Alex Villar climbs up a scaffold and breaks into a business

I just came across video documentation of a new public performance by Alex Villar – “Breaking into Business” that he executed as part of the Open City festival in Lublin, Poland. In “Breaking into Business”, he literally performs the concept of “Open City” by walking through the city pushing a scaffold on casters, setting the scaffold below a business window, climbing up the scaffold and into a window. As I watched the video, I kept wondering if all these places had agreed to his visit or what was the reaction within the location as Alex stepped into the building from a second or third story window. Unfortunately, the videographer only follows Villar on the street and we never see the interaction within the building. As is the nature of Alex Villar’s performative work, the focus is on his action, movement and intervention in and through the urban space.

Documentary film maker and colleague Kelly Anderson has just launched a kickstarter campaign for a doc in production titled “My Brooklyn” revolving around urban planning and gentrification in Brooklyn, particularly changes occurring in and around Fulton Mall. Check out the trailer and support the film if you like what you see!

My Brooklyn trailer from Kelly Anderson on Vimeo.

Sci fi has long predicted an army of drones, however today’s NYC Times’ article on Microdones is at once awe striking and fearful. Hear are a few excerpts that rung strongly as I read through the article:

Last summer, fighter jets were almost scrambled after a rogue Fire Scout drone, the size of a small helicopter, wandered into Washington’s restricted airspace.

“There’s a kind of nostalgia for the way wars used to be,” said Deane-Peter Baker, an ethics professor at the United States Naval Academy, referring to noble notions of knight-on-knight conflict. Drones are part of a post-heroic age, he said, and in his view it is not always a problem if they lower the threshold for war. “It is a bad thing if we didn’t have a just cause in the first place,” Mr. Baker said. “But if we did have a just cause, we should celebrate anything that allows us to pursue that just cause.”

One of the smallest drones in use on the battlefield is the three-foot-long Raven, which troops in Afghanistan toss by hand like a model airplane to peer over the next hill.

And here are a few images of the shrinking size of drones:
The highly used Predator Drone, particularly since 9/11.

The Shadow Drone.

And as photographed in the NY Times article the prototype for a hummingbird-like drone.

Of course in more recent critical art practices, setting aside the long history of drones in Science Fiction, there are several works that come to mind, particularly the long standing fictional work of Alex Rivera – Cybracero and the sculptural work “Parasitos Urbanos” of Gilberto Esparza. Although Esparza’s work reflects upon the self-sufficient nature of Mexico City’s street commerce, Rivera’s work points squarely at the de-humanizing aspects of the transnational corporate-military machine. Unfortunately, critical art, does little to stop the growing drone army by the Empire’s military. And we – all tax paying U.S. citizens and non-citizens are contributors.

I don’t know who this performance artist is or who she is protesting against, whether it’s the Colombian government, or multinationals or power in general, but it’s exciting to see (in more ways than one), particularly the street actions, such as the performance on Bolivar’s Monument below.

Eventually she stops dancing and merely sits on the edge of the monument. The video states:

Eventually a police man forced me to step down from the Bolivar’s monument because he felt that my body on the monument’s steps was vulgar and I was ruining the tourist photos. So I continued the action without erotic dancing.

You can see more of artist’s work at: http://www.lafulminante.com or her YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/LaFulminantexxx

One of the grads, Alex Mallis, in Hunter’s Integrated Media Arts (IMA) program is seeking funding for a film capturing a group of people who feed off discarded food. Support the film via it’s Kickstarter campaign.

“An aging artist, his young assistant, and blind friend arrive by rusted retro car; a Puerto Rican woman and her teenage grandson embark on foot, lead by a rattling grocery cart; a hyperactive twenty-something and his stoned companion leave a Bushwick loft to navigate the subway. Familiar faces and converging philosophies meet to take what others deem unworthy of consumption. The reward of a free and delicious discovery activates a ritual adventure – a night of extraordinary harvest.”
- Alex Mallis, Excerpt from film description on Kickstarter

The fight for public education is just getting started…

I’ve become a big fan of Duke Riley’s work. Riley combines historical research, public intervention and skilled craft to generate narratives that are immediately engaging and subtly layered and complex.

I Photoshopped the drawings pictured in this post in order to better see the detail that Riley executes in his graphic work; they are worth seeing in person whenever possible. Although the only work documented in this post is graphic representation, Riley works across media and he has gotten the most attention for his public interventions, such as “After the Battle of Broolyn” for which he built a replica of an 18th Century U.S. Revolutionary submarine “The Turtle” and set out on the Hudson to attack a ship, the Queen Mary 2 docked off Manhattan. The NYC Coast Guard hauled Riley and his submarine from the Hudson.

The latest exhibition presents two installations revolving around two separate historical narratives – the hobbo ballad “An Invitation to Lubberland” and Petty’s Island, a Citgo owned island in the Delaware River.

I didn’t have the patience to watch the videos portraying An Invitation to Lubberland which presented a late 19th century/ early 20th century dressed man running around underground tunnels. I was much more drawn to the second work presented “Reclaiming the Lost Kingdom of Laird” which consists of an intervention upon a Citgo fuel storage tank and a reclaiming of the island by the Laird Kingdom Liberation Army that published a letter to Hugo Chavez on the Huffington Post reclaiming Petty’s Island.

The project includes a giant portrait of Ralston Laird painted onto the top of a storage tank, interviews with the great great grandson of Ralston Laird, artifacts of the Laird family and beautiful drawings that re-imagine the island. (Ralston Laird was an Irish immigrant who once lived on Petty’s Island and claimed himself king of Petty’s Island.) Below are a few closeups of the large scale drawing pictured above.

Duke Riley goes all out with his work. He ventures across boundaries to realize work that must be taken seriously due to the earnestness of execution. My only point of critique is that his graphic work is consistently in line with hipster subculture aesthetics informed by past eras of Americana and I would much rather see Riley establish his own visual language. Although the visual styles are generally informed by the era of the topic that he tackles it seems to be the same early 19th century U.S. graphic style that he recreates. Perhaps what I enjoy the most is that Riley really seems to enjoy his work thus the research leading to dense narratives that are conceptually and visually engaging.

Scholar and writer recently published an essay titled “The Un-accounted Body in Performance: Who is the Subject of the Rights of the Illegal Alien?” in the current publication of the academic journal LLJournal in which she discusses the art projects VOTEMOS.US and Design for the Alien Within.

Following brief abstracts of the two projets, Sandez opens the essay with the following paragraph:

Both Votemos.us and Design for the Alien Within imagine treating the illegal alien as if he/she matters; Votemos.us considers their political substance through hypothetical voting rights, and Design for the Alien Within considers their safety. It is not my intent to provide an in-depth analysis of either Votemus.us or Design for the Alien Within, but to trace the specific phenomenon of the unaccounted body as it is articulated in each project2. These artistic interventions, which have the unaccounted body as their subject/theme, present a space that has yet to reach their subject—whether as audience or as a catalyst for a better life making their situation better—and the hypothetical situations they evoke. Giving voting rights to undocumented people could not occur when their civic being has not yet been accounted for, and designing furniture for the hiding of bodies cannot be functional if people do not feel a real need to hide undocumented immigrants.

Read the entire essay on the current volume of the LLJournal, Vol5, No 2

Walking around Chelsea yesterday, I stepped into David Zwirner that had a show titled 112 Greene Street: The Early Years (1970-1974) and was excited to discover Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fresh-Air Cart” from 1974 (pictured below).

Last night, upon the invitation of Moritz von Rappard, I attended the performance of KLASSENTREFFEN by the Ballhaus Naunynstrasse theater company at PS122 and it was excellent. KLASSENTREFFEN is a documentary theater piece in which the performers retell their personal stories as Turkish immigrants living in Germany or first generation Germans of Turkish descent. The piece revolves around identity politics and the memories and emotional histories that are recounted touch upon cultural loss, the difficulties of being Turkish in Germany, and ultimately the construction of cross-cultural identity. I don’t feel that the stories told represent new discoveries or new perspectives regarding the “other,” rather the power of the piece lies in entering these people’s lives and listening to the accounts not from an actor, but from the individual who has lived the difficult experience of defining oneself between cultures. It is the unveiling of personal experience from the individual in real-time that establishes an emotional reaction in the audience.

Pictured above sitting in a row are the performers: a taxi driver and owner of a taxi company, a publicist, a Green Party politician, a police woman (the first female police commissioner), a Turkish/German pop music producer, and a professional actress. The last man in the row is Moritz von Rappard, the production manager and I don’t recall the second to last man, sitting to the right of Moritz, I believe he may have been an artistic co-producer. Sitting behind the actors are artistic director Shermin Langhoff and director Lukas Langhoff