If there is a revolution in public practice happening today it is not in a conference at a private art college. Revolutions in practice can not be captured and summarized at a conference. The very notion of Creative Time Summit conference runs against “revolution,” “public,” or “practice” and mutes anything powerful or inspring about these terms, simply because it is curated and caters to a particular audience. In many ways it is a closed session. And the term “Revolutions in Public Practice” reads as hyperbole in the context of an art elite conference.

I was at a round table discussion at Conflux today and afterwards headed to a Lower East Side Bar to meet a bunch of friends who had been at the Creative Time Summit. Once there, I asked people how the Summit had been and it was the usual conference response… what’s the point? why are we here? it was the usual conference scenario… The usual reactionary responses to a conference. And my response to people is do not be duped by the catch terms “revolutions,” “public,” and “practice” as well as “summit” and “creative time.” This is my problem with such a title, it is not revolutionary or public, so please don’t misuse these terms; these terms have already lost so much meaning or power. Most of the people I spoke with didn’t go the second day, rather they tuned in and out from home.

Creative Time Summit is however an exceptional moment to network and hear a summary of evocative creative ideas and briefly exchange perspectives with like-minded individuals.

Sadly people buy into “The Creative Time Summit” as if it is a revolutionary agent, but it’s just another conference, put on by another institution that is far removed from anything revolutionary – whatever meaning that term can carry in relation to contemporary art that is safely nested in Western networks of capital.

Last November I received an invitation from Ignacio Nieto to participate in an exhibition titled “portables” at the Museum of Fine Arts of Santiago. Last Friday I returned from Santiago, following two weeks of production.

Early this year, I contacted my old friend Kurt Olmstead to work with me on a project that I knew would be beyond the scope of anything that I could do alone within a period of several months. Kurt was on board and we started discussing the premise of the project – Chile as the laboratory for neoliberal economic philosophy of the Milton Friedman flavor. Kurt and I grew up in the midst of Reaganomics. In the 80s, Reagan and Thatcher embraced Friedman’s neoliberalism and Chile was framed as the example of what privatization, deregulation of the markets and cuts to social spending will do to control inflation and allow a nation’s economy to prosper. In 1981, Friedman declared the phrase “Miracle of Chile” to reflect the transformation of Chile’s economy through his neoliberal philosophy as implemented by the Chicago Boys, Chilean economists who studied under Friedman.

It is now 2010, we live in the midst of a global economic crisis and are now questioning the neoliberal economic formula. The art project consists of a workshop, public discussion, bus intervention and a virtual labyrinth. Each element asks participants in Chile to identify the Miracle of Chile in the scope of their city and personal lives. A documentation site is available at www.miracleofchile.com

Two workshops were held as part of the project, one with middle school kids and a second at Matucana100 Cultural Center asked participants to document the Miracle of Chile in their public space.

Street situations, an interactive sidewalk tile invites pedestrians to ask one another “What is the Miracle of Chile?”

As an example of privatization of public space, a small bus intervention was executed on bus rider handles sold for advertisement.

La apertura para la exposicion portables es el sabado, 14 de agosto a las 18:00 horas en Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Mall Plaza Vespucio, Santiago, Chile y permanecera hasta el 19 de septiembre. Curada por Ignacio Nieto, el tema de la exposicion es artistas que usan y crean dispositivos como medio creativo. Portables presenta las obras de Michelle Teran, Chimbalab, Alejandra Perez, Carolina Pino, GraphTech, Otto Von Busch, Ricardo Miranda Zuniga and Kurt Olmstead (fotos abajo).

Yo estoy estrenando El Milagro de Chile, obra colaborativa con Kurt Olsmtead.

from NY Times article “City as Stage, Audience as Family”:

“I don’t believe theater can change the world. People can — through rigorously created art that can reveal to those watching what their politics are and through an interrogation of ideas that massages empathy, the place where all great politics comes from.”
Melanie Joseph

Today’s NY Times presents a bright future starting July 4th, 2009:

http://nytimes-se.com/

Change is upon us!

Generally, I blog art that I like and find inspiring, but every now and then when I find art really annoying and over the top, I can’t help but including it in this site and Olafur Eliasson’s NYC Waterfalls fall into the annoying and ridiculous of contemporary art.

Jerry Slatz gets it right when he states that “the waterfalls seem dinkier than you’d think…  In addition, it’s obvious that these aren’t waterfalls at all; they’re just plumbing, tall metal scaffoldings with pipes pumping cascades of water off the top.”  Then in the following paragraph of his NY Magazine review he waxes poetic, not so much about the Waterfalls, but how they enhance the NYC skyline.  But the NYC skyline doesn’t need clunky$15.5 million waterfalls to enhance it!

The NYC Waterfalls strike me as a failed attempt at monumentalism and an example of the worst type of public art – public art that can not be enjoyed and experienced by people, it can only be stared at from a distance.  Whenever I visit Chicago, I make a point of going to Millennium Park, the grand public arts work in downtown Chicago.  Millennium Park has its own conflicts, but as I watch people interact with monumental contemporary works of art at the park, I see success because people are able to enjoy the work first hand.  Children play in Plensa’s “Crown Fountain”, people stand within Kapoor’s giant bean and are mesmerized by the reflection and visual play.  Of course Millennium Park is permanent, but the park presents exciting possibilities for public art at a monumental scale, whereas the Waterfalls presents a modernist throwback to public art.

People have compared the Waterfalls to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates, but The Gates managed to transform Central Park at both the sweeping grand scale of the park as a whole as well as at the level of the individual pedestrian.  Whereas the Waterfalls are not attractive, they merely appear as a lot of scaffolding with running water that shrinks below the scale of the city.  It’s a shame that the Public Art Fund doesn’t take a more visionary approach to the possibilities of what public art might be.

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
Link to BLU

VOTEMOS.US the site that questions what the 2008 U.S. presidential elections would look like if all residents in the U.S. could vote will now feature weekly video interviews with U.S. immigrants and Mexico City residents concerning the presidential elections and general relations between the United States and Latin America.

Although VOTEMOS.US is a Spanish-language site, the videos have English language subtitles so that U.S. citizens may have an insight into the views of their Spanish speaking neighbors within the country as well as those south of the border. The weekly video interviews are available on the site, as a podcast or rss feed:

This week Argentine Jose Antonio Lazzari relaxing in the park Alameda Central located in the historical center of Mexico City states that he would not vote for Obama, Hillary or McCain and he questions who the leftist candidates are in the U.S… Jose Antonio goes on to point out that the United States is controlled by the transnational companies that are making a fortune in Iraq.

We had a lengthy conversation with Jose Antonio Lazzari, a theater actor and educator who runs a free school in Argentina. Sections of this conversation will be published over the next few weeks. Past interviews with NYC undocumented resident Raymundo are also available and all videos will be archived on the site.

I’m too tired to comment much, but I’ve got lots of images accumulating without sharing. There’s been so much art in NYC lately that the work I shoot just ends up on my desktop. Here are a few from today:

I’ll never understand Murakami’s stuff – as long as people can’t ride it, what’s the point… well, other than making lots and lots of money. Takashi Murakami has a show at the Brooklyn Museum, I haven’t checked it out, but was briefly visually entertained by what’s in the lobby. Even the kids stare in awe, but it fades fast once they realized they can’t touch or ride the stuff… crazy eye candy.

Hopefully he’ll open an amusement park that hands out free acid upon entry.

Afterwards, I hiked it over to Wall Street to catch the tale end of Pia Lindeman’s Soapbox Event, where kids took turns outside of Federal Hall to get people’s attention and inspire participation.

And inside participants were given a nice new soapbox to stand on and exercise their freedom of speech. Assuming that there really wasn’t much of a point in addressing the ongoing wars that US citizens contribute to and allow to continue while hundreds of thousands of innocent people die along with several thousand US military… I complained about the dog shit and piss that litters the streets of NYC.

By the time I got there, most of the audience were the assistants, but given all the boxes on the floor, it was clear that there was lots of participation.  It seems as if the street would present a stronger venue.

And at the end of the afternoon, I made it to Martha Wilson’s exhibition at Mitchell Algus Gallery. On exhibit are a few of Martha’s early works, executed between 1971-74. It’s the work of a young woman, a feminist, a critical thinker that remains powerful today. The NY Times has an excellent review of the show.

After a week of tearing up radios, building small noise circuits and preparing wooden guns for the insurgency act of Moving Forest, it finally came together on Friday and it was great fun. View documentation of the Radio Gun Revolt.

Shu Lea Cheang and Martin Howse organized the Moving Forest, a 12 hour sonic performance for transmediale that ocurred Friday from 11am to 11pm. Moving Forest is a reinterpretation of the final 12 minutes of Akira Kurosawa’s “Throne of Blood”, a film based on Macbeth – a premise for a sound performance that is all too fitting for the 2008 transmediale as the theme this year is CONSPIRACY

Previously I had been working on a project involving an electronic circuit and wooden guns, Martin liked the guns very much and asked me if I’d bring them to transmediale. However, the only sound on the circuits is a beep, so for Moving Forest, I replaced the original circuit with radios and other circuits that merely make noise and with 20 volunteers we marched from Siegessauele, Berlin’s Victory Column to transmediale, meeting up other armies of insurgency along the way and we stormed the castle – Haus der Kulturen der Welt (House of World Culture). Each group was transmitting its own broadcast (I was transmitting from my backpack to the immediate area), but upon gathering before the stairs of HKW we all switched to the same transition for one noisy insurgency. Here are a few still from a video documentation of the insurgency: