The colophon for the original Open Space, published by White Rabbit Press. The 1965 volume is a cherished gift from OS contributor and then-colleague Jay Mollica.

It’s 9:44 p.m. on the last Monday in October.

I just finished editing the last first draft for Open Space’s last season. Lots more editing to do, but — no more opening the new submission, wondering what you’re getting versus what you commissioned. No more sending it back to the writer, thanking/querying/cajoling/explaining … that’s all over now.

For the longest time I haven’t known how to begin this goodbye. I’ve had it noted in the editorial calendar as “Solong&thanksforallthefish,” a dumb sf in-joke with myself, some form of comfort food.

And what is there, really, to say, that hasn’t been said in one form or another by someone or other on this rabbit warren of a site?¹ Open Space doesn’t lend itself to summary, to closure — certainly not by one person. As founding editor Suzanne Stein wrote when we tasked her with addressing the site on its tenth birthday:

And but so. Now it’s 4:04 p.m. on the first Monday in November. It may be true that the pleasurable things always get delayed. But not endings: Here we are, last stop, on the heels of former managing editor Gordon Faylor’s evocative, oblique farewell. That’s not a royal we — I invited Suzanne to join me for this post, or she suggested it, or more probably it was somewhere in the happy middle. It’s a funny (hard, maddening) thing to run a tiny, for-artists-by-artists program inside a big institution; being able to collaborate with Suzanne, especially these last few months, has helped ease the strange loneliness of it. I’m grateful to her: for envisioning and building this site, for inviting me to take over its stewardship, for being a superlative collaborator and friend.

I’m grateful to everyone who has helped to make Open Space what it is… whatever version that is, to you. I just said that OS is tiny, which it is: Currently a team of one, supported by a sole funder (thank you Davis/Dauray Family Fund!), it’s always at most been a half-handful of people inside SFMOMA (Grace Ambrose, Gordon… I see your deft hands in so many of these beautiful pages, and in so many memories of our by-the-seat-of-our-pants parties), and a few kind souls borrowed on occasion from other departments (thank you Gillian Edevane, thank you Noah Biavaschi, thank you Sam Mende-Wong, thank you Bosco Hernández — and thank you Sylvia Castillo, dear Sylvia, without whom this page, along with myriad others produced in the last couple of years, would not look nearly so spiffy). But the whole point — the possibility and the rub — lies in looking beyond the edifice, and then: so many contributors! So many coffee and cocktail dates, studio visits and tech rehearsals. Meetings and showings and consultations and collaborations, notebooks full of plans realized and forgotten. And edits, edits, edits… always edits.

More than anything final, it’s this making-of that feels important now: the dedication to trying something, perhaps something one doesn’t know quite how to do, or why, and seeing how far one can take it. The wondering and wrangling and debating and eye-rolling and laughing and trying again next time. That’s how art has always made sense to me, as a making sense of this world, using the materials and means at hand, and then sending whatever results out into the same world, in vanishingly rare instances changing it, every once in awhile connecting, and more often than not simply being reabsorbed. Nothing worth keeping lasts by staying the same.

Is that true? Maybe. Maybe not. Let me say instead, at 11:22 a.m. on November 9, 2021: I have such gratitude for all of this, and all of you. For the messy, uncomfortable, imperfect, glorious present that was and always will be Open Space.

And so (now! November 29, 11:32 a.m. — no, wait, make that December 1, 3:57 p.m.!), finally: So long, and thanks for all the fish.

-clr

•

When I left SFMOMA five years ago, it never occurred to me I’d remain so involved as to be composing a last post, as (un)certainly as I penned the first. I should have known, perhaps: It speaks to the ideals of the publication. See, you leave a job. You don’t keep doing it! But what you can’t leave — even in a breakup — is a relationship. And Open Space describes a net of relation.

Open Space was (past tense!) an experiment, a challenge, an architecture, a lark. (Also, a thing that sings.) When I talked my way into the situation that would become this publication, I promised myself that, for a duration of two years, this alone would be my poetic experiment. Thirteen years on I’m startled when I consider the macro view: so many hands, so many minds, so many lines! A lot happens in a decade-plus, as Claudia points to above; I’ve said farewell once already and I’ve even summed up.

This feels like a moment to simply say thanks.

To Gordon Faylor, for editorial companionship and his expansive curatorial intelligence, whose care for the esoteric, the wildly experimental, and the historical brought new texture and dimension to Open Space, not only but especially where poetry is concerned.

On behalf of all of us (writers, artists, readers!) to Cody Carvel, poet and digital fellow at Brown University, who extensively advised and supported me as we worked hard to preserve possible futures for the Open Space archive. Many smart and caring people are part of this effort, and I feel confident our work is secure.

And, thoroughly, to Claudia, from whom I’ve learned so much. When I passed editorship of this weird experiment to her I couldn’t have known she would become dear friend, confidant, collaborator. This artist, so generous in creating space and time for others, who — knowingly! — took a job that meant she’d be privileging others’ work over her own. She invited me to join Open Space as writer myself, allowing me for the first time to feel what so many contributors had expressed to me over the years: The freedom to write, unconstrained, in so public a platform, is a transformative creative and critical experience. And it makes the loss of this unique publishing endeavor feel all the more poignant for me, and just a little bit harder to bear. And as to those edits, edits, edits: not only supporting, but gently, elegantly, making others’ work better—this gift, this particular form of care, so often invisible.

I would like to mention some of Claudia’s other achievements on behalf of this community of artists as well. Her first effort as editor-in-chief was to ensure that contributors no longer needed to seek permission from SFMOMA to republish their own work. Before the end of her first year, she saw that Open Space was W.A.G.E. certified, which meant that contributors would be paid a fair wage scale calculated in relation to SFMOMA’s total operating costs — the only outlet of the museum that could claim to be so transparently equitable! Claudia expanded Open Space’s live, in-person component to include dance, performance, and sound collaborations; and together with Gordon began to commission poets not only for essays and commentary, but for poetry plain and simple. Critically, crucially, they expanded access and invitation to so many people and voices traditionally marginalized, not only within arts publishing, but within the walls of the museum itself.

Open Space was always within, and against. This tension and contradiction was built in from the beginning, made it what it was. If the platform is lost, I like to think the possibility isn’t.

Finally, and especially, to each of you who have ever had a hand in this thing, and you know you who are: for your thinking, making, and talking within and for Open Space, and for your friendship, attention, and conversation. We — collective we — made something fierce, unkempt, something alive. Open Space, never a collection of things, always a constellation of people, ideas, expressions —

-ss

•

How does one do justice to such an ever-expanding entity, to get at its density and its reach? We asked Lenny Gonzalez to try. His answer, in collaboration with animator Chris O’Dowd, is this video, the final Open Space commission.

We recommend full screen, sound on:

The post Track Changes appeared first on Open Space.

Oakland, August 2020

Leslie Scalapino is a summer poet. Her work’s humid, skin and air become indistinguishable. She catches glints of light and dogs and sex, unfurls montages of violence distant and palpable, interpolates and peels away the composite mercy of structure. Cloud and camera, her figures vent an obstructive dexterity that enhances their paratextual qualities as climates and vivid animals.

My windows are shut. A whirring fan goes on chugging walks, squirrels and birds peep and skitter while endless afternoons slither into irresponsibility their slabs of kindness. The rapport of the huddled foregoes witness I mutter over my shoulder. “It’s so hot I can’t think”: Heat’s dehiscence against memory and containment. Oakland sidewalks seem wider.

Respect I derived from you when you kept forgiving me while a little patch of grass beside the driveway yellowed. The tree there looked parched as hell.

Scalapino’s work floats beside her architectural reader, who can only let the malfeasant quiet of her paintings surround and drift by. The writing’s vexations pollinate across works, across books, portals in and through one another.

Scratching sounds in the vents, head in my hands, reprieve until someone else’s surface leaves or forces, as a friend, a brief respite— worse, salvation — from the bidding of the conflagrations that govern our melting world.

We were always invisibly countered. I felt the bodily pull of a car against the ground where you stood when you said goodbye.

All-quilty populism retraces sentiment, an aggrievement presses us tighter the more we try to topple the board. Workplace heartbreaks go stodgy, madcap endowments pricelessly redact the slaughter and will continue to. I put my cap on and bask in the sunlight, take long walks, huddle in the reading chair, put the cap on a table in front of one of two windows and look at it. Repairers’ bliss in observation.

Life grows incrementally smaller until you can fit it in your pocket like a mint. Leaves flicker — a corridor, a negligence in forgiveness emerges I can’t remember because I hit myself too hard with disdain and forgot.

When love’s comportment gives way, rush it onto parched grass and cackle because you’re free. Return the deceit we’d accrued via devotion, beg for less. Forgive your home or wrest your world from it and go, I told my flies.

At the round table beside the rectangular table beside two identical chairs. My bed’s behind me and my closet. I pile books on the kitchen counter to my left. Movie chair, reading chair, “filing cabinet,” nightstand, bookstand featuring my lovely friends.

“Huddled in a room” timbre characterizes the specter of movement for a second, Bay saturate edition poets hear together — leftist paradigms charged, flagrant energy impelled, ambient fucks made toast to heal the fractures. Feeling great or we got wasted or kept going. The inexorable march beside me until the tide turns I’m praying too ridiculous or not to get cynical: “What’s that beside you on the table. Is that a weapon?”

“No, it’s harmless.”

People leave you with abscesses, the fortune you homed in on loves to hobble. Cloistered rage, histrionic guilt, plead with, whine a fumble, craft a bit. How I dog people evokes the largesse of incorporation and the merit I seek against in those murky waters; the turgid recalcitrance that often pains my friends speaks there as well.

My head in your lap, you picking at my shirt.

I didn’t realize until this last, brutal New York summer when Scalapino’s writing kept showing up on my feed that she was a summer poet. When I moved to the Bay Area in 2013, she was my regional icon.

I was hanging out with Brett Goodroad here the other day and a dopey film crew approached and asked us all why New York is better than Los Angeles. Brett was the only one to respond: “In New York, you can be an asshole. Fuck you.”

Even if the last three years have proven net terrible, the assemblage of my doubts breaks them into peaceable moments, fleeting and choppy and funny. A day at the beach — you get so burned after a billion days of work, the clouds parallel to obscure a sense of defeat. I laugh so hard I almost drown.

Lying near you, still existing about the worst compacts, set out your clothes in trash bags forever, elegantly circuslike before you move again.

I felt a lot of kindness from you over the years, how we were held together. We spoke and wrote and hung out and made idle threats. When you’re listening I perceive only this trope of you in the future glancing away from me at a withered transparency of “the scene.”

A dead rat in the vent. The flies were louder than usual. They were my roommates now. Behind me cloud pics marched by. I kept haphazardly under them, how I considered the sky a lush orange I could sink my teeth into, efforts sunkissed, the singular atmosphere of the Bay. Ugh — purple light charged red, sweet bolus of night easing an impossible season.

“Huddle” dramas dice art sociality into one’s court with disheartening participation freakers’ capital; let’s undo our time together, they say, learn to wear down while you plan and I hit my face more. I’ll hold resentment this close but I can’t help it get any harder, only you can do that. Fuming complements evisceration, sweats salty air and cools me down as the summer progresses. I feel my body shut apart from that life, curried to dogs.

If we fall in love will we land here? That’s the shadow our scene creeps behind us, careful self-recrimination squeezing polyps of fear and abandon like bubble wrap. When you get to see her negligible gestures cubecore the office’s lathering up of the board to suit an immaculate complacency and findom sustenance inhuman at best, we should recognize the game never even started. Even those in it forbid themselves.

Was our creativity not so much internal autonomy as external monstrosity? They build malls on shellmounds.

Leslie Scalapino read the minds of dogs. The unusability we’ve ingested, those junked things I wanted to give you so long ago, I can’t wish on that anymore. The endogenous quiet fades into noise, dust, and debris until one’s senses are so overloaded it makes more sense to simply not move a muscle, lest the violence escape.

I left something behind. It’s this knife I tried to kill my flies with when they got sick, couldn’t kill anything really. It’s yours if you want it.

The scratches gazed into themselves and blurted how can I help? Was that growing life, or that which opposes life? We make it our inhibition to part from work, such that we get so packed together we go humid and the sureness of that work suspends time a little.

The comportment of your love meant the world. I remember the time you came over with flowers just to celebrate us recording an afternoon together. Did we?

The post Over My Shoulder appeared first on Open Space.

“When it was set up it was meant to be primarily social, with the idea of a Lady Bountiful, you know, to receive at receptions and previews and so on,” SFMOMA’s first director, Grace McCann Morley, explained in a 1960 interview with the Regional Oral History Office. “Well, these women were of a caliber to whom that would not have had continuous appeal. They were perfectly willing to do their duty socially, and it was very necessary and helpful, of course, to have that kind of social representation at our big openings and previews and so on, and the social publicity that it produced was very good. But they were of a type to respond with more conviction to other more serious interests, and that’s why I called on them so continuously and so urgently, and very often at much sacrifice of their time, energy and even money, to give me support in the educational development of the museum.”

Morley, seated far right, in a meeting with the members of the Women’s Board, c. 1956

It may be easy, as I once did, to dismiss at first glance the volunteer work of well-to-do women, but it would be a mistake. These individuals established the foundation of SFMOMA as we know it today. From early on, their focus, with the guidance of Morley, was squarely on education and community outreach. The museum’s film program and other important offerings such as tours, classes, lectures, concerts, and performances were established within the first couple of years of the group’s operations.

Here are just a few of the events sponsored by the Women’s Board:

Filmmaker Frank Stauffacher’s Art in Cinema film series

Koto performance by Shinishi Yuize, 1953

Ravi Shankar performing on April 10th, 1957

School tour of the exhibition Design in Scandinavia, 1957

Children’s art class, 1961

Before SFMOMA could afford a paid staff, the Women’s Board oversaw numerous endeavors at the institution. Member Louise Ackerman volunteered at Saturday morning children’s art classes, and managed the library from 1938 until the museum could afford to hire a librarian. Clara Heller paid for art periodical subscriptions for the library; she and Helen Crocker Russell also donated film equipment. The group established a $25 revolving fund to set up the museum bookshop, and upon the recommendation of Marge Lindner, the museum even opened a branch in the Parkmerced Towers in 1952. Its goal was to “enlist the interest and active participation of a great number of residents who could not otherwise take advantage of museum membership.” The space hosted classes and exhibitions.

Bookshop at the Van Ness building, 1953

Library at the Van Ness building, n.d.

Parkmerced gallery, 1952

Morley relied on the Women’s Board heavily during World War II, when the draft left the museum understaffed. Its participation in the Red Cross Arts and Skills Program was among its most notable activities during this period; member Dorothy Liebes, a textile designer, introduced the program to her colleagues in 1943.

Meeting minutes describe the Red Cross Arts and Skills Program as consisting of “artists from many fields who are willing to donate their time and services to teach their crafts to the convalescent soldiers, sailors, and marines now in the seven service hospitals in the Bay Region. This work will be carried on under the supervision of an American Red Cross field worker, its object being threefold: first, to provide the men with recreation; second, to teach them to re-educate their muscles; third, as a morale builder as well as a possible means of support.”

It was an effort to use art as therapy for wounded soldiers, recruiting local artists as teachers and placing them in military hospitals. A motion was passed that the work be carried on under Liebes’s chairmanship and that the museum help register artists willing to give their time.

Promotional brochure for the Red Cross Arts and Skills Program (recto).

Promotional brochure for the Red Cross Arts and Skills Program (verso).

Bay Area artists, including Ruth Armer, Victor Arnautoff, and Clay Spohn, volunteered for this program in many capacities — as instructors, as jurors for the exhibitions of the works produced, and as advisors. The artist and writer William Justema proposed expanding the program to include writing workshops. Writing to Marion Chidester, Justema explained that “there are many wounded men who have no feeling for the plastic expression who might, however, be helped by having their means to express themselves in writing increased. In my own case I was often sustained through the fourteen months I spent in the Army by a kind of verse diary I was always working on — in the sense that it gave me a thread for my days, a continuous interest… Everyone is said to have a story in him — the wounded surely have.”

Justema’s suggestion does not appear to have been incorporated into the Red Cross Arts and Skills Program. The body of records, though, reflects the commitment so many local artists had to this program.

Installation views of 2nd Annual West Coast Arts and Skills Exhibition, American Red Cross in 1948

Another significant Women’s Board contribution was the Rental Gallery, launched by Chidester in 1947. This precursor to the Artist Gallery at Fort Mason ¹ was an early museum effort at community outreach. Works were exhibited in the gallery space dedicated to the program and available for rent or sale to the museum public. “There is a section of the art-minded public which does not find the time to attend the many interesting exhibitions in the museum,” Chidester explained in a report. “But with the aid of the Rental Gallery works of art by local artists are circulating in private homes — in most cases the environment for which they were created. Some become a permanent possession through purchase. Thus this plan inevitably serves the artist.”

Rental Gallery invitation.

In its early decades, Rental Gallery exhibitions featured Bay Area artists such as Ruth Asawa, Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn, Claire Falkenstein, Adaline Kent, Emmy Lou Packard, David Park, Nell Sinton, and Hassel Smith, to name a few.

Installation view of the exhibition Rental Gallery in Spring 1954

Installation view of the exhibition Rental Gallery in Spring 1955

Installation view of the exhibition Autumn Rental Gallery in 1956

In the 1956, the Women’s Board added a school program component to the Rental Gallery, extending the reach of its existing rental and educational activities. Schools were invited to participate by bringing their students to the museum. The children were given an introductory tour by a museum docent and then brought to the Rental Gallery, where they voted by ballot for their favorite work.

Installation view of the exhibition Spring Rental Gallery (1958) with school group in the background

Rental Gallery School Program brochure

Thank you letter from student

The Women’s Board contributed in myriad meaningful ways beyond their original mandate, often behind the scenes. Members sent care packages to enlisted staff during World War II, for example. And after the war, they donated art books to damaged German university libraries. Back home, Janette Spencer worked with engineering to oversee lighting in the galleries; Frances Elkins helped furnish the museum member’s room; Margery Smith managed the renovations to the staff break room and kitchen.

In a 1982 oral history with the Archives of American Art, Morley mentions that whereas the board met once a year at most, the Women’s Board “met monthly and had a very deep interest in everything that went on in the museum, lending a lively support to everything it did. This was a constant encouragement and solace in periods of disappointment and in failures to achieve the standards that one aspired to.”

The board disbanded in 1975 and joined with another auxiliary group, the Membership Activities Board, to form the Modern Art Council (MAC). On the occasion of this merger, Mary Heath Keesling, former trustee and President of the Women’s Board, summarized, “To attempt to write about the spirit of the Women’s Board is like trying to describe in everyday terms one of the nature’s rare phenomena. The spirit, which was a unique quality of this particular board, was based on belief, and this belief created a force — a selfless and tireless dedication that has prevailed throughout the years. Many who served responded to the magic and thus remarkable things took place on a simple volunteer level. The belief was established by Grace McCann Morley, the first director of the San Francisco Museum of Art ². Along with John Humphrey ³, a couple of typewriters, and a few prints and drawings from Albert Bender ⁴, the Museum began in its present surroundings. Most of all it began at the outset of a glorious period in the history of the art of the Bay Area. Grace Morley was firmly convinced of the importance of art and she gave generously to the local artists space in the Museum to show their works.”

During my nine years at SFMOMA, I spent a lot of time in the archives poring over inspirational moments in our history, trying to understand why they happened, how they were sustained, and how they could be replicated. A desire to make sense of the world is probably what drew me to this profession in the first place; there are so many factors for why a good thing doesn’t last or why good people have to leave. So I search for clues — even if the ability to make sense of things is little comfort when faced with colleagues losing their livelihood and the institution losing parts of itself.

This summer, my last at the museum, brought news of the end of the museum’s Artist Gallery, Film Program, Modern Art Council — and Open Space. It is hard to say goodbye to these foundational programs, and it seemed appropriate, as I, too, was leaving, to reflect on their creation and their contributions.

The post Foundations appeared first on Open Space.

And they danced to music
Dogs chance squares sometimes to bark
The family played the piano
Goodnite, Johnboy
Forgiving you family
And the wind swept the plain
The wind moving the grass
Like life
Tune in tomorrow!
The dog is happy with the owner
What a happy ending
The tail hit my leg
Aloha!
A flying dog flying in the mountains
Gloomy gray sky
The elevator doors closed

— Juan Aguilera, Chris Corr-Barberis, D’Lisa Fort,
Jorge Gomez, Gail Lewis, Larry Randolph, Elizabeth Rangel,
Julie S., Nicole Storm, Monica Valentine, Kathy Zhong

The post Mystery Zone, or A Lotta Endings appeared first on Open Space.

Un-Disclosure

We were teaching on the reservation when, overnight, the campus closed. We were working remotely, seeing students in person only when shopping at Fred Meyer. The tribe took care of us, valuing science over the bottom-line. There were challenges for students — finding Wi-Fi in Starbucks parking lots, dealing with children, caregiving. There were losses in the community and personally, too. We flew to California to be with family, with grandma, especially, who was recovering from Covid. Coming from a sewing lineage, in which grandma and mom worked in sweatshops (and we studied apparel design), we formed a production line making masks. We stopped writing, but then brought it back through the theme and process of sewing. In Bellingham we walked the neighborhood, becoming familiar with and grateful for neighbors, dogs, children, free vegetables, deer, and rabbits. There was much more we might say, but what was the proper protocol for telling stories not our own? And how might we respect and honor the people they involve?

Ghost Flowering

We were underground for a time, like a cicada or a mushroom, and then we emerged. Like many great women artists (Emily Dickinson, Hilma af Klint, and Lee Bontecou to name a few), we sprung out, bursting at the end of or after a life, posthumously, like monotropa uniflora. We wondered: Were we a fungus or a flower? We were no longer hidden. We got a divorce. Together we stayed in the house and farm until they were sold. Together we got Covid and then we got better. Afterward, apart, we moved into town. We didn’t sleep much. We were working, painting, teaching, chairing, thinking. We were alone, so we had time for reading, too. We made small groups dedicated to theory and dream-work over Zoom. We walked the one hundred-acre wood, discovering places we’d never been before. We had discovered we were capable of a lot more than we knew.

The Universe Owes Us Nothing,
but We Have to Live Some Kind of Life

At the beginning, we fell in love and fled — to Taos, Tahoe, Moab, Bend, and Lincoln City, meeting our person, making escapes. Racing up the coast, we nosed ahead of fires, landing as a friend’s house burned. On the road, we taught in parking lots and slept under the stars. Back home, we washed our bananas, led studio classes masked-face-to-masked-face, and performed Friday Night Scream Therapy on Instagram. We paused our own work, pouring something of it into our students and the community, co-crafting soundscapes and video projections around Bellingham. Our matka complained that even during World War II, when there was no food and the Gestapo took people, the schools never closed. We turned her words over to the students and added our own—the universe owes us nothing, but we have to live some kind of life.

Driving the Autumn Dawn

We were driving the autumn dawn, lulling our sleepless daughter into dreams while her mother, an insomniac, slumbered in the warm of our bed dreaming, too. We circuited the neighborhood at first, going nowhere in particular. Pulled to the north and west, we moved along the water, finding our way to the reservation, to Lummi Nation. What we remember was the sound of the rain and the blue of the bay. It made a deep well, a home. While we worked here, our art travelled elsewhere, to Poland and Palestine. There was a lot to do. Exchanges with partners abroad were rich, but our technology poor — over WhatsApp our friend and collaborator, a sound artist, sent extensive, devastating reports about life in Ramallah; over Zoom we performed a solemn, public ritual in Chrzanów, the call dropping right in the middle.

Epidemic Obsessive

Decades ago, as a teen, we read Camus’ The Plague, everything on AIDS as well as on the flu of 1918, initiating an obsession with epidemics. This prepared us — stashing water, a month’s supply of canned goods, one hundred N95s — just in case. Yet, with lockdown, preparations fell short. How could we plan for the dissolution of a cross-border relationship? The boomerang of childhood trauma? Our elderly dog going deaf? It wasn’t enough for her to be in the same room as us — needing to press up against, just as we were no longer able to touch another human. To make sense of time, we kept spreadsheets tallying Covid cases in various locales, baked bread, took long walks, and taught AIDS literature. A season later, we fell in love and returned to writing essays. A year later, we laid our beautiful dog to rest on the longest June afternoon.

The Law of the Conservation of Energy

We had returned to this place, just before the virus arrived, seeking refuge again, this time from Seattle. It was the fifth return, maybe even the last, but who knows (although building and sustaining community is more appealing now than new experiences). Often we found ourselves at Little Squalicum Beach or behind the plywood factory, remembering the many hellos and goodbyes we bid the city there. Before the pandemic, we were sick, unable to date or make art, but grew stronger living moment to moment. Out of each day we carved long walks, and from each week ocean swims. We slowly grew close to someone we had crushed on for ten years, but our nostalgia for the form this specific energy had taken before was misplaced. We returned to art projects abandoned over the past decade, recouping the energy in rethinking them and recognizing the multitude of possibilities which already exist.

Commémorer

With the border closed, we stayed home, our regular crossings no longer possible. It was there in Canada, too, where we had grown up Franco-Ontariens; where notre mère and frère still live; where we met our American partner at Banff; and where we spread the ashes of our youngest horticulturalist frère among the rhododendrons in Stanley Park. It was over there we were denied entry, into here, our marriage being unrecognized then. So, we were home, teaching and re-evaluating our legacy, with photos we found and took. We began to sort and separate, fold and suture, sharing the process of commemoration — Look how handsome I was! What goofy glasses. Where were we? We walked the neighborhood counting bunnies (49, 30, 24, 62). We lost our eighteen-year-old cat, gained friends among neighbors and a café owner, and began Zooming with notre mère on Sundays. Somehow in all this, things got stronger.

Profane Optimism

We had come back from a long time away living in Northern California. There, we made performance art using profane rituals exploring apocalyptic themes. Our mothers, practitioners of the sacred arts, were rooted here, where we were raised, and growing older. We longed to join them and a larger community, but found in the latter the insidious affliction of a general liberal malaise. We turned to activism — to defund the police, to provide aid to the houseless occupation camp at city hall, and to stop sweeps of the same camp, where police in militarized gear, rooftop snipers, and officers from five different law enforcement agencies violently kicked people out. We adopted the space of the street as theater, donning the clownish persona of the do-absolutely-fucking-nothing mayor, “listening to” every request and need. None of this is over and we have not given up, a profane optimism fueling us forward.

Distance is Far

Distance is far. Traversed so easily before, two or more times a year we’d fly 16,000 kilometers to our homeland under proximity’s illusion, but with lockdown we had to reckon with distance’s true reach. Years before, we chose to leave from where we had come, just like our mother, who migrated there (Deutschland) from here (US) before we were born. We had, in a sense, returned to the motherland, yet with a firm anchorage back home. Raising a child without family cut the hardest, but the sad narrative of being away transformed as our relationship to this place deepened. Slow to see its beauty, it took four years to realize we lived on the sea, to fall in love with an apple tree moving through seasons. From this sanctuary we cocooned, exchanged frequent, lengthy voicemails with our best friend in Berlin, and wrote from the depths of our body, claiming the darkness of this time without shame.

A Hard Arc, Softened

We were sick already, the house we grew up in having poisoned us with mold. Half fixed when lockdown began, it stood vacant in upstate New York for months. By then we had stopped making work. What was the point? We thought we were dying. We walked the city for air and to spy. Who was alive? What was changing? We started meditating. Slowly we got better. A neighbor gave us a kitten. We took it with us, driving cross-country last summer to renovate the house in New York. By autumn, we found the hallway expanded — into parallelograms of golden-white; no longer pure architecture, but a light structure; not a dark Reaganomics shelter 어머니 built, but a jewel-box. After listing, there was an offer within days. Then came a call from the adoption agency. There was a match. On Christmas night our miracle was born.

With thanks to Cynthia Camlin, Elizabeth Colen, Yanara Friedland, Brel Froebe, Pierre Gour, Casandra Lopez, Sasha Petrenko, Peter Rand, and Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman for the pandemic stories that informed these portraits of artists and writers in Bellingham, Washington, also known as the sacred ancestral and perpetual home of the Lummi people. Deepest gratitude to Bean Gilsdorf and Claudia La Rocco for the invitation and support of this piece.

The post Who We Were When We Were Here appeared first on Open Space.

We heard, many years later after our artistic self-perception was fixed, that the teacher improved our paintings in the evenings when we were gone. She had a rigidity to her process and desired outcome, which was rolling bucolic landscapes with no livestock. Houses abandoned when the surrounding timbers were cut. Always a perfunctory wash of color first, blue to underpin a warm fall landscape and orange for a spring one. The impulse is to give the impression of talent and the harm that’s done is people end up thinking they should be artists, or that they should be artists a particular way, with prescribed materials and vernacular. I picture her applying little hillocks of the difficult ultramarine she kept in her office with the narrowest brushes. I never noticed anything weird. I agree that art shouldn’t be solitary but it sure is.

Teleportation is possible through like objects (the color wheel and the circle of fifths), mists and gases, nice smells, and the obvious portals like word choice and holes. 

No one notices the improved quality of my mark-making. 

I am trying to stop excluding things I hate or find boring or upsetting from my pictures. 

Next steps: gossip; saying what I mean all the time not just when mad; intrusive thoughts about fixing the boring post-war paintings at the museum; sublimating futility into very small particles; endings that are openings.

I can draw a thousand ways to feel empty or open.

I’m harmless.

The river is frothy white and narrows away from the glass. A variety of tree trunks appear alongside it, cut off beneath the canopy, and rounded old green-blue then gray-blue mountains peek between them “in the distance.” There is a seam where the painted background and the arranged shrub-like and fern-like materials meet, so well done it’s difficult to discern. If you press your face in, which is not recommended because of suspended disbelief, you can see an improbable clear sky with cirrus wisps curving forward to meet the glass. This is almost like real life. 

Smooth bare tree limbs criss-cross the sculpted portion of the river. The trillium and nettles aren’t visible. Cinnabar chanterelles are hidden beneath scattered detritus. Beautiful soft rocks you can grind up and paint with are in such a river, and hard ones like unakite and jasper, and black and orange salamanders, and juvenile rainbow trout, and wolf spiders. None of that is visible. The inhabitants are out for repairs and there is a placard explaining everything.

For Charlie Macquarie, Alison Jean Cole, and Claudia La Rocco.

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Heather Edgar, Untitled, 18″x24″ acrylic on paper

I like to proselytize to any non-poet who will listen. My speeches go something like this: You don’t have to understand every poem that you read, and you certainly don’t have to like it. Read all over the place, pay attention to your own reactions. A poem is not a puzzle that needs figuring out (which is, unfortunately, how poetry is often taught in school). This isn’t to say that poems can’t be intentional, or want to tell you something.

Murray Silverstein sent me this poem in response to a call for submissions for the Creative Growth poets; working with translation is one of the key ways the collective collaborates (for a full description of the process, read this). Comparing Murray’s poem with our version offers an interesting case study in meaning and intention. Here is Murray’s:

Here is the Creative Growth version:

Murray had this to say about “A Battle for The Soul of The Universe”: “So intriguing… swapping out beauty for meditation, justice for equality. And the through-line of life as a show, a show we both watch and are in […] I’m impressed and honored.” For my part, I was intrigued to see how Murray’s very personal poem was transformed into something wilder and more jagged, at times silly but in the end no less serious. Read together, the poems show one range of poetry’s possibilities, from deliberate meaning to playful strangeness.

In order to continue facilitating conversations with poets outside Creative Growth, I have previously posted prompts from Creative Growth poets that anyone might use. These generated a number of great responses. Paul Sardo, for example, decided to use Good Thinking as a prompt offered by the collective, sending us this untitled poem:

And our very own Claudia La Rocco produced this poem from another title suggestion:

I asked Claudia if she had the Creative Growth poets in mind when she wrote this poem, as it has a wonderful affectionate sweetness. She responded: “I wanted it to be jocular and then tip into something more mysterious, which is something I love in the CG poems — how fast they move between registers.” This is something I have loved also and tried to imitate in my own work.

It has been exciting to see the way people have been moved to write after reading our collaborations. Imitation, it turns out, is not only flattering but productive. My aunt, Peg Maringer, sent me these short poems:

Peg is an immensely creative person, but I’ve never known her to write poetry, and Paul Sardo indicated he had not had much “success” writing poems in the past. So perhaps I have converted a few people with this humble experiment?

But wait. Why am I pointing out who is the novice poet and who is not? I feel like an amateur every time I sit down to write. Unless I want to write the same poem over and over, I imagine I will always feel this way. I suppose that is what’s magical about poetry — it is, simply, what various minds can do with language and just because I might have done it well once is no guarantee I will be able to do it again; just because you haven’t ever done it doesn’t mean you can’t do it now.

Please consider writing a poem with the following prompts, care of the poets of Creative Growth. If you like the results, please share them with me: lorraine[at]creativegrowth.org
 

Write a poem using one of these titles:
 

Write a poem using a group of the following six words/phrases:
 

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5 Stages mural by Saiyare Refaei and Tiffanny Hammonds, 2017. Photo: Crews Creative. The mural was produced through Spaceworks’ Artscapes program.

Last October, as part of Tacoma Arts Month, I drove around the city with my sister, artist Teruko Nimura. We delivered handmade mental-health care packages to residential food pantries, driving through areas with little access to public transportation, past neighborhoods with brand-new condos, through food deserts and down streets lined with designer boutiques, in and out of pockets of need across the city. Running between the sweeping views of Point Defiance Park and Commencement Bay to the north, and majestic Mount Rainier to the southeast, Tacoma’s freeways divide the city along lines of class and race — all layered on the tribal lands of the Puyallup. As we crisscrossed the terrain, we noted that most of the community centers and museums are concentrated in just a few neighborhoods, and that whole swaths of the city do not have easy access to public art or arts organizations.

Teruko Nimura printing “Care Is Free” postcards at Springtide Press.

As the third-largest city in Washington, Tacoma has gained a reputation for supporting the arts. With 67% of the vote, in 2018 we were the first city in the state to pass the sales-tax initiative Tacoma Creates, designed to support arts, culture, and heritage organizations, addressing inequity through and around the arts. Though it’s only in the second year of its implementation, I have seen concrete results. Fifty-one organizations, large and small, received funding in the second year, totaling over $4 million. For the first time, our independent Grand Cinema movie house took its summer camp to the Salishan, a historically underserved, racially and economically diverse neighborhood on Tacoma’s Eastside. Organizations like Tacoma Urban Performing Arts Center (T.U.P.A.C.) and the Asia Pacific Cultural Center have received much-needed infusions of cash for programming, and are likely to continue to do so. Yet, as game-changing as Tacoma Creates has been, it’s a program that largely funds institutions and organizations rather than individual artists.

Classical ballet students at Tacoma Urban Performing Arts Center, founded in 2017 by Kabby Mitchell III and Klair Ethridge. Photo: Jenny L. Miller.

In 2021, mayoral candidate and filmmaker-activist Jamika Scott used “creative economy” as one of the pillars in her campaign. “The strongest asset of Tacoma’s economy is the creative legacy of our city,” she wrote on her website. “We are a city full of creative entrepreneurs and with the right support our creative industry can grow to be the backbone of our local economy.” Though Scott’s campaign was unsuccessful this year, the ethos stands. Can the city build structures and systems with a focus on racial and economic equity? Can we create structures that support representation, sustenance for the marginalized and vulnerable, the undocumented, artists with kids, and artists experiencing housing insecurity?

We wear our nickname, “Grit City,” with pride as a tribute to unions and activists in a city that, as performance artist Anida Yoeu Ali says, “feels true to working-class people.” Many artists in Tacoma — nationally and internationally renowned, both homegrown and transplanted, across a variety of disciplines — juggle full-time jobs with their artmaking. To support them will require a larger concerted effort from other artists, patrons, and community supporters, and the city’s own infrastructure. If one of Tacoma’s greatest assets is creative labor, then the essential question is: Can we keep our artists here? The answer I’ve so far received to this question is largely anecdotal, and it’s not great: The anecdotes all revolve around artists who have moved elsewhere or commute to other cities for their artistic careers.

Installation view of The Kinsey African American Art & History Collection at Tacoma Art Museum. Photo: Steven Miller.

As a rapidly growing city, Tacoma can and should foster meaningful, sustainable connections between the arts and social change, including a reckoning with past mistakes that goes beyond superficial appeasement. As one example of a step in the right direction, some might point to the Tacoma Art Museum’s current exhibition of The Kinsey African American Art and History Collection, which focuses on objects of African-American culture amassed over five decades. For contrast, this is the same museum where artist-activists Christopher Paul Jordan, Jamika Scott, and Jaleesa Trapp protested the lack of Black representation at the nationally traveling Art AIDS America exhibit in 2015, a movement that brought nationwide attention and gave birth to the Tacoma Action Collective. Six years later, the museum is partnering with businesses, artists, and community organizations around the exhibit. They are inviting Black-owned businesses like Campfire Coffee to do pop-up events, and the Hilltop Action Coalition to have conversations about the exhibit. But the question remains: What will happen to these connections and consciousness when that exhibit leaves?

The exhibition opening of The Kinsey African American Art & History Collection at the Tacoma Art Museum. Photo: Amber Trillo.

In a post on the TAM website earlier this year, head curator Margaret Bullock acknowledged that the institution’s collection skews white and male (just 7% of the artists identify as people of color and only 20% as women or female-identified) but underlined that it has earmarked “acquisition funds for at least the next several years solely toward this effort.” A museum representative pointed to several additional indicators of the seriousness of the institution’s commitment to equity, including its support, to the tune of $10,000, of a new Black Lives Matter mural planned in spring 2022 for Tollefson Plaza, a city-owned public space across from TAM. The representative also noted the museum’s years of hosting a community Día de los Muertos celebration and co-hosting of “In the Spirit,” a festival featuring Indigenous artists. The festival is co-sponsored with the Washington State Historical Society and the Museum of Glass and advised by community members, including those from the Puyallup Tribe. (No such recurring arts event exists at TAM for Asian American/Pacific Islander communities.)

Ellaina Lewis singing at Black Splendor at Lakewold Gardens. Photo: Serena Berry.

More comprehensive change is underway elsewhere in Tacoma, led by individual artists and smaller organizations. At the Lakewold Gardens, creative director Joe Williams worked with contemporary Black musicians and composers like Ellaina Lewis and Damien Geter to create Black Splendor, a subset of video concerts within its series Music from Home that highlights Black artistry in the Pacific Northwest. “The performances create a genuine feeling of belonging to the musical experience for every audience member,” says Robert Murphy. “I am honored to have participated as a violinist in Black Splendor, which the community created. It validated my artistic voice.” Pianist and music educator Kim Davenport describes the series as a “unique and vital” accomplishment, adding, “Music from Home celebrates artistry in classical music at the highest level, while also holding accessibility and inclusion as primary values.”

Over at Dukesbay Theater, Aya Hashiguchi Clark and her husband Randy Clark have created a space that practices “color-conscious” casting — staging shows written by artists and featuring characters who reflect the region’s ethnic diversity. Aya has also joined the board at Tacoma Little Theatre, where she has recently recruited people of color to constitute almost half of the board membership. After three years of pushing for this change, she remains optimistic. “It’ll be a snail’s pace, but it’ll happen,” she tells me. “We’re not going back.” As one measure of her seriousness she co-founded Rise Up, a coalition of theater artists in the South Sound that meets with the leadership of larger arts organizations, offering consultation and resources for those who want to pursue diversity, equity, and inclusion work.

Nevertheless, these examples prove what Saiyare Refaei, a muralist and letterpress artist-activist, tells me: “The last four years [in Tacoma] have been a push to diversity, but it’s been up to artists of color to do that push.” Dionne Bonner, a graphic designer, studio artist, and muralist, continues to advocate for more change: “I’m not confident I see myself or my community represented fully in my city.”

The Red Chador by Anida Yoeu Ali, Photography by Masahiro Sugano.

Meanwhile, resources and deeper infrastructure for artists remain concerns. “We need places to show and perform our work,” performance artist Anida Yoeu Ali says. Ali has shown, lived, and traveled globally, with a successful international arts career — but has only been featured in Tacoma arts spaces twice in the five years that she’s lived here. Still, she says, “I have a lot of hope for this town.” The City of Tacoma does have a grant-making system for artists (disclosure: I am a recipient in the current grant cycle), but most of these are relatively small disbursements of a few thousand dollars, tied to a specific project. Ali and Refaei agree that larger amounts of money should go directly to artists; Ali also underlines the need for unrestricted funds, along with affordable studio spaces and places for artists to show and perform, to offset the burden of living expenses.

An increase of resources will be crucial to retaining artists in a city that has recently become one of the hottest housing markets in the nation; pressures of gentrification and displacement are urgent, even as Tacoma still has something of a second-city mentality, in the shadow of Seattle’s larger, more competitive arts scene. (We seem to be perpetually “on the verge” of bursting onto larger arts scenes. I moved here in 2004 and was told — and saw — this “on the verge” perspective a lot.) This isn’t all bad; cartoonist Mark Monlux points to a supportive and collaborative ethos here, noting that “The artists of Tacoma have concern for each other […] they will take the time, make the effort to be not merely available for each other, but active in their lives.”

Will the city also make that effort? “Where there is new development, can we also make space and involve the arts and artists?” Refaei asks. This has happened in Hilltop, the city’s historically Black neighborhood, where organizers have rightfully raised concerns about displacement of the city’s long-term residents as a result of gentrification. The City of Tacoma’s Spaceworks program, known for activating vacant storefronts into art spaces and incubating small businesses, created its first Black Business Incubator cohort this year, encouraging entrepreneurship in Hilltop. And Fab-5, a Hilltop organization for youth artists and the organizers of #DesignTheHill, has brought murals and deep community involvement to the neighborhood in the wake of a massive light rail extension. “[This project] gives us the opportunity to really stake our claim in this place,” says fourth-generation Hilltop resident Stephen Tyrone Whitmore, in a video for #DesignTheHill. Community discussions, planning, and artists have all been part of the development process.

“Overall, I don’t know if Tacoma has ever been a truly viable place for artists to make a living. I wouldn’t know if it’s truly a viable and supportive place for artists with families, or some of our most marginalized community members,” says Fab-5 cofounder, muralist, and long-time Tacoma resident Kenji Hamai Stoll. “Tacoma is viable and supportive for some, and not for others. I was fortunate to have been raised here and connected to lots of local programs and artists. I also had a really stable childhood and family — without these things I don’t know what my artistic trajectory really would have been.”

I’m grateful for Stoll’s long-term, candid, and nuanced view. I share the concerns raised here by my fellow artists. And, like Anida Yoeu Ali, I have a lot of hope for this town.

Poet Christina Vega, the publisher of Blue Cactus Press, has just released a locally authored women and non-binary folks of color anthology. It’s aptly titled We Need a Reckoning, borrowing a line from “New Year’s Eve, 2020” by Tacoma’s current Poet Laureate, Lydia K. Valentine. “Kate Threat, gloria muhammad (our main editor), [and I] chose the title because we felt it is representative of the climate in our community now,” Vega wrote me, “and of what much of the content in the book is asking of readers. It speaks to the idea that we, women of color, demand our stories be heard, that we be seen, and that it is time for change. We need a reckoning of what has [happened and what is] happening, and then we need to take action. This anthology is not a lament, we are not asking for sympathy. Instead, it is an appeal for honest reflection, for change, and ultimately, celebration.”

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Chip Lord, 1974, in front of Ant Farm’s Studio at Pier 40 with a Cadillac Ranch reject. Photo: Doug Michels

There are many points of entry to thinking about a lifetime of making work. We could use linear narrative to retrospectively cast a story, but I’ve not experienced time or memory to be well suited for that frame. We could talk about influences and scaffold a sort of art historical hold for the work one has done, decorated with artists and popular culture and the predominant sentiments of the sixties. We could talk about the present, about San Francisco, which has become synonymous with the uranium hue of technological production. But for the architect and artist Chip Lord, who’s radical collective Ant Farm famously smashed a car into a wall full of burning televisions, perhaps it makes most sense to just think about images — the production of images as a form of movement. -TW

Theadora Walsh: So, you came to San Francisco one year before the summer everyone came out?

Chip Lord: ’66

TW: You were early.

CL: It was the summer before the Summer of Love, which I missed. Then I came back in ’68, for the Halprin workshop. That changed my ambition to be an architect into my ambition to being a countercultural architect.

TW: Was there something specific in the Halprin method?

CL: Well, a sense of collaborative practice. The structure came quite literally from the relationship between Lawrence, a landscape architect, and Anna, a dancer. They were truly collaborative, and it wasn’t didactic in any way. It was a series of exercises for young dancers and architects. Which from the point of view of the architects, was a good idea, I’m not sure the dancers felt the same way. Sometimes it was just movement, very basic movement exercises because the architects were so out of touch with their bodies.

TW: Do you think that interest in movement made it hard to want to design just buildings? In Media Burn there is so much about momentum, there are sketches that indicate the movement of the car and make estimations about how much air it will get. You could interpret that as a kind of dance, the car is being pirouetted, smashed down… making a jump. I like the emphasis you put on really wanting the car to go off a ramp, for it to get air. I think of Nijinsky.

CL: I’ve never thought about that as an influence, but it is possible that the experience of studying movement may have stuck with me, in terms of developing a body knowledge. I think originally Media Burn was more Evel Knievel than Anna Halprin.

TW: He was a performer too, I guess. He had a strong awareness of the way his form was being rendered in space.

CL: Yeah, though when he made his jump at the Cow Palace in 1972 he crashed and was injured.

Drawing by Doug Michels sent to Lord in 1989 as Mail Art. HOC refers to House of the Century, by Lord, Jost, and Michels, Ant Farm, 1973. Photo: TW

TW: It seems like the architecture projects you’ve made have active, moving, living, components. They are kinetic. It was radical when you first did it, and it’s radical now.

CL: Perhaps we are heading towards the post-building, post-architecture world.

TW: I’ve been thinking about this idea that, because of ecological collapse, a new form of houseless-ness will be experiencing immobility. If you can’t physically move the place where you dwell, you won’t have secure housing.

CL: Or, you’ll have to retrofit where you live so it can provide all your food, stream information, and bring you everything you need in a post-automobile world.

TW: That makes me think of the new Volkswagen electric car, which is meant to be a mobile home where you can work and plug into technology. It is great for a disaster.

CL: One thing that is interesting is that for an electric car you don’t need the grill. The grill, for me, has always been the smiling face of the automobile. But the Tesla designers didn’t bother to make an imitation grill.

TW: That’s true, it isn’t animatronic anymore.

CL: Did you see the Roman Coppola version of Media Burn?

TW: Yeah. I couldn’t believe that!

CL: Well, he actually launched the car into the wall of televisions. He had a bigger budget than we did.

TW: It’s a Supergrass music video from the early 2000s, stylized as an exact reproduction of Media Burn. Everyone is wearing the same costumes, and they even reconstruct the same gestures and ersatz press photo opportunities.

CL: He had the video of our event.

TW: I’ve seen many reproductions of Media Burn. I like the viral nature of the work, if you are producing and designing an image then that will always be in motion and always be mobile.

CL: That’s right.

TW: It’s interesting to think about an image’s entrapment in physical mediums. During the pandemic I thought a lot about artwork being contained in physical spaces — shuttered galleries, closed museums. When I think about the decontextualization of images, I also think about the image without a viewer. The museum’s containment of artworks which accrue capital but cannot be seen feels pertinent. When did you start showing things in museum settings?

CL: Well, there is an irony there. We were based in the counterculture and thus predisposed to be against museums, and against galleries. We wanted to make work outside all the existing systems of authentication. But, when given the opportunity, we participated in the first SFMOMA survey of the decade’s performance video and multi-disciplinary medium. While we were outside an establishment, we were happy to be in that show, Space/Time/Sound—1970s: A Decade in the Bay Area (1979), curated by Suzanne Foley.

Chip Lord in the office of the Ant Farm Studio, 1976, self-portrait with toy collection.

TW: Do you think of yourself as an artist or an architect?

CL: That’s such a fundamental question. I think of myself as an artist now, but at the same time I think everything I do is rooted in my training as an architect. I use a structural grid when I make photographic pieces because I care less about the individual image than its juxtaposition in the work with other images.

TW: In an interview with Connie Lewallen, she brought up the work of Nam June Paik in relation to your piece 100 Television Sets, in which a series of televisions of varying ages are arranged chronologically coming out of a swamp, as if caught in evolution. But his work is much more about the physicality of the television, whereas your work is about the image, and the television itself is just a temporary body, serving its purpose as a conduit that is going to get destroyed.

CL: Yes, that’s true with Media Burn, but 100 Television Sets, made earlier, was designed to have three huge brand-new televisions that would be wired and running the three major networks, NBC, ABC, CBS. But our client’s husband, who was paying the bills, didn’t like that idea. It was more about, for me, the idea of plugging in the TVs and just letting them run until they fell apart. The flow of the television programming would lead to collapse.

What we might consider doing is going down to the studio, and I can show you a photo lecture called The Long Goodbye to the Automobile.

TW: Do you perform live while giving the lecture?

CL: I don’t consider it “Performance Art,” but I privilege the images.

• 
  Chip Lord Studio, June 2021. Photo: TW
• 
  100 Televison Sets, 1972, Angleton, Tx. HOC under construction in the distance. Photo: Chip Lord

[We begin the slideshow and for several minutes look at photographs of cars, Fords and Cadillacs, sometimes commenting on the tailfins of particular models. I look around Chip’s studio, the lowest level of his Noe Valley house. Someone once told me that you should judge an artist on how carefully they’ve built out their storage space. The rafters here are meticulously well-organized, holding decades of work. Chip points out a photograph of a Cadillac similar to the one used in Media Burn, which he knows I’ll recognize. We started talking in February last year, spurred by a comment Chip left on an essay I wrote for Open Space, thinking through Steve Seid’s book on Media Burn. That turned into invitations to collaborate artistically, an exchange of ideas, and even Instagram support for particularly good photos posted to our stories.]

CL: After the Halprin workshop, Doug Michels drove out to California and we founded Ant Farm as an “underground practice,” because in San Francisco there were underground newspapers, underground film, underground radio, and we thought we could be the underground architects. We described that to a friend, a graphic designer, and she said, “Oh like that toy I had as a kid, Ant Farm.” As a metaphor it was perfect, and it was a good name for a band, too. We had no clients, but our first big hit was Cadillac Ranch.

TW: That work has had such a funny afterlife. I’ve seen it on social media, on Tumblr, in photographs from people’s travels, and always without context or attribution. The image lives online. How did you have the idea to make Cadillac Ranch?

CL: Well, we had grown up in the ’50s and we were all car nuts as kids. We found a book, The Look of Cars (1966), and in it was an illustration showing the “rise and fall of the fin.” Curtis [Schreier] made it into rubber stamps, and Hudson [Marquez] made sketches that became our stationary. Through the Mail Art network we met a rich Texan, Stanley Marsh 3, who lived in Amarillo, Texas. He invited a proposal and we sent him an architectural drawing. We understood the ridiculous decorative elements of the fins and their cultural baggage.

[Looking at images of Cadillac Ranch, we agree that the tailfins on the nose-down cars look ridiculous, half submerged in the dirt — ass out and lined up in a long row. The cars are helpless, rendered purely sculptural. Their status as luxury items, substitute masculinity, or any notion of freedom is charmingly decapitated. I like talking to Chip about cars because I’ve never understood them. I only got my first car a few years ago, a very old Honda Civic, and it was stolen so many times that in the end I gave it up. He sees something in their aura, their cultural positioning, their architecture that is so abstract to me. It’s like he’s teaching me a foreign language and I’m trying to make the sounds that don’t exist in English.]

TW: It seems tied to this idea that a car is definitional to your identity, right? It sounds like it addresses this aspirational element to desire, which relates to something illusory. Sorry… I’m not a car person.

1974, Cadillac Ranch by Ant Farm (Lord, Marquez, Michels). Reproduction of original 1974 proposal.

CL: When I meet someone I ask, “What do you drive?” It is such a register that defines identity., but that is disappearing with your generation, isn’t it?

TW: We can’t have anything.

CL: Right!

TW: I do know a few people who are retrofitting vans to live inside during the pandemic. It seems like part of the reason San Francisco is emptying out. All of the young tech people are trying to have a van life where they put a bed in their car and work their job remotely. In that case a car is less about identity and more about habitat.

CL: We did that with our Media Van in 1971.

TW: But your van was broadcasting media out of it right?

CL: Not actually broadcasting, but giving the sense that it could broadcast. We just had one Porta-Pak camera/recorder and we could play back in the van.

TW: Media Van is a predecessor to the new deluge of young people adapting to a semi-nomadic existence in which remote work is paired with the expense of contemporary life.

[He skips forward to a picture of the Media Van, a kind of collective vehicle built by Ant Farm to operate as a mode of transmitting and create the aesthetic of broadcasting. The vehicle, here, is a kind of public space — an intermedial tool used to receive and send information.]

CL: This is the 2008 Media Van, commissioned by Rudolf Frieling for a show at SFMOMA called The Art of Participation: 1950 to Now. We revisited the original Media Van, trying to imagine what it could be forty years later. The first thing we did was remove any dependence on fossil fuels. The original Media Van was a form of networking with social communities we were in touch with through the Mail Art network. The 2008 version has similar functions: acquiring media, playing it back, and connecting with social networks.

In the center of the vehicle, we had installed a “media Huqquh,” which people could sit around. This was in November of 2008 and the iPhone had come out in May. Our computer guy, Paul Rauschelbach, hacked the iPhone so the “Huqquh” [designed by Bruce Tomb] would grab a file randomly, a picture or a music file, and add it to a growing digital time capsule.

[We look at a photo of a mock computer interface made by Ant Farm. Some museum visitor’s file, a picture of their dog, moves slowly across the screen, technical information about the image’s size and format serving as an impersonal caption.]

CL: Then it spits out a receipt with the date and file name and offers you a 10% discount in the museum store.

TW: Good deal. Whatever happened to the original Media Van?

CL: The original one is lost, but we made some fictions about it on video. We shot a story that it was “discovered” forty years later at a missile silo in the Marin Headlands. In our second video it lives on in an Amazon-style co-location facility near Reno, Nevada, observed by a rotating surveillance camera.

[The slideshow skips forward to photos of two actors in brown suits, leaning against a sterile office environment. It feels conspiratorial.]

• 
  Chip Lord and Philip Garner, Chevrolet Training Film: The Remake, 1978–1980, single-channel video, black-and-white, with sound, 27 min, dimensions variable; collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund purchase, 2014; © Chip Lord and Philip Garner. Photo: Nancy Reese
• 
  Burial of the Citizens Time Capsule at Artpark, September, 1975, Ant Farm (Chip Lord, Doug Michels, Curtis Schreier). Photo: Doug Michels

CL: Here is Phil Garner, not Pippa yet. Garner wasn’t part of Ant Farm, but rented our studio for a summer. We found a film at the Alameda flea market together that was made by Chevrolet and meant to be circulated to the dealerships to show the sales team how you close a deal. Garner and I made Chevrolet Training Film: The Remake in which Garner plays the salesman and I’m the straight man, the car buyer. That was in 1980; we performed it live several times, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

One amazing fact — when we were invited to show it at the Whitney, Garner’s wife at the time, Nancy Reese, said, “You know they mentioned this dealership is on Long Island, let’s call it up and see if the salesman, Bob Warner, is still there.” Well we found him, he was selling Cadillacs in Manhattan. We invited him to a performance, and he had this surreal experience of coming to the Whitney and seeing this recreation of a video that he had acted in, as an actual salesman.

TW: What did he think of it? It must have been strange to see the reproduction and be invited to consider his work for the dealership as a kind of performance.

CL: If you watch the whole training video, it ends with a panel of managers reviewing the salesman’s performance. We love this line from one of the salespeople, who said, “I think Bob is a real artist, he throws some numbers around here, he confuses the buyer just enough, so they don’t notice he is using financing to take them for thirty-five dollars.”

TW: You must have rescued the film from total obscurity. At the Alameda flea market, where there’s nine hundred thousand movies.

CL: Actually 16 mm film, not video, and of course, not asking any permissions.

[Now it is a picture of Ant Farm lighting a fire in a small USC classroom. The underground architects are all mischievous and out of place in the sterile classroom, grinning and holding gas masks. Chip and I both smile once the picture comes into view. It looks like a picture of being young.]

CL: Another Ant Farm performance, in the early ‘70s, was at a conference of experimental art and technology at USC. Joe Hall and I put on gas masks in one of the classrooms and lit highway flairs beside a cake decorated like an old tire. We turned the lights down and began projecting slides, most of which were also of gas stations. The duration of the piece was that whenever the highway flare burned out, that was the end. When it was over the room was completely empty because of the noxious fumes.

TW: Were the slides being projected through smoke? Did that hold an elongated image? I saw this amazing film, Anthony McCall’s Line Describing a Cone, where a minimal white line is projected against a dark surface. The idea is that it should be shown in a room filled with a smoke machine (or in this case, cigarette smoke), which causes a conical ray of light to be formed in the room. It was for an eviction party.

CL: This was more overtly in your face. We weren’t thinking about the beauty of the projection and we never tested it out. There was no rehearsal. In later years, we were more informed and came to understand that we were performance artists.

TW: Media Burn is very theatrical, but by design it could only be done without practicing.

CL: In 1975, in the summer we did a residency at Art Park in upstate New York, near Niagara Falls. It was an era when land art was becoming very popular.

TW: Though you had already done land art with Cadillac Ranch.

CL: None of the works at Artpark were permanent, the artists would come, make their work, and then dismantle it. So, we made a proposal for a work that would disappear by the end of the summer: We suggested burying a car.

TW: It looks like a hearse.

CL: It was a participatory project. We invited people to make donations to a time capsule we stored inside the Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser station wagon, which we used as the car. Doug sat at a card table in the park with empty suitcases and explained the piece. We also had a Kmart experience where we bought consumer products and magazines. Then we put all the suitcases in the car, sealed it with roofing tar and drove it into the side of a hill. It was supposed to be uncovered in the future, the year 2000, but this innovative program at Artpark only lasted three years. In 2008 they discovered some toxic materials in the soil and got worried about digging into the land. So, as far as I know the car is still buried there.

[We click away from the Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser pressed halfway into a green knoll, covered in dirt, to a series of photos of Chip’s cars. He’s had almost thirty and each demarcates a period of his life. He grew up with them. As we go through the images in eerie digital silence we talk about slides, which would have made a sound in time to the changing images.]

List of the Cars I have Owned So Far, 1983, mixed media drawing. Photo: TW

TW: So, what’s the current car?

CL: 2018 Honda Fit.

TW: That’s what I should get.

CL: It’s not in my fantasy garage, but it is perfect for the city — it Fits in parking spaces that big cars cannot fit into.

[The PowerPoint slideshow is now made up of analog slides, two on the screen at a time. We move through a dozen or so photographs of people standing beside their cars. It feels more personal than other works.]

Chip Lord and Doug Michels, Cars and Owners, 1969-1994, two slide projections, each eighty 35mm slides, dimensions variable; collection SFMOMA, Accessions Committee Fund purchase, 2014; © Chip Lord and Estate of Doug Michels

CL: Cars and Owners, this was never shown publicly, just in our studio. It was like an obsession. Doug Michels and I would set up two slide projectors, side by side, and share images that we’d taken of people with their cars. We liked the way the images, by chance, relate to each other. Cars and Owners begins with a series of shots of cars that we owned, with me on the left, Doug on the right, through like six or eight pairs. We kept this up until the year Doug died, 2003. Ant Farm only lasted ten years, but this sharing of images went on way longer.

And that’s it. That’s The Long Goodbye to the Automobile.

TW: We reached the end of the long goodbye?

CL: Yes.

The post Looking at Pictures: Chip Lord in Conversation with Theadora Walsh appeared first on Open Space.

                                                                      2. Rare rain outside The Bay and its windows and skylights and tent flaps. 

3.  so tired

                                                                                                                                                                                 beat up even, these days, these days i sit on

corner stones

and count the time in quarter tones to ten

4. so i’ll be short. 

First site, 

Death of a snake

Snake on the head

                              Does our work reflect that we are so tired

and that loooooong rest is needed    that there is an altar    to placate mars red peppers that never got cooked on a chipped dish on an ikea step stool?

on a candle the inscribed symbol.                          ‘masculinity’/’male,’ you know     the one arrow/circle      x            surprising there      on the wax

i recently battled them

over fire

right after a snake

un culebrón

una boa puertorriqueña 

a Chilabothrus inornatus

shed its skin above me and landed on my 

head

True story! ask me sometime if we see each other. 

i was looking for shelter in a place

i’ve been away from

to be compromised 

in light of everything

                 UN SER

Difundido

Difuminado

Sumergido

Invitado

Inundado 

Invertido

                   EN LUZ

                                                                                                                                                                                                            A BEING     

Diffused

Blurred

Submerged

Invited

Flooded

Inverted

                                                                                                                                                                                                              IN LIGHT 

Again, i say it it has ended

                                                                                                                                                              Already!

Wrecked, adrift among rotten, hole-filled posts 

so tall, falling over

when the wind blows too hard

Sparks fly from flapping 

slapping wires

and we start                    

                                                                                                                                                                     a fire.

A woman in Florida

teaches me 

from afar

how to shake old Memories out of my low spine

says she used to say 

“Some of us” now says “All of us”

                                                                                                                                         when she speaks about trauma. 

El bebé huele a manzanilla 

por dormir al lado de su papá 

cuyo aliento cargaba flores

por haber tomado té

A las 3 de la mañana esa breve transmisión

es lo más hermoso 

de todo el universo

en todo su tiempo

The baby smells like chamomile

from sleeping next to their father

whose breath carries flowers

for having drunken tea

At 3 a.m. this brief transmission

Is the most beautiful thing

 in all the universe

in all its time

Y así se fue, el fin, hasta que venga otra vez por ahí, así, prendida en llamas, tranquila.

And like that, it passes, the end, until she comes back, alight in flames, chilling.

The post II. an anthropologist he wrote a book, he called it “myths of heaven” appeared first on Open Space.