loud paper

a little batty

Judy Fiskin, Untitled, Dingbat 1982-1983

Sara: Roland thinks L.A. is a place for the brain-dead. He says, if you turned off the sprinklers, it would turn into a desert. But I think - I don't know, it's not what I expected. It's a place where they've taken a desert and turned it into their dreams. I've seen a lot of L.A. and I think it's also a place of secrets: secret houses, secret lives, secret pleasures. And no one is looking to the outside for verification that what they're doing is all right. So what do you say, Roland? 

Roland: I still say it's a place for the brain-dead.

-LA Story, 1991

This endless east coast heatwave is working my last frayed nerve, so I am jumping on a plane and heading to Los Angeles, where I can eat all the sprout and avocado sandwiches I want. Wheat germ and wheat grass, bring it. You can find me either at Intelligentsia Coffee or Vegan Glory.

While I'm in town I have the pleasure to sit on a panel hosted by the LA Forum entitled Dingbat as Cultural Icon, as part of the LA Forum’s recently completed Dingbat 2.0 Design Competition. (You can view the winners of the competition here.)

The event is moderated by Michael Osman and I'm excited to join panelists Barbara Bestor, Alan Hess, and Christopher Hawthorne. Hopefully, there will be a lively debate about the role of the dingbat as a cultural symbol for LA and the future of housing.

When: Saturday, July 17, 3-6 pm

Where: Woodbury Hollywood Exhibitions, 6518 Hollywood Boulevard

uncommon commons

Gavin just sent over a video that he and Laura Hanna finished for The Nation. The topic, The Commons, seems particularly important these days as we look to both publishing (creative commons), networks, and even infrastructure. The video has a lovely indie vibe and cool tuneage. Gavin says: "It has a nice soundtrack, so make sure you're speakers are turned on."

on method: laura hanna and ted smith

Filmmaker Laura Hanna brought the work of architect Ted Smith to the loud paper broadsheet. She hadn't heard of San Diego's Ted Smith when she was commissioned to make short video about him for the US Pavilion at the 11th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia. And little wonder: the reclusive Southern Californian architect doesn't have a website or any publications to advertise his work, and often shies away from public appearances. This unorthodox and self-described "developer-architect" states, "Where the industry is complex, I hope to eliminate voice by acting as many industry players as possible. I want to be the architect and the developer and contractor. Architects are well- trained to make good buildings and cities, and need to know that perhaps they are the main players that will advance alternative goals." Smith’s reticence to engage with the media does not stem from lack of opinion; his GoHomes are as much about social activism as they are about personal history.

View Hanna’s full Biennale profile video of Ted Smith.

lackluster: future shack

In anticipation of A Few Zines, Amy Balkin sent over a story intended for the never-published fourth issue of her and James Harbison's zine, Lackluster.

I was happy to save the interview with Phil Patiris from the proverbial dustbin:

In this 1996 interview, Phil Patiris speaks to James Harbison, co-author of the zine Lackluster, about what the artist himself describes as, “the world's longest work in progress…Future Shack.” Future Shack is a video whose epicenter is the Biosphere 2 project. Biosphere 2 is a structure that was built in Oracle, Arizona in the late 1980s to house a closed ecological system and serve as a prototype for space colony habitation. 

Future Shack progresses to expostulate on the information age, the rise of the information class, and how the Biosphere can be extrapolated right into people's homes. Patiris is a pioneer of one of San Francisco’s foremost time-based art meccas, Artists’ Television Access. He is also the creator of the video work, “The Iraq Campaign: A Television History in Color” (1991), made during the first Gulf War.

Future Shack

Phil Patiris:  Anyone who's been raised on Star Trek and the Space Program has encountered the idea of colonizing space, and the Biosphere 2 project is an attempt to experimentally determine whether people can live for extended periods of time in a completely sealed environment.  The purpose of the Biosphere project is to build such an environment here on earth and then to put people inside for an extended length of time - the first crew was in for two years - to see if they could manage a small ecosystem. 

The project is a definite brainchild of the 1970s and ‘80s. By the late ‘80s financing for such a project was obtained from Ed Bass, one of the Bass brothers. The Bass brothers, by the way, are major shareholders in the Disney Company. Ed Bass kicked in $150 million, and they built this large, glass greenhouse that they called Biosphere 2.  Biosphere 1of course being the earth; and Biosphere 2 is the replica of the earth.  And they built it in the Arizona desert near Tucson.

My interest beyond the general interest in space fantasy and colonization comes from the fact that I had a few friends who worked on a promotional video for the Biosphere while it was still being built.  One of them actually was the stepson of somebody who worked at the University of Phoenix, which was involved in the educational aspects of the Biosphere Project, so there was a little "in" there. He happened to be a video producer and he and a couple other people went down to the Biosphere and got to roam around with their video equipment for several weeks, taping the inside of the unfinished Biosphere.  Not many people got inside the place.  So that was fascinating.

And what made it even more fascinating was that the main person on this (video) project, who was a devotee of the Biosphere and all that it represented, once he got in there, began to find out that all was not right in the Bio-world. He got discouraged, and so he pulled out of the video project after having collected about $103,000 already. And they took him to court.  They didn't just sue him for breach of contract; they sued him with criminal racketeering charges. They basically threw the book at him.  He was drawn into it of course, and my two other friends were drawn into it, and I got a real taste for how nasty the supposed progressives of the Biosphere can get when it comes down to legal and money matters and the preservation of their well-crafted image.

James Harbison:  Well, do you think the investors were so nasty because it wasn't a very sound investment?

PP:  They were nasty because, like most true believers, they don't have a sense of humor. They take themselves way too seriously, and couldn’t handle any kind of criticism whatsoever.

Continue reading.

oh, canada

After getting completely soaked in yesterday afternoon's deluge, I tucked my drowned-rat ass into a seat at the ICF to see My Winnipeg. Maddin's dreamscape, "docu-fantasia" of his home city is uneven—part Oedipal talk therapy, part archival record of what appears to be a strange, snowy, haunted, and cold place. Some of the best moments give stylized history lessons, such as the tale of the horses that fled a fire at Whittier Park racetrack and ran into the river, only to be trapped, panicked, in the ice. Clip is here.

Other bits are ponderous, but beautiful, navel gazing, such as when Maddin sublet the house where he grew up and shoots Casavettes-like docudrama. Maddin is at his best when he isn't the subject, but when he finds the quirky stories of loss rooted in buildings and the urban fabric: the dynamited hockey stadium, the Golden Boy pageant held at the Bay department store with the backdrop of a real paddlewheel, the triple-decker public baths, or his aunt Lil's beauty parlor. Maddin was at the screening to take questions and make light of some of the pretentiousness, but mostly he confirmed his mother issues.

whether underground

Early on in Rob Walker’s upcoming book, Buying In: the Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, he discusses the “new consumer’s” slightly irrational obsession with authenticity. He writes:

While evoked constantly, the word is seldom defined. But one can presume that the authentic symbol is grounded in some kind of empirical, provable reality—that if you burrow down behind it, you will find exactly the things that the symbol purports to represent.

I was reading an advance copy of Rob’s book on the train up to Columbia on Monday night, so it was still resonating in my head as took my seat for Ant Farm: Radical Hardware, a panel discussion featuring Ant Farm members, Chip Lord and Curtis Schreier, and moderated by professors Felicity Scott and Mark Wasiuta. Ant Farm’s the kind of countercultural, prankster, media-savvy, architecturally off-the-wall group for whom I always have a soft spot. The sixties/seventies work is great, but also kind of awful: equal parts spectacle, pop, psychedelia, hi-tech, and Krazy Kat. A postcard of their piece, Media Burn (1975), where they drove a tricked-out Cadillac into a wall of burning TVs used to hang above my desk. If anyone was looking to latch onto something authentic, this was it.

Ant Farm’s been on the university circuit before, but what were these former radicals doing this time around in an academic institution, aside from helping Scott promote her new book on their work? Were they not there as authentic symbols of a history rapidly being embraced by architecture historians, even as they were brushed off when contemporary? Introducing the panel, Dean Mark Wigley, who likes to stir the pot a bit, remarked that Ant Farm’s appearance and exhibition at the Buell Center was not nostalgic, but all about the future.

And yes, in some ways it is. Scott and Wasiuta awkwardly attempted to mine the seventies oil crisis, environmental architecture, and communal living scene for its present day resonances, but seemed more comfortable in the past, focusing on the pre-Media Burn work. By contrast, Lord and Schreier, as working artists/architects fully versed in television and web 2.0, and with new installations in the works, made fluid leaps into today. Their easy demeanor was real, yet somehow dismissible (or dismissed) within the lecture auditorium context.

Lord summed it up best in a quip: “How to make subversion suitable for the institution? Add time.”

steal this couch

Ikea has long tried to make a shopper feel at home. The showroom tableaux feature books and supposedly comfy sofas. Don’t you just want to crawl under the crumpled duvet on one of the unmade beds and eat meatballs? When I was teaching a class entitled Total Design, which explored the integration of interior design and identity, I used to send my students to the blue and gold fortress and ask them to document the areas of slippage. The places contrived to let a buyer project herself into the space.

Guy Ben-Ner took it further. He moved in.

Stealing Beauty, now on view at Postmasters Gallery, is a eighteen-minute video that depicts Ben-Ner, his wife, and kids living in Ikea. It was shot without permission at numerous stores around New York, Berlin and Tel Aviv. Everyday life is preserved and exposed: sleeping, eating, TV watching, email checking. Family values are both banal and consumable.

I have yet to make it to the gallery, but New York magazine has some fine coverage:

Ben-Ner’s film, while a bit inert and drawn-out, takes cues from Buster Keaton, Rube Goldberg, John Cage, vaudeville, Frederic Engels, and Edward Said. Shots are well-planned but simple, chance dictates results, sight gags reign, identity politics are ever present. In the opening scene, we watch the straight-faced beanpole Ben-Ner duck behind a shower curtain and begin to bathe. Ben-Ner’s wife peers into the shower and catches him masturbating. He throws on a robe and dashes out, protesting that he was only washing. His son and daughter enter as Ben-Ner pours a drink (we hear liquid, but nothing comes out of the pitcher). Ben-Ner’s wife tells him that his children have been misbehaving. He lectures the kids, spouting pseudo-Marxist bromides like “the family stops the property from leaking out,” holding forth on the value of objects, commodities, and the means of production. The son asks, “Is Mom private property?” and the kids write a manifesto of statements like “Children of the world, unite.” If Air America ran after-school specials, they’d sound like this.

Film clips via Structural Patterns.

rewind and play

Photo via Wollaeger’s blog.

Albus Cavus, an artist collective headquartered in New Brunswick, New Jersey, sends news that it is collecting films for its upcoming Street Art Film Fest 2008. This year it’s screening in NJ, DC, and CA. Several films are already listed on the program including a couple by stenciler and performance artist Peat Wollaeger: Casa Del Luchador and Bill Hilly the Stencilbilly.

Not on the program is the apparently well-known (10,000 YouTube hits since it was posted in December) but new-to-my-eyes piece, My Tribute to Keith Haring…Miami 2007. In a subculture that routinely stresses hidden identity and cool posturing, what amazes me is that Wollaeger transforms himself into a Haring doppelganger—hair, eyeglasses, jeans, sneakers—before stenciling a mural in the artist’s likeness. All of which is captured on film. The lines between representation, re-representation, and the pure pleasure of fandom are all blurred.

In an interview at ourartsite.com Wollaeger has this to say about the piece:

The mural is a large scale mural project called Primary Flight in the Wynwood arts district being curated by Blackbooks stencils and will feature murals by Logan Hicks, Michael De Fo, David Choe, Futura, Lady Pink, Andy Howell and many more! I am doing a very special tribute piece to Keith Haring for three reasons. One...he is probably one of my favorite artists of all time. Two...December is AIDS awareness month, and Keth died of AIDS In 1990. Three...because Keith would have turned 50 this year. I am doing a pile of his figures in the background to represent all that have been lost to AIDS and then over the top is a large portrait of Keith Haring in my style. I have cut off all my hair and I will be dressing as the Artist as a tribute...I even purchased 3 pairs of vintage Air Force ones, just to make sure I found the right pair that he would have worn.

 

new old, old new

Best to admit it right now: the New Museum is old news. I was in San Francisco way back when it opened in early December. On return, I lallygagged getting over there. Yeah, I was excited, but then again, I had already read a bunch of commentary. My faves include Kazys’ review over at varnelis.net and Sam Jacobs' scathing photo essay at Strange Harvest that documents twenty fundraising plaques throughout the space. Memorial water fountain anyone?

I made my pilgrimage to the SANAA addition to the Bowery a couple weeks ago. At 4pm, the light was too low for the skylights to work, so the effect of the stacked boxes was lost on me. Collage, the second (and more promising) installment of Unmonumental just opened, so I’ll try to return earlier in the day. Overall, the big spaces didn’t seem big enough. Perhaps unmonumental sums up the building, too. The assemblage art was installed too close together, and little of it made use of the lofty ceiling heights. My favorite moments in the building were the tiny, tiny spaces along the rear stair. Oddball niches no bigger than a closet, they seemed a bit illicit, as if the architects had gotten away with something—an alcove where art lovers can sneak away for a snog.

Much of the criticism of the New Museum frets over what a cultural institution located next to the Bowery Mission is doing to the Bowery. That bringing the arts to the neighborhood is really just giving up the ghost to gentrification. That a beloved grubby street historically dotted by bums and kitchen suppliers represents authentic New York. Sure, I see their point. I too enjoy a bit of grit and a little subcultural tourism. I might even follow it with a vegan BLT at Moby’s Teany. But I also wonder if the artistic commoditization of the Bowery is something that’s been going on since it was Skid Row.

Recently, at closing party of NYNYNY (photos of this great mini-urban assemblage show here), Flux Factory screened the 1956 film On The Bowery by Lionel Rogosin. The award-winning, quasi-documentary tracks real down-and-outers as they try to shake the bottle and get back on their feet. It is true Beat verite filmed under the shadow of the El. The New Museum with its industrial loft gallery spaces and mesh clad façade (to be blackened soon) is just another entry trying to capture some of that patina.

look out, look back

It is no freak coincidence that the Spice Girls announced their reunion tour (complete with Ginger Spice) within weeks of the release of Todd Haynes’ wonderfully arty Dylan biopic “I’m Not There.” At least not to me. A million years ago I wrote piece for loud paper chronicling the intersection of snarl and sass, pop and posturing, bubblegum and cigarettes. The confluent point: the bulbous Royal Albert Hall. A space that brings together “Don’t Look Back” and “Spice World.”

Inspired by Haynes film, which skillfully interweaves genre, poetry, and identity, I’ll subject you to my early, somewhat lushy, ramblings:

There is a revolution brewing in “Don't Look Back.” It seeps out of the architecture, out of spaces with one too many people sitting on a dirty Danish sofa. When one mixes the great unwashed with modern furniture, trouble is bound to happen. The cameraman, Pennebaker, is pushed up against the corner of those close rooms. He is approved to get the entire atmosphere on film. He takes it all in - the excitement, the existential bullshit, the kohl eyeliner on be-bobbed girls. The lens implies a scent: it smells like cinders and cooked cabbage. Steam comes from the kitchen up through the floorboards and, like a draft, encircles the familiar mop of curly hair and hangers on in striped shirts.

The film is composed of seething interiors. Even the walls, wrapped in flaky floral paper, reflect the heaviness of an ancient Victorian status quo and a post-war angst. Although the film was made in the mid-sixties, Modernism is not evident. There is no free plan, no ribbon windows and the closest thing to transparency is Donavan, who is touring simultaneously. All the hallways, the hotel rooms and the dressing rooms make for just about all the claustrophobia one can handle on an El Niño Valentine's night at the Roxie Theater.

The entire piece is here. Also, don't miss David Cross as an inspired Allen Ginsberg.