BARGE’s “Matta-Clark Parks” @ Root Division opening 6/13

MC PARK 3

LEAVE THE CAPITAL

Any capital. Polite no-manners plus
barman of the year claimants = 
quick exit. - The Fall

Opening Reception: Saturday, June 13th, 7-10 pm
Sliding Scale Suggested Donation: $2-$20

Exhibition Dates: June 10-June 27, 2009
Gallery Hours: Wednesdays- Saturdays, 12-4 pm (or by appointment)

Leave the Capital is an exhibition of art and media dealing with the agency of the periphery—beyond political, economic, and media centers. The 13 artists in the show offer a critical mix of observation, confrontation, urban intervention, hybridity, and cathartic celebration in order to assert the self and counter-publics. This is a timely investigation in the face of current economic restructuring. Re-considerations of the role of the public sphere and the individual within larger machines of production are more relevant than ever.

The title is taken from a 1981 song by UK post-punk band The Fall (who in turn are named after the Camus novel The Fall). The song is a starting point from which to investigate how artists address and break off from the need to perform for “Capital,” represented in the widest sense of the word—as money, media, power, rules, lines, roles, etc. The exhibition presents artists negotiating between the demands of the centers of power and the possibilities presented by secondary zones and identities in the Bay Area, Los Angeles, Stanislaus, Amsterdam and elsewhere.

FEATURED ARTISTS:
David Buuck (BARGE)
Zoe Crosher 
Jetske de Boer (S.T.O.P.)
Edmundo de Marchena
Scott Kiernan 
Fang Lu
Dominic Nguyen
Jennifer O’Keeffe 
Kamau Amu Patton
Nancy Popp
Sam Snowden 
Kevin E. Taylor
Chris Treggiari

Curated by: Deric Carner and Jessica Tully

ROOT DIVISION GALLERY
3175 17th Street (at S. Van Ness)
San Francisco, CA 94110
415.863.766
www.rootdivision.org

Site-specific workshop @ Marin Headlands Bunkers 6/21

SITE-BASED PRACTICES

a workshop led by David Buuck & Jessica Tully

Marin Headlands Bunkers

Sunday June 21, 11am-2pm

co-sponsored by Small Press Traffic & the Headlands Center for the Arts

 

Please join writer David Buuck and artist Jessica Tully for a site-specific workshop at the former military bunkers in the Marin Headlands. We will explore a wide range of methods and practices related to site-based writing and art practices, including several on-site exercises and experiments. This workshop is designed for ALL levels of interested writers and artists, to explore how we engage place, site, environment and the political histories therein as writers, artists, and citizens.  We will discuss and explore writing and research techniques as well as much more performative and embodied strategies of site-work, so be prepared to try new ways of thinking, moving, and working!

David Buuck is an alumni artist in residence this June at Headlands Center for the Arts. He is contributing editor at Artweek, and teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute. Recent publications include The Shunt (Palm Press) and Buried Treasure Island, a guidebook printed in conjunction with an installation and audio-tour by BARGE (the Bay Area Research Group in Enviro-aesthetics).

Jessica Tully is a conceptual artist working at the intersection of culture and politics.  From hip-hop water ballet to a rock opera of live construction equipment to voter education drives, her site-specific performances, videos, drawings and campaigns are set within socially charged public spaces. In 2008 she debuted a new stencil series and walking tour entitled Syndicate commissioned by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts for the Bay Area Now 5 triennial exhibition.

Note: We will meet at the Headlands Center Dining Hall at 11 for introductory remarks and head out from there. We will arrange for car-pooling to the site for those who need it. There will be optional pre-workshop readings. Bring notebook, camera, sunscreen and/or hat, outdoor shoes, layers for cold, etc. The Marin Headlands is home to several former military installations, including the bunkers, the Nike Missile Site, and the current home of the Headlands Center for the Arts.

$40 general public / $30 students and members of Headlands Center for the Arts and/or Small Press Traffic.

Class is limited to 20 participants.

Sign up online by using paypal from sptraffic.org

or make arrangements through email at smallpresstraffic@gmail.com

“17 Reasons Why” Closing Reception/Performance: Sat 5/30 4-6pm

Please join Mission17 and BARGE for the closing reception of "17 Reasons Why", the Visual/Cultural Criticism Residency exhibit. As part of the closing event, David Buuck will lead a performance and tour of the show, which will include live readings, video, and interactive street performance. As a culmination of the residency and public programs, a free micro-catalog of the exhibition will be available for all visitors. Food and drink will be available - hope to see you there!

Saturday May 30, 4-6pm.
Mission17 Gallery
2111 Mission Street
Suite 401
San Francisco 94110

This Sat in LA: performance-talks

I’ll be at the Outpost for Contemporary Art this Saturday 5/23, along w Liz Glynn-

details here.

Wed. May 20: BARGE & Mission17 event with Erick Lyle, Kari Orvik, & Nick Pagoulatos

Please join Mission17 Gallery & BARGE as we host another event in conjunction with the current “17 Reasons Why” exhibit, an ongoing residency exploring the cultural politics of the Mission district, hosted by David Buuck & BARGE. Writers, artists, & activists Erick Lyle, Kari Orvik, and Nick Pagoulatos will present recent work related to the Mission District and anti-gentrification struggles in San Francisco. There will be food, drinks, and conversation as well, so please come by!

Erick Lyle is a writer, musician, activist, and zine editor. He is the author of *On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City* (Soft Skull), and since 1991 has edited the influential zine *Scam.* He has published work in a wide variety of cultural and political publications, performed in numerous bands, and worked with the Coalition on Homelessness in San Francisco. He spent much of the 90’s hopping freight trains around the country and living without electricity in abandoned buildings. For most of 15 years, now, though, he has resided mostly in San Francisco.

Kari Orvik is a San Francisco photographer whose work in low-income housing led her to start creating public portraiture projects. Like a portable JC Penney, she has set up on-site photo studios in SRO’s, on rooftops and on the street, where community members can get formal portraits for their own use. Displaying these portraits in public spaces has been a way to recognize as members of the community everyone who lives, works, hangs out in or passes through our public spaces. In 2007 she received a San Francisco Arts Commission Grant for her photo and video project Mission Portrait Studio.

Nick Pagoulatos is the Community Planning & Development Director at Dolores Street Community Services, and the Coordinator for MAC, the Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition, whose goal is to stop the displacement of working class people in the Mission District and San Francisco. He has also worked as the Project Director for St. Peter’s Housing Committee and at the Mission Economic Development Agency on community planning, economic development, and land use issues. With a background in housing law and tenant advocacy, he holds a J.D. from the New College of California.

Wed. May 20, 6-8pm

Mission17 Gallery

2111 Mission Street @ 17th, 4th floor

THE SHUNT

The Shunt provacatively explores one of our most ordinary experiences of social discomfort—embarassment for the flailing comedian and his all too visible affective labor—in a strikingly intelligent and utterly heartbreaking way. For all its acerbic tonality, The Shunt’s affective agenda is thus the exact opposite of ironic cynicism, which is one of this brilliantly discomforting book’s most delightful surprises.

                                                                                                  —Sianne Ngai

With its stutters, fractures, puns, sarcasms, and ironies, The Shunt is part of a cluster of books recently written by US poets attempting to understand what it means to live in a country that is constantly bombing other countries. But with its relentless attention to the group psychosis that this state of siege induces in US citizens, The Shunt is also something sui generis. This is your brain on war.

                                                                                                   —Juliana Spahr

available now from Palm Press. Excerpt here. Support independent presses!

Reason 8

Because certain privileged vantage points of seeing can be in uneasy relation with modes of surveillance and paranoiac methods of interpretation…

How do the desires of visual and cultural criticism to ‘capture’ its content and render it into some legible form coexist with the limits of one’s training and perspectives? How are forms of visual criticism complicit with the forces of spectatorship or academic discourse? 

Taking a Reading: tripod, cameras, audio

(& late at the office, as I was working on the question of framing spectatorship & talking with Kari Orvik about the proliferation of surveillance cameras in the Mission, I looked out the window & realized that with the sun down & the lights up, it was I who was being watched, on display in the gallery for those across the street, an unwitting work of social sculpture…)

Reason 9

Because how we see the landscape and environment around us is framed by the conditions through which such seeing can take place…

How do our habituated ways of seeing limit what we are drawn to in a landscape or vista, and what gets erased, ignored, pushed out of the frame? What kinds of counter-framings can help provoke new forms of seeing and attention?

Reason 3

Reason 3 : On the Case

Because everyday movement through a neighborhood contributes to our critical understanding of place—the routes and roots, the enticements and hauntings—and how we navigate such spaces helps shape our mental maps of the urban landscape…

How does moving through a site, encountering the street-level visual culture through the prisms of its materiality and its diverse inhabitants, re-frame our notions of place? What vernacular modes of understanding produce what kinds of maps? How does psycho-geographic practice provide the basis for a critical rendering of place? What visual and cultural clues do we follow, and towards what ends?

On the Case 3: performance video, w/improvised text, April 09. 

On the Case 1: (after Lisa Mee) performance video, w/improvised text, April 09

more here

More Reasons

another visitor’s (unsigned) contribution:

“saint mornings earth the street side of piss and aluminum spies some random junkies jagged crest crusts stowing prostitutes over the pockets rages meanwhile urine soaks ambitions cracks into hopes and shit and vomit into flip flopped feet (rage) lost murals gaudy sunlight mirror garbage and wind automobiles dinosaur street walkers $1.99 pants jackets socks boots lemons bananas avocados night more hoodies and gumball toy machines spit treasure tight pants keep falling off somehow streets belch used snack bags baby carriages shoves burritos into cigarettes shot ring everyones doorbells more stoops empty palm fronds crash eager for cement synchronize the mission of this mission”