creative than what was really there.

Frieze-ing: spatial rough drafts

On Sunday I spent some time on Google SketchUp (the free 3D modeling program that has totally rocked my world since discovering it) to do a preliminary rendering of my booth at the Frieze Art Fair. I won a special Frieze Projects commission to realize a new project: “COPYSTAND: Autonomous Manufacturing Zone” and it opens in mid-October in London and runs for the duration of the fair. A bit more detailed description is below, but needless to say, it is involving a TON of planning-at-a-distance. I have to coordinate so much from San Francisco to London that it’s a strange process and I’m not used to not having a “physical” hands-on approach to the entirety of the show. Much has to be built and arranged/delivered before I even get there… An interesting thing is that I haven’t actually “made” anything in my studio in quite a while because my recent projects have been more about coordinating things from afar. “COPYSTAND” is one such example and I wonder if this just bodes for more of the same in the future. Hmmmmm.

Preliminary diagram of layout for the parasitic project "COPYSTAND: Autonomous Manufacturing Zone". To be presented at the Frieze Art Fair, London, October 2009. A live artwork counterfeiting event to be held within its own gallery booth space. On the left side is the "production area" and the right side is the "gallery area" that will display the finished artworks. During the duration of the fair, a cadre of 3-5 artists at a time will be re-creating other artworks found within the Frieze Art Fair and displaying them as they are finished. All works will be available for purchase, with a final liquidation sale happening on the last day.

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On a side note, some fun links to peruse:

San Francisco artist and friend Sasha Petrenko has made some really awesome small sculptures for her two-week alumni residency at the Headlands Center for the Arts. I love the way they look and I think part of it is because I have a bias towards things that look architectural and are made of simple materials (‘natch!). It’s a great project and I love the way she tried to limit herself to materials at-hand to create the works. (all images below by Sasha Petrenko)

Sasha (along with artist Kathryn Kenworth) have recently started working on a project called Non*Mart that I’ll be planning to submit some time towards:

Non*Mart is a design studio and shop that uses post-consumer waste and repurposed materials to create new goods and services. Non*Mart’s mission is to explore alternatives to consumerism and develop more relational, less commercial means of economic exchange. Non*Mart Design creates products that promote independence from the mainstream economy. Offering home and lifestyle alternatives, our interior addition products and plans for mobile health and shelter options increase the function of your home and garden.

Shop Non*Mart, challenges conventional buying behaviors by giving consumers an alternative to currency based exchange. Buyers and sellers work with a barter system to determine the value of designs and products. Non*mart merchants and collectors discover the added benefits of a personalized mode of economic exchange, where the relational aspect of a transaction has the potential to increase the value of the traded goods and/or services.

Non*Mart is taking submissions for objects of trade/purchase, so contact them if you have something you want to trade

Non*Mart logo

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Christine Wong Yap never ceases to amaze me. She currently has a new installation work up at Triple Base Gallery, as well as a backroom show that she has curated called “This & That.” Consisting of work that has been mailed in to her from all over the world, it was a lovely show to peruse and it was put into context with Christine’s amazing exhibition graphic treatment and the time she took to write a bit about each artist and artwork submitted. I feel it’s so common to see group shows in which there are scores of artists all submitting works that get hung salon-style and sort of left to hang together in a lump of other junk, and the curator doesn’t seem to care about what gets submitted and nothing is written about the work or artists. Not this show! Christine makes it shine with her attention and care to each piece. Thank you for the great example of a group show of this nature that really works!

Installation view of “This & That” by Christine Wong Yap

Contemporary Arts Museum Houston catalog now viewable online

As I’m slowly trying to keep my art website up-to-date by adding reviews and catalog publications of my shows: behold! I’ve added scans of the wonderful essay by Contemporary Arts Museum Houston curator Meredith Goldsmith to the site. The show happened back in October 08 – Feb 09 and it was an amazing treat to work with the museum and Meredith, especially. I’ve never had such a wonderful, smooth, and collaborative experience with someone on a show and I give her plenty of kudos for pulling it together and making it happen. And she’s no slouch as a writer: it’s a challenge to try to make sense of what can seem really disparate about my work and I treasure the connections and observations she put forth…

A little of this, a little of that: hunting & gathering

I’ve been spending some time doing research for a class I’m teaching this Fall 09 at UC Berkeley: “Temporal Structures” is a new genres studio art class and It’s been an interesting challenge to drum up a whole new syllabus. In the past I’ve focussed primarily on object-based (as opposed to time or temporal-based works), and I’m trying to rise to the occasion by not just pulling from my archive of resources but find new (to me) things as well. Some potential class topics I’m brainstorming include:

Media Jamming as Culture Jamming

(Mis)Translations: Systems Reinterpretations and Cross-Media Resynthesis

Participatory Structures: Social Practice as Creative Catalyst

Public Interventions

Snapshot Sculptures: Temporal and Temporary Objects

Shareware Everywhere: Utilizing Found or Free Networks in an Ad Hoc World

Hacking Objects

Capitalism as Public Discourse: The Storefront as Creative Metaphor

Ongoing and Endless: invisible and Total artworks

Duration and Minutiae (long-length and insanely short artworks)

The Mashup as Cultural Critique: Reading Between the Lineages

In the process of thinking on these (never mind if it works for my class!) I’ve found some interesting links and spaces online. Maybe in some way most deal with issues of “temporality” or even performative action. Maybe not. But I’m linking them here because I want to revisit these in some way in the near future:

The online Significant Objects project is a really interesting experiment in value-added objecthood: writers are paired with a tchotchke object to give it some form of fictional history and then auctioned on ebay. Whether the object sells for a lot or a little is always curious… (thanks to Rob Walker of Murketing fame)

Oakland-based artist Joseph del Pesco is an insane fountain of ideas, and we are lucky enough to have him share them with us on an almost nonstop basis. His latest project, Anecdote Archive, celebrates the idea of how stories about art and artworks become themselves the means for documentation and distribution. I have yet to peruse all of them, but am looking forward to the project building and… uh… getting passed along by word of mouth, too.

A quote from the “about” page:

“The fact that works of art to a large extent are tales, points to the folkloristic aspect of the artworld. In other words, the art world is a place for transmissions: someone has seen or heard of someone who has done something. The story is told and retold. As in any other oral culture there are misunderstandings, adjunctions, displacements and falsifications. The dependence on ‘what is on every lip’ creates a situation where works that are difficult to talk about run the risk of being neglected and ‘disappearing’. Sometimes an art practice escapes omission through stories about the artist as a person. Whatever one may think of this oral circulation of art — through formal seminars, think tanks, staged conversations, informal discussions, and not least through chatting at bars and cafés — it should be recognized as a place for art distribution equally important as the exhibition space and printed matter.”

—Magnus Bärtås from his essay Talk Talk in Geist

Allan Kaprow’s essay “Tail Wagging Dog” is probably something that I read when I was a fresh young undergraduate at the San Francisco Art Institute back in the early 90s (ack!), but for the life of me, I don’t remember it. And reading it now is like a bit of fresh air, since how we look at “performance art” today seems to have considerably shifted from the theatrical stagings of the 80s (think Laurie Anderson) back towards a super-ephemeral or everyday-like activity. Methinks it’s because the newfound, renamed genre of “Social Practice” has come to engulf notions of performance and temporality more so than how performance work was lumped in with “new genres” and video programs in the past. Either way, I used to think Kaprow was outmoded and a romantic hippie (yes, that was my 17-year old brain at the time). But now I realize it’s come full circle and it was a fun re-read

Rickrolling is a phenomena that I somehow missed out on during its heydey but I’m still getting a kick out of learning of it (oh, that was SO 2008, right?)… Thank you, wikipedia:

Rickrolling is an Internet meme typically involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song “Never Gonna Give You Up”. The meme is a bait and switch: a person provides a web link that he or she claims is relevant to the topic at hand, but the link actually takes the user to the Astley video. The URL can be masked or obfuscated in some manner so that the user cannot determine the true destination of the link without clicking. When a person clicks on the link and is led to the web page, he or she is said to have been “Rickrolled” (also spelled Rickroll’d).

Oh, the wonders of the internet. Such joy, such terror!