I’ve been a little busy this week, as Devin and I were heading out the door for a month. First to Portland to the Open Engagement conference, then to NY to see my brother and perform a show at a bedroom-converted-into-a-white-cube, and then a week off until we go to a wedding. All very good things that I’m excited about and will no doubt write more about. For the moment, however, I wanted to post an image of Achilles’ shield. I made a series of these cards for the NY performance and this is one of my favorites. They were made in response to the long poem Devin’s planning to read and will be introduced periodically like props. I’ve been thinking of them as  Rorschach cards for the text. I’ll post more images from the same series later on this week.

It is Sunday all over again and the world is a flutter with mother’s day sensation. The plethora of touching mother/child photographs everyone is posting on facebook, the emails, the phone calls, magazine covers and television advertisements. Even the florist in your grocery store has likely been staffed and stocked to the brim. The week’s content seems to resonate with this day, reflecting as it does on the easily overlooked but essential elements of every day life: community, loss, courage, house plants, children in museums, life on other planets, success stories, and why it might be alright to be a vulture after all.

We lost a dear colleague this month —

“A pioneer in green architecture and sustainable development, Kevin Kurtz Pierce, 55, of Chicago, IL, passed away May, 2, 2013, following a “lengthy argument,” as he drily referred to it, with glioblastoma multiforme. For the past 15 years Pierce specialized in sustainable design. Memorable projects include the Chicago Center for Green Technology, the city’s flagship green building and the first U.S. municipal structure to be certified “Platinum” by Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED). Additional award-winning structures include Bethel Center and the Chicago headquarters of Christy Webber Landscapes.”

Perhaps the only way to answer absence is through bravery and (a perhaps impossible) trust. Anthony Romero happened to post the very next day about courage :

“I don’t know how to be courageous. I don’t think that I am now but I know, at least I feel, that I must be in order to make it through this moment. Recent months have seen us, as Americans, wrestling with the baseline hatred and oppression that we had so naively believed we had moved beyond, a desire we know now to be a desperate fantasy. I believe Cornel West to be true when he tells us that courage will lead us to other virtues, other strengths that might enable us to not only make it through our time but to imagine a real alternative, a utopian dream no farther than our beds. What I mean to describe here is not a kind of free imagination but, as Žižek has described, “a matter of the innermost urgency”, an imagined alternative to a situation whose solution is so far outside the coordinates of the possible that one is forced to imagine an alternative space.”

Parrots (installation view), Jacopo Miliani (2008), Frutta Gallery

New post on PLANTS! from our new guest contributor, Faye Kahn:

“The houseplant’s original intention was for the interior decorator, whose profession hinges on the art of arrangement. Houseplants usually function as decoration in the home to soften our transition from nature to domestic space. It freshens the air, appeals to our aesthetic senses, & reminds us of idealized places we aren’t (outside). This relationship to interior decorating is recognized by many plant-wielding artists, including & exemplified by Claire Fontaine in her Interior Design for Bastards show (2009) whose statement immediately admits its awareness of  ’[t]he close and ambiguous relationship between art and decoration.’”

Are you interested in more plant convos? Because two more (no doubt of thousands that I am missing) come to mind 1) a great list of indoor houseplant art examples by Corinna Kirsch, and 2) an interview with Claudine Ise and Chicago’s own house plant photographer/sculptor Heidi Norton. Conclusion? Plants Are Trending and Kahn wants to know why.

Christopher Kardambikis, Squaring a Circle (detail), 2012. Multiple Digital Print on Paper. 100 feet.

Jeffrey Songco sends word from California by way of a great interview with S. Christopher Kardambikis:

“There are about nine people in the world who can pull off a Clark Kent outfit – you know, the button-down business shirt that is unbuttoned to reveal a giant S. Christopher Kardambikis is one of those people. The Superman reference can point to a number of things: Christopher’s dashing good looks, his nerd-level interest in comics, and/or his weakness to Kryptonite.”

Eric Asboe talks about the free day at the Walker Art Museum, May Day Parades, and Puppet Theaters in his post “Young At Heart: One View of the Twin Cities”:

Every first Saturday of the month, admission is free to the Walker Art Center with family oriented activities throughout the day. The activities not only make use of multiple areas of the museum, they are inspired by and derive from major exhibitions on view in the galleries. This month’s Free First Saturday, Some Assembly Required, was inspired by Abraham Cruzvillegas’s exhibition The Autoconstrucción Suites, which explores assemblage, local, found materials, and “self-construction,” utilizing “improvised building materials and techniques” when “materials become available and necessity dictates.” Artist Eric Syvertson guided children through making bird’s-eye views of their ideal landscapes, the maps of their ultimately functional worlds. Children were also invited to continue building and adding to the autoconstrucción begun by the Walker Teen Art Council. The changing, expanding structure juxtaposed the teens’ collages with children’s drawings and minimalist inspired tape paintings. In the most living of the autoconstruccións at the Walker, the structure became a new space of creation with the entrance of each child. The works they left behind continued to shape the space into which others entered and altered for their own needs.

Work by Jessica Taylor Caponigro, from the show “BLACK DAMP” at
Johalla Projects (1821 W. Hubbard St.)

TOP 5 Weekend PICKS courtesy of the ever magnanimous Stephanie Burke

SAIC students’ film is nominated for the Cannes Film Festival.

And here I am going to circle back around to the beginning of the week — because I want to end on the comic that Jeriah Hildwine included. Last Monday, Hildwine reflected on the meaning of community in the art world, suggesting we might learn something from Vampire bats:

So what, then, does the concept of community really mean within the context of the art world?  The answers that spring to mind come in the form of analogies:  the art world as ecosystem, the art world as family, the art world as neighborhood.  Any of these metaphors can provide insight into the nature and structure of a subculture, but they can also be misleading, as well as potentially offensive and therefore divisive:  the vulture is an invaluable part of the ecosystems it inhabits, but few would want to be called the vultures of the art world.

 

 

Mississippi: Live: Birth II
2013
Ink, laser print collage, oil paint stick and Staonal crayon on panel.
18″ x 24″
Photo: Joseph Rynkiewicz
Courtesy Kavi Gupta Gallery
A late winter sun falls through McArthur Binion’s studio windows, as train horns blare audibly from the neighboring tracks. Inside, the artist’s paintings hang on the wall, some still in process, others dating back to the 1970s. As is indicative of Binion’s life, his work draws on numerous influences; “Ghost: Rhythms”–a recent show of early work at Kavi Gupta Gallery–shows the influence of action painting, Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism. Binion pulls stylistic tropes common to folk artists as well, borrowing quilting patterns, layering photographic imagery and motifs and grids. He does all this while using one implement: his characteristic “crayon,” or paint stick. With that in hand, the artist is emphatic about the primary importance of narrative, extolling his own personal history as his fount of inspiration. “I’m coming from some place that’s not part of an historical lineage,” Binion says. “I already had my voice,” he adds. “I had to find my hands.”

Binion was born in 1946, one of eleven children, on a cotton farm in Macon, Mississippi. He moved to Detroit where his father took a job in an auto plant. “I had a speech block until I was 19–I stuttered. I couldn’t talk. Up until that point, my whole life was about non-verbal communication.” The same year he stopped worrying about his stutter, he dropped out of college and moved to New York, and found his way into a museum on a work errand. “I’d never been to a museum before,” he recalls. “I never understood that painting could be of a philosophical nature. It really got me.” Binion returned to school, to pursue the arts. “It took me two or three years to build up the courage, most of the things I tried I could do really well–but drawing was the first thing I had ever done that I totally had nothing going. It was an emotional experience. All these other kids had been drawing all their lives and I was 22 without experience.” In 1973, he became the first African American to graduate from Cranbrook with an MFA. He returned to New York and found himself in a nexus of contemporary art, amid such figures as Dan Flavin, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gordon Matta-Clark, dealer Mary Boone, et al. “We were all there, and for me it was like I finally met my colleagues. It was like let’s get this motherfucker on!” (read more)

Chicago, Apr. 2013: Guy Ben-Ner began with an idea. He wanted to divorce a soundtrack from a film, then make a new film that accommodated the appropriated soundtrack. The idea provided a mechanism, defining the rules of a game which would yield Ben-Ner’s latest work, Soundtrack. He decided to appropriate eleven minutes of sound from Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. In Ben-Ner’s version the world is not ending exactly, rather his kitchen erupts into chaos. The sound of rain in the Spielberg movie is described by a frying egg in Ben-Ner’s, just as the Hollywood sounds of robots are explained in Soundtrack by way of an everyday blender. Ben-Ner embodies the voice of lead as his three children, ages eighteen, fifteen and two, play their own parts in the score. His parents also make a debut appearance, as well as friends and Yaara Shehori, the mother of the two-year old child. Having enlisted this cast, Ben-Ner wrote, directed and edited the resulting film, intentionally emphasizing a disconnect between the overarching soundtrack and the visual actions that fulfill it. The effect is breathtaking—a ballet of everyday gestures in which a fried egg plays as much of a principle role as the children themselves. Consider also the lineage of this work: a piece originally written in 1938 by HG Wells; reworked for radio by Orson Welles and broadcast in 1938; to the 2005 adaptation by Spielberg; and now Ben-Ner’s translation in 2013. As with much of the artist’s work, he plucks up tales in the collective consciousness, borrowing the readymade structure of a family and grafting it onto the folk story of alien invasions and apocalypse. These structures provide an exterior framework within which Ben-Ner explores his own status as a divorced father failing to achieve a sense of order. Ben-Ner adeptly explores the relationship between global and familial worlds, between sound and image, between the impersonal and personal spheres of influence, begging the question of individual agency. (read more)

Experiment #63: Ideas For A Velvet Eruption

SATURDAY, MAY 11th: 7pm / doors lock 7:30pm

Featuring: Joel Craig, Chris Glomski, Chuck Stebelton

at Outer Space Studio
1474 N. Milwaukee Ave
suggested donation $4

JOEL CRAIG is the author of The White House (Green Lantern Press, 2012), and the chapbook Shine Tomorrow (Lost Horse, 2009). His poems have appeared lately in Boston Review, GutCult, A Public Space, TYPO, and Rabbit Light Movies. He co-founded and curates The Danny’s Reading Series and edits poetry for MAKE: A Literary Magazine—where he lives, in Chicago, Illinois.

CHRIS GLOMSKI’s second full-length poetry collection, The Nineteenth Century, was published in September 2011 by The Cultural Society.  He was born on an army depot in Pueblo, Colorado and grew up in Elk Grove Village, Illinois, northwest of Chicago.  He resided in Pisa, Italy from 1991 to 1992, free-lancing as an English teacher.  He co-curated the Danny’s Reading Series with Joel Craig from 2006-2010.  Currently, he is a Senior Lecturer in the English department at the University of Illinois, Chicago and lives in the Humboldt Park neighborhood.

CHUCK STEBELTON is author of The Platformist (The Cultural Society, 2012) and Circulation Flowers (Tougher Disguises, 2005). Recent print objects and chapbooks include Asterisk (Number 13, Fewer & Further Press), ‘Tis (John Riepenhoff Experience), A Maximal Object (Mitzvah Chaps), Flags and Banners (Bronze Skull Press), and Precious (Answer Tag Home Press). He works as Literary Program Director at Woodland Pattern Book Center, Milwaukee.
**Upcoming**

JUNE 22
Experiment #64:
James Belflower, Michael Sikkema, Jen Tynes & Nikki Wallschlaeger

Red Rover Series is curated by Laura Goldstein and Jennifer Karmin. Each event is designed as a reading experiment with participation by local, national, and international writers, artists, and performers.  Founded in 2005 by Amina Cain and Jennifer Karmin, the over sixty events have featured a diversity of renowned creative minds.

Email ideas for reading experiments
to us at redroverseries@yahoogroups.com

The schedule for events is listed at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/redroverseries

WOW WOW WOW
Red Rover Series
on facebook? why not?

Caroline Picard, OM SO CLEAN OM SO (edition of 500), 2013
cut-out collage drawings construction paper, white-out, fluorescent pen, permanent pen
Photo by Elizabeth Woodward Photography

I am part of this show in Beverly MA tonight — the photos in this post are from my piece. I’m headed there next week to do some portfolio reviews at Montserrat College of Art and while I’m there I’ll get to see the exhibit. I’m excited, but here is the info on the show in the meantime:

Check out 17Cox Thursday, May 2nd, from 6 – 9pm for an opening reception

Point of Sale
May 2 – July 4, 2013

Featuring
Zayde Buti
Marc Bradley Johnson
Lane Brandon Phelps
Caroline Picard
Mike Vance

Performance by Zayde Buti
Thursday, June 6 at 7pm

The group exhibition Point of Sale turns a contemporary
art gallery into a retail mart. The artists each sell commercially
wrapped packages of self identity, examining the acceleration
of entrepreneurialism in the art word and the ever moving line
between mass-production and the handmade.  Does this shift
undermine the assumed uniqueness of fine art objects and
minimize the artist’s hand in the work?

I just found out about this tree! I kind of can’t believe it — it’s a tree in Athens, Georgia that allegedly has a deed to itself from 1890. Or at least the first tree that owned itself had that deed. From what I gather, that first tree died officially (or was removed? It’s interesting how the death of a tree might only really mean something with its removal  — because of  course as it dies, continually slumping into the ground, it hosts all kinds of living action) in 1947 and then someone took its acorn to sprout “The Son of the Tree That Owns Itself.” Setting my quibbles about gender aside, it sounds like a novel that Faulkner could have written. 

It reminds me also about the Liberty Tree — a place where the forefathers of our country used to meet for public discussion and protest.  I went to college in Maryland and on our very small campus grounds we had an old canon, a Liberty Bell and a Liberty Tree. My senior year the decision was made to remove the Liberty Tree after an especially bad storm. As I understand it, the tree had been on its last legs for some times. Its trunk was already full of concrete from past attempts to preserve and strengthen its base. I remember they had a big ceremony and the school gathered around to watch a chainsaw cut up its parts. Those who attended the ceremony had the option of bringing a piece of the Liberty Tree home with them — I took a small glass-coaster sized cross-section. Someone else made a speech about how they would graft an arm of the tree to a young sapling and then replant the tree as a second generation. It’s all very surreal to think about now — the way we feasted on its branches, eager to pick up its parts as keepsakes. The irreverent banality of the chainsaw’s whine, and of course that it continued to whine throughout the day, because the tree was too large to elegantly dispose of within the time we had gathered. And for months afterwards, groups of boy scouts would visit the campus on field trips, wandering around in search of this tree.

I don’t know what the Athens tree would jog this memory, but I suppose it’s something to do with a tree who’s existence pierces human conception, creating a presence for itself in our common vernacular. It makes me think of Charles Ray’s Hinoki, of course — another favorite of mine, and how Ray stole into someone else’s property to capture a mold of a rotton redwood.

At the eco-poetics conference this last year in Berkley, I saw a talk that is maybe related to this. A young man (I wish could remember his name) spoke about old land deeds in (I think) the Tennessee Valley. He read a number of them, illustrating the relationship between legal language and landscape. The legal language was hard and tried to assert itself over the land, (clumsily), to fix boundaries using landmarks — this poplar tree, for instance, that boulder, this stream etc. The speaker pointed out how the landscape resisted these delineations simply by constantly shifting themselves. The banks of river collapse and fill in periodically, just as a tree that might mark a far corner would eventually die and collapse, forcing the legal language to reevaluate itself.

Obviously this is a rambly day for me, but it’s so nice outside I can’t quite help myself and my ambient thoughts are grazing.

Excerpt from “Monument Working Strategies LLC: Structuring Creative Freedom,”Dushko Petrovich and Roger White, The Highlights, an online arts journal, 2013.

I don’t often think about labor, explicitly — it hangs around in the back of my thoughts, obviously permeating everything, but it tends to get swallowed up under other umbrellas — art, money, sustainability, satisfaction, frustration, excitement — I tend to overlook it. Obviously it seems to be on the fore of America’s mind, what with the recent fast food strikes, or the strikes at Walmart, or even Occupy. However I’ve very recently started meeting with a few local poets and writers I especially admire — we’re working up to do some kind of a performance this coming fall as part of Red Rover — and the subject of labor continually bubbles to the surface. Over the course of my Monday morning emails, I found my way almost accidentally through a series of posts that seem to form their own essay…I thought I would share that with you —

Firstly this essay, which I think I have posted here before — an essay by my dear friend Moshe Marvit, he wrote about the university system’s addiction to cheap labor (via adjunct professorships), and how adjuncts don’t easily congregate, or even know one another (thereby making it almost impossible to organize themselves):

[Josh] Zelesnick had been teaching two courses per semester for several years at Duquesne. He had just finished interviewing to become an adjunct at the University of Pittsburgh in order to pick up a few more courses. By teaching a total of four courses a year at Duquesne – a full time course load for many tenured faculty – Zelesnick was making less than $12,000 per year and had no access to health insurance. In early 2009, Zelesnick realized that his low-paying jobs with no benefits were also precarious. (read more)

I thought about this essay again, because one of the colleagues I mentioned sent me a link to Cathy Wagner’s essay about teaching at a university — it offers the same story, I think, told in a different voice, through a different genre:

I AM A POET AND I HAVE one of the jobs that poets are supposed to want at our moment in history. I work at a park-like sharecropper estate called a university. I am not myself a sharecropper; I am an associate professor of creative writing. I make $62,500 a year, wildly more than I made when I was a sharecropper (I was one for thirteen years). $62,500 is supposed not to be very much for my “rank,” and I am to be given a raise this year, partly because I am underpaid in comparison to my colleagues locally and nationally. I asked for the raise. I have decent health benefits, dental/mental, etc., and money is deposited for me into a retirement fund every month. I also have access to about a thousand dollars a year to travel to conferences, exclusive parties to which sharecroppers can’t afford to go. I have worked at the park-like estate for six years. (read more)

And then, by that strange coincidence which my mother would have called universal province, and I prefer to think of as the Internet-responding-to-public-events-in-tandem-with-my/our-brain/s, I received a link to a new online publication in my inbox. The Highlights: An Online Arts Journal that, in this case, focuses on that same issue of Labor. I haven’t had a chance to read through the whole issue, but was immediately drawn to the names I recognized and in particular found this photo essay by Dushko Petrovich and Roger White called “Monument Working Strategies LLC: Structuring Creative Freedom.”

1) What inspired you to adapt the piece you did for the Graphic Canon? 
I actually contributed two pieces—the first came out in the first GC volume, where I adapted an ancient Incan play, Apu Ollantay. It is the only play known to have survived the Spanish Invasion. I was first taken with the story because I’ve loved Incan works of art for so long and wanted to see how I could potentially incorporate some of those stylistic elements into the comic. As I worked with the story more and more, I began to fall in love with the issues it wrestled with. There are a number of strong female protagonists in the play, at the center of which lies Cosi Cuyllur, the princess, who has decided to go against her father’s wishes and sleep with a husband she chooses for herself. It’s a tragic story for her—she sleeps with her lover and is thereafter exiled to a cave, which causes the country to go to war—but those who banished her are ultimately condemned, just as she is rescued (or unearthed) by the daughter born out of wedlock. While I don’t think her final redemption makes the torment she suffered worthwhile, I think the story tries to capture the wasted lives her father’s will caused. The princess’ body becomes a politicized site, one whose impact and meaning is embodied and carried on via subsequent generations. (read more)