PASSIVE/AGGRESSIVE

Southern Exposure’s 2nd Public Art and Urban Intervention Day

JUROR: Jeannene Przyblyski, Dean of Academic Affairs, SFAI

Saturday, December 5, 2009‚ 11am to 5pm

Location: Sites throughout the Mission District

Selected Public Art/Urban Intervention Artists

Steven Barich

BARGE

Arianna Davalos

Christian Frock presents Invisible Venue

Packard Jennings

SoEx’s Youth Advisory Board (YAB)

Chris Treggiari and Jessica Watson

Linda Trunzo

Heather Van Winckl

Victoria Wagner

Jackson Wang

Situate yourself in the public realm for this day of urban interventions and public art projects. The PASSIVE/AGGRESIVE Public Art/Urban Interventions Day presents work by artists using the city as a platform for creativity and expression. A map locating these projects will be available soon at www.soex.org or pick one up at Southern Exposure and start exploring.

———————————

BARGE, Groundbreaking
822 Alabama St. (vacant lot behind Atlas Café) – 11AM to 5PM

BARGE will enter a vacant privately owned fenced-off lot and begin reframing it as a public park. The initial groundbreaking ceremony will be the daylong excavation of a ‘gash’ in the land, symbolically ‘liberating’ the buried potential of privatized space that could be re-purposed for public use. Instead of making earthworks we will be *doing* earth-work, foregrounding the collaborative labor required to reclaim the commons in the midst of gentrification pressures and the affordable housing crisis. Handouts will be available throughout the day, with hopes of producing a temporary and autonomous public artwork by the end of the day.

Post Brothers Present:

EXERCISES IN SEEING

a one night only exhibition held entirely in the dark

Saturday, December 5th, 2009. 9 PM – 6 AM.  Free and open to the public.

Queen’s Nails Projects : 3191 Mission St, San Francisco, California.

A free audio guide by David Buuck will be available as a limited edition CD and will be downloadable at queensnailsprojects.com

Featuring projects by:

Jesse Ash (UK) Olivier Babin (FR) Nina Beier (DK) Francesca Bennett & Nicolas Matranga (CA/NL) Raymond Boisjoly & Ryan Peter (CA) Liudvikas Buklys (LT) Deric Carner (US) Etienne Chambaud (FR) Brian Clifton (US) Torreya Cummings (US) Dina Danish (EG/NL) Gintaras Didžiapetris (LT) Rosie Farell (UK) Isola & Norzi (IT) Seth Lower (US) Benoit Maire (FR) Darius Mikšys (LT) Tegan Moore (CA) Elena Narbutaitė (LT) Daniel Oates Kuhn (US/CA) Kamau Amu Patton (US) Mandla Reuter (DE) Snowden Snowden (US) Gareth Spor (US) David Stein (US) Daniel Turner (US) Freek Wambacq (NL) Jen Weih (CA)  Christine Wong Yap (US)

“Is not vision itself—seeing abysses?” - Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

One cannot be certain that they have seen the Exercises In Seeing exhibition, but they may have heard about it from its numerous audio guides, whose authors did not see it either. Apparently, the exhibition escaped visual perception completely. Originally curated by Valentinas Klimašauskas and Jonas Žakaitis, a series of artworks first disappeared at Tulips & Roses in Vilnius, Lithuania, and then subsequently vanished at The Royal Standard in Liverpool, UK. Now at San Francisco’s Queen’s Nails Projects, the critical enterprise Post Brothers has turned the lights off, inviting over 30 local and international artists to test the aesthetic and conceptual potentials of the dark. For one night only, Queen’s Nails Projects will become ”terra incognita”—a dark space on the map, a blind spot in our vision for impossible projections and amplified sensations. Here, rules are nullified, orders undermined, negation celebrated.

An “inhibition” rather than an “exhibition,” all of the works in this paradoxical display are presented without the aid of gallery lighting. Despite this predicament, the multidisciplinary projects elicit alternative means of understanding through their visual lack; they chart absence as much as presence, and their works linger in the gaps of perception. Some of the artists have chosen to place an already existing work in this cave, extending and compromising their artwork’s critical capacity by purging its perceptual palette. Others have contributed new projects that will disappear for their first appearance; their very existence becomes dependent on blind encounter within this treacherous void. Headless sculptures, encrypted transmissions, and familiar objects vocalize missing truths, creating a correspondence between the shadow and the real, stretching the encounter of form to its lineaments. While some artists nefariously throw caution in the wind, others push the limits of caution itself, teasing our anxieties and trust. Forbearers range from surrealist and conceptual propositions on the nature of art and perception, to the use of negation in philosophy and science, to many of the works of James Joyce (where lights going out allows characters to see clearly for the first time), to the movie ‘Les Amants Du Pont-Neuf,’ where a blind woman sneaks into the Louvre at night to experience the works firsthand. In lieu of standard and instructive documentation, writer David Buuck has provided an audio guide to orient the viewer. However, as he has not seen any of the works, his directions through this nocturnal vacuum may mislead the audience into dimensions unknown. Exercises In Seeing will be an examination of darkness, a probing of immateriality, an inquiry into invisbility, a venture in non-knowledge, a scrutiny of sensitivity, an undertaking in underexposure, a demonstration of disappearence, a movement into the unknown, the (d)evolution of vision.

Various responses to the EconVergence Conference in Portland last month:

CA Conrad & Frank Sherlock (scroll down to Oct 18)

Rob Halpern, Kaia Sand, & David Wolach

David Wolach & Elizabeth Williamson

& my own notes

thanks to all–

Excerpts from short & (rushed) Powerpoint talk at Rising Tide Conference, Stanford 4/09

I’d suggest turning the sound off, but check out the Student-Alumni Action Group for more details. The forced bleeding by the administration this last year stands alongside the crises in the UC system & the more general adjunctivizing of the cognitariat here & elsewhere…

The Berkeley Art Museum has brought (back) Fernando Botero’s “Abu Ghraib Series” so thought I’d re-visit my review of the (troubling, complicated, urgent, problematic, etc) 2007 exhibit of the paintings. They had originally been displayed in a wing at the UC-Berkeley Doe Library, sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies, under what felt like heavy security for a library show & what I remember at the time seemed to be an air of (somewhat manufactured?) ‘controversy’ (the buzz was that the works ended up in the bland Doe alcove since the BAM wasn’t able to protect against some imagined protests against the paintings, though that may very well have been apocryphal…) — anyways, worth a visit regardless…

How do we respond to images of torture? What is our responsibility, if any, to engage the modes of spectatorship that such images seem to demand of us? Who are “we” when we look at photographs from Abu Ghraib, from Guantanamo Bay, from Beirut or Basra or the many other contemporary sites of political and military violence? Is it enough to merely register our disgust, while demanding that “everyone” should have to see such images? If such images are presumed to be powerful enough to change public opinion, then how are “our” own (educated, enlightened, liberal) opinions and feelings challenged by the kinds of photographs that came out of Abu Ghraib? What role can art have in mediating such issues, by engaging representational and aesthetic practices to take on the images within the visual realm?

These questions were put to the test in the recent exhibition of Fernando Botero’s “Abu Ghraib” series of paintings and drawings, hosted by the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Featuring several large and ambitious works, as well as a noticeable degree of exhibition security, the exhibition highlighted a general concern for the delicacy of the subject matter (and the politics related to it), as well as a broader desire by diverse audiences to directly engage the potent, if often conflicting, thoughts and feelings aroused by the troubling images that have appeared from Abu Ghraib and elsewhere during the ongoing American wars and occupations.

Botero, famous for his corpulent figures and gentle humor, departs here from the neo-baroque to a more rigorously canonical approach to the contemporary. His portraits of prisoners—of bodies in pain and mute suffering—are tenderly depicted with a “masterly” use of paint and light in a clear nod to Renaissance-era painting and its historical legacies in Christian allegorical painting, Latin American portraiture, and German expressionism. The bulk of the paintings in the exhibition feature one or two blindfolded detainees, their arms restrained behind their backs, in evident pain, fear, and disorientation. The figures tend to be shown in mostly classical formation—centered in the canvas, against a fairly empty background depicting the jail cell or infamous open hallways featured in so many of the released Abu Ghraib photographs. While the colors are generally muted, splashes of reds and browns and maroons hint towards the blood and dirt covering the bodies of the prisoners and spread on the concrete floors. These marks of violence are rendered even more forcefully in the drawings accompanying the larger canvasses, where charcoal smudges and sudden slashes of color present themselves as a kind of painterly violence against otherwise more formalist figurations of the prisoners, as if these sketches required a kind of visual debasement in order to reveal the violence depicted therein.

While a few images depict fierce, barking dogs, and at least one shows a prison guard, the bulk of the paintings and drawings focus on the body of the prisoners. Large, fleshy, bloodied and bruised; variously blindfolded or hooded, tied and restrained; these bodies reveal gruesome evidence of the shameful atrocities we now know to have been committed against the detainees of Abu Ghraib and elsewhere by U.S. forces. While Botero avoids any clear representation of national identity or specific contextual references, it is clear that his paintings stand as an indictment of such violence, as well as an invitation (if not an insistence) for us to look—to witness the violence done in “our” name, and perhaps to begin to understand the travesties depicted in a way that only art can provoke. At the same time, Botero’s paintings gesture towards a grander narrative of historical violence, of the dignified suffering of individuals throughout history, as well as that narrative of art history in which the engaged artist responds to such violence with images of witness and protest.

Critics such as Arthur Danto have praised the work, primarily along the lines that such paintings help us to better feel and understand such suffering, to evoke the human sympathy that can result from the empathetic gesture of shared humanity offered us through such images. Others have praised Botero’s use of Western traditions of allegory and Christian iconography to bring the Abu Ghraib images into a longer tradition of image-making, where the suffering of the body becomes a spiritual matter, a universalizing experience of corporeality that goes above and beyond the banality of “everyday” horror that we find depicted in the Abu Ghraib photos. In this reading, painting and other forms of artistic representation can accomplish things that the more banal and vernacular photographs from the prisons cannot—to restore dignity and humanity to the victims, while challenging viewers to confront the very degradation of that humanity at the hands of the torturers. Further, painting allows us the space of contemplative seeing, over and against the instantaneity that vernacular digital photographs proffers, often making it difficult to move beyond the raw facticity of what is framed there to a considered response.

I would like to suggest, however, an alternate reading of these works, in order to think more broadly about the limits of certain kinds of representational strategies in the face of these and similar contemporary images of violence and torture. By appropriating the Abu Ghraib images into a Western art historical tradition of Christian allegory and representations of sanctified suffering, these works tend to universalize the historical particularities of the contemporary modes of torture and image-making. The suggestion that such narratives and canonical forms of painting are the best avenues for engaging such imagery strips the photographs (as well as the victims) of their much more dynamic, contradictory, and non-Western (and non-Christian) contexts. Perhaps most crucially, by bringing the Abu Ghraib images into the Western art tradition (the very move for which many critics have lauded him), Botero risks provincializing the photographs within a discursive regime that “we” safely understand and are not challenged by. (It also allows viewers to safely engage in the kinds of voyeurism we might otherwise disavow when looking at the photographs, for with Botero we are seduced instead by the horrible beauty of the flesh, the paint, the light.) It should be noted that the artist’s intentions, however laudable and sincere, are ultimately beside the point; while I have little doubt that Botero chose to engage the Abu Ghraib images out of the same kinds of anger and protest that most of world shares with him in response to such images, the work itself ultimately remains within an art historical discourse that does more to salve the well-intentioned liberal conscience than it does to provoke one to consider one’s complicity in the kinds of violence and voyeurism at play in such images. Indeed, the sympathy we are invited to partake of is with the victim of torture and violence. Botero largely leaves the prison guards (here exclusively male, if seen at all) out of the frame, though it is those (American) guards who are a more troublesome “we” to encounter, if not identify with.

Further, the Abu Ghraib photographs themselves seem to partake of a new form of image-making and representational practice. Alongside the increasing wealth of vernacular images from digital cameras, cell phones, and other portable devices that have provided us with counter-narratives in the image wars currently being waged as part of the broader wars on terror, these photographs exemplify the kinds of unscripted image-making that reveal the largely hidden truths of our militaristic culture. I don’t mean to suggest that the mere fact of these being “homemade” and unofficial images somehow marks them as formally unique, but rather that in the broader historical context of war and politics in the twenty-first century, the kinds of images that might yet burst the near-total hegemony of spectacle in the global image-world are those images such as the Abu Ghraib photos that simultaneously shock and confuse us. Even as “we” might “know” such torture is occurring—and reports of torture at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and elsewhere had been reported for months prior to the release of the photos—there is something in these photos that goes beyond the mere making-visible of the heretofore hinted-at or unknown. Certainly there is truth to the idea that in the contemporary image-world, photographs hold more power than language to change public opinion about wars, and that the primary issue of the Abu Ghraib photographs should therefore be one of censorship vs. dissemination, or the responsibility of Americans to see these images, as if only such revelation could shock everyday citizens out of what elites presume is their ignorance to the realities of war. (Thus Rumsfeld’s initial response to the photos’ public release being to forbid cameras among the guards, as if it were the images that were the crime, not the acts depicted in them.) However, what I wish to propose is that the Abu Ghraib photographs also challenge the educated, liberal Western viewer as well, not merely at the level of conscience or personal response, but in their very travesty of social forms of representation. There simply is no stable taxonomy by which we might begin to categorize and understand these images, no solid aesthetic discourse that would explain them in terms by which we enlightened antiwar citizens and critics could safely domesticate them. We must recall that the cynical response to images of war, violence, and torture—the “this doesn’t surprise me” or the “these are (good, important) images of bad things!” responses—are, while understandable and necessary in today’s climate, nonetheless also tactics of distancing, that allow us to once again look away, to swiftly categorize the images and move on to the next onslaught of imagery and information from the media spectacle. Unlike Botero’s paintings, the Abu Ghraib photos slander the kinds of social forms that we expect from the contemporary regimes of representation—not only by their abhorrent content, but by the forms of vernacular representation themselves. Evidence of torture, self-conscious stylizations, suggestions of pornographic and ‘trophy’ imagery, the tourist’s scrapbook snapshot, the scenes staged specifically in order to be photographed—these and other contradictory semiotic practices overwhelm the simple reduction of these images to the documentary or evidentiary.

Ultimately, it will take artists, critics, and everyday image-consumers to construct new idioms of visual criticism by which to engage such images in a manner that attends to the complexities of such travesties while at the same time risking the same kinds of confused and contradictory responses in our own politics and protests, that might move beyond the necessary exclamations of disgust and/or empathy, towards active dismantling of the image-worlds and militaristic policies that give birth to these new forms of torture and image-making. 

April 2007 

(slightly different versions originally published in Artweek & later War and Peace)

Fri 9/25 – Belladonna AdFemPo Conference talk, CUNY Grad Center, New York

Fri/Sat 10/2-3 – Econvergence Conference – poetry reading (Fri) & BARGE talk (Sat), along with PACE action.

Tue 10/6 – Reading & talk @ Evergreen State, Olympia, WA 

Wed 10/7 – Reading @ Subtext, Seattle

also: “Learn the Letter” in new issue of Bombay Gin

& Stan Apps’ review of The Shunt in new issue of Jacket

Thur 7/16 @ Books & Bookshelves, SF, with Alli Warren, 730pm

Fri 7/17 Palm Press Event @ Poetic Research Bureau, LA, with Rob Halpern, Dana Teen Lomax, Harold Ambramowitz, & Kristin Palm, 7pm

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-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