For his second solo-show at Sikkema Jenkins & CO., Mark Badford has created a series of large scale (approximatel 8′ x 12′) collage works. What I really enjoyed about these wall pieces is that they initially look like giant maps - intricate topographies of cities - and as one approaches them, tiny colorful details become apparent. Carefully looking at the works creates the effect of zooming in from an arial view to a street level view of a cityscape. According to the press release, these large scale rectangular collages are entirely made from found materials, materials that Mark gathers as he goes out into the city. In practice the works are commodified step children of the dadaist and situationist city expeditions - dérive - a “technique of locomtion without a goal.” However rather than drifting without motive, Bradford drifts through Los Angeles with the goal of gather materials to assemble precious art works.

As one studies the collages up close, the content appears to be primarily from comic books as Spider Man and Hellboy begin to pop out.

I’d love to know Marks process in creating these pieces. In studying them it looks as if he layered pages from comic books and magazines onto a large canvas and then topped it all off with reflective silver foam board. Once all the materials have settled down, he creates the topography with a router. Of course, I’m just guessing, I’d be surprised if this is his process because of how well the details show up in the final product.

There’s a much better image on the Sikkema Jenkins site, but here’s a detail:

As much as I enjoyed these large scale, attractive collages, in considering Mark’s work, I remembered what he did for inSite05 (a biennial-like exhibition that exits between San Diego and Tijuana) and recognized why I’m so drawing to work that exits in the public space and functions through a network of people.

With inSite05 Bradford organized the “Maleteros” project.  On the Tijuana side of the border, there are people who sell their service as bell boys for pedestrian border crossers.  These men will carry ones things from the point of entry to the nearest taxi for a small wage.  In collaboration with these guys and the Mexican border police, Mark organized these disparate workers into an institionalized version by giving them vests that would identify them as border bell boys and got them stations to place their hand carts and shopping carts.

Bradford’s “Maleteros” brings up all sorts of problems - is this a positive intervention, is it merely a brief imposition onto a foreign labor space by an artist for the length of an exhibition or does it propose a more organized system to a labor space that may be adopted or at least considered?  Either way such cultural work is adventurous for these reasons, by creating a situation in a social space, all sorts of consequences become possible and to me that is art.  I view this as art because it’s not a closed or individualistic process that ends as an object to be sold to a wealthy patron, rather it is an idea advanced into a situation with all sorts of possibilities.

Obsessing about the sun - it’s history, power, influence in relation to the history of the United States - Manifest Destiny, Native American genocide, slavery… has led Shuan O’Dell to create a series of drawings that are visually dynamic on view at Susan Inglett in Chelsea.

The drawings at once bring to mind a diverse set of aesthetics from Aztec codices to traditional U.S. quilts conveying Quaker imagery to geometric abstraction but O’Dell manages to meld these different visual elements into works that invite the viewer to attempt to follow a narrative. These are stories of travel, exploration and discovery.

As O’Dell considered his personal history with the sun. He asked others to write him with their very earliest memory of the sun. He then took these memories to create a sun drawing pictured below.

And in a small room at the rear of the gallery, O’Dell inserted a video of the ball of fire burning. It’s an incredible image, unfortunately it doesn’t work with the rest of the exhibition and I believe detracts from the drawings, because it leaves an odd punctuation. The show will remain open until March 15th.

Phoenix Police to Check Arrestees’ Immigrant Status. Following the killing of a police officer in Phoenix last fall, conservative legal group from DC pressures Mayor Phil Gordon of Phoenix to have the police become immigration enforcement.

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:

I’ve been a fan of Guy Ben-Ner’s work since first seeing it, about three years ago at what I think was his first Postmaster’s show and with each new video my admiration grows. The latest video that I thoroughly enjoyed is titled “Stealing Beauty” shot entirely at IKEA show rooms with his family. As in his past videos, Ben-Ner works with his kids to create narratives that question or deconstruct elements of our society.

“Stealing Beauty” features the traditional modern nuclear family unit. They go about regular daily activities, showering, sleeping, watching television, checking email, reading, washing dishes, sharing a meal, however throughout the 20 minute video is an ongoing discussion between the individuals. This is a discussion that primarily revolves around a lecture by Ben-Ner to his kids proclaiming the virtues of Capitalism:

“Private property creates borders… Some day this [the IKEA show room] will all be yours through inheritance… Love holds the family together and the family keeps the property from leaking out, family is like a big piggy bank,… Sharing is primitive… We evolved to rise on our feet and point at things to say this is mine. We freed our fingers to count…”

As the video proceeds there are traces of rebellion by the daughter, she questions if she is owned by her parents, she demands her freedom and at one point Ben-Ner grounds her. The video concludes with the reading of a Manifesto by the children… “Children of the world unite” calling children to claim what they want, to steal from parents, to claim their free will.

Although the water doesn’t flow from the sinks or shower head and the television and computer aren’t turned on, the family inhabits any number of IKEA show rooms as if everything functioned. They get into the beds, sit at the dinning room or in the living room and play out the script as shoppers walk by. At one point a woman peers into the video camera and pokes at it, someone behind the camera asks her to not touch the camera and re-positions it to focus on the co-opted stage.

The entire work is pieced together from any number of show rooms to the extent that a single exchange is assembled from various shoots. I left wondering if this was so, because they shot the video without permission and had to assemble the video from different IKEAs as they would be pulled from the show rooms. And indeed this is the case - it “was shot without permission at numerous IKEA stores around New York, Berlin and Tel Aviv.”

The dialogue doesn’t present any ground breaking ideas, however juxtaposing the script against the sets available at IKEA’s idealized show rooms is brilliant!

Thursday, January 3 is the Iowa Caucus and the 2008 U.S. presidential election year begins! With ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, a dropping dollar, increasing foreclosures of homes, fear of a recession and an incredibly negative international view of the United States, it is time for a change! And in a country built by immigrants who better to bring change than the country’s immigrant population, legal and illegal.

We live in a multi-millionare two party republic with a gigantic near slave-wage labor population that helps keep this country going, the United States should give all its hard working residents a vote! Votems.us - Mexico Decide does so by presenting a Spanish language portal to the US presidential elections and allowing users to register, vote and give their opinion on the US elections.

“In 2005 the percent of U.S. population that are migrants is 12.86%” the highest in the history of the country.” - Farhana Hossain, “Snapshot: Global Migration”, The New York Times

“The U.S. Social Security Administration has estimated that undocumented immigrants contribute approximately $8.5 billion in Social Security and Medicare funds each year.” — National Immigration Law Center, “Paying Their Way and Then Some”

“The U.S. Internal Revenue Service has determined that undocumented immigrants paid almost $50 billion in federal taxes from 1996 to 2003.” — National Immigration Law Center, “Paying Their Way and Then Some”

Votemos.us also features parts of an interview with Raymundo, a Mexican immigrant who left his home in Puebla in 1984 to come to the United States. He discusses the pointlessness of the border fence, that it is merely a political act that will not slow illegal immigration, after all most people pass through the border entries. He also recollects his own crossing of the border and the reality that although he has been living and working in the United States since 1984, he remains without his resident papers since he never had his birth certificate nor the means to acquire his residency because he doesn’t speak English or have money.

Votemos.us goes on to propose that Mexico have a vote in the U.S. elections. The United States has had a powerful influence in the Mexican national elections, now it’s time to turn that around. Between Mexico and the United States exists a constant circulation of people, product and capital so there is plenty of reason to give Mexico a say in who will be the next U.S. President! Mexico should be part of Super Tuesday, February 5th when California and New Mexico, two states that were once Mexican territories go to the caucus.

I originally planned this web site for Transitio, the video and new media festival in Mexico City that happened this past October. With the help of John Kuiphoff, votemos.us has a content management system that allows visitors to register with the site, vote and write an opinion on the elections; anyone may view other’s opinions and write their own reaction. The goal of the project is not only to point to the fact that within the US border lives a very active Mexican population that contributes to the national economy and is not allowed to vote, but also to present a repository of information and links to the Latin American community (within and beyond the U.S.) concerning the US national elections and to establish a public space to share their views.

Growing up in the Mission (San Francisco, CA), my dad loved cruising Mission street on Friday and Saturday evenings when it was packed with lowriders and girls running from car to car, guys trying to prove who had the superior car. My brother and I were too young to really appreciate it. I found the bouncing cars entertaining for the first 10 minutes, but as cars inched along we’d be stuck between 25th and 26th Streets for nearly an hour, way too long for me. However, when I see an incredible lowrider, it reminds me of that period and evokes a bit of nostalgia. (This was before the SF police cracked down on cruising, the lowriders moved to Daly City at that point, early 80s.) The artists John Jota Leaños and Artemio Rodriquez have teamed up to create a beautifully painted lowrider with motifs indicative of today’s reality - motifs that point to war, disaster and death.

“The fully functioning mobile art installation includes four animations from the New Media Opera, Imperial Silence that plays on the LCD movie screen in the car as well as radio programs from ¡Radio Muerto!, a specially curated radio dial with content from dozens of artists, writers, youth, and everyday Californians.” Go to John’s site to check out the full description: El Muertorider.

My school recently switched to a new email client, Zimbra, which I avoided for a while, because I felt like it had too much going on and it takes a while to load and I was just used to the good’ol squirrel client. But Zimbra is amazing, it’s like the web in hyper drive. Zimbra is an early “web2.0″ product that needs code updating for some platforms, but it’s only crashed my browser once and works well otherwise.  For example, I received an Amazon notice that my order had shipped with the UPS tracking number. After spending nearly an hour at the post office yesterday and watching people in line nearly get into fights, I’ve decided that I’m going to closely track the package as not to miss it. The tracking number was a hyperlink, so I clicked on it and a new window opened up with the UPS page for my item. Generally, I’d copy the number, go to the UPS site and paste it… Also any address are also hyperlinked so that an ajax preview box pops up with a yahoo map of the location (yahoo recently acquired Zimbra). I’m sure Zimbra is old news to people, but it’s a surprise to me. Best of all it’s open source and free to download.

I found this response / comment to the 1717 Troutman resident vacate entry so insightful that I wanted to pull it out of the comments area and post it as an entry.

Shawn Says:
November 20th, 2007 at 4:22 pm

This is a difficult situation; I am an artist, live in the area and am familiar with the problem. I understand the “logic� of eviction from an unsafe building; no one wants to be responsible for a building full of people going up in flames with no fire escapes or sprinklers.

But, this is not a problem in any other city I have ever been in, there are warehouses full of artists in almost every other major city in this country and the cities are, on the whole, happy to have them there. It is understood that conditions may be a little sub-standard, but “rent at your own risk� seems to be the more common city stance.

Not in New York. In New York, I think, there is bitterness about rent and a vicious contempt between the “haves� and the “have-nots�. That is, those who own property (or rent significantly below the market rate) and those who are slaves to the financial-commercial monster of this city to be able to afford the absurd market rate rents. This has created (i) dumb and arrogant city agencies intent on over-managing the housing market and (ii) rapacious, unscrupulous landlords who are nonetheless feckless property owners. Anyone perceived to be “getting away with� renting on the cheap are not tolerated by either the city agencies or the landlords.
The real losers in this battle are the artists.

There is ABSOLUTELY NO awareness of the problem facing working artists in this city by the city itself or its agencies. (Disclaimer: my “day job� is at one of these city agencies). OK, landlords are scummy and will always be scummy, I accept that, but the stance of the city here, which should be protecting artists instead of always working against them is ridiculous. Many city officials who pride themselves on being representatives of a “cultural capital� still advocate policies that would turn the whole city into a luxury condo wasteland, populated by hordes of insipid, bland, Sims-like financial sector employees.

When one does find awareness of “artists� by the city, they are either expendable gentrifiers or (sorry if I offend anyone here) art-related professionals, like web designers, marketing and advertising people, company (not freelance) graphic designers, etc. These people are not studio artists. Studio artists need work space. It would also be nice to have a place to live.

Live-work space combos are not just some screw-off kids trying to get away without paying residential rents, live-work spaces are a sad necessity for most artists here, who on the whole would much rather have separate studios and apartments and who even when they are selling their work are in a constant struggle for rent, not to mention health care, basic living expenses and so on.

The problem is that no one sees the problem of artists. If the city would start viewing artists as small manufacturers (which they most certainly are), then the city could start to offer benefits to artists and to those who provide the artists with stable, affordable work space. There are a myriad of industrial benefits offered by various city agencies of which currently most artists enjoy none.

I sympathize with the unfortunate former tenants of 1717 Troutman. But for some time now, droves of artists have been leaving the myth of a New York bohemia behind and moving to other cities where they are wanted (Berlin for example) and where they can afford to live and sell their work. The writing is on the walls. In less than 10 years, if things don’t change, New York will not be the “world cultural capital� for contemporary studio-based art that it is so often advertised as in brochures for luxury condos and in incentive packages for mega-financial institutions.

I’ve added character descriptions for the characters featured in the animation “Arbol Torcido”. I’m also hoping that people wishing to do something interesting with these characters will contact me, so that I might send them the Illustrator files for these characters. I may not be able to do anything with them any time soon, so perhaps someone can use them. Although the animation features popular television super heroes, El Chapulin Colorado and Ultraman, I created other characters such as “Terrorista”.

Terrorista is a child of dark complexion carrying a head of two faces and arms without hands, walking naked with dynamite strapped to his body. The United States has been at the helm of establishing a fractured world. In the 20th Century, the United States global ascendence began with uncertain pride that transformed into self-rightousness and ended in gluttony. Terrorista is a reflection of that which we have wrought upon sectors of our globe - poverty with little recourse. Above are also “Labor” and “Man of War”.