An old friend from undergrad, Lara Miranda, has been re-creating biblical stories for film and they are crazy - violent, fanciful, and wicked - an excellent literal portrayal of the Bible.

Thus far  2 Kings 2:23 of “True Stories from the Bible” is the only passage available on YouTube from Dawn Burns Films.  I briefly spoke with Lara nearly a year ago and I remember her telling me that she was filming donkeys.  There are no donkeys in 2 Kings 2:23, so I imagine that she’s got more films in the works.

Meanwhile the literal interpretation of 2 Kings 2:23-24 (I copied the King James Version below) is a throw back of 60’s and 70’s low budget Biblical films.  It reminds me of the sort of films I would see in Catholic school as a child.  This moment in time, seems like an incredibly appropriate period to revisit this film genre, as these films portray the inherent violence of the Bible at a time of war and conflict in the “Holy Land”.

2 Kings 2:23-24 (the King James Version)

23And he went up from thence unto Bethel: and as he was going up by the way, there came forth little children out of the city, and mocked him, and said unto him, Go up, thou bald head; go up, thou bald head.

24And he turned back, and looked on them, and cursed them in the name of the LORD. And there came forth two she bears out of the wood, and tare forty and two children of them.

In the midst of being thrown out of my home by NYC and staying with friends and family, it took me a while to assemble some documentation of the recent commission I completed for a festival in Mexico City:
http://www.ambriente.com/carreta_nagua/

The animation “Arbol que nace torcido, nunca su rama enderece” (Tree that is born twisted, never straightens) is available online:
http://www.ambriente.com/carreta_nagua/animation.php
The animation is about 8 and a half minutes long and features El Chapulin Colorado and Ultraman discussing the effects of globalization, immigration and personal loss due to cultural transitions. The script is based on my parent’s current reality as they move back to Nicaragua after 45 years in San Francisco, CA. The animation was featured on a rickshaw as passengers were offered a tour of the colonial park Alameda Central in the historical center of Mexico City. The title of the project is “Carreta Nagua, Siglo 21″, a description of the project and explanation of the title is also available online as well as plenty of images:
http://www.ambriente.com/carreta_nagua/

The tour and animation generated excellent discussion and lots of local press, primarily on television and is still on view at the museum - Laboratorio Arte Alameda - http://www.artealameda.inba.gob.mx/
So if you are in Mexico City, please stop by to see the exhibition. It’s an excellent exhibition that I discussed in my blog while in Mexico City:
TRANSITIO at Laboratorio Arte Alameda

I had a young crew of three boys to help me assemble the cart through the weekend. Saturday morning I took a trip with their boss, a Spaniard named Hector who runs a fabrication company that primarily does exhibition production for large media companies such as Sony, but prefers to do production for cultural institutions, they just don’t pay the bills. We drove to his shop with a couple of his employees to gather tools and materials. Returned to Laboratorio Arte-Alameda and immediately got to work. It was a late start and I only had the three guys that day and Sunday. By the late afternoon the cart began to take shape. We completed the basic structure, installed the bus chair and resolved a few questions. In the early evening it began to poor so we stopped to continue on Sunday.

Discussing the joining of the axle to the steel tubes that would make the primary structure.

Cleaning up the welds.

Friday, October 5th was the first day on getting started in assembling the physical component of my TRANSITIO commission for “impolis”, one of a series of curatorial components that make up TRANSITIO_MX02, the second installment of this new media festival in Mexico City.

I’m building a rickshaw that will tour people around a park in the historical center of Mexico City, Parque Alameda. As people take a ride on the rickshaw that I will pull, they will watch an animation that I’ve been creating over the last few months. Carreta Nagua is an old folk tale from Nicaragua, tale generally told to children when they refuse to go to sleep, because it’s a wagon (carreta) driven by death and pulled by two skeletal oxen, it makes a great deal of noise, as if chains were been dragged along the ground as it makes it way. When the Carreta Nagua arrives at ones home, the person is sure to die. It’s assumed that the tale, a very old tale shared amongst the indeginous people of Nicaragua, but also having many parallels throughout Latin America, is believed to have been established due to the slave carts driven by the Spaniards to take slaves to the mines. People taken by the carts would disappear, only to be seen again as corpses. The Spanish would take indeginous people to the mines to work, where they would wear away to die and be taken as corpses for burial. When indeginous people heard a cart, they would hide, the cart became a symbol of death.

The animation featured on the cart, on a panel that sits in front of the passenger is based on my parents. They left Nicaragua over 40 years ago, to work and establish a family and to give their children greater possibilities. Now they are returning to Nicaragua, but it’s an entirely different place than the one that they left. “La Carreta Nagua” is an allegory for the translocation of people, the leaving of ones culture, extended family, language - for greater means or opportunities / for economic reasons in a pancapitalist era. This is the personal or subjective or individual portion of globalization, not the corporate form of globalization, but the mass migration of populations due to highly subjective decisions by individuals.

So Friday was day one, when I was taken by Juan and Israel to “deshuesadores” - one translation might be skeleton cleaners, but really auto wreck dumps. The rickshaw needs an axle, tires, seats, a steel frame… all parts that can be found at an auto dump. I’d been concerned at how all this would come together, but it went smoother than I could have imagined. At our second stop we acquired nearly all the primary parts and at a fraction of the price that the curators had set aside for the project. One of my goals was to assemble this piece entirely from recycled parts and not to use new materials, so far so good. Here are a few shots documenting day one.

This auto wreck site revitalized an old bus as its office. To the right is the office and beyond is surplus of old and new cars and parts that can no longer function as designed.

I showed a kid working the site a few drawings, explained what we were building and asked for specific parts and he pulled out an ideal axle, a unit nearly ready to go that would be wide enough to seat two above. We bartered down the price by leaving the shocks that were on the axle. Every single piece has a value.

After we asked for seats, he showed us a few car seats, mostly bucket seats from recent cars, but they weren’t what I was looking for. I looked into the office and saw the bus seat near the backdoor and told the guys that were taking me around that that was what I was interested in and they said well, let them know. I did, they gave us a price, we haggled and we got it. Everything is for sale, event sections from the business office.

Their tire prices seemed high, so our driver suggested that we try a few tire repair places, such as the one below. Set up on a corner, one can pick up a new tire on the fly, such as the one below

After a day that started with a long and crowded metro ride and continued into several hours of driving around Mexico City in increasingly terrific traffic and haggling for car parts, I was taken by Antonio, the exhibition administrator who took car of all the public art permits to a very old taco place in the town center. Then we had a couple tequilas on his deck overlooking Mexico City’s downtown.

A view of Mexico City’s historical downtown from a 5th story deck

As an artist and professor, I try to make the rounds to the Chelsea galleries with each new round of exhibitions. However, over the years, I’ve narrowed the number of galleries that I stop through, because there are so many and for the most part I think that most of the work I see in Chelsea is really bad.

One of the galleries that I always try to stop by is David Zwirner, because the work presented there usually reflects my flavor for an ideal combination of content and execution. I generally see compelling work that is well done. And the current exhibition by Raymond Pettibon, “The Big Picture” is a great example of this.

Pettibon’s drawings are beautiful and exciting. They are the sort of drawings that make one want to draw, because they are full of energy, they tell a story, they pull the viewer in and they are topical. Through his drawings, Pettibon lays it out, this is the world that we live in and it’s fucked up.

On the other hand, Zwirner also shows bad stuff. Step out of Pettibon’s Big Picture, down the hall way to Chris Ofili and you’ll see Modernist junk. Incredibly boring work with a precious price tag.

Presentity by Kabir Carter was one of the most unique public art experiences that I’ve had in a very long time. This is primarily due to its honesty and subtleness. The project did not involve any spectacle, rather it was a highly private experience carried out in tourist center filled with activity.

A few weeks before the dates of the performance, Kabir emailed an invitation to be audience to Presentity. Eager to listen to Kabir’s work and spend time with the sound artist, I replied and he wrote back with a time and date and that I would receive a text with the exact location the day of the performance. It was all a bit mysterious.

On Saturday August 18th, I received the address - the back stairs of City Hall on Chambers. That afternoon I sat and waited for Kabir as firetrucks rushed by to the Deutsch Bank building where a fire exploded. There was one other guy who showed up and looked like an artist. Kabir showed up carrying three walki-talkis, he introduced us and we began to walk.

On Chambers we walked east, turned the corner at Centre Street and entered a very old subway elevator. We rode the elevator up and down twice, the first time with one other person, the second time, only the three of us and the performance began. Kabir manipulated the walki-talkis to create the electronic sound performance, we merely walked with him and listened as carefully as possible. We exited the elevator below ground, entered the subway station, walked through the tunnels, up the stairs and back onto Centre Street, walking adjacent to City Hall, listening carefully. Then crossed the street toward Pace University. Bent down to the ground to listen to the sounds resonating within the cavernous space below a steel grate.

Again we entered the subway, this time via a desolate subway entrance at the corner of Pace University, we walked through a long, empty subway tunnel. We exited the subway and the performance ended.

The walk and performance were a delicate intervention upon the City Hall area of New York City, I call it delicate because it was comprised of three individuals focused upon careful listening in a saturated space where focus is difficult to achieve.

I felt that the sound performance began a bit awkwardly, as if Kabir needed a bit of time to catch his rhythm. However the elevator was a highly successful tool for spatial transfer… I’m not sure how to put this. The elevator was very successful in creating the sensation that we were being taken to a different place, to a site within a site… to our own place, a private space shared between us three individuals but located within the City Hall Park area.

At first the most difficult element personally was negotiating between getting out of the way of pedestrian traffic and listening to the performance. But as we continued, the listening took presedence over the concern of allowing pedestrians by. Also as the performance continued the sound began to coalesce, there was meat to it, it sounded as a concert or performance and not merely noise trying to find its language.

Yesterday, I stepped into David Zwirner not expecting to see anything exciting, but as I turned the corner of the initial gallery, I was taken aback by the gigantic, beautiful watercolors of Yan Pei-Ming.  The first gallery had one huge oil painting, which had good energy, but wasn’t anything particularly exciting, but the 5 by 9 foot watercolors on paper organized in grids that gave them context and even greater heroic scale than the individual oil paintings are great!

Part of what I love about these are the exact draftsmanship from a distance and the abstraction formed by the droplets and pools of watercolor as one approaches the paintings.

I think that painting is most exciting when abstraction is collapsed into graphic representation to create rich textures which these watercolors accomplish.

I also enjoy new takes on portraiture that present political or social undertones, in this case reflections of social and civic power.  Yan Pei-Mings paintings at David Zwirner come down this weekend.

I once did an artist residency in Poland where I got to know the artists Piotr Parda who now lives in Boston. Over the years we’ve kept in touch and I’ve become a bigger and bigger fan of his work for its humor, ingenuity and wit.

Upon first arriving to the states, Piotr made his living as a children’s book illustrator and he recently used his gift of illustration to create new Google icons that reflect ongoing conflicts and disasters. The piece titled “ON OCCASION” takes the usual Google icon manipulations to celebrate major US holidays a provoking step further. Piotr transforms perhaps the most pervasive online icon into a momentary reflection of the world we live in with illustrations that allude to Darfur, Neo-Nazis, KKK and AIDS. Piotr’s site archives his work over the years.

In a hotel room in Connecticut, three Guevarrian Neo-Marxist Latino Terror Revolutionaries seek to help establish a balance toward justice for the crimes committed by the United States of America toward small and poor nation states, cultures and peoples.

The video El Ritual Apasionado was commissioned for the exhibition 50,000 Beds organized by Chris Doyle. Chris Doyle a friend and incredible artist has spent much of the last two years in hotel rooms due to a couple large commissions, so much so that the hotel room became his studio. When three Connecticut art institutions publicized a call for curatorial proposals, Chris responded with the question - what would artists do with the opportunity to produce a video during one night in a hotel room. His proposal received approval and he contacted 45 artists and artist groups to spend a night at participating hotels in order to make a video. The exhibition will present a wide array of approaches to the task of creating a video entirely shot in a hotel room from relational and situational work, to fictive narrative, to animation and private performance…

El Rito Apasionado has been inspired by the rhetoric and tactics revolving around immigration used by Southern conservative officials capitalizing upon Homeland Security and the national fear mechanism to recieve funding toward militarizing the border. The claim that impoverished undocumented immigrants represent a terrorist threat is insincere and opportunist.

I believe that we must regain control of our dangerously porous borders, and we must cut off the employment magnet that drives illegal immigration… I am steadfastly opposed to any form of amnesty…that would provide a path to citizenship to illegal aliens, or any expansion of guest worker programs.
Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado)

No immigration reform, no amnesty, no guest worker programs… such legislative perspectives are retrograde and ignorant of the world we live in and perhaps most importantly are not realistic.

View a 6min 30sec excerpt from the video, the full length is 23 minutes and will be on view at the exhibition 50,000 Beds, opening July 20th, 2007 at the Aldrich Conremporary Art Museum, ART SPACE and REAL ART WAYS.

Occasionally, not very often, but every now and then I’ll come across paintings that make me want to paint. I am attracted to narrative and when I see interestingly executed paintings that reflect an engaging story, I want to rush to the studio, build a birch panel and pull out the oil paints. I experienced this desire when I came across Elizabeth Huey’s solo exhibition at Feigen Contemporary in Chelsea, NY.

The paintings present fantastic narratives that collapse Christian and Americana iconography to create a confection of stories in a single setting. These are stories that draw from our elementary and high school education by embedding enough visual hints to have the viewer establish associations with pilgrims, a Salem witch trial, the Civil War, the journey into outer space… The scenes are not so concrete that one is given a clear insight into what is happening, rather there are enough clues to make the stories familiar, but strange enough to force the viewer to analyze what is happening, and try to make associations. The viewer becomes a writer of the narrative.