Structural Patterns

Since we’re spending the holidays in San Francisco, we drove to San Jose to check out Vagamundo currently installed as part of San Jose Museum of Art’s Retro Tech exhibition. A couple months ago I had to ship out a new joystick and in trying out the game, it’s still running or at least running as well as it ever did! The show looks great. It was fun to watch my son desperately trying to play the game.

Lately, I’ve been struggling with a “What’s it all for” period. Generally, when I’m in between projects or exhibitions, I go through a period of questioning my work, the relevance of art in general and wondering what I’m doing and why… The last several weeks, I’ve been feeling this way more strongly than usual. Fortunately, today, I enjoyed a stroll through the Chelsea galleries (yes the heart of the beast) and appreciated work that wasn’t necessarily critical or trying to present alternative perspectives, but reflected the hard work of individuals enjoying creativity. It’s important to be reminded that engaging in a creative process is meaningful even if it isn’t a mechanism for social change or greater awareness (as art seldom is).

Dear Father Knickerbocker, I Just Googled You, William Earl Kofmehl III at Lombard-Freid Projects

I knew Bill Kofmehl from Carnegie Mellon University. He was in undergrad while I was in grad school. The guy worked like a madman and he took on projects/performances that no one else would, such as building a giant tree house behind a science building and living in it in a costume as Lobster Boy.

Waste_Generation, Chris Doyle at Andrew Edlin Gallery. Chris is a friend who has always been supportive of my work and I’ve always been grateful for his. It was great and inspiring to see what he’s been up to.


Chris makes his videos available on his portfolio site: http://chrisdoylestudio.com/animation/
Be sure to scroll to the bottom of the pages to find the videos and you can find them on his Vimeo page.

Hard in the Paint, Raymond Pettibon at David Zwirner

I once had the opportunity to hang out with Daniel Martinez in Tijuana during inSite05, he’s an amazing person, charismatic and smart and generally I’m a fan of what he does and has to say. However this show I hated. It was boring and not compelling at all. The text and numerical figures of human carnage painted on to the walls of the gallery are blunt and sad realities of humanity, but the display fails to do anything, even hit the viewer over the head, which I think is what Daniel is trying to do. Putting this stuff inside of a commercial gallery is simply silly, stupid and claims the viewer as ignorant. If an artist is really going to try to use a commercial gallery as a platform to declare outrage at human carnage, then do something with it. This show does nothing. Or perhaps the gallery sold some of the work and they made $$$.


I kind of liked the hare bomb, could be a compelling symbol in a more interesting installation.

Fun facts by Daniel Martinez

If he had really exploited the fun house mirror or just the fun house as a point of departure, perhaps it could have been a stirring installation. “HUMAN LIFE IS A MISTAKE WE ARE NOT HERE BECAUSE WE ARE FREE WE ARE HERE BECAUSE WE ARE NOT FREE…” BLAH BLAH BLah blah blah…

Last Saturday on my way to Conflux, I stopped through a few galleries in the Bowery / Lower East Side, it’s crazy how many there are now. I don’t have much to say about Tony Oursler, he does what he’s been doing for a long time now. I think the pieces are fun and creative, but have low impact. In his current show at Lehmann Maupin he takes advantage of the new tiny video projectors to create whimsical vignettes.

The presentation is minimal, but the works themselves are not.

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.

The Temporary Travel Office has published a set of artist audio works as audio tours of sites in North America. Last winter, Ryan Griffis contacted me to contribute to the publication by revisiting Dentimundo, a 2005 project commissioned for inSite05 that investigates medical tourism in the form of US citizens traveling to Mexican dentists along the border for dental care that is unaffordable in the United States. For the project, I traveled the length of the U.S./Mexico border and met with dentists and patients to learn about this detail of the border economy and relations.

For the publication “Stories in Reserve,” I revisited all of my old files, photographs, interviews, research and writing to compose a narrated audio work. I recently received the publication that also includes America Ponds by Sarah Kanouse and Siting Expositions:Vancouver by Ryan Griffis, Lize Mogel and Sarah Ross. The publication includes a full color booklet with statements by the artists and translations of the works as necessary along with three CDs for each of the pieces. It’s a great little publication and worth checking out online for free – Volume One.

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.

My first year teaching at Hunter’s Department of Film and Media Studies is nearing an end, just a couple finals next week and then grading. As with any new position, it’s been a great deal of work and I’ve done a lot of curriculum planning.

One of the great pleasures is the quality of work from many of the students. The highlight has been a beautiful animation by Natalya Serebrennikova titled “Cicada”. The animation was executed in my Intro to 2D Animation course (it was the first time I taught the course, but have wanted to do so for sometime). Fortunately Natalya walked in with a story and art work in mind that she developed in Tim Portlock’s Graphic Novel class. With a great story and the aesthetic developed, it was really a matter of conquering the technical skills of animation and a bit of guidance.

I consider Natalya’s work an excellent example of various courses and faculty working together to help a student realize her vision.

Natalya was just awarded a National Board of Review Student Grant! Hopefully, I’ll have a few more great projects this semester.

I’m listening to an interview on NPR with the band OK GO talking about their new video featuring their “original” Rube Goldberg Machine. So I check out the video and see that it’s basically a rip off of “The Way Things Go” (1987) by Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Generally, I don’t use the term “rip off” and consider culture and ideas to be up for grabs, but when I hear the guy being interviewed say that to his knowledge there’s never been a Rube Goldberg Machine of the scale that they built, it just pisses me off.

Pop is cool, but it’s important to acknowledge precedents, particularly when they are more conceptually compelling. Fischli and Weiss primarily used house hold chemicals as the agents of force, to reflect on the strength and potential harm of these chemicals. The chemical reactions work with recycled goods to create the kinetic sculpture in time. “The Way Things Go” is an art classic, and it’s hard to believe that an arty pop band doesn’t know about the piece, particularly when the staging is so much of a replica. Also Fischli and Weiss’s version is much longer, about 15 minutes, more complex and didn’t cost $150K or use a team of engineers. It’s cool how the OK Go version is precisely timed with the music and they put themselves in it, but acknowledge where ideas come from! Judge for yourself (unfortunately, “The Way Things Go” is so long that only small portions are available).