Structural Patterns

The new prime minister of Spain Mariano Rajoy reduced 15 ministries to 13 last week by merging culture and education with sports, and entirely eliminating science. It’s difficult to imagine a Spain without a Ministry of Culture. This of course is an austerity cut to salvage the Spanish economy.

The new minister of culture, education and sports, Jose Ignacio Wert has stated “We will have to do more with less. There will be less culture of the subvention… One of our first priorities will be to develop the patronage law” has quoted by the newspaper El Mundo.

So it appears that if culture is to continue to proser in Spain it will largely be through private sponsorship. The incoming rightist party PP will in general seek to privatize, cut social spending and allow the markets to prosper… Once again, Friedman’s formula for a neoliberal economy will be the solution to Spain’s economic problems. Following the collapse of the Lehman Brothers, irresponsibility of banks and the recent economic collapse, I simply can not understand this. I can understand Spaniards being frustrated by the previous prime minister and the Socialist party’s inability to make economic reform, but to elect a strongly neoliberal party in its place?

During my current stay in Madrid, I am two blocks from a branch of “la Caixa” – “currently the leading savings bank in Spain and the third largest financial entity in the country” – according to their website. Over the last couple weeks, new stickers have appeared on the bank’s window facade. Old stickers announce a June 19th demonstration and states “The plazas and the streets are ours… VIOLENCE IS TO CHARGE 600 EUROS”. New stickers declare “LET IT BE KNOWN, THIS BANK LIES AND STEALS AND THROWS PEOPLE FROM THEIR HOMES” and links to “Plataforma Afectados por La Hipoteca Mdrid” a blog for those effected by Madrid mortgages. There’s another sticker not pictured that presents four CEOs with nicknames and their salaries. Whereas the bank ads on the window state “Tranquility… that is what I ask of my pension plan…”

Meanwhile, “la Caixa” funds the magnificent CaixaForum Madrid the architecturally amazing cultural and social center that reflects the bank’s social cause. It’s entirely free to visit and features the vertical garden below on the facade of an apartment building across from its entrance.

The complexities of the capitalist economy… does this beautiful and “free” cultural center make up for the injustice felt by many thousands who are experiencing economic hardship?

What will happen to edgy cultural centers such as El Matadero that is currently publicly funded, when private money is its only lifeline?

Currently the feature exhibitions at CaixaForum are “Delacroix (1798-1863) and “The Persistence of Geometry” featuring a long list of well established artists such as Bruce Nauman, Donald Judd, Dan Graham, Richard Long, Gordon Matta-Clark, Mario Merz, Robert Smithson… Whereas El Ranchito, the latest program at Matadero Madrid focuses on work by young artists with a social agenda. Would CaixaForum ever feature the art of a young large collective Todo por la praxis? Or the very difficult work of Sally and Gabriela Gutiérrez Dewar who have worked with squatters to realize their work at El Ranchito? Or will art work presented at Spanish cultural centers be reduced to safely historicized pieces that exist in the collections of the bank and its board members?

The art center, El Matadero in Madrid, Spain inaugurated its latest project – El Ranchito last Thursday, December 15, 2011. El Matadero is dedicated to contemporary art practices and El Ranchito is a gigantic space (Nave 16) within El Matadero that is dedicated to artistic research, process and social engagement. Brooke and I collaborated with two artists in Madrid to begin a long-term project titled EXCEDENTES/EXCESS that revolves around food waste in our cities. Below are images from the final night of preparation for the opening and photos from the media tour on the morning of the opening as well as an image from the opening.

André Komatsu employed largely discarded construction materials around El Matadero to create “Landscapeknowhere – Timeout”. I enjoyed getting to now André Komatsu, however, I found his installation to be very formal, not particularly interesting and not in line with the mission of El Ranchito – research oriented and engaged with social practice.

Inteligencia Colectiva bases its practice in traveling the world to discover, document and adopt alternative means of construction. Their mission is to create a public archive of alternative modes of construction. As part of their residency, they constructed the future administrative space in El Ranchito that will be self-sustaining through a bicycle generator located at the top of the office tower.

Aesthetically one of my favorite installations or series of works is by the collective Todo para la praxis. Of all the resident artists, this group has been perhaps the busiest at designing and constructing. They have created a series of practical sculptures designed for public use. Amongst the constructions are a mobile street kitchen, a dining space, a mobile boom box, an info center. They continue building new things through workshops that they lead. Soon a children’s table and workspace will be introduced.

“EXCEDENTES/EXCESS” is a collaborative project between RICARDO MIRANDA Zuniga Y BROOKE SINGER (NUEVA YORK), JOSE LUIS BONGORE, BEATRIZ MARCOS Y SISSA VERDE and was selected as part of the public call for El Ranchito. The project revolves around the large amounts of food going to the dump when there are plenty of people hungry in the cities of New York and Madrid. In NYC the focus has been research and we hope to construct a “composting bicycle” in 2012. In Madrid, the realization of the food rescue and redistribution cart (pictured last in screen documentation) has lead the Madrid group to researching the possibility of establishing a law that would facilitate the collection and redistribution of discarded food that is safe to consume. A law similar to the Good Samaritan Law in the United States, signed by President Clinton.

This past week, Brooke and I met with Joel Berg, director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger and author of All You Can Eat, How Hungry Is America. We sought out Berg, because we’re collaborating on a food reclamation project with Spanish artist Jose Luis Bongore for a residency and exhibition at El Ranchito.

The goal of the project is to introduce mobile carts to food vendors in Madrid where they will place food that will otherwise be discarded as trash. Due to the high level of unemployment in Spain, dumpster diving is not uncommon. The desire is to present a system that will facilitate the reclamation of discarded food.

Here in NYC, Brooke and I have been researching food waste from supermarkets and in general the systems in place to salvage food. Questions we’ve been asking include: What goes to organization such as City Harvest? What stores participate in food redistribution? What becomes landfill leading to methane and greenhouse gas? So we decided to consult an expert. Joel Berg has devoted much of his career to eradicating hunger in the United States. We asked him if food reclamation at the supermarket level is a worthwhile endeavor. Below is the initial sequence from our interview. Shortly I will post more edits.

Last Thursday I made it to the opening of Ecologías Correlativas at 319 Scholes curated by chimera+ and was treated to excellent new work. The piece pictured above left the strongest impression on me as I think that it’s beautiful at many levels. “untitled slime moulds” by Dan Baker is a stop motion animation of mold seeking out food and surviving. The artist set up a backlit mold environment that he documented over an extended period of time. The final video isn’t simply a compilation of the stills, but rather the artist pans throughout the environment following the mold as it moves and grows, seeking food or dying. The animation is beautifully rendered and the manner in which the mold moves and expands appears programmatic. It brought to mind some of the more beautiful data visualizations that I’ve seen in different years, however this is a living entity moving in space. The piece immediately reminded me of Thomas Aquinas’s writings and his argument of geometry as the language of God.

Although I have mixed feelings about my work in the show, projected in the back room and documented below, I was flattered to be part of a thoughtful and compelling exhibition that thematically stemmed from Félix Guatarri’s “Three Ecologies”. The beginning of the video “El Rito Apasionado” is available online.

Another piece that I thoroughly enjoyed is Miguel Soares “Place in Time”… brilliant!

Miguel Soares, Place in Time from migso on Vimeo.

And below is a textual contribution by the Chilean artist Ignacio Nieto.

The exhibition is only up until the 27 of this month and definitely worth the trip. Gallery Hours: Thursday – Saturday, 2:00pm – 6:00pm, and by appointment, 319 Scholes, Brooklyn, NY.

I’m in a group exhibition titled “Ecologías Correlativas” at 319 Scholes curated by chimera+. The exhibition is thematically inspired by Felix Guattari’s “Three Ecologies” and the curators asked me to write a brief statement in response to the essay for the exhibition’s catalog. The following is what I submitted.

I live with a three-year-old boy named Iggy in a household that does not have a television. Iggy has never seen a movie, and yet he recently demanded to be Lightning McQueen for Halloween. Over the past year, he referred to Lightning McQueen and the characters from Disney’s “Cars” merely as “Halloween Cars”. He did not know the names of the individual characters or that they were from a movie. Iggy only knew that he had seen many young children dressed up as “Halloween Cars” last Halloween when he was two. And since then he has observed toys, billboards, posters, books, magazines, lunch boxes, caps, t-shirts, backpacks, folders, bags, stickers, balloons, banners, flags presenting the image of Lightening McQueen or some other character from “Cars”. And then he visited his cousins in Connecticut, two boys, ages three and five that live with a 36-inch television that presents hundreds of cable channels. They regularly log extended periods of time in front of this television. Since that visit, he knows the name Lightning McQueen and would like to know the names of other characters, particularly the tow truck. He has developed a small obsession with “Cars”, a movie he has never seen. From the moment of conception onward, we are all subject to the phantasmagoria of commodity capitalism. It swirls all around us, captivates our imaginations, seduces our senses and consumes years of our lives. At times it can be stimulating and good, but for the most part it is noise, bad noise, not the type of noise that takes you on a voyage, rather the type of noise that conjures ambivalence.

Currently, my partner and I are learning about schools for our son. Iggy is two years from kindergarten, however New York City is over saturated with children, so a parent must inform oneself as early as possible. There are not enough schools to properly serve kids and it is getting worse every year. I have recently learned a very important term regarding schooling – “entry point”. There are primary entry points to school – these are the years of a child’s life when there are the most seats available to gain entry into a school. A primary entry point into public schools is Pre-K – age 4. According to one friend younger siblings of kids already attending a given school largely take that entry point. So the next large entry point, because a class or two are added is kindergarten at which point in the public school system Iggy is entitled to a seat in his school district. Of course the problem then becomes overcrowded classrooms and poor learning environments, not to mention the goal to keep moving the kids along through examination and exam training.

Besides the general public school system, there are charter schools and private schools. Both charters and private schools proclaim small classes, individual attention and alternative methods to various degrees. Private schools near my home range from $25k-$30k per year for pre-k through elementary school. Charter schools are publicly financed but independently run and free to experiment in classrooms. I believe that charter schools prosper through the financial and personal intervention of parents. Generally, I do not believe that a low-income parent has the means to financially or personally intervene in a child’s school. I may be mistaken, but I tend to consider charter schools as the privatization of the public school system.

To a large extent I agree with Guattari’s “Three Ecologies”. Remarks against Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) resonate with me. I agree that

(Confronting IWC) will not come about through centralized reform, through laws, decrees and bureaucratic programs, but rather though the promotion of innovatory practices, the expansion of alternative experiences centered around a respect for singularity, and through the continuous production of an autonomizing subjectivity that can articulate itself appropriately in relation to the rest of society.

However, I am left wondering how bourgeois must we become to afford our son a good education. An education that will help provide the weapons to defend himself against the phantasmagoria of commodity capitalism through critical thinking and a nuanced perception of our society.

We’ve built a country where the presidency must be paid for at excessive amounts, where lobbyists are simply part of the political fabric. Any sense of democracy is long gone. It is so explicit that Chase Bank basically announces that the NYC police will be working for them: Announcement of 4.6 Million Dollar donation to enhance security.

JPMorgan Chase recently donated an unprecedented $4.6 million to the New York City Police Foundation. The gift was the largest in the history of the foundation and will enable the New York City Police Department to strengthen security in the Big Apple. The money will pay for 1,000 new patrol car laptops, as well as security monitoring software in the NYPD’s main data center.
New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly sent CEO and Chairman Jamie Dimon a note expressing “profound gratitude” for the company’s donation.
“These officers put their lives on the line every day to keep us safe,” Dimon said. “We’re incredibly proud to help them build this program and let them know how much we value their hard work.”

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

Brooke Gladstone of “On the Media” recently collaborated with cartoonist Josh Neufeld on a graphic book titled The Influencing Machine. Here’s a great animated sequence using Gladstone’s words and Neufeld’s graphics to give you a sense of the nature of the book.