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A Situation Where Art Might Happen: John Baldessari on CalArts

Portrait of John Baldessari. Courtesy of the California Institute of the Arts Institute Archive.

CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: Can you describe the program at CalArts? Because it was relatively raw then.

JOHN BALDESSARI: Yeah. Well, it’s easy to go back now and try to sort out the chaos, but at the time it seemed totally chaotic.

CK: Where was it in 1970?

JB: In Burbank. It was the Catholic girl’s school. Villa Cabrini.

CK: Villa Cabrini?

JB: Yeah. Because the new building wasn’t finished. And then it was a near disaster because of the earthquake, and the earthquake stopped right at the golf course right next to CalArts. The building wasn’t harmed, and we were able to open then the next year. But— I don’t even know where to begin. Well, let me start with the first day, let’s say. [laughs]

CK: That’s a good place.

JB: We drove up with Max Kozloff, who was on the first faculty, and we drove into the parking lot, and we looked around, and I would say 90 percent of the plates were New York and New Jersey. And then you realize that this was going to be a sort of total import of New York culture in California.

CK: Faculty or students or both?

JB: Well, I guess both, you know. And then we both laughed about it and said, “Well, here we go.” What had happened, in fact, was that the various deans were mostly out of New York, and they got teachers that they knew, mostly from New York, and the teachers brought their graduate students, mostly, and so.— This was also a time when new schools were popping up, I don’t know how many a year. And there was this band of nomadlike students and teachers that would go from one hip school to the next hip school. And I think that CalArts was the next hip school to migrate to. And so they all descended. [laughs] And there was just all this hype around, you know, who’s going to be the next Black Mountain College in alternative education, and, you know, blah, blah, blah. There was a lot of underground word about it. And I think every crazy in the world descended the first year. There was just utter chaos. But out of chaos, quite often there’s a lot of order going on. It’s order that one should distrust usually.

CK: Um-hum.

JB: But you could— In thinking again about the first year, you begin to see the handwriting on the wall about what was going to happen, because there was a great deal of excitement for a moment, when it looked like Herbert Marcuse was going to come up and join the faculty from UCSD. And he was willing. And the trustees said no. They didn’t want all the bad, bad rep. And so you could see the beginning of the end sort of right there.

I mean, looking back. You couldn’t have seen it then, of course. Another thing, rather, that was very hard for me to come to grips with is that coming from teaching situations that evaluated students with grades, all of a sudden you’re in a situation where there are no grades. And it was always sort of a given, and you realize how much classes depend on grades as sort of like a punishment, you know. And here—

CK: To keep people in line.

JB: Yeah, exactly. And so…there was no curriculum. One didn’t assign, let’s say, class problems or what have you, and there was no reason for a student to stay in your class if he or she didn’t want to. Well, I mean, we know now. All of a sudden, a few contracts weren’t renewed because nobody would go to the teachers’ classes. “Well, I think the person’s boring,” or “Too much of an autocrat,” or for whatever reasons, right, you know. And so that was unusual. And then there was a lot of money around that first year. Every class got pin money of fifteen hundred dollars. It doesn’t sound like a lot but—

CK: Again, that would go a long way.

JB: Yeah, yeah. This is per class, you see, for incidentals.

CK: Incidentals.

JB: Plus there was a fifty-thousand-dollar-a-year fund, student administrated, to give grants to students for projects that might take unusual expense—

CK: Wow.

JB: —that they could make, put in application for. The equipment we had was unbelievable. I remember portapaks—you know, portable video cameras—that’s what they called them at the time. Which are pretty unusual, period. You know, we had 25 of them. And students could check them out. The equipment policy was so lax, there was incredible rip-off. There was just no monitoring. Allan Kaprow actually noticed this guy was just building this giant box in the shop, and you didn’t pay much attention to it. And each day he walked by, and then one day he sort of looked in, and this guy was filling it full of equipment he was just going to mail back to where he came from. [laughs] And so there was a lot of loss that way, but in a way the best reading of that you can be, it’s like if a book is stolen from a library, it’s great, you know, it’s being put to use.

The school was supposed to be cross-disciplinary, but the architecture just really inhibits that, because it’s all corridors and doors and so on. Inasmuch as it was encouraged, I don’t think it was ever that successful. I think it’s a little scary for students to try to collapse into another school. Although there seemed to be trade-offs going on. If a student wanted to learn something in the film school, he would hang out over there—or she—and begin to trade things. The student might do some sets, whatever, and the trade-off would be that you would get to use a camera and crew or something like that. Another good thing was that the place was open around the clock, so you didn’t have to turn on creativity at eight o’clock in the morning and stop at five. We were very relaxed about living in the studio and sort of winked at it, so students that had very little money could just live and work in the same space. We had studio space for everyone, and every graduate student had a scholarship pretty much.

CK: About how many art students were in it?

JB: I think roughly about, oh, maybe a hundred to a hundred and thirty were tops. Of those maybe 30, 35 would be graduate students. There was no curriculum, as I had mentioned, and I even suggested—and we tried it for one year—that students could propose any course that they thought would be necessary, and we would find an instructor for it. That met with moderate success, and I guess students were still authoritatively bound. [laughs] Feeling that adults knew best. And we had some unusual courses. I think one of the most bizarre ones that comes to mind was a course on joint rolling.

CK: Joint rolling?

JB: Yeah, we actually had it listed. And we had another one taught by a sociologist who was on the critical studies faculty, and that class was in session anytime that he encountered a student on campus. So in other words, no fixed time. Rather Socratic. [laughs]

John Baldessari, The Pencil Story, 1972-3. Color photographs, and colored pencil on board, 22 x 27 ¼ in. Courtesy of John Baldessari.

CK: How did the infamous Post Studio class—

JB: I was hired as a painter and was a bit frustrated. You know, I really didn’t want to do that, and there were other painters that had been hired, Allan Hacklin, John Mandel.

CK: You hadn’t been painting for five years at that point.

JB: But I guess they didn’t know what else to call me. [laughs] So I went to Paul Brach and I said, “Listen, this is really kind of silly and makes me uncomfortable. Can I devise a class that’s more in keeping with what I’m thinking about?” And he said, “Sure, make me a proposal.” And I thought about it and thought about it, and tried to bring some structure into it, and I thought about calling it conceptual art, but that seemed too narrow and too prescribed. I think I owe the phrase, the title Post Studio, to Carl Andre. I know I didn’t coin it. But it seemed to be more broadly inclusive, that it would just sort of indicate people not daubing away at canvases or chipping away at stone, that there might be some other kind of class situation. And so I elected to use that. And it seemed to work.

CK: So how was the class organized?

JB: Structured?

CK: Yeah.

JB: Basically, I tried to give them sort of a brief history of contemporary art, so they could see that the things I was interested in didn’t come out of the blue sky—that there was some continuity to it all. So a liberal use of slides and overhead projectors instead of books. And since I was on the road a lot in Europe and New York doing shows, I would bring back catalogs, magazines, and talk about the stuff I’d seen. These students had probably the quickest access to information of any art school in the US, I would wager. They didn’t have to wait for it to come into the magazines. And plus the visiting artists. I would have at least one or two a week talking there. And field trips. But not necessarily art related, you know: going into the things that introduced them to culture in the broadest sense, like going to Forest Lawn, or the Hollywood Wax Museum, or what have you. And a lot of times just anything to get out of the studio. One of my tricks was that we’d have a map up on the wall, and somebody would just throw a dart at the map, and we would go there that day. [laughs] They could take their video cameras and still cameras, and do whatever they wanted in just staying out there. Try to do art around where we were.

CK: Was the availability of equipment at CalArts influential in your own work?

JB: Yes, of course. Because this is one of the reasons students and teachers align themselves with an institution where they have access, right? Yeah, sure, I had access to video equipment, film equipment, and so on, sure. CK: And you hadn’t done any of that before CalArts? Video especially.

JB: No video. I started video there, yeah. And film.

CK: What colleagues on the faculty—either permanent faculty or guest/visiting faculty—were of particular import to you?

JB: Well, I literally, by that time, I sort of was the sort of Cupid between the art world and CalArts. Or the pimp. Or whatever you call it. [laughs]

CK: Cupid or pimp.

JB: You know, I invited everybody I met that seemed interesting to come out in any way they could, and I would not sort of take no for an answer. If they’d say, “Well, I can only come out for a day,” I’d say, “Come for a day.” But if they didn’t have enough money, I would arrange other gigs around town for them, with other colleagues or what have you. I guess the most reticent one was Sol LeWitt. He said no, he didn’t want to go to any teaching institution. And I said, “Well, how about we could meet in a local bar?” He said, “Oh, that would be fine.” So we just hung out in the local bar all day and I talked to him, drank beer. But I mean, that was the whole mistake I could see schools were making, you know, one, if they even thought about artists, they would have to be there on their terms.

CK: Yeah, right. Five, six hours.

JB: I always, I just figured the important thing was to get the artist at all costs. I mean, any that you could manage or any way you could do it. I would pick them up at the airport; I would find places for them to stay. You know, anything. Yeah, I was a pimp, if you think about it. [laughs]

CK: And who among students that you had were—if there were any—who were important to your work?

JB: To my work? That’s probably hard to— There was a certain group of artists and a lot of them moved down here to Santa Monica, where I was living, which was also good. David Salle, for one, moved right down here. And Jim Welling and Matt Mullican immediately come to mind. And then I encouraged them to get places where they could have studios as well, so that began to happen. And then when that began to happen, I began to schedule classes, each week a different studio, so we could meet and see the work that was going on and what have you. And then, there was this trade-off I told you of people working on various people’s work. So I would help on students work when they needed help and vice versa, and— Oh, and the other important thing, too, is an attitude I tried to develop, was that you were an artist when you walked in the door. We’d break down this relationship of student and teacher. We just had more years on them, that was all, but we fully accepted them as artists, and that helped a lot, too. The teaching didn’t stop when the day was over, class was over, or what have you. Students either would be visiting me or I would be visiting them. 

 CK: Is there any specific relationship or types of relationships that you see between your work as a teacher and your work as an artist? 



JB: The reason I got into teaching was that it was the closest thing to art I could be doing to make a living; it wasn’t art, and it wasn’t actually teaching. And then I just decided, “Well, listen, it looks like I’m going to be doing this most of my life, and I’m going to have fun doing it,” so I decided to make it as much like art as I could, given the parameters of the teaching situation. I finally think it came to a point like that, that one will loop back on through the other, that my art would be sort of an example or illustrative or a metaphor, for what things I was dealing with in class. And I was going at my class much like I would do art, which was basically trying to be as formed as possible but open to chance. [laughs]

John Baldessari, still from Teaching A Plant the Alphabet, 1972. Black and white video, 19 min. Courtesy of John Baldessari.

CK: You know, I think specifically of— I don’t know if I have the right name of the tape, but the Teaching a Plant the Alphabet. Is that what it’s called?

JB: Yeah.

CK: The first time I saw that tape it was—

JB: The stupidest idea in the world.

CK: It was a long time ago. No, but the first I thought was, I wonder which of his students was the plant? [laughs]

JB: Well, that’s another tape called Teaching a Vegetable the Alphabet. [laughs] No. Well, the whole idea was to raise the question what do you do in an art school? And you say, “Well, what courses are necessary to teach?” and that is question begging in a way, because you can say, “Well, can art be taught at all?” And, you know, I prefer to say, “No, it can’t. It can’t be taught.” You can set up a situation where art might happen, but I think that’s the closest you get. Then I can jump from there into saying, “Well, if art can’t be taught, maybe it would be a good idea to have people that call themselves artists around. And something, some chemistry, might happen.” And then the third thing would be that to be as non-tradition-bound as possible, and just be very pragmatic, whatever works. You know, and if one thing doesn’t work, try another thing. My idea was always you haven’t taught until you see the light in their eyes. I mean, whatever. Extend your hand, that’s what you do. Otherwise, you’re like a missionary, delivering the gospel and leaving. [laughs]

Excerpted from East of Borneo. This is an edited version of a much longer oral history interview in the public domain. To read the entire transcript click here.

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CalArts Admissions Bulletin, 1973-74

Courtesy of the California Institute of the Arts Institute Archive

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After Benning, after Math: 12, 13 and counting...

by Dick Hebdige

“If each generation were allowed and expected to build its own houses, that simple change, comparatively unimportant in itself, would imply almost every reform which society is now suffering for. I doubt whether even our public edifices—our capitols, statehouses, courthouses, city-halls and churches—ought to be built of such permanent materials as stone or brick. It were better that they should crumble to ruin once in twenty years or thereabouts, as a hint, to people to examine and reform the institutions which they symbolize.” — Holgrave, Hope Party reformer, painter and practitioner of the new art of daguerrotypography in Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel, House of the Seven Gables (1851).

Email sent August 5 2010:

Dear Amy, I just left a rambling heads up on your voice mail to the effect that I'm now back in Joshua Tree after a brief stay with James Benning at his place in the High Sierras circa 1846 (no internet or cell phone coverage, no answer machine, no fancy victuals e.g. bread, eggs, etc). As a consequence of falling off the grid and ending up in Donner Party land, I didn't retrieve your messages till yesterday afternoon after the 5 hour drive down the mountains through Kern County and across the inner wastes of the Mojave. Despite the distances, the heat and the lack of amenities up there, the trip turned out to be magical and restorative though I got hit on arrival by some kind of vicious 72 hour bug. I'm always stunned by how beautiful James's place is. The house is an authentic slice of early '70s Americana projected on stilts off the sheer side of a mountain, suspended at tree-top height over a forest that stretches off for miles into the peak-studded distances that separate his idyll from the blistering Central Valley and the exhaust-laden transport hub of Bakersfield....

December 2005: “James just gave me a Bill Traylor drawing—a Baron Samedi figure in a stovepipe hat with a cane. On the back there's an inscription that reads "after Traylor, JB" and the date.” — Author's diary entry.

The Benning manse is, as I say, poised over a steep V shaped canyon...the most jaw-dropping feature is the open deck hovering like an airplane wing out into the ether, framed out fair and square with four evenly spaced horizontal planks at the top running the length of the house Japanese Zen temple-style. We'd sit there in the evenings talking into our drinks and the gathering darkness, gazing out into the blue, pink, then star-clustered distances as the hawks and eagles pinned to the sky like silhouettes on a child's bedroom wall turned into bats looping open-mouthed through swarms of flying insects. The spirit of the Unabomber presided over all, looming in the barbecued air between the deck where we were sitting and the Kaczynski cabin nestled 30 yards down the hill beneath our feet, a miniscule structure (12ft. x 10ft. x 6ft. 9in.) half-obscured by a giant Manzanita, like the gingerbread house in Hansel and Gretel. By way of contrast, the Thoreau cabin (12ft. x 15ft. x 7ft. 4in.) just over to the west can't be seen at all in summer from this position. It's off to one side, completely shrouded in foliage (as if it's been placed in parenthesis). For now at least from where we were sitting—at least until that bush gets bigger—Kaczynski kind of dominates the composition....

“The nature of things is in the habit of concealing itself”. — Heraclitus, Fragment 5:4

SQUARE ONE: 2 CABINS + CONTENTS

James Benning's cabins sit 40 meters apart bedded in among thickets of scrub oak, manzanita and ponderosa pine at an elevation of 4,000 feet mid-way down a steep foothill adjacent to the Sequoia National Forest in the western High Sierras. Flanked by high bushes and oriented at different angles, each cabin, secreted in plain sight, is a one-room world unto itself. Separate but connected (there is no directly linking path) they each command similar yet completely different inward- and outward-facing views. Along with a clear glass-paneled door and contemporary equivalents of the two large windows from the hut on Walden Pond, the walls of the Thoreau cabin open onto five distinct, intensely wrought worlds:

1 'Hawkins' (The Blue Boar #2 [1989]),

1 'Ramirez' (Train Tracks with Two Tunnels, 1948-61),

1 'Darger' (At Ressurrectoation Run. Attacked by Fierce Glandelinians, one of the Vivians Hurls Grenades, 1960),

1 'Tolliver' (Self-Portrait, 1978) and

3 'Traylors' (Man in Blue House with Rooster, Blue Construction with Two Figures and Dog, Female Drinker, 1939-43).

All 7 works are exact hand-made replicas of the originals, the mimetic detail extending to media, materials, mode of execution, age and provenance of frames, etc.

July 2006. JB gave me two more 'Traylors' done on authentic mid-century cardboard—a small ink drawing in a thick square wooden thrift store '40s frame of two male figures boxing with Traylor's trademark rounded heads, beady bird eyes and curvilinear dancers' bodies and a blocky bull in red. They are deceptively simple and not at all straightforward. Like Japanese manga or a painting by Nara, the filled-in silhouettes may appear disarming and child-like at first, but once they've settled into the wall they begin to glower back at the viewer with an amused kind of ferocity. (This may be where Kara Walker got the idea for her horror-history silhouette series). The slave's gift to the master: a poisoned glass of juke joint rum made from sugar grown right here on the old plantation. It occurs to me that the second drawing could be the logo for that caffeinated energy drink/alcoholic mixer. — Author's diary entry.

James Benning, Ted Kaczynski Cabin: Window (detail), 2008. Photograph.

The views from inside the Kaczynski cabin, a facsimile of the Unabomber's former Montana home are as intense and heterogeneous as those from inside the Thoreau cabin. In addition to the solid door and the two small square windows installed asymmetrically on opposite sides as in the original structure, the perforations in the walls open (in or out depending on how you figure spatiality) onto:

1 'Black Hawk' (Dreams of Visions of Himself Changed to a Destroyer or Riding a Buffalo Eagle, 1880 or 81),

1 'Yoakum' (Idaho Falls, Braintree Pass, c. 1966),

1 'Howard' (A Man Has No Right to Defend his Family etc.,1955),

a scanned .pdf of a page of Kaczynski doodles,

a 1 in. x 3 in. scrap of paper with a motto (Taking a bath in winter breaks an Indiana law) found in the original Kaczynski cabin typed by JB on the same Smith-Corona manual model Kaczynski used to type the Unabomber Manifesto, and

a framed hand-written copy of a sheet of the 'secret' numerical code TK used to document his most incriminating thoughts and actions—1 of 3 pages found hidden inside the cabin walls after his arrest without which, as the FBI admit, the relevant sections of the Unabomber's journals would, in all probability, have remained un-deciphered.

The Cabins Project, JB's tribute to the American vernacular yard art tradition is perched on the just-about-buildable edge of a hillside, public park land, defensible appropriation art practice and permissible speech. It is equal parts design-build demonstration project, historical echo chamber, political statement, conceptual-outsider art installation, living museum, artists' retreat and secessionist compound. At first glance, aspects of the project may seem congruent with broader trends in the contemporary art world, for example, the engagement of individual artists and art collectives with design, domestic living space and bare-bones architecture or with simulation and altered states of consciousness or with the genealogy of '60s West Coast counter-culture and cybernetics etc. But the Cabins Project remains, at its core, stubbornly recalcitrant and singular. Like the group of awkward loners whose works and lives provide the second-hand citational substance out of which it has been woven, it cannot be annexed by any trend or socially networked 'world' (art or otherwise) outside itself.

JB's imaginary collective is as impossible and illusory as Theodore J. Kaczynski's Freedom Club (FC)—the fictional anti-technology terrorist organization in whose name the former Berkeley math professor, raised in a lower-middle class Chicago suburb, pushed through high school at an accelerated rate and sent off to Harvard, aged 16, issued his demands, pronouncements and 'Manifesto' to the FBI, the Press, and, via them, to society-at-large during his 16-year reign of terror from a one-room plywood shack secreted on a heavily timbered 1.4 acres in Florence Gulch within a mile of Stemple Pass Road on the edge of Lincoln, Montana (2010 pop. 1,465). FC, the initials TK stamped on the metal plugs he used to cap his sometimes lethally effective lo-tech pipe bombs, before enclosing them in elaborate, hand-crafted wooden boxes and mailing them to people connected to industries and professions he disapproved of, became Kaczynski's personal signature. In all likelihood, it's only in his FC-signed communiqués, written in the ‘royal we,’ that Kaczynski, condemned to life in solitary long before his feral paradise in Florence Gulch, Montana morphed into a cell in a federal penitentiary in Florence, Colorado has had recourse to the first person plural pronoun:

This message is from the terrorist group FC. To prove its authenticity we give our identifying number.... By 'freedom' we mean the opportunity togo through the power process, with real goals not the artificial goals of surrogate activities and without interference, manipulation or supervision from anyone, especially any large organization.1

JB's Cabins club is a similarly fantastic collective—an assortment of odd ducks, dissidents, recluses and marginals bound together through a speech act delivered by an outside-inside artist. It exists in here between these covers as much as, if not more than, out there in the world. Benning's paradoxical 'community'—an Army of Ones—is as illusory and non-existent from a fact-based point of view as the "American people," that other meta-fictional entity, endlessly conjured out of the ether, interpellated and spoken for in stump speeches, press conferences and policy tweets by members of the professional political and pundit class. In fact, the endlessly biddable "American People," the blimp that floats daily through the blabo-sphere, blown this way and that by competing currents of hot air (as opposed to actually existing American boots, shoes and bare feet on the ground) is what JB's FC stands against—or rather turns away from.

I have a huge love-hate relationship with this country...that's what my films underline...(they) express my frustration with being an American and question the direction this country has taken. Not explicitly but I think it's always in all my films because it's part of me. And around 1995 I decided I had only two criteria to make films from now on...to go to a place I want to be in, to really understand place, to define place as having meaning and then to look at this place (so) that it can tell me something about my life...to put my life in maybe more focus. — James Benning2

BOUNDARY FUNCTIONS: LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCUTION James's property is situated on the edge of a small berg in Tulare County, the poorest county in the state. The town is centered on a cluster of mobile homes and cabins on stilts wedged into a holler with a stream and though the map says 'California' the place has an authentic east coast Appalachian feel. There's a bar attached to a motel that's open 5 days a week and closes around 8:00 p.m. and a store that sells mainly canned goods. James's fridge contains tins of soda, a few bottles of beer and cellophane wrapped packages of liverwurst. There are also large plastic flagons of water (the tap water is contaminated with uranium). James's main source of nutrition is, of course, research and ceaseless making. Stacked up in one corner of the living room adjacent to the boxes of tapes and CDs are orderly piles of books, especially biographies and catalogues devoted to the folk/outsider artists he's so tightly drawn to, and whose work he's been copying in a series of meticulously rendered replicas for the past 7 years or so, ever since he finished working on the house. As my summer cold set in the following day, I picked up an armful of books and headed downstairs to the guest quarters directly below the flying deck and retreated to bed where I lay reading, dozing, sneezing...glancing up at intervals, as the afternoon wore on into another evening, at the apparition of the Unabomber's hut visible through the window, peeking out from behind that bush in the feverish half-light....

James Benning, Ted Kaczynski Cabin: Library (detail), 2008. Photograph.

A single shelf running the length of the west wall in the Kaczynski cabin holds 115 books stacked in 11 horizontal piles. Roughly half are duplicates taken from the 257 titles listed by the FBI in their inventory of the original TK cabin contents. The other half consists of additional 'sympathetic' inserts from JB's library, including some books owned by figures convened by Benning in "Twelve People" published elsewhere in this volume:

Sunday May 7, 1972 Found something to do with my $10 Confederate Flag. Wiped the dust off my shoes with it before polishing them. It's too thin to use as a polish cloth. ‘Wish I was in the land of cotton.’ Bang! ‘Bama. — Arthur Bremer, An Assassin's Diary3

The artist's textual additions include Arthur Bremer's An Assassin's Diary, the self-penned chronicle of the 21 year-old unemployed busboy from Milwaukee who set off on an extended transcontinental meander in the early spring of 1972 with the stated intention of assassinating Richard Nixon, only to end up at a rally in a shopping mall in Laurel, Maryland on the afternoon of May 15 severing the spine of George C. Wallace, then the segregationist Governor of Alabama, with a bullet from a .38.

April 24, 1972 Tuesday Just another god Damn Failure4

Henry 'Hank' Aaron, dubbed the "Last Hero" in a recent biography by Howard Bryant is the only proper name from JB's "Twelve People" that escapes incarceration inside the cabin complex. Joined forever at the hip to Arthur Bremer in the universe of Benning as the one-time starring outfielder with the Milwaukee Braves through the 55 minute montage of Aaron baseball cards that take center-stage in JB's film American Dreams (1984) while Bremer's semi-literate diary entries scroll right to left across the bottom of the screen, Aaron alone is allowed to float free from the labyrinth of making-dwelling-thinking JB has dug over the course of several years into his hillside property at the edge of the Sequoia federal wilderness reserve. 5 . He alone is spared inclusion in the matrix of obsession, positioned to one side as an honorary affiliate of the JB FC, an unsullied icon from Benning's adolescence, when, thanks to his skill as an Industrial League 'sand lot' pitcher in Milwaukee in the '50s / early '60s JB, too, was for a brief while courted, as a pro-baseball prospect. 6

But then again, like Bill Traylor and Mose Tolliver (and George Wallace), as a native son of Alabama (born in Mobile, 1934), Aaron doesn't get to float that far....

The Milwaukee in which Henry Aaron arrived in 1954 was...adjusting...(after World War II to)...the arrival of thousands of southern blacks during the great migration north. The postwar increase in the black population would produce for Milwaukee one of its great contradictions, for despite its reputation for tolerance, high-quality-of life Milwaukee earned a reputation as one of the most severely segregated cities in the country.7

Among the 280 portraits of mainly working and lower-middle class students of German, Jewish and Polish stock in Benning's graduation high school year book for 1961, there is not a single black face though JB grew up just four blocks west of 'Bronzeville,' the tight rectangle of streets in downtown Milwaukee set aside for its African-American population. 8 The march through the heart of the Irish-Italian neighborhoods of South Milwaukee led by Father Groppi in 1967 that ended in a violent clash at Kosciuszko Park during which several protesters, Benning included, were beaten to the ground by opponents of desegregation may have contributed to the city's first fair-housing ordinance passed the following year, but the violence and the racism continued unabated.9 ee Bryant, and James Benning, "Off Screen Space/Somewhere Else," in Barbara Pichler, Claudia Slanar, eds., James Benning (Vienna: Österreichisches Filmmuseum, Synema, 2007) 10 Throughout the 1973 season when Aaron was poised to beat Babe Ruth's 'all-time' home-run record, he received sack loads of hate mail from white baseball fans, many hailing the future Hall of Famer as "Dear Nigger" including the following more politely framed death threat reproduced in Aaron's auto-biography:

Dear Hank, You are a very good ballplayer, but if you come close to Babe Ruth's 714 homers I have a contract out on you. Over 700 and you can consider yourself punctured with a .22 shell. If by the all-star game you have come within 20 homers of Babe you will be shot on site by one of my assassins on July 24, 1973.11

A transversal scan of the volumes on display in the Kaczynski cabin taken in the light of the preceding paragraph two hours after it was written on the replica desk in the Thoreau cabin on 7/13/11 highlighted the following:

found in Arthur Bremer's apartment after his arrest: Bradford Angier, How to Survive in the Woods (Macmillan Press, 1956);

referenced in Henry Darger's Realms; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852; Signet, 1966);

from the FBI inventory of titles found in the Unabomber cabin: Hugh Davis Graham & Ted Robert Gurr (eds) Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives volumes 1 and 2: A Report to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence (Sage Publications, 1979; 1989); The Basics of Rifle Shooting (National Rifle Assn, 1987); Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (1907; Doubleday, 1953);

from JB's library: Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave Written by Himself (Boston, 1845; Anchor 1973); Stephen B. Oates, To Purge This Land With Blood. A Biography of John Brown (University of Massachusetts Press, 1984).

2d, December, 1859 I, John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done.12

A note containing this prophetic proclamation was handed to an attendant by John Brown hours prior to his execution for treason after the abortive raid on the federal armory at Harper's Ferry on October 16, 1859, the action that, in retrospect, eleven months before the firing on Fort Sumter, served as the unofficial opening salvo in the American Civil War. At 11 a.m. that day as the open wagon carrying the Old Man seated on his coffin entered the field outside Charlestown, Virginia where a crowd of 1,500, including the actor John Wilkes Booth, had gathered to see justice served, the abolitionist/domestic terrorist/freedom fighter/martyr to the anti-slavery cause looked up for a moment at the Blue Ridge mountains in the distance framing the gallows and remarked to no one in particular:

This is a beautiful country. I never had the pleasure of seeing it before.13

BEAUTY + THE BLOOD ≡ THE PLEASURE OF SEEING Bill Traylor; the former slave from Benton, Alabama who, from 1939 to 1942, spent his days seated on a crate with a pencil stub drawing what he saw inside the bits of cardboard blown in by the wind in the doorway of a pool hall on Montgomery's Monroe Street, spent his nights sleeping in the coffin storage room of a nearby funeral parlor by kind permission of the owner.14

Mose Tolliver, who was raised with his eleven siblings in a one-room sharecropper's cabin in Pintlala, Alabama but lived much of his adult life in Montgomery, former capital of Andrew Jackson's Confederacy, home to Rosa Parks and, from 1954-1960 of Martin Luther King, both of whom, separately and in unison, pursued John Brown's agenda by other means, spent his days sitting on a bed painting what he saw when he looked down into the sheets of plywood resting on crippled knees crushed beneath a falling crate of marble at the warehouse where he'd worked before the accident.15

Henry Darger, who enlisted Little Eva and Simon Le Gris from Uncle Tom's Cabin as combatants in opposing armies of The Realms appropriated the uniforms, weapons and supplies of the Civil War to model his own private holocaust—the bloody inner war waged, brother within brother, between the lust for purity and butchery, grace and desecration, implosion, explosion and epiphany.16

And Henry David Thoreau spent a famous night in jail because he refused to pay taxes to support a government that condoned and protected slavery, heard John Brown speak at Concord, gave money to support his war in Kansas against the Border Ruffians, delivered the speech "A Plea for Captain John Brown" defending the use of violence against the "wicked(ness of) human bondage," helped one of the Harper's Ferry raiders, Francis Jackson Merriam escape to Canada, and assisted the passage of fugitive slaves to the same destination on what he called America's “only free road, the Underground Railroad...owned and managed by the Vigilant Committee.”17

They are themselves mistaken who take him to be a madman.... Ask the tyrant who is his most dangerous foe, the sane man or the insane? Do the thousands...who have rejoiced at his deeds in Kansas, and have afforded him material aid there, think him insane?... Is it not possible that an individual may be right and a government wrong? Are laws to be enforced simply because they were made? Or declared by any number of men to be good, if they are not good?... I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the good and the brave ever in a majority? Would you have him wait till...you and I came over to him? — Henry David Thoreau, A Plea for Captain Brown

East of the Kansas line, Jesse Howard, born dirt-poor and white, one of nine children in a one-room log cabin in Shamrock, Missouri who, in later years, turned the roadside yard in front of his home on Sorehead Hill in Fulton, MO into a public exhibition site for his handwritten upper case opinions would, even at the age of 97, regale visiting folk art collectors with tales from his childhood, including colorful stories about the legendary outlaw, Jesse James. He recalled, for instance, how James, a hard-core Southern Loyalist who, before robbing banks had served as a Confederate guerilla and taken part in the Centralia Massacre in Clay County, MO in September, 1864 when 22 unarmed Union soldiers were scalped and dismembered "would take his horse to shop and have his shoes put on backwards" to confuse pursuing posses.18

A MAN HAS NO RIGHT TO DEFEND HIS FAMILY DECATUR. ILL. OCT 11. 1961. OF ALL THE UN=AMERICAN. UN=CIVILIZED WAY OF LIFE. 'ARREST=A MAN AND THROW HIM IN JAIL.’ BECAUSE HE HAD NO PERMIT TO CONSTRUCT A FALLOUT SHELTER. FOR HIMSELF=AND=HIS=FAMILY. — "after Jesse Howard, JB" wall text in 'Kaczynski' cabin

The Unabomber ghost stood before me throughout the entire stay, solidly visible to my aching eyes in flu-fever: thick hair amok and stiffly upstanding, JB style, a filthy fleece shirt and grease-shiny jeans hanging off his scrappy frame, startling blue eyes obscured behind the aviator shades from that famous FBI poster; the whole apparition topped with a poncho worn against the cold Montana rain, every inch of its transparent plastic surface smeared with dried mud beneath which lurked a mass of rain-smudged runes and mathematical proofs written out in a neat school boy's cursive with a black magic marker....

Ted Kaczynski, sole member of the original Freedom Club adopted tactics as ingenious as the bandit, Jesse James to throw the agents off his trail. Those tactics included, inter alia, screwing smaller-sized soles to the bottoms of the trainers he wore while on monkey-wrenching expeditions; dousing bomb parts in a mixture of oil, turpentine and water to remove finger-prints; attaching single hairs he picked up in a restroom in Missoula to the electrical tape used on one of his devices to muddy the forensics. He was alleged to have laid a sheet of paper across the envelope of a letter addressed to the New York Times in June, 1994 and written "phone Nathan R - Wed 7 pm" hard enough to leave a (barely legible) imprint thus sending the FBI on a wild goose chase with agents poring over national phone listings attempting to track down every Nathan with a surname beginning with an "R", then tracing back all incoming calls around 7 p.m. inside the time-frame established by the post mark.19

(Researchers) note...that the health, life, and genetic legacy of members of social species are threatened when they find themselves on the social perimeter. For instance, social isolation...promotes obesity and Type 2 diabetes in mice; exacerbates infarct size and edema and decreases post-stroke survival rate following experimentally induced stroke in mice; promotes activation of the sympatho-adrenomedullary response to an acute immobilization or cold stressor and delays the effects of exercise on adult neurogenesis in rats;...increases the 24 hr urinary catecholamines levels and evidence of oxidative stress in the aortic arch of rabbits.... Humans, born to the longest period of abject dependency of any species and dependent on conspecifics across the lifespan to survive and prosper, do not fare well, either, whether they live solitary live or they simply perceive they live in relative isolation. — Wikipedia entry under Social Isolation

And throughout the twenty-five years he spent alone without electricity or plumbing surrounded by his books and bomb components, his personal Nature deities, Grandfather Rabbit and the Will 'o' the Wisp" 20 and his edible companions—the rabbits, elk, squirrels, rats, mice and crickets that would end up in his stews along with wild plants and home-grown self-composted carrots and potatoes, he wrote incessantly, compulsively documenting his daily thoughts and actions, his natural history observations and Promethean experiments on more than 22,000 typed and hand-written pages, simultaneously disclosing and concealing through an elaborate, and, as it turned out, futile security-alert transcription system that switched back and forth between various languages (Kaczynski's library included primers in Chinese, Egyptian, Finnish, German, Latin, Russian and Spanish) and the numerical code he reserved for 'Q' (queer i.e. sensitive) and 'QQ' (very queer) disclosures—the whole scriptive system representing a vast confessional labyrinth into which the Unabomber would fall as he set out every morning like Dante Alighieri on Groundhog day on his walk into the dark wood.

“A” coded numbers: 14, 95, 16, 91, 28, 41, 90, 43, 57, 16, 18, 82, 96, 67, 44, 51, 32, 98, 81, 87, 31, 3, 57, 11, 22, 0, 65, 37, 67, 57, 38, 8, 52, 23, 75, 32, 61, 38, 39, 22, 56, 82, 56, 1, 31, 3, 43, 51, 1, 57,,,

“B” coded numbers: 0, 62, 83, 17, 86, 29, 16, 30, 27, 04, 89, 20, 68, 53, 26, 23, 10, 80, 69, 45, 17, 70, 32, 90, 47, 54, 2, 95, 11, 15, 14, 90, 31, 87, 63, 8, 31, 13, 74, 50, 14, 29, 35, 83, 19, 79, 18, 22, 46, 29,,,

Using the 'secret' double key hidden by Kaczynski in the original cabin wall, the two sets of numbers above deliver the first ten words in bold of the coded journal entry translated below which TK rated 'Q':

Exxon conducting seismic exploration for oil. Couple of helicopters flying all over the hills, lower...dynamite on a cable, make blast on ground, instruments measure vibrations. Early August I went and camped out...in Diagonal Gulch, hoping to shoot up a helicopter.... Proved harder than I thought.... 2 quick shots.... Miss both. When I got back to camp, I cried, partly from frustration at missing, but mostly grief at what is happening to the country. It is so beautiful. But if they find oil, disaster.... Where can I go now for peace and quiet? 21

The entry was deciphered on 7/16/11 by JB with the following program written by JB in BASICA on a 1983 NEC computer and described in his own words below:

The computer program does the following: 1) prompts to enter the “A” code numbers 2) prompts to enter the “B” code numbers 3) subtracts B from A 4) if the difference is less than zero, then 100 is added to the difference 5) translates the difference to a Letter, Word, Number, Punctuation Mark or Word-Spacer according to Kaczynski's List of Meanings

For example: 14 is entered from the “A” list, 0 is entered from the “B” list. The difference is 14 minus 0, which is 14; and from the list of meanings 14= "E" Then 95 is entered from the “A” list and 62 is entered from the “B” list. The difference is 95 minus 62, which is 33; and from the list of meanings 33= "X". Then 16 is entered from the “A” list; 83 is entered from the "B" list. The difference is -67, which is lless than zero so 100 is added giving 33; and from the list of meanings 33= "X"; and so forth. Note that after 3 entries, the code gives: EXX, which are the first three letters of the corporation known as EXXON. — James Benning, email 7/19/11

Everything we have to do to get to the truth has to be sneaky. It seems a shame to sneak to get to the truth—to make the truth such an evil, old, dirty, nasty thing. You have to sneak to get to the truth. The truth is condemned. The truth is in the gas chamber. The truth has been in your stockyards, your slaughter-houses. The truth has been in your reservations, building your railroads, emptying your garbage. The truth is in your ghettoes, in your jails not in your courtrooms.... They put a picture of old George on the dollar and tell you that he's your Father - worship him ... they're butchering themselves every time they go on the freeway. They hate themselves. Look at the signs—STOP, GO, TURN HERE, TURN THERE, you can't do this, you can't do that.... You can't, you can't, you can't. This is illegal. That's illegal.... The police used to watch over the People. Now they're watching the people.... —Charles Manson22

Systematically cross-referencing as a counter-example the trial of John Brown, who resisted entreaties from his lawyers and family to avoid a death penalty by entering a plea of diminished responsibility due to mental impairment, lawyer Michael Mello argues that by effectively making the commencement of the Unabomber trial contingent on Kaczynski's acquiescence in an insanity plea, Judge Garland Burrell denied Kaczynski his constitutional right to participate in his own defense.23 Mello argues that whereas Brown could die a martyr to his cause, having seized the opportunity presented by a highly publicized trial to launch a withering denunciation of slavery and the government that passively supported it in morally irrefutable terms and in a resolute and dignified manner that helped to galvanize the Northern opposition, Kaczynski, another trenchantly articulate and inflexible extremist with a grandiose self-image and an inflated sense of righteousness, violently opposed to the overweening power of the state and a more subtle but, for him, no less pernicious or intolerable form of technological slavery24 was denied his day in court, confronted as he was, with a no-win either / or: either life in prison and a guilty plea as the price for his silence or free speech as a madman as the reward for a probable death sentence. Regardless of how disgusting and abominable the acts of violence perpetrated on randomly selected individuals by the Unabomber were, the actions of the judge and Kaczynski's attorneys in what turned out to be the Unabomber no-trial raised, in William Finnegan's words "fundamental questions about...the role of psychiatry in the courts and the pathologizing of radical dissent in the courts and the press."25

The Kaczynski cabin played a central role in these maneuvers. Lifted onto a big rig and stored for 17 months at Malmstrom Air Force Base 70 miles west of its original location, then transported a further 1,000 miles across the Sierras to an industrial park near the Sacramento courthouse in December 1997 at the request of the defense team, the shack was to be presented to the jury by Kaczynski's attorneys as physical evidence of his reclusive schizophrenia.26

Richard Barnes, Unabomber Cabin Sacramento, 1997. Dye destruction print, 41 x 53 in. Courtesy of the artist.

Mello points out that, while admittedly smaller than the modest cabin 'Mad' John Brown built for his family on the shores of Lake Placid, New York, the man known to his supporters as 'God's Avenger,' in contrast to Kaczynski, shared his accommodation with a wife and up to ten children. 27 And the Kaczynski cabin was originally sited on the outskirts of Lincoln, Montana, so named, in 1865, in honor of the martyred hero of Gettysburg, whose humble backwoods origins in rural Illinois are memorialized in the image of a rough hewn log cabin—patriotic icon of Americas pioneering roots—stamped into the shining bronze-colored alloy of the 2009 commemorative Lincoln penny.

Read TK cd get by on as little as $200 a year when in MT. Wd send angry letters to phone co. demanding reimbursement re. unreturned quarters frm local call box — Text message sent, 8/22/11 (160 characters)

000,000. Nothing. No confidence. No nothing. NO: 000. — Jesse Howard sign

According to the logic of the linkages pursued and manufactured from this line of inquiry, the Cabins project could be described as an historic battle-field site in the ongoing American Civil War (1861-) that ties John Brown's body suspended from a rope tied to a scaffold in a West Virginia field to the epoch of Obama, the Tea Party and a terminally deadlocked Congress.

Big Government small government no government at all

The Cabins Project is also, of course, in case you hadn't noticed, exclusively a men's club: a homo-social Free Masonic Lodge in the time-honored tradition of the Revolutionary era. Only one woman—Julie Ault—is allowed admission as an honorary affiliate, in her capacity as convener of and contributor to the published version. The X-ing out of the XX chromosome within the project's DNA is attributable, no doubt, in varying degrees, to historical, cultural, biographical and genetic factors. A case in point: the incidence of autism and Asperger's syndrome in the USA currently runs three times higher in boys than in girls, (though this may indicate a diagnostic discrepancy with similar symptoms being interpreted differently across the genders).

The stereotype of the asocial obsessive-compulsive male, prone to repetitive behaviors, with limited empathy and, in some cases, a propensity for math has been fixed within psychiatry for more than a century:

The...word autism was coined by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1910.... He derived it from the Greek work autos (meaning self), and used it to mean morbid self-admiration, referring to "autistic withdrawal of the patient to his fantasies, against which any influence from outside becomes an intolerable disturbance"...."(A)utistic aloneness" and "insistence on sameness" are still regarded as typical of the autistic spectrum of symptoms. — Wikipedia entry under Autism

Falling ill at JB's house turned out to deliver a pitch-perfect research opportunity though I got overly fixated on the Unabomber bios. Being confined to bed like a child with measles was the ideal position from which to absorb the grim(m) tale of Ted K's preternaturally lonely life ....

It's been suggested by more than one author that TK may have selected victims with names or addresses with woody connections e.g. Percy Wood from Lake Forest etc. More than one author claims Kaczynski was drawn to the word by its rich literary history and multiple metaphorical connotations e.g. “provoked to madness; dumb, catatonic, rendered speechless by trauma; having an erection etc.”28

It's probable that K has never had sex with another person outside himself though, naturally, he thought about it a lot, especially when young. He went on just three dates with a woman he met while working at a factory called Foam Cutting Inc (another FC) during a brief return trip to Chicago in the '80s. After the third date, she told him never to contact her again.... After suffering systematic emotional abuse at Harvard as a volunteer subject in experiments conducted by a sadistic CIA psychologist named Dr Henry Murray, he went on to do a PhD at the University of Michigan and, at one point, decided he wanted a sex change, not because he felt like a woman trapped inside a man's body (though this was the canny explanation he'd rehearsed for the psychiatrist), but because he reasoned that was the only way he'd ever get direct access to a woman's body as an erotic object. Sitting in the waiting room at the psychiatrist's office, he realized he couldn't go through with it - too humiliating – pleaded insomnia and exam nerves, was given a prescription, and, once back on the street, had the epiphany that turned his world upside down and right way up—the solution to his dilemma was...he would KILL the psychiatrist. Later the list of targets expanded to include “a scientist, a businessman, corporate employee, a big shot and a communist” (though his actual victims would also include secretaries, student interns and other surrogates at one or two removes from the designated addressee)....

Thoreau, whose unusual appearance included, according to one contemporary, "hair which looked as if it had been dressed with a pine-cone... disheveled attire that bore signs of tramps in woods and swamps" 29 and a neck beard which Louisa May Alcott averred "will most assuredly deflect amorous advances and preserve the man's virtue in perpetuity"30 did indeed remain celibate his entire life after his courtship of Ellen Sewall foundered on her father's interdiction. The man who saw in "Wildness...the preservation of the World"31 and who extolled "the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet"32 grew squeamish when confronted with lyrical allusions to actual sex acts in the work of Walt Whitman, a poet he otherwise admired ("He does not celebrate love at all. It is as if the beasts spoke.").33 As a good Transcendentalist, Thoreau sought to sublimate what he called "the generative energy" and advocated sexual continence as an aid to manly vigor and clear thinking.

December 26 2004 JB just gave me a Mose Tolliver "Moose Lady" done in house paint on board—a big round head with wide set eyes, straight stripe nose and oyster mouth over an upturned crescent banana with feet at each end and a skinnier crescent the other way up with tiny hands attached. The whole composition revolves round the Lady's open vulva—a crimson oval that bores into the soft pastels of the rest of the picture like a Black & Decker drilling into aluminum siding on a Sunday morning. JB suggests I hang it in the living room next to the dartboard. As with a genuine Mose T. there's an authentic pull-off tab from a 1977 beer can JB bought at an antique store in Porterville tacked into the back to hang it from. Below the tab in the bottom right hand corner, an inscription reads "after Tolliver, JB".

James Benning, After Darger, 2008. Watercolor and ink on Manila paper, 18 x 23 in.

...The Lady will take some accommodating but the 'Darger' pencil drawing he gave me for Christmas two years ago was a definite keeper - very fine and delicate: two identical Vivian girl nudes standing together in three quarters profile, one in front of the other like Siamese twins, The duplicated figure derives from a Darger source material magazine cut-out JB took from the room on Webster Street that HD never got around to undressing/adapting and transposing to The Realms so it's a genuine JB "after Darger'' one-off rather than a copy. I hung it by the bedroom window before I put in blinds and sometimes I'd wake up in the morning and glance up at it from the pillow with the sun streaming in behind my head and think—what if neighbors with binoculars call it in and I get raided? Middle aged man living alone in open sight in hillside desert shack in bedroom without blinds + little girls + penises. As it turned out, the issue resolved itself over time without human intervention as the drawing, exposed directly to the strong Mojave light gradually disappeared in a slow-motion reprise of Rauschenberg's erasure of de Kooning but I still regret the loss though not, I hasten to add, to the same extent Darger himself for much of his life mourned the loss of the 1911 newspaper photograph of "little Annie Aronburg" (probably based on real-life five year old Chicago murder victim, Elsie Paroubek). It was the loss of the latter that drove HD and a fellow bachelor to form the Society for the Protection of Children and, some scholars argue, to launch his single-spaced 15,145 page life-work The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm Caused by the Slave Rebellion, the multi-volume series that documents in detail the torture, spiking, throttling and evisceration of the Vivian girls at the hands of the Glandilineans. 34 — Author's diary entry.

Among the volumes added by JB to the Kaczynski book collection is Sloan Wilson's 1979 novel, Ice Brothers.

...on June 10, 1980—(United Airlines president Percy) Wood's birthday—he received a package posted from Chicago containing what seemed to be a copy of Sloan Wilson's novel Ice Brothers. In fact, behind the title page the book had been hollowed out to contain a bomb. When Wood opened it, the device exploded, inflicting serious cuts to his face and upper left leg. The bomb...like its predecessors, was carefully—almost lovingly—put together, out of ordinary household materials. Inside the excavated book, the bomber had filled a section of galvanized pipe with smokeless powders, wired to a fusing system consisting of two D-cell batteries. Opening the cover completed an electrical circuit-detonating the powder.35

Another JB addition to the library (which also contains a volume from TK's own collection by Henry Jacobowitz entitled Electronics Made Simple [Doubleday, 1963]) is Raymond F. Yates, A Boy and a Battery (Harper & Bros, 1959).

The latest method of producing current is that of converting atomic energy directly into electric current.... The materials and parts that enter the construction of the atomic cell (are) Strontium 90, the container (holds radioactive material), silicon wafer (transistor-type junction).... The young experimenter cannot hope to make his own atomic cell or battery at this time. He cannot purchase one either. The author is including this chapter on the atomic battery merely to give the young reader some idea of the exciting advances that are being made in the field of science and electronics. — Raymond F. Yates, A Boy and A Battery (1959)36

One way of modeling how the Cabins Project functions as a 'live' assemblage primed to light up, blow up, overload and crash at any moment at any of the myriad points of entry open to the reader/viewer/navigator within the network of connections out of which it is composed is via the metaphor of the electrical circuit, especially as in DC where the current is conducted through a wire from a negative to a positive terminus—let's say, for the sake of argument, from Kaczynski to Thoreau or vice-versa—though to complicate the picture, the charge is prone at any time to suddenly reverse so that the system is not simply infinitely extendible—circuits within circuits within circuits—but inherently unstable—sets within sub-sets of further sets—as it oscillates violently between AC and DC, art and autonomy, art and appropriation, originality and replication, secession and succession, outside and inside, authorship and autism, reason and psychosis, wild(er)ness and control, withholding and disclosure, civil disobedience and terror etc. etc. ad infinitum.

The charge will circulate so fast and in so many directions at once that the circuit will short, blow and burn out.

Connecticut, Connect-I-cut" cries little Joey. In his study The Empty Fortress, Bruno Bettleheim paints the portrait of this young child who can live, eat, defecate, and sleep only if he is plugged into machines provided with motors, wires, lights, carburetors, propellors, and steering wheels: an electrical feeding machine, a car-machine that enables him to breathe, an anal machine that lights up. There are very few examples that cast as much light on the regime of desiring-production, and the way in which breaking down constitutes an integral part of the functioning, or the way in which the cutting off is an integral part of mechanical connections. — Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari37

James Benning, After Kaczynski, 2008. Pencil on paper, 10 x 8 in.

EDEN AFTERMATH: CRAFT - CONTROL JB's Cabins Project is also, and finally, (for the purposes of this essay), a meditation on the inexhaustibly exhausting trope of the American Eden where, whatever history, knowledge and experience might have to say about it, the serpent and the apple still hang forever, side by side, upon the tree, unheeded and unplucked. Eternally renewable innocence remains American exceptionalism's most noteworthy miracle. So Paradise Lost is regained in the honest, clean construction of the cabins accomplished in the time-honored Transcendentalist d.i.y tradition established in the spring of 1845 by Thoreau on a rise by Walden Pond, and in every view of the pristine, unspoiled landscape framed inside the cabin windows. It is found again in the fugue-like looping to infinity of the folds and tracks and tunnels that preoccupied the artist in the copy of the Ramirez painting; in the cranial conflation of the outer and the inner in Yoakum's Braintree Pass: worlds within worlds within worlds without end. Paradise is lost and found and lost again in the page torn from a Dept. of Indian Affairs ledger book on which Black Hawk, in a trade for subsistence rations with the reservation agent, painted his extraordinary vision of apocalypse—an Avenger dread enough for Little Big Horn. It is placed on hold and put in check, voodoo-style, by Traylor; pushed off the human scale and made bestial and sublime in Tolliver's Self-Portrait; found again, and lost for good in Darger's bloody Realms; and is finally laid to rest in whatever that thing is coiled up inside the nest of Ted Kaczynski's numbers.

A: 65,63,87,32,10,76,64 44,93,90,19,34,83,85 49,31,78

B: 54,8,67,18,45,42,53 20,71,79,6,18,70,53 35,10,57 — Kaczynski coded journal (see first four words in bold below)-

Berkeley bomb did well for its size. It was sprung by Air Force pilot, 26 yrs old, name Hauser, working on a Masters deg. in Electrical Eng.... Witness said, "whole arm exploded," blood all over the place. Also there was damage to one eye.... Further search of newspapers yielded.... Hausers arm was "severed or nearly severed." Tips of 3 fingers torn off. Use of arm and hand will be permanently impaired, to what degree not known. Hauser father of 3 kids. He was working toward PhD, contrary to other paper that said Masters. He was afraid his "dream" was ruined. Dream was to be astronaut. Imagine grown man whose dream is to be an astronaut.... Recently I camped in a paradise like glacial cirque. At evening beautiful singing birds were ruined by the obscene roar of jet planes. Laughed at the idea of having any compunction about crippling airplane pilot.

craft n. 1. skill esp. in practical arts 2. a boat or vessel 3. cunning; deceit vt to craft, to make in a skillful way — The Oxford Essential Dictionary (American Edition), 1998

In the act of copying by hand a drawing of a manzanita bush rooted in a hillside, the copyist, intent on every detail, soon gets lost inside the labor, the blind mimetic trance as the wood inside the paper fades back into the outline of a tree, and, in that process of absorption, all the connotations of craft come into play: humble skill and cunning; dexterity, accomplishment and masterful deceit. God and Devil both are in the details. Hand and eye become a single vessel sailing on a surface towards a destination that's been mapped out in advance.

JB's reconstructions, copies and transcriptions are exercises in redemption—rescue operations directed at forms of art and knowledge, culture and critique, ways of being and seeing that have been pushed into the margins, either neutralized and isolated within literary or folk/outsider art traditions or patronized as minor or manual, uneducated or too smart or discounted altogether as extremist or insane. In the process, he reasserts the value and productive force of solitude and solitary accounting at a time when the rights to privacy in and secession from today's control societies have effectively been abrogated.

For, after all, when we come back from our sojourn in the wilderness and log on—and who can afford not to do either these days?—we are forced willy-nilly to comply with the single overarching diktat such societies insist upon: our voluntary internalization of the organizing protocols, priorities and goals including self development, self discovery, self expression, self improvement that in a globally wired neo-liberal environment, and in an increasingly literal and preemptively coercive way are now routinely programmed into the workaday creative applications that are currently reshaping the psycho-social genome. The scope of that techno-corporate-governmental demand for control now extends through every scale imaginable from the nano, the genetic and molecular across the global and on all the way out beyond the earth's atmosphere where the satellites are orbiting, and, beyond that, to the inter-planetary level. All those minerals waiting to be mined.

Nonetheless, we would do well to remember in the context of a project devoted to an investigation of the possibilities for self-reliance, radical autonomy, radical difference and radical dissent still remaining or extinguished for the individual(ist) (American male) monad in 2011, that the scale that really counts from the interested vantage points of the multitude of monitoring agencies that cluster on the internet, and similarly organized social networking technologies, is the individual user: the cookie cut-up on-line user profile that gets updated, tracked, monetized and monitored with each keystroke, download, posting, purchase, Google search or credit card application that we make.

And make no mistake when you gaze up in wonder at the stars while out there in the wilderness on a camping trip or into the clear blue light of the cell phone as you upload a text while sitting in your car stuck in traffic, something beyond human, something post-human, something alien, if you like, that couldn't care less about your individual welfare, is looking back unblinkingly at you.

Control is not discipline. You do not confine people with a highway. But by making highways, you multiply the means of control. I am not saying this is the only aim of highways, but people can travel infinitely and "freely" without being confined while being perfectly controlled: That is our future. — Gilles Deleuze 38

SQUARED ROOTS: ONE IS THE UNIT NUMBER I think it is telling that a man who for so many years seemed to embody in his films and in his person the road-ready restlessness of the generation that witnessed the construction of the US freeway system (begun in 1956) and that grew up associating the expanded spatial scales and accelerated rhythms of a car-centered culture with what it means to be free and in America should choose to park up, dig in and build out from one spot at this moment. It's not just about slowing down with age or rising gas prices (though Benning's inner Rain Man will certainly have run the numbers on his budget and the actuarial tables and made the necessary adjustments).

JB's unpacking of the James Dean persona imposed upon him (especially by the Europeans) but embraced by the artist, none the less, in whatever spirit of ambivalence or irony, has led to some surprising developments in terms of gender performance. A young neighborhood boy, dropping by to pay a visit unannounced a few years back, struck dumb by the spectacle of James sitting on the porch doing needlework received, in lieu of a greeting, the following explanation, delivered without his host looking up from the multi-colored coverlet draped across his lap:

I belong to a quilting motorcycle gang.

Film, the medium with which JB is principally associated, is, of course, just another mode of replication. The discipline of copying by hand and building three-dimensional structures that double up as guest accommodation, spare but serviceable work spaces, meditation cells and remote location viewing platforms, far from representing a departure for JB, are logical extensions of his filmmaking practice over the course of four decades. Beyond the structural and compositional lessons from fabrication and facsimile learned and put to use by JB as a film-maker, the most pressing imperative for Benning remains unchanged: to get himself into the work and out of its way—to build something beautiful to the very best of his ability, to lose himself in the labor process, and then to start again. James Benning is fanatically productive and prolific—40 films and counting (plus 3 lost shorts), installations, photographs and now 2 cabins and their not un- so much as a-classifiable contents. As the years race by, the projects begin to blur and overlap. The intervals between them get shorter and shorter as the spiral circles in upon its center. There are no vacations. There is no spare time.

When JB is filming, all the labor goes into setting up the shot. Once the shot is framed to his satisfaction and the light is right and the world is settled right around the edges of the frame, he begins counting down—he will check the image one last time inside the viewfinder, and in a single integrated gesture without looking up, push the button, turn on his heel and quickly walk away, shoulders raised, like a mining engineer bracing for a detonation:

...I'm looking for an answer within the mind. Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967) was completely upsetting and at the same time thrilling, and it questioned narrative and the way light hits the screen, That film was an explosion - and I want some more explosions. — James Benning39

May 18, 1996. Had heated argument with JB at (CalArts) graduation party in Val Verde re. the Unabomber Manifesto while enveloped in smoke from student-dug bar-b-q pit, I called Unabomb actions morally indefensible and labeled Manifesto politically naive Luddism, James said it said stuff no one else is saying about technology that really needs saying. He also specially likes the bit about the Left being "over-socialized" i.e, too pc, self-censoring, timid, sanctimonious, bourgeois, elitist, deferential re. corporate power, identity politics, law, social etiquette etc to go toe to toe with the powers that be/the Right. I conceded that that sounded interesting and admitted I hadn't actually read the Manifesto but would maybe do so now (though I still think maiming 17 random people and killing 3 just to get published is a bit excessive not to say downright psychotic). — Author's diary entry.

The square root of 2 is irrational. It can't be expressed as the quotient of two whole numbers. It can only be defined between two intervals—a lower and an upper bound—where the interval gets smaller and smaller but can only close at infinity.

One is the unit number: all arithmetic flows from the number 1. — James Benning in conversation, 7/19/11

One world at a time....40 — Thoreau on his death-bed, responding to former minister and family friend, Parker Pilsbury who, observing how close Thoreau stood to "the brink of the dark river," wondered how the "opposite shore might appear" to him.

Excerpted from East of Borneo.

[calartsarchive]

Rhapsody in Pink: Stephen Prina Paints

Stephen Prina, As He Remembered It (detail), 2011. Installation view, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013. Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, and Petzel Gallery, New York. Photo: Museum associates / LACMA

by Thomas Lawson

Pantone LLC, an X-Rite company (NASDAQ: XRIT), and the global authority on color and provider of professional color standards for the design industries, today announced PANTONE® 18-2120 Honeysuckle, a vibrant, energetic hue, as the color of the year for 2011. A dynamic reddish pink, Honeysuckle is encouraging and uplifting. It elevates our psyche beyond escape, instilling the confidence, courage and spirit to meet the exhaustive challenges that have become part of everyday life.1

Artists and writers carry ideas around with them all day. These half-formed thoughts and random pieces of information jostle against each other, mostly making no sense. This is the quandary of the creative mind, full of inspiration but staring at a blank page, into an empty room. Then a pathway appears, an opening suggests itself. I suspect that Stephen Prina carries around more ideas than most, ideas about art and architecture and music and the relationship between high culture and pop, and a lot else besides. In his work he attempts to triangulate between historical reference, popular culture, and the personal, seeking an exquisite pleasure in the exact balance between these areas of interest. But first he must begin.

For his installation at the Secession, As He Remembered It, Prina’s starting point is a thirty-year-old memory that resonates along the finely tuned path that connects Vienna and Los Angeles throughout the twentieth century. Two young artists, Prina and his friend Christopher Williams, are walking along La Brea, one of Los Angeles’ major boulevards, late one night in the early 1980s. This is in itself unusual; walking in Los Angeles? Perhaps they have been to catch a show at the Ranchera transvestite bar at La Plaza. Perhaps they were looking for a late-night snack after those drinks, maybe stopping at Pink’s famous hotdog stand, following the heavy footsteps of Orson Welles, who in those years was reputed to stop there every night on his way home from dinner. But the echo of these steps distracts me as it reverberates back down the shadowed streets of Vienna, looking for that elusive third man, forever changing identities, translating the past to the present.

Back in bright, neon-lit Los Angeles, and stopped in mid-conversation, the two artists are simultaneously transfixed by a lighted storefront across the wide street. In it, under a fierce spotlight, stands an oddly incomplete piece of furniture, painted pink. Intrigued, they hazard traffic and cross the street for a closer look. It’s a desk, but one originally built-in, here revealed to be maimed in some way, removed from its supporting wall, the paint attempting to give it a renewed sense of completeness. But even in its distress the desk was compelling, a crippled sign for a “post-studio” artist’s workplace.2 Looking for some explanation the artists found a label identifying it as the work of R. M. Schindler, an architect whose work was only then beginning the long path back to recognition. For two artists exquisitely attuned to the nuance of culture, to the spaces that open up when an object or action slips into visibility, that must have been a memorable night out.

In 1911, in a similarly revelatory moment, a young architecture student in Vienna saw the recently published portfolio of Frank Lloyd Wright designs and began to dream of another life far from the overwrought mannerisms and hothouse feuds of his home city. He knew Wright lived in Chicago, which to him was the epitome of the modern city, and began a one-way correspondence. By 1914 Rudolf M. Schindler had found a job apprenticing to an architecture firm in the windy city, although he had yet to hear from Wright. Once there he did finally meet his hero, and in 1920 traveled with him to Los Angeles to help develop a sprawling hilltop complex for the wealthy art lover Alice Barnsdall.

In Chicago, Schindler had met Pauline Gibling, an intense young musician and political activist who taught at Hull House, the Nobel laureate Jane Addams’ pioneering housing and education project for the poor, that also served as a center for progressive thinkers in Chicago. Schindler and Gibling married, and once out in Los Angeles began to plan their own much smaller and more experimental house. Partly inspired by Addams, partly by Barnsdall, they contrived a shelter for themselves and another couple, Clyde and Marion Chace, who helped with the construction, in an experiment in communal living. But they also intended the house to serve as base for a variety of social and cultural activities, as a hub for art and politics. As Pauline wrote her mother, "One of my dreams is to have, some day, a little joy of a bungalow, on the edge of the woods and mountains near a crowded city, which shall be open just as some people's hearts are open, to friends of all classes and types. I should like it to be as democratic a meeting-place as Hull House where millionaires and laborers, professors and illiterates, the splendid and the ignoble, meet constantly together."3

The house itself is an arrangement of fluid spaces constructed of simple elements that look as though they had been prefabricated and each lend support to the next. It contains four low-ceilinged wood-and-concrete studios forming two L-shapes, each facing a small courtyard. Each studio fronts its yard with glass walls and sliding screens to enable easy passage of eye and person from inside to out. The courtyards are conceived as outdoor living spaces, with fireplaces to take the chill off the Los Angeles night. Where the two L-shapes meet there is a kitchen and a guest room. Too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter, the house is severe yet beguiling, a test model for a life in art. It is a collective campsite and plein-air studio, ideal for young artists who want to share living and working experiences, and have a place to invite friends and associates over to play music, discuss politics, plan projects.

His own house, 1922, An experiment in the enclosure of space Became the prototype of California modern. Its lyrical quality is in contrast to the abstract forms of the early European moderns. The inspiration for the S-shaped house came from the camp shelter Each room has a masonry wall to the street, With sliding canvas doors and glass opening Into a garden. Prefabricated tapering concrete walls were cast on the ground, tilted into place The units are joined by narrow streamers of glass, Which allow space to filter through. The floor is a concrete slab, level with the garden. Space itself is a material in the house. Uniting house and garden. Space forms are part of the integral decoration.4

The Schindler house is a defining icon of art in Los Angeles—it is experimental in materials and methods, and works with space in highly original ways to enable a rethinking of social conventions. Designed as a working salon, it served as a hub of interdisciplinary activity. The house was never comfortable; it was more, as Reyner Banham says, “a brave experiment in balancing the community and privacy of serious and experimental people. It didn’t work, the Chaces pulled out early and the Schindlers were at loggerheads from 1927 or so, until RMS himself died in 1953.”5 After the Chaces moved out, the Neutras moved in, then a young John Cage, the German collector Galka Scheyer, and the dancer John Bovingdon. None stayed long, but all left a mark. In its heyday, from the 1920s through to the 1930s, the Schindlers’ house hosted music and dance performances, readings and discussions, while supporting very idealistic attempts to combine the personal and the political through collective activities, from playing music to real political organizing.

Pauline Schindler lived there continuously from 1938 until her death in 1977, in the half that had first been the Chace studio. As the one person to really inhabit it, she left her mark on the house. She made it more livable, improving the plumbing and adding carpet to the concrete floors. We know from the archives that she gave permission to various tenants to paint the Schindler side various shades of white, and, as Stephen Prina notes, she painted her side pink.6

Stephen Prina, As He Remembered It, 2011. Installation view, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013. Courtesy of the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, and Petzel Gallery, New York. Photo: Museum associates / LACMA

In view of the very spare aesthetic of the building, pink seems a rather extreme decision. In fact, it sounds so much like sacrilege that we are bound to ask its meaning. So who was Pauline Schindler? To return to Banham, a longtime friend and supporter, “She was small—birdlike is the word, I’m afraid—gentle-voiced, searingly intense and pure Hampstead socialist.”7 And further,

She was an original, her own woman. And that was one of the reasons one should not have been so surprised at her; California is where you go to be your own person, do your own thing, including Marxism . . . then I remembered how strong is the socialist tradition in the southland. Not just Upton Sinclair and all that, nor Will Rogers, the long-time socialist mayor of Beverly Hills, but all those reds who, in the era of the Hollywood blacklist, were not under the beds, but in them, legally and peacefully as normal citizens until the inquisition struck.8

In short, she was a pinko.

But perhaps it is too much of a stretch to claim she painted the walls to reflect her politics; maybe she was simply trying to update the modernity of the house. In the 1957 musical film Funny Face, in which Fred Astaire plays a Richard Avedon-like figure in the fashion worlds of New York and Paris, and Kay Thompson inhabits a version of the mind-bendingly declarative Diana Vreeland, Thompson sings a barnstorming “Think Pink,” a rousing anthem in favor of chucking all color for pink. The song and dance sequence in the movie is a paean to the everyday use of pink, from clothes to toothpaste, to interior walls and doors; pink is modern, pink is alive, pink is now. As the much later Pantone website declares, “Paint a wall in Honeysuckle for a dynamic burst of energy in the family room, kitchen or hallway. A brave new color, for a brave new world. Let the bold spirit of Honeysuckle infuse you, lift you and carry you through the year. It’s a color for every day—with nothing ‘everyday’ about it.”9

Pink is, indeed, the element that defines As He Remembered It, with its large group of sculptural objects arrayed in a grid, each colored, somewhat unevenly, in an aggressive tone of dark pink that is very definitely not for everyday. The objects are recognizably furniture of various sorts, but they are all a bit limp and lean-to, clearly cut off from supporting walls and rooms. Something indefinable is missing. There is an air of discomfort—the display is not so much IKEA as the storage space for a film or stage set. The spaces delineated by the furniture, the space between bed and closet, or table and piano, are cramped, adding to this sense of unreality. The grandeur of the Secession gallery magnifies the inadequacy of the objects, and over time, as gravity pulls against the lack of architectural support, that melancholic weight will cause a heavy sigh to slowly permeate the building as surfaces sag and droop.

The original desk, a pale pink memory, is the palimpsest to this excessive overwriting. What seemed the momentary staging of an imagined workspace is blown up into a nightmare vision of the domestic as it might appear in a fevered dream. There is a dread little sleeping area, with unmade bed sliding into curtained closet. Empty bookshelves and credenzas, vanities and other storage units crowd one’s vision. Perhaps the strangest space of all is another tight corner housing upright piano, kitchen table, and banquette. Nearby, a stepladder rises, hopelessly.

The furniture that Prina has reconstructed was originally designed for two small houses, and in those spaces there was certainly pleasure in the economy of it all. How marvelous that the owner can enjoy playing the piano after all. As the writer Ellen Janson described them, Schindler’s “unit-furniture” pieces were so designed and constructed that they can be combined and recombined and separated variously to make up all desired units, such as sideboards, bookcases, double and single seats, tables, couches, and can be arranged and rearranged so as to follow the lines of the room and give an added effect of spaciousness. No single piece of furniture is static; the units are not symmetrical and self-centered like so many boxes forming mechanical pigeonholes, but are designed to combine into groups which again achieve on a larger scale.10

But the houses in this case no longer exist, and the replicas here inhabit too much space: the dynamic illusion of spaciousness is replaced by the airless oppression of the showroom. There is a devious humor at work, both reticent and bold, creating a receptive field alive to uncertainty. Prina talks about this odd mistranslation, the fact that his work is an improvisation on the back of a set of drawings which were themselves the point of origin for a work of improvisatory cabinetry; that he is creating a ghostly presence.11

First they were built of pine plywood, not fir. Then they were stained to enrich their surfaces. Both cheapness and the attempt to improve on it are in sympathy with Schindler’s methods. So was the decision to stain the surfaces with colors found near the original sites of the buildings, an ochre and a green, both toned down to a beige suggestion of color. So far we seem to follow Prina as he carefully, respectfully follows the research, cleaving to the true path. But then the wild, brushy, almost slapdash application of this pink gloss paint throws the eye a curve. The paint pools on the surface, creating visual depth, which in turn suggests emotional complexity, but then it is not so well done after all, and the surface reeks of insincerity. Is this really the repressed rage of the widow, her desire for better politics, more modern comfort? Or Prina’s detached humor? “And it just happened that this year it is pink, this very particular ‘Honeysuckle’ that is dark and vibrant and has yellow in it.”12 As he notes, using this color helps him get past his own personal story while flipping the historical one on its ear. For the work is in the translation, the gap into which meaning collapses as we chase it down. These objects do no have the gloss and sheen of minimalism and do not share that kind of certainty of presence. Rather, they exist in a nether region of the indeterminate, splotched, and wounded; objects of thought, constructed.

And what haunts this entire installation is an idea about painting. We have been talking about the color pink, the aggressive skin given these orphaned objects. But that skin is blemished, overloaded with the marks of its making—strokes, drips, pools of paint. Every surface is painted, but first it is also stained. The objects themselves have been so carefully recuperated from the archive—original drawings studied, considered, and completed, structures built. But in the end these objects do not stand alone, for they are now elaborate supports for the complex act of painting. They are specific objects, real in the world, given over to the unreality and mystique of painting. They bear the evidence of having been labored over and handled by someone simultaneously taking care, and caring less. The details of such distinctions become all-important, for it is our task to give an equal consideration to the task of decoding the conundrum in front of us. Our bodies, our eyes, are entrusted with taking the measure of our often absurd relations with the world we live in, and given that trust, we recognize the folly of it.

1www.pantone.com 2In writing about conceptual art, Lucy Lippard was the first to discuss a move away from the studio to the office as emblematic of a new kind of artist. In her later sociological analysis of the first years at CalArts, Artists in Offices: An Ethnography of an Academic Art Scene (Transaction Books: New Brunswick, 1979), Judith Adler pushed the notion further, suggesting a desk-bound model for the artist in academe. Prina and Williams, as recent graduates of the school, would have been hyperaware of the connotations. 3Robert Sweeney, “Life at Kings Road: As It Was 1920-1940”, in Elizabeth A.T. Smith and Michael Darling, The Architecture of RM Schindler, exh. cat. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001), p. 87. 4Esther McCoy, voice-over narration in Erven Jourdan’s 1950 film Architecture West. 5Reyner Banham, “Woman of the House”, New Society (6 December 1979): 556. 6“Modus Operandi,” interview with Stephen Prina by Annette Südbeck (Vienna, May 6, 2011), p. 96. 7Banham, 556. 8Ibid. 9www.pantone.com 10Ellen Janson, unpublished biographical notes on R. M. Schindler, 1939. Esther McCoy papers, Archives of American Art. 11“This was another benefit of actually not having the house. We couldn’t go back and measure or inspect the houses, so we had to start from the original plans of Schindler. In his early work the plans are quite detailed and as he continued working over the years the plans became less and less detailed. It wasn’t so much that he had an idea about a building and then executed it, so it wasn’t about the pre-executive, that is fully determined and then realized, but it is the idea that the architectural plans are a proposal in a certain direction and in the process of building he would make decisions and revisions.” Stephen Prina, interview by Annette Südbeck. 12Ibid. I want to thank Susan Morgan for her help in pointing me to various invaluable sources concerning R. M. Schindler, Reyner Banham, and Esther McCoy. And of course also Stephen Prina for taking time to talk to me while the paint dried between coats. This essay was originally published in Stephen Prina: As He Remembered It (Vienna: Secession, 2011) and is republished here with permission from the author. All original formatting has been preserved. Excerpted from East of Borneo.

[calartsarchive]

CalArts Art Benefit And Auction Los Angeles Opening

[calartsarchive]

The CalArts Story

This is a historical video about the founding of The California Institute of the Arts.

[calartsarchive]

A Story about Civil Disobedience and Landscape: Interview with Andrea Bowers

Andrea Bowers, No Olvidado - Not Forgotten, 2010. Graphite on paper, 23 drawings, 50 x 120 in. each. Photos: Robert Wedemeyer. All images courtesy Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.

This interview took place in the kitchen of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects on a July day near the end of the run of Andrea Bowers’s exhibition "The Political Landscape." The show consisted of two large projects and a suite of small drawings. The first project, which one encountered upon entering the gallery, was No Olvidado (Not Forgotten), a mural-like drawing consisting of 23 ten-foot-high panels that listed the names of people who have died in the attempt to cross the Mexican-American border. The second was a single-channel video projection, The United States v. Tim DeChristopher, which examines DeChristopher’s disruption of a government auction of wilderness land for oil and gas exploration. Operating as a lever or hinge between these two oversize images, respectively of an enclosing, claustrophobic wall and of a vast, somewhat forbidding landscape, was a line of small, meticulously rendered drawings of individuals holding signs protesting the recent Arizona law giving local police the authority to question anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant. In these works Bowers was using well-established representational modes to open up a wide-ranging discussion of the politics of landownership and control, and to implicate the landscape tradition in art as part and parcel of that. As the press release for the show notes, one of the earliest functions of the landscape picture was to display owned land, and Bowers turns that project on its head to reveal the abuse of ownership that has too often been the reality in the American West.

Thomas Lawson: Before we begin talking, I just want to say that the show is stunning, and requires considerable time to sort out. The first piece, the memorial with the names, is kind of overwhelming, both grand and very intimate in its effect. It is also oddly light filled—the gallery is bright, there are patterns of light and clouds drifting over the names inscribed on the wall—it almost seems uplifting until the weight of the names sinks in. And then we step into the next gallery, which is in total darkness for the projection, and witness this strange alteration between an extreme close-up of a talking head, and you marching back and forth in a very barren and cold-looking landscape. It takes a while to sink in that it is all about various governmental misuses of variously inhospitable, but fragile, desert lands. We could start by saying that the show is about the American West, right?

Andrea Bowers: Yes! It’s the contemporary American West, and the abuse of power—which is what the depiction of landscape has always been about.

TL: And in fiction and film the American West has been presented as the locus for an endless struggle for power and control of the land and its resources.

AB: I looked at a lot of those photos [Timothy H. O’Sullivan, H. H. Bennett, Darius Kinsey, Edward Weston] that were taken when the American government initially surveyed the West. They sent all those photographers on explorations of the West, and they took iconic, sublime photographs. My idea was to recontextualize these images in some way to reveal a historical lineage of colonialism embedded in all those sublime photos.

TL: Are you doing this in some way to effect a change of consciousness in your viewers? Do you have hopes of engaging people in working toward some sort of action after seeing the work?

AB: I don’t think I’m directly attempting to bring about social change. I just see myself as bearing witness or documenting these people [the names in No Olvidado] because I think they’re underrecorded. My way of doing that is through art, because that’s what I’m good at. It’s also just about … It’s really about me and figuring out what I believe in and where my limits are. It’s really about the reeducation of Andrea. I grew up in an apolitical Republican family. So, it’s very much about that.

TL: This was in Ohio, right?

AB: Yeah! In Ohio, the political battlefield state. Now you’ve got 24-hour, seven-day-a-week news. It’s all really, really fast, sound bite sound bite sound bite. What can we do as artists? The art world is really slow. One thing I think we can do is tell an in-depth, long story. I think that art can be a kind of amazing history vault; things reach out. So it’s pretty simple. I’m telling stories that you won’t find on a 24-hour-news-cycle channel.

TL: I wanted to talk a bit about how you do that, how you actually make the work, not just the idea, but how you put it together. And because I think they offer an interesting insight into your process, I’d like to begin with the group of little drawings, and how you went about making them.

AB: Okay, well, first I want to say that a lot of what I do starts with a photograph. For these drawings I shot the pictures myself, I didn’t find them.

TL: So you went downtown to join the demonstration.

AB: Yes, on May Day in 2010, downtown Los Angeles, and it was a really loud and contentious march. That’s when the “show-me-your-papers” law had just been announced in Arizona; people were really fired up. I just went to the march, and along the route asked people if I could photograph them with their protest signs.

Andrea Bowers, Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Stop Ripping Families Apart), 2010. Graphite on paper, 9 x 12 in.

TL: And they posed themselves?

AB: Yeah, it’s not very complicated. They’re walking, part of a huge crowd of thousands of people, and I’m like, “Hey! Can I take your picture with you holding your sign?”… but I’m a terrible photographer, I never passed a photography class. I failed or dropped out every time. But I realized that the whole process is important to me, and that even if I could find similar images in an archive somewhere, I actually prefer to draw from my own bad photos. I can remember the moment I shot them.

TL: And are they color photos or black and white?

AB: I shoot color, and usually if it’s a color photograph I draw it in color. But in this case I decided to do them in black and white, to have a relationship to the drawing installation. I thought that it would be interesting to have to deal with my really bad photographs; they were totally backlit, which left most of the faces dark, with crazy light patterns on them. There’s a similar light quality in the big drawings.

I still work from slides; I think that slides are so much richer than a video projector. I know I’m going to have to use a video projector eventually. It’s important in all my work that the viewer be clued in to the fact that all my imagery comes from a documented source, and is not an invention of my own subjectivity. I’m becoming more and more interested in thinking about ways to compose that are systematic, in order to question the Romantic myth of the artist. I have this belief that there’s a huge difference between a photograph and a drawing. People just read them differently. I think photographs are much more cold in a certain way, or documentary. I think I seduce people into the imagery with the craft of the drawing. And at times the drawings function as agitprop.

TL: So it’s through your labor that you get people to look at the political content?

AB: I mean, you understand this idea, I think I might have learned it from you—that there are certain ways of making art in a vernacular that everybody understands. I think drawing is populist in a way that almost everybody identifies with it, particularly when it is labor-intensive and skillful.

TL: And maybe they like it also because it’s realistic, right? They can feel some sort of comfort that they know what they’re looking at.

AB: Yeah, but I get really criticized for that type of illusionism.

TL: Well, it’s not a 20th century avant-garde tactic particularly, although you contextualize these drawings with plenty of other activities that do seem more in line with avant-garde practices.

AB: That’s true, like the series of events and conversations occurring during the show. And the thing that I hoped would happen was that these events would broaden the viewing community. It did, particularly with the Latino community, because of the subject matter of immigration rights. I thought—I assumed—that it would be the list of names that the majority of people would identify with, and surprisingly it was not. Those small drawings were a last-minute addition, and yet people would come in and they would have their pictures taken with them.

TL: Wait a minute; they were getting their pictures taken beside the drawings of people who’d had their picture taken by you?

AB: Yeah. It was amazing—it was so amazing. That was the work that just reached out emotionally; they identified with the images. There would be whole families in the gallery and they’d have their kids stand underneath the drawings. First they’d take close-up pictures, and then they’d step back and shoot the whole family posing with the drawing. I had no idea the drawings could function that way.

TL: That’s interesting, because when you walk into the gallery, the showstopper, the thing that grabs your eye, is the huge, multipanel drawing with the names.

Andrea Bowers, No Olvidado - Not Forgotten (detail), 2010. Graphite on paper, 23 drawings, 50 x 120 in. each.

AB: Yes, it’s a hundred-foot drawing.

TL: And it is set up as a memorial, it’s a very grand piece. Let’s talk about it. Since it is monumental, it presumably required a different way of working?

AB: Right. I worked with a graphic designer and several assistants. It resulted from a conversation with an activist, Enrique Morones. He founded an organization called Border Angels. They started off in I think ’86, providing water and blankets to people crossing the border.

TL: And many die in the attempt—are they killed out there in the desert, or do they die from exposure and thirst?

AB: It’s both, but in many cases nobody knows. A lot of people die from dehydration or temperature, but there are also people who are killed. So Enrique collects names of anyone who dies migrating from Mexico to America. He actually has about ten thousand names. He finally admitted that the group of names he provided to me, a list of four or five thousand, is only up to the year 2000.

I’ve always been making memorials in one way or another, but memorials that I thought would never be made, or memorials that were kind of impossible to make. I’m fascinated by the Vietnam Memorial in DC, and how listing names functions in general. An important part of what I do concerns this documentary-type collection of information. But then there is the formal aspect, the translation of that information into form. For years I’ve been working with another drawing method that acknowledges the photographic source, not as detailed as in the photorealistic works. For these I scan an image or text and then turn it into vinyl, and use the vinyl as a template. It’s a method that allows me to work on a larger scale … it enabled me to make these twenty-three drawings, 10 feet by 50 inches each.

I worked with a graphic designer to place the names because I wanted them to function as individual units and yet feel interwoven in the chain-link and razor wire. It was tricky finding the right font and the right thickness of chain-link, and also finding images of barbed wire that didn’t look cartoony when you turned it into more of a pattern. I worked for literally a couple of months with a designer and then printed them out as large Xeroxes to figure out the scale. I tried different sizes and finally decided they needed to be on sheets of paper at least ten feet high. Once the cut vinyl was on the paper, I brushed the ground in powdered graphite using a five- or six-inch brush, so it was very gestural, and any remaining white areas we would fill in with shading, in a medium gray or light gray. And then I had to copy the gestural mark making in the shading to create a transitional pattern from one sheet to the next.

TL: As you describe that process I am thinking about the fragility of it all. I mean it’s … in terms of doing this monumental work but making it out of paper and graphite, which, is so superfragile and hard to handle.

AB: Yeah, a disaster to handle. They get smudged constantly. They’re not pristine.

TL: But I think the smudges and everything adds to the humanity of it.

AB: Right. I just have to tell this one little story. At one point, this little girl—she was maybe four—ran up to one of the drawings. She was wearing a perfectly handmade white dress with all this beautiful embroidery, and she ran up and rubbed her whole body on one of the drawings, and then she slid down three of them. So there are four drawings that are just like shhhhhrrrrr. It’s amazing, just part of the work now.

TL: Is that audience participation?

AB: Yeah! They call her the tornado girl at the gallery, because she just spun around and hit all the white walls too. She was covered in smudged graphite. Her mother came up to me almost in tears, and I was like, “It’s okay! It’s really okay!” But, you know, it is what it is. I was determined that these large drawings function as a setting for social activity. I thought about it as this really fragile situation, and the drawing being this personal thing that I would do. Most official monuments are made of stone and marble and bronze, they are sanctioned by the government, they get a specific place. There’s just something that is so psychologically fragile about border regions, and so—I guess because I lived in Tijuana for a while, crossing the border never made sense to me. It was just so wrong, because as an American citizen I could easily cross, while so many other people couldn’t.

TL: The ecology down there is so fragile, and having this ridiculous intrusion of a fence…

AB: And until recently, there were holes in the fence; it was more porous. Many artists my age who are from the border region talk about playing along the fence, going from side to side. It’s so ridiculous because we have millions of undocumented workers in this country. The jobs are here, or they wouldn’t come. I saw these amazing signs at a recent protest. People were holding images of the caution sign that’s along the freeway in San Diego, it [the caution sign] shows silhouettes of a family crossing the border. Each protest sign was recontextualized with the addition of a word like dreamers, opportunity, education…

TL: And it’s just part of the human way that people move. They move in waves. For various reasons: the economies, the climates, politics. I think we’re always in flux. And to try and make a barrier is almost…

AB: Yes. I wanted to create the opposite of this really hard, solid structure because I am suggesting the opposite of the American government’s border policy. That idea of building better fences. I wanted it to be a confusing space. You couldn’t read: foreground, middle ground, background. Everything is in flux in terms of the perspective.

TL: Right, and the light—when the light shines across it. The smudge is perfect, the girl’s—

AB: I know! I tried to clean it up at first. I’m a control freak, you know? And then I realized, “Okay, conceptually this is great. But as a craftsperson I’m dying inside.”

TL: How are the names ordered across the face of the piece?

AB: It’s just the way that Enrique [Morones] had them listed on the website, organized by the state where the person died.

TL: It’s a very emotional set of information…

AB: It becomes very personal. And you know, I’m just getting to know Enrique. We’ve been working together for two years, and I think that he’s beginning to trust me. He didn’t see the work until he came to the gallery a week after the opening, and he was really happy. Then he started trusting me. I asked him to speak on the first Saturday of the exhibition, and it was overwhelming because he could point to names and tell you how they died and who their families were. That was very powerful. I didn’t expect that.

TL: That is fantastic. Let’s try to navigate our heads into another space, the Tim DeChristopher piece. It seems so different in some ways. How do you get involved in a new subject or a new project?

AB: I read and I listen to alternative media. It’s usually a relationship between a story that pulls at my heartstrings and that I’m politically compelled by.

TL: So you’re working on the names piece, say, and you hear a story about the Bush administration’s plan to sell off land bordering Arches National Park [among other public land parcels] in Utah?

AB: Well, it was kind of about the same time. I think it was 2008 when DeChristopher bid on all of that land in Utah. Bought it illegally with no money.

TL: Well, I guess he didn’t buy it, right?

Andrea Bowers, stills from The United States v. Tim DeChristopher, 2010. Single channel HD video, 16:15 min.

AB: He bought it but he couldn’t pay for it. He bid on 22,000 acres of land at $1.85 million. He was so compelling because he’s the first activist I’ve ever done an interview with who is so pessimistic. Most of them, especially the environmental activists, are superoptimistic. But he is getting into survivalist mode, to deal with climate change.

TL: It’s a pretty great story. And then you contacted him?

AB: Yeah. I did the research to track down his email. I regularly correspond with different activists, so I can usually call one of them up to help me get in touch with another.

TL: It seems that when we’re talking about the formal aspects of studio practice and all that, there is a huge work difference between making drawings and making videos. It seems like a different—

AB: Yeah, except there’s this evil similarity. Sometimes I get so obsessed, I’ll tape off a photograph down to an eighth of an inch and copy it as an abstraction. And when you edit, there are 24 frames per second. So I can have 24 still images, right? For every second!

But there is a crucial way that the video, for me, is different from the drawing. 1 It’s monotonous to do that drawing, and the video projects provide a more direct engagement. People always ask me—you totally understand this—if there is some sort of sublime experience while I’m drawing. No!

TL: No. You go in and you rev yourself up to do some task.

AB: And you’ll spend a lot of time in avoidance—I’ll scrub my tiles in my bathroom with a toothbrush before I get that drawing started. And it’s exhausting, because there’s a thought process, a weird concentration. You’re not really doing that much, but you’re confronting decisions all the time.

TL: I do understand that very well, but with the video work, what I find difficult is to come to terms with the movement…

AB: Yeah, I’m not as good at that. I’m much better at 2-D. When I was shooting the landscapes I was dealing with this grand panorama, and the camera really sucks at capturing it. When you’re there you have much more of a sense of depth and scale.

TL: You’re surrounded by something.

AB: You can’t get that on a video camera, an experience of space through your body, it just really flattens it out. So I wanted something that’s a little more involving for the viewer, because otherwise you have to just speed up the footage to see the clouds move or the birds fly by or whatever. I really wanted a sense of scale—of how much land he’d bought. And then, of course, I was in the land of Earthworks artists. Thinking about Smithson, I spent two days before traveling, getting all wound up and annoyed with the macho boys, even though I love the work. I looked at a lot of photographs, the stills of those guys, out there with their shovels, wearing bad cowboy boots. I just wanted to make a little fun of their pretensions.

TL: But Tim is kind of macho too, at least in the video.

AB: Yeah, that’s always kind of a problem for me, you know? All of these environmentalists are pretty much macho men. But I think it’s a much more heroic gesture to leave the land untouched rather than dig it up with big bulldozers. I thought another counterbalance was to have him speaking, and me doing the walking. I’m still trying to create an alternative to the representation of women in the history of art and advertising. I try to present myself in action. Simple! He is an activist who actually succeeded. There aren’t many of them. It’s a story about nonviolence, about civil disobedience. It’s a story about landscape.

TL: Earlier you were saying that one of the ways you brought a different dimension into the work was by creating events in the gallery, and you did separate events for this piece, again inviting people who don’t normally go to art galleries to come and see and discuss the work.

AB: I was trained to believe that galleries were compromised institutions. I have a lot of guilt associated with my participation. But in teaching public practice these past few years I’ve been thinking about the gallery as a community center. We just need to expand the audience. I did these events almost every Saturday during the show, and the funniest thing is that the regular art crowd was petrified to walk in the door because they’re so used to the gallery functioning in a certain way. I didn’t plan on that happening either. I had to literally stand at the door and kind of whisper or usher people in and explain that it was okay and they could walk around and they could have some food and they could sit and talk to people. But in the end, it was good. Some of the events were fund-raisers, and we were able to raise money for both DeChristopher and Border Angels.

TL: You’re a fund-raising machine.

AB: I’m a fund-raising machine, for now. I can’t do it for every exhibition or activist, but this is a big, beautiful space, and that is a good opportunity.

Excerpted from East of Borneo.

[calartsarchive]

Artists at Work: Liz Glynn

Liz Glynn, Made in L.A. 2012, 2012. Installation view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photo: Brian Forrest. Courtesy of the Hammer Museum.

I met with Liz Glynn on July 17 in her Chinatown studio to discuss the work she created for the “Made in LA” 2012 biennial at the Hammer Museum this summer. The three-part installation—with multilayered references to Egyptian pyramids, smuggling tunnels into Gaza, and other spiritual and material trade routes, legitimate and not—continues an investigation of the intersection of antiquity and the present that began with her 2008 performance, The 24 Hour Roman Reconstruction Project, in which she invited people to help her build and then destroy a cardboard model of ancient Rome. Other related projects include the 2010 III, for which she built a pyramid of shipping pallets on a hilltop in East LA as the site of a series of performances, and the 2012 exhibit “No Second Troy,” which considers the parallel journeys of Trojan gold and Turkish workers to Germany.

THOMAS LAWSON: Let’s start by talking about the work at the Hammer. To me, there is something very compelling about the used pallets, the worn wood, the scuff marks, all the accumulated evidence of use and age placed against the clean white walls of the gallery. I don’t quite know what I want to say about this, but there’s something about the presence of that aged lumber in a museum context that seems very poignant somehow. It gives a kind of gravitas to the structure. Maybe it is that sense of overuse, of material that’s been worked to death in some way. You have used these shipping pallets before to great effect in the pyramid piece in East LA. Where did that come from?

LIZ GLYNN: The first time I used them I was interested in the pallets as this anonymous signifier of commerce. They’re used in trucking and shipping and used to carry a variety of different goods and often used for different commodities over time. They are also vigorously recycled: They get broken down; the parts get reused over and over. No single pallet shows any record of its own history, but collectively they bear the marks of a history of this movement across the country and even around the world. There are a lot of black marks that you’ll see on the wood, and they’re from forklift skids lifting the piece from underneath. I’ve been using the material as a signifier of anonymous movement, in a sense.

TL: Which is central to everything that you do.

LG: Yes, very much. I’ve been thinking about it in relation to work that I used to make when I lived in New England or in New York, where there’s a lot of building material that has this very precious surface quality to it, suggesting very specific histories. But there’s something about the interchangeable nature of the pallets. Each one has traveled in a specific direction; it feels to me more like the movement of people rather than the movement of one individual over time. So it’s this mass movement, which I like.

TL: The installation here consists of three pieces?

LG: Three pieces, yes. When you enter the space, it’s intentionally somewhat obfuscating. There’s a hole cut into one of the walls, this wooden framed space through which you peer into the first work, Passage (Giza / Gaza), which is a tunnel that creates a perspectival illusion of space opening up through the wall. When you come around the smaller museum wall, you see the side of the tunnel and across from it you see a large bank of similar material, which is the reclaimed forklift pallet slatting. But when you turn that corner, that bank of forklift pallet slatting is revealed to be a set of drawers, which are painted various colors. If you open the drawers, you find that they contain a variety of objects that are made of cast lead and ballistic fabric with resin. These objects are all copies of items that were reportedly smuggled under the border from Egypt into the Gaza Strip. This piece is called Anonymous Needs and Desires. Since the Battle of Gaza in 2007, when Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip, there has been a proliferation of smuggling tunnels.

Liz Glynn, Anonymous Needs and Desires (Gaza / Giza), 2012. Detail. Cast lead, dimensions variable. Photo: Gaea Woods. Courtesy of Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles.

TL: And these objects range from garlic bulbs to jars of baby food to personal electronics like BlackBerries, right? I mean, it’s quite a range of—

LG: It’s a range from goods of necessity to goods of almost total fantasy. There’s a Dungeness crab somewhere in there. Tramadol was one of the most interesting objects: It’s a pain pill, and it’s maybe one of the most popular recreational drugs in the Gaza Strip. It has a mild numbing effect, and people who use it say it helps them deal with life in this tumultuous time. There’s also a lot of building material in the piece: copies of wooden studs and also metal studs, and sacks of cement. Some of these items were banned for their potential dual use, for bomb making as well as construction. But then there are also items that seem more romantic. In the far cabinet, there’s a wedding dress and a lemon tree that’s hung upside down. There’s one gentleman who told the story of having had a lemon tree brought in to put on his balcony so that he could be assured of having fruit through the year.

When ancient Egyptian artifacts are displayed in museums, one often sees bits of old food or some of these crates and things that were made of wood but just coated with enough layers of some sort of paint or something that they held up over time, also buried in the desert with no moisture to rot them. The idea of this sort of very fragile material enduring, I think, is really poignant in some way.

TL: So the material and the objects all speak in ways large and small about globalization and trade. How do you think of form here?

LG: Well, the forms also reference certain histories. For instance, the form of the large wooden tunnel called Passage is based on the architecture of the Grand Gallery inside the Great Pyramid, which is the tunnel that descends into the king’s chamber. There are a lot of historic etchings of this space, and I used these somewhat dated representations rather than photographs I might have taken when I actually visited the pyramids during my research. Despite picturing possibly fictive scenes from the colonial era, these etchings provide a good representation of the morphology of the interior forms.

TL: Right, and then that tunnel is about a royal tomb and then the other is about smugglers.

LG: What was interesting to discover is that the entry shafts of some of the tunnels between Egypt and the Gaza Strip are built out of very similar wood that’s used to cover the floors of the royal tombs to ease access for tourists. And so while the shape of these underground passages varies enormously, there is a similar feel to them materially.

TL: This play of similarity suggests big metaphorical readings—the pharaohs were buried with all the stuff they would need to survive in an afterlife; the Palestinians smuggle all these necessities underground in order to survive this life. You were talking the other night about the politics of the situation there: How do you see that playing out in the work? Or does it?

LG: What’s interesting to me is the fact that a lot of the objects smuggled in aren’t necessarily specific to the political conflict of that region. As I kept researching the tunnels, I became more and more interested in the fact that what’s actually smuggled over the border is less representative of the political imbalance there and more about simple human need. I think that people see the situation in the Gaza Strip, because of the religious history involved and the ramifications of that, as insolvable or completely intractable. So I think what the piece is trying to do in some way is to open up the idea that there’s something very ordinary and recognizable at the core of life in the Gaza Strip. With Anonymous Needs and Desires, the idea is, rather than think about it as a humanitarian crisis or political conflict, think about the lives of these people. Instead of thinking about the conflict as this inapproachable thing that we can’t touch, think about the situation as something that has implications that are more universal in terms of the human ability to deal with life.

Liz Glynn, Made in LA 2012, 2012. Installation view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photo: Brian Forrest. Courtesy of the Hammer Museum.

TL: And that’s presumably where the open-ended performative aspect of the work comes in. Your public can come and move things around either in the space or throughout the museum, and in doing this potentially become empathetically engaged in the act of smuggling.

LG: Yes, part of the idea behind casting the objects in lead is that even though the objects are very small, they are incredibly heavy. Some of them are much more identifiable to us, and they are very pocketable—something like a BlackBerry or an iPod can just conveniently slip into your pocket. I’ve also specifically worked with the museum to position the security officer outside of the space so that you’re able to handle the objects behind the cabinets with no one watching you.

TL: So you’re setting up a temptation. Or an opportunity.

LG: Yeah, the opportunity, I think. But also, I’m someone who is hyperaware of having a guard at your back. I’m always the person who, in spite of knowing how close I can get, always leans too close to the sculpture.

TL: Using lead, as you said, gives these objects a weight that they wouldn’t have in real life. But lead is a base metal; it carries within it a sense of transformation?

LG: It does. It’s one of the alchemical bases for making gold. Another reason I chose to use the lead was that the Israeli military operation that occurred prior to the border controls becoming much tighter was known as Operation Cast Lead, as in bullets, which seemed kind of chilling.

But for experiential reasons, I am interested in the weight of these objects in your pockets. I really like the idea that this weight gives you a heightened awareness of these small things as you’re moving through the museum and that this might signify kind of an emotional weight to them.

Lead wasn’t a material that I’d worked with before, but when we first did them there are the unexpected qualities that emerge, like that lead is really malleable and so just hammering it will yield a mark and you can almost stick a fingernail into the pieces and leave a mark on them.

TL: Which means you can quickly get to that feeling of used-ness that you get on the pallets, I guess?

LG: The pieces are clear-coated, but over time the metal will oxidize and it will turn black, so they have to be recoated or polished up. I like that it doesn’t feel like a stable metal, that it feels like something that’s constantly being used and sort of alive in some way.

TL: You’re from the East Coast, but now you’re based here in Los Angeles. How come you’re doing so much research in the eastern Mediterranean area?

LG: It’s always been a way to talk about both emotional and political ideas that I’m interested in. At CalArts, when I tried to make work based on references that were a lot more contemporary, I found that people had already made up their minds, and it was harder for them to enter the work.

TL: Give me an example.

LG: I was trying to make a series of sculptures that had something to do with Buckminster Fuller, and instantly people would say, “Utopia failed.” I wanted to address something about possibility or human agency, but that was immediately short-circuited. So that was when I started developing the 24 Hour Roman Reconstruction Project, as a less direct way to talk about these things. The truism that Rome wasn’t built in a day had been used politically as an excuse for why Iraq could not be fixed or New Orleans rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina. I was interested in a physical, performative refutation of this, looking in a more historical sense at empires rising and falling and thinking of it as a metaphor for the American situation.

I visited Egypt in June 2011, so six months after the revolution happened, and the younger people that I met just walking around were all incredibly excited. Many of them used the analogy that the time of the great pyramids and the pharaohs was the last great moment in Egyptian history and that now we’ve hit the second. Whether it proves to be that significant, I think, is much more complicated than that. But that idea of approaching the moment with that sense of history really struck home to me.

In the great pyramids, there’s this very elaborate physical architecture that is actually a representation for the idea of the afterlife. And the way this metaphor was negotiated in real time was through the elaborate rituals laid out in the Book of the Dead. These rituals allowed the deceased to enter the eternal land and live there, with different chapters describing different destinations and the interactions necessary and expected.

So in III, the first pyramid piece that I did [in 2010], the idea was to borrow themes from the Book of the Dead to talk about the kind of uncertainty and superstition that maybe framed our thinking in the context of the financial crisis. I was specifically thinking about myself and a lot of the other artists I know, using all these kinds of puddle-jumping ways of dealing with our own financial situations or our own uncertainty about what we’re doing in the world—that whole, “if I pay this bill and not that one this month, if I do this and hope that that show works out” scenario. From this kind of trying to get through to the other side, it doesn’t seem like much of a leap to the anonymous transgression of smuggling, whether it’s trying to get through to the place where you’re safer or getting through this good that will improve the quality of your life.

Liz Glynn, III, 2010. Reclaimed wooden pallets, 16 x 27 x 27'. Courtesy of the artist and Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles.

At some point, I realized I was drawing pictures of myself sleeping in the back of a car, thinking about squeezing through things, or about different points in people’s lives that had become uncomfortable. So in the work, something like the specific situation on the border between the Sinai Desert and Gaza Strip becomes a stand-in for other ideas of passage, transgression, and anonymous movement. There is definitely a way that I think some of the themes are much larger and more archetypal. When I was making the drawings for the piece, I ended up just making all these drawings of tunnels over and over, thinking about the role of lightness and dark in painting, or how it functions architecturally inside the pyramids; lightness and dark, thinking about movement between life and death.

TL: You have talked about your travel and about making drawings as a way of thinking through the work. Can you talk a bit more about your process? I mean, you talk about developing your drawings; there’s the research; there’s the travel. How does it start and where does it—

LG: It usually starts with a passing reference in some other text I’ve been reading for another project. In this case, I’d done a series of smaller, really site-specific projects with nonprofits, and looking back at that work after a year, I was very unhappy with them. It felt like I was responding to very specific things but that I needed to figure out in a larger sense what I wanted the work to deal with in the world. At that time we were doing a class on cultural capital at The Public School, which got interesting only when people started talking about when they had gotten paid or not for museum shows, the precarious nature of their teaching jobs, and what their lives were actually like. I realized that conversations like that can be very difficult but generative and that I wanted to transpose that kind of information into an environment that wasn’t just discursive but was more emotional. I wanted to get at the emotions and anxieties, the real and valid responses to a situation that is usually dealt with objectively through journalism.

The fact that I had done III meant that the events in Tahrir Square resonated, and I began reading more about Egypt, going back historically but also reading news reports. Thanks to Google News, I was able to read investigative reports in papers ranging from the Christian Science Monitor to the Israeli daily Haaretz. And it was interesting because the politics of each site vary so widely: Some are highlighting drugs and guns, and others mention milk and baby food. In the case of the ancient Egyptian material, I looked at a lot of the British and American archaeologists who first excavated the great pyramids, photos from that period. I also got interested in the Egyptomania at the turn of the century, along with an interest in black magic and other strange undercurrents at the same time.

I spent several months doing this kind of research, and then I went to Egypt and tried to see as many things as I could firsthand. I emailed some of the English-speaking reporters who had reported on the smuggling tunnels, but no one was there at the time. I went to Cairo hoping that I could go and just experience walking around the street, but it was actually very difficult, as the cultural gap was a lot vaster than I anticipated. I’ve traveled a lot in Europe just by myself and walking around had never been an issue, but suddenly being an American woman in a Middle Eastern country was sort of like, “Oh, right, I’m not supposed to be doing this. I should be getting a car everywhere.” Which didn’t stop me from doing it for another week. I went and looked at all the pyramids, visited the Valley of the Kings, shot photos, made drawings, went to the Egyptian Museum. There, I actually cried within the first 30 minutes because it’s so sad. It’s completely overwhelming with the number and wealth of artifacts in comparison with the Met or anywhere else. And they’re all kept in, like, dusty cases, mostly without identification tags or labels. The King Tut room and the Ramses room were actually properly lit, but the rest of the museum is lined with cabinets full of jade beads or little amulets or whatever and no notification of what tomb they’re from. In part, the idea of these sets of drawers in the Hammer piece came from thinking a lot about a major national museum that foregrounds its storage in its main galleries so that you can apprehend the vastness of the collection, and so also of the history that represents.

I went to Egypt thinking there were two possible pieces for the Hammer. There was this one, or another piece that would have been called The Museum of 18 Days, which would have been all monumental sculptures based on ephemera documented during the protests and some of the artifacts from the Egyptian Museum that were damaged during that time. Because of the uncertainty around the future of the revolution, this project didn’t align with the gestalt that is a year of planning leading to a show.

Once I’d decided on the piece, I made a number of models and I quickly realized that I wanted the tunnel to penetrate the wall because it felt very important to implicate the institution and the museum, or the idea of a museum, in some way. I wanted to signal that the institution was somehow engaged. So I made a number of models and drawings, then over a couple months, in conversation with the preparators and the curators, figured out which wall it would be OK to cut into relative to the rest of the exhibition design, as other artists adjacent to me were shifting plans as well. We found a section of wall that could be penetrated, and I had the general proportions for the tunnel so we started building the tunnel. And one of the things that makes my life very difficult is that I can’t start making anything until I’ve let the research settle a lot and know what I am making and why. And then when I start making it there’s this whole other set of problems that arise. I spent about five months trying to find someone in LA who would cast lead, and there was no one; it turned out that I ended up mailing all the molds up to a company in the Bay Area. So I would get these flat-rate Priority Mail boxes back full of lead. It was the biggest abuse of the postal service. But that was how I ended up casting all of the objects. And coming to the final stretch, I decided to color-code the drawers, rather than face them with the forklift pallet slatting, which seemed inaccessible. I had wanted the drawers to be approachable but mysterious. I hesitated at first but decided to add a color-coding system so that the objects are originally placed in appropriate places—red for illicit substances, yellow is food, slate blue is technology, dark blue is building material, white is fuel. There might be one or two more. There’s one that’s clothing; I think it’s a turquoise.

Liz Glynn, Made in L.A. 2012, 2012. Installation view at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Photo: Brian Forrest. Courtesy of the Hammer Museum.

TL: So when you were talking about resetting the installation from time to time that’s about putting the things back in the correct color-coded areas?

LG: Yeah, because the piece is interactive, people can move the small pieces around as they like, and what happens, as far as I can see from having gone in every couple weeks, is that if it gets arranged to a certain point people seem to stop rearranging it. So from time to time, I just return all the objects to the drawers they came in, leaving a couple of them out to encourage further movement. Some people seem to want to create narratives with the objects—the crab becomes a bit of a character, or the tiles will get arranged as though they’re actually tiles on the floor. They’re life casts of ceramic tile. I try the best I can not to exercise judgment in rearranging things—I don’t necessarily go in and make my own arrangement of the objects. I just return them to where they came from and count and see what has disappeared.

Excerpted from East of Borneo.

[calartsarchive]

Ingrid Calame in Conversation with James Welling

Ingrid Calame, #256 Drawing (Tracings from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the L.A. River), 2007. Color pencil on trace Mylar, 48 x 72 in. Courtesy of the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York.

James Welling visits Ingrid Calame's studio in Los Angeles to discuss the process behind her series of paintings and drawings made by tracing the asphalt surface of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

James Welling: Okay, couple of things, just to establish. These drawings are all one-to-one scale in size.

Ingrid Calame: Yeah.

JW: And you work by contact. Tracing is a contact medium.

IC: Right.

JW: So you have to be in contact with the original source. How do you get to the second step, making the work, just simple tracing of the original Mylar? This question of transferring data from one transparent sheet to another is what initially got me thinking about your work and its relation to photography. The contact print and negative are the same image size—it’s the idea of the direct copy of something.

IC: Right. When I first started tracing, in 1998, I traced all alone, wouldn’t even let my boyfriend come with me. But as the projects started getting bigger and the tracings more intricate and time-consuming in 2000, I began tracing with assistants. We translate stains into lines that make closed shapes. There’s a subjective aspect to how each person translates a stain, which I like. It opens the process up to other people’s perception within my game.

JW: One of the things I noticed in your studio was the quality of the incredible detail in the Indianapolis Motor Speedway drawings. You said that was because the concrete had an interesting surface that was not visible. But when you were on your hands and knees you could feel it.

IC: The asphalt is diamond cut—they use a special machine to graze the concrete, gravel-like surface down, like a meat cutter on a piece of meat. And that’s what it feels like on your skin! It pulls at the rubber of the tires. When you look at the skid marks closely, they look crystalline.

JW: So it has an incredible “coefficient of friction.”

IC: Yes. Incredible.

JW: To stop the race cars?

IC: And to start. Actually in the pit, where the cars pull in and out to refuel and have their tires changed, the Speedway leaves the rubber there because it gives traction for cars to take off. Everywhere else at the Speedway, they clean the track incessantly so that nothing will impede the cars.

Tracing at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, 2006. Courtesy of the artist.

JW: But the whole idea of friction is so integral to what you’re drawing, the friction of the pencil on the smooth surface of the paper. And then when it’s translated into the drawings, there’s the slippery surface of the colored pencil on the Mylar. I also noticed that this Indianapolis tracing looks a little bit like a reef or sunken ship, underwater photographs of the Titanic—what’s left after a hundred years of corrosion on metal and wood. Do you ever look at source material like that? IC: No. I don’t. But connections emerge from things I see in life, just like art references emerge. I noticed that the layers of pit tire marks on this painting reminded me of Gerhard Richter’s squeegee paintings. The marks of the tires, having sped across the Speedway’s gridlike, cheese grater surface, have that squeegee-like loss of continuity in a smooth pulling mark.

JW: So the phenomenon is similar.

IC: Right. And what you were describing about the idea of a reef or a shipwreck, it’s kind of like a cross-section of this information—disintegration to its midsection. The rubber tire mark would be rough when it comes down, but as it takes off again it slices off that last layer of rubber.

JW: Where the rubber meets the road.

IC: Yes.

Ingrid Calame at work at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, 2006. Photo: Tad Fruits. Courtesy of the artist and the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis.

JW: But the rubber hitting asphalt is also very similar to a printing press, where a lithographic cylinder hits a piece of paper and leaves an impression. For example, offset printing uses a rubber cylindrical offset plate that’s laying down the ink, like rubber on the surface of the Speedway track. So when I look at your work, I am reminded of graphic arts processes, rubber cylinders hitting paper. When I was looking at this drawing and these small paintings, they also look like stencils, silkscreen stencils. One of the challenges with silkscreen is that you can’t print continuous tones. Instead it’s all flat tones. Or the issue around reproducing continuous tones in lithography or in silkscreen is to break it up into dots. I know you’re choosing things that are already broken up because of their wear and tear and surface features. This seems related to your need in these drawings to draw continuously bounded shapes. There are no fuzzy edges in your work. Everything is a closed outline. And that’s why I think it has all sorts of adjacencies to offset printing, silkscreen, and photographic processes. There’s no continuous tone. Everything is flat. You use spot colors—planes of color rather than gradations. In most printmaking, one uses transparent dyes or inks. One of the great things about your paintings is they’re totally opaque. You can paint one color over another, and there is never any color bleeding through. Is that because of the paint’s intensity?

IC: Yes, I use sign painter’s paint because of its liquidity. You can see all the marks that I make. But there’s no layering on the actual painting. It’s made like a puzzle.

JW: You mean there aren’t overlays?

IC: Exactly. Each shape is painted, filled in—I wanted it to be like a sign.

JW: Yes. Do you ever look at books on mapmaking? Cartography? Because these paintings also remind me of maps.

IC: Interesting. I love maps, but I don’t aspire to make them. I recently saw a topographic map at Desert Center, and I finally understood what people see in my drawings, because people always say they are like topographical maps. And I saw this map from afar and thought, Wow, yeah, that looks kind of like one of my drawings. But mapmaking is antithetical to my whole process of one-to-one scale. On the other hand, the inspiration for my work is born out of a desire to know the world, which definitely connects it to mapmaking. It’s just that I’m crawling around on the ground, while cartographers are trying to get an overview.

JW: So your work is totally against mapmaking. It’s a map that’s one-to-one. Which would be very difficult to make.

IC: Yes.

JW: You know, when I came in today I thought your work was all about relief. But it’s not only about relief; it’s often about these other sorts of stains. It’s a visual interpretation of the stain through the transparency of the Mylar.

IC: Yes, and it’s topographical too, like with a coffee spill on the sidewalk—the aggregate of the concrete affects how it pools. So there is topography to stains, even if it’s microcosmic. The coffee pools to the bottom of the aggregate, rather than the top of the gravel, and I’m tracing the darker part of the pools. If it were a chunky aggregate, the liquid would pool to the bottom and my tracing would have big circles in it where the liquid pooled away from the pebbles. But if it spills onto a very fine aggregate, the stain looks like a smooth continuous tone, and the tracing is one solid shape.

Ingrid Calame, detail of Tracing at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, 2006. Pencil on trace Mylar, 10 x 40 ft. Photo: Tad Fruits. Courtesy of the artist and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

JW: So it’s almost like a shadow cast or some sort of a flow pattern. When I was in Austin, Texas, two weeks ago, I was looking at the sidewalk concrete and noticed that it had almost exactly the mixture of stones and aggregate as certain sections of East London, where the galleries are located. Both concretes had medium-sized chunks of rock embedded in this sort of beige, or yellow actually, warmish concrete. And the only difference between Austin, Texas, concrete and London concrete was that in London the concrete guys stamped a grid into the surface. You must look at a lot of concrete.

IC: I do. And I end up moving through different kinds of grounds and stains. I don’t want to trace certain kinds of marks anymore, you know? Certain marks are inspiring at certain times. It was exciting that the concrete at the Speedway was so different from your average asphalt. The concrete, the activity of the area, and the weather, have as much to do with the creation of the marks as the viscosity of the liquid that made the mark. Or tire. Rubber isn’t really a liquid, except when it’s hot. When I was in Buffalo looking for tracing sites for my exhibition at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery I thought of your Buffalo images.

JW: Of the psychiatric hospital?

IC: Yes. We wanted to get access to it because it’s so beautiful and intriguing and mysterious. But we couldn’t.

JW: There were big wings that were closed off. And I remember when I took pictures of it I had to sign a release that I wouldn’t photograph any of the people inside. I can’t believe that I got access to it. I just went up to the front desk and said, “I want to take some pictures.” I guess they understood that it was architecturally important.

IC: Getting access to places is part of the intrigue of doing my work. It isn’t just the drawing and painting, but also all the negotiations out in the world. And going up to the desk and finding out you could just walk in there is part of finding out what the world is about. That’s part of the mapmaking. Rather than being in my studio painting something that is containable here, it’s important to me to negotiate doing a project on the Speedway or in the stock exchange or on the LA River. And then come back into the studio and have the introverted activity of making a painting or drawing.

JW: I think “negotiate” is the operative word for all of your work, from finding the sites to making all the decisions on what lines to trace. The other thing I thought of was the idea of blindness, of the sense of touch rather than sense of sight. It’s a kind of blindness drawing—instead of using your eye; you’re using your tongue to feel the texture of these surfaces. The drawing especially seems as if you’ve dropped this image into a bath of acid, and it’s coming up etched. To go back to the image I had of a boat or wreckage, it’s like the surface of the paper is a layer of water—one plane—and the pencil lines emerge as another raised plane. Your work definitely has a Braille quality to it.

IC: I think surface is something that artists notice a lot. When I look at a painting, I often look at whether it is underpainted—how many layers are there, what hidden history is there to be seen or not? Painting is a document of performance. In an early Philip Guston painting I was surprised to notice that in painting a dog in profile behind a man, Guston didn’t paint the dog’s tail continuing behind the figure even though it emerged on the other side. The painting seemed much more spontaneous than that trail of impasto revealed. That’s a big decision. It gets down to a philosophy of making, a philosophy of visualizing and planning. I wonder how you think about that when you make a print.

JW: I’m always looking for ways to extend the surface of photography. I never feel I am able to do it very successfully, so I like looking at people who have. In a couple of older photographic processes you can see quick relief layers of gelatin. In Polaroid photographs you also have a kind of a relief situation, as well as in carbon prints. I remember a Paul Outerbridge photograph at the Getty, with different surfaces and kinds of reflectivity, and he’s painted back into the picture with inks to darken certain things. It’s a very hands-on material photograph. Ink-jet prints and gelatin silver prints are really different, and I like both surfaces. But still there’s almost not enough surface for me in photography, so I have to imagine that there’s more surface there. I think the important ideas for me in your work are this idea of mapping, negotiating, and then blindness.

Ingrid Calame, #258 Drawing (Tracings from the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and the L.A. River), 2007. Enamel paint on aluminum, 6 x 10 ft. Courtesy of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the Carmen and Mark Holeman Contemporary Fund. IC: Mapping like nonmapping?

JW: Like the impossibility of mapping—the idea that you are mapping the world, but at a one-to-one scale, and the futility of that process. It’s negotiation because it’s all about visual interpretation of the stains through the transparency of the Mylar. It’s really mediated. It’s not a rubbing. You’re looking through something, so it’s a kind of very primitive perspective. It’s not just this idea of transferring things from one surface to another; it’s a negotiation and a decision-making process in the hand of the draftsperson.

IC: Rubbings are really beautiful, but they are too tactile for my project. I like the tracing being a translation into a highly graphic image. That’s why I use a line, because a line is like a word. A line is based on writing. There’s a semiotics of line and drawing. And there’s legibility to my translations of gray mass “shadow” into line. I’m interested in the relationship between representation and abstraction. So this tracing is a representation, it’s like a word I’ve written of what this tire mark would be. This is my word for it. And there’s legibility to the entire gesture through the accumulation of these tiny parts of the image. On the other hand, all the tracings are abstract because they do not naturally begin and end. I’m defining the edge of the grayness; I’m deciding what is negative and positive at once. Drawing is like language to me. Language is the most representational thing. When I’m doing the trace drawing outside, I record the stain, which is representational. The further away I get from that first tracing of the ground, when I use the tracing in my model of representation, the more it becomes an abstraction. The link of the tracing to the street is both representational and abstract. Just like words are abstractions, yet we continually rely upon language’s ability to describe images and experience, to be representational.

JW: And one of the ways you learn to write is you trace. And you trace letters.

IC: That’s true.

JW: And you could take all these traced sheets of paper back to the site and line them up. But the connection between drawing, legibility, and writing is important for you. The idea of tracing, copying, of repeating and representing is, if not language, like language. It’s like a very primitive language, where a word stands for a thing, and you’re just peeling the language off of the thing, or the lines away from the object, and then we look at them with all their ghostly negative space. The issue of negative space is the other thing that’s really remarkable, especially in these dense Indianapolis Motor Speedway drawings. There is no negative space. It’s hard to tell what’s positive and what’s negative. There are so many little floating elements. Of course there were floating elements in your earlier work too.

IC: Yeah, but it’s gotten a lot more complicated. And I’m amazed when people helping me trace can follow what they are tracing, because you always have to remember what’s positive and negative. Otherwise you end up with little lines floating out there. Tracing is very zen, actually. You have to pay attention to the moment, but you have to pay attention to the whole and its parts at the same time.

Excerpted from East of Borneo.

[calartsarchive]

The Personal is Political, Revisited – Andrea Bowers

Artist Andrea Bowers describes the influence of pioneering activists, who drew from their own life experiences to work for change and to create powerful grassroots movements. The list included abortion rights activists The Army of Three (Pat Maginiss, Lana Phelan, and Rowena Gurner), environmental activist Majora Carter, AIDS activist Cleve Jones, and undocumented immigrant Elvira Arellano. She argues that the “Me Generation” (from the '80s to today) must overcome mainstream cynicism and doubt about the possibility of social change and political agency.

Andrea Bowers spoke on the panel "The Personal is Political, Revisited" at Exquisite Acts & Everyday Rebellions: 2007 CalArts Feminist Art Symposium, a student-organized project that took place at CalArts on March 10, 2007.

http://exquisiteacts.org/symposium/the-personal-is-political-revisited.html

Excerpted from East of Borneo.

[calartsarchive]

Artists at work: Monique Prieto

Monique Prieto, Burnt by a Bullet, 2006, oil on canvas, 152.4 x 152.4cm. Courtesy the artist

Artist Monique Prieto interviewed by Thomas Lawson, October 2006.

http://www.afterall.org/online/artists.at.work.monique.prieto

Excerpted from East of Borneo.

[calartsarchive]

Charles Gaines – Experimental Impulse interview (2011)

Charles Gaines interviewed by Fiona Connor, 2011.

Excerpted from East of Borneo.

[calartsarchive]

Leslie Dick presents "c. 7,500", an exhibition curated by Lucy Lippard

Writer Leslie Dick describes her early encounter with feminist conceptual art in the exhibition "c. 7,500" curated by Lucy Lippard. The exhibition was first shown at CalArts' A402 Gallery in 1973. She recalls, "It was funny, and deathly serious; it had that energy, that aggression which I recognized as mine, an internal conflict, a dynamic, that seemed to me to speak from a place that no one knew about, that place where women live out our contradictions."

Exquisite Acts & Everyday Rebellions: 2007 CalArts Feminist Art Symposium was a student-organized project that took place at CalArts on March 10, 2007.

Excerpted from East of Borneo.

[calartsarchive]

David Askevold: The California Years

by Thomas Lawson

The conceptual artist David Askevold employed video, photography and performance in his allusive explorations of both the natural and the cultural landscape. He used fragmented images and texts, collaborative performance, and chance to create implied narratives of suggestive power. He began teaching at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 1968 where he helped shape that school’s conceptually oriented studio program. For his Projects Class he asked a group of New York based artists, including Lawrence Weiner, Robert Smithson, and Joseph Kosuth, to submit projects for his students to carry out. He travelled to Los Angeles in 1976 to teach at UCIrvine, and while there he developed the piece he showed at LAICA the following year. By that time he was also teaching at CalArts, where he met and befriended a younger group of artists like Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler. Askevold and Kelley collaborated on The Poltergeist that was presented by Foundation Art Resources (FAR) in 1979.

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Excerpted from East of Borneo.

[calartsarchive]

Allan Sekula interviewed by Edward Dimendberg

by Thomas Lawson

Two linked themes have long dominated Allan Sekula’s photographic investigations; Los Angeles and maritime trade. Over the years he has documented the social and political landscape of his hometown, and traveled the world to better understand the ebb and flow of the international trade that gives shape to its economy. In many ways the unveiling of Frank O. Gehry’s Disney Hall, back in 2003, provided Sekula with an unrivaled opportunity to bring the two themes together under the metaphoric sails of the shiny new building on the crest of Bunker Hill, the old residential quarter long ago demolished to make way for corporate tower blocks and cultural jewel boxes. In a precursor to the Pacific Standard Time project, the Getty Trust gave Sekula a grant to mount an exhibition exploring the story surrounding the new concert hall, and in this interview with Ed Dimendberg, Sekula discusses the results.

http://bombsite.com/issues/92/articles/2754

Excerpted from East of Borneo.

[calartsarchive]

Allan Sekula, "Reinventing Documentary"

“This article appeared in a catalogue accompanying a pair of one-person exhibitions at the Long Beach Museum of Art in 1976. Fred Lonidier’s Health and Safety Game and Philip Steinmetz’s Somebody’s Making a Mistake. David Ross, the museum’s director of television and film, curated the exhibition. Early on, the decision was made to produce an exhibition catalogue that worked against the high art fetish of limited “quality reproduction.” That is, the catalogue’s form (newsprint, lots of critical text) and presentation (it was both used as an exhibition announcement and was available for free at the museum) were intended polemically. Following Walter Benjamin, these artists see the political value of photography in its reproducibility and in its “bracketing” with speech or text.” – Allan Sekula

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Excerpted from East of Borneo.

[calartsarchive]

Allan Sekula, 1951-2013

The image above is from a part of Fish Story, and is titled Dismal Science: Part 1. Middle Passage. Mid-Atlantic, November 1993.

Allan Sekula had a remarkable, indomitable spirit. For over two years, from the first word that his body could not be repaired, he fought against the inevitable with inner strength and grace. At first he continued to travel for his work, then his many collaborators traveled to him so that several projects could move forward. He lost weight and he lost energy, but he never lost that keen eye and sharp mind that saw so clearly what was wrong with this world. Hospitalized again after suffering a massive hemorrhage, he finally gave up the struggle on Saturday, August 10.

As a writer, Allan described with great clarity and passion what photography can, and must do: document the facts of social relations while opening a more metaphoric space to allow viewers the idea that things could be different. And as a photographer he set out to do just that. He laid bare the ugliness of exploitation, but showed us the beauty of the ordinary; of ordinary, working people in ordinary, unremarkable places doing ordinary, everyday things. And, like the rigorous old-style leftist that he was, he infused that beauty with a deep sense of morality.

From the beginning he was concerned with the numbing regime of the punch-card, but over the past two decades expanded his frame to encompass the contemporary maritime world, the complex trading routes of international shipping lines and the vast oceans on which they ply their trade. This epic project grew from a relatively conventional Fish Story (1989-1995), with its didactic arrangements of photographs and texts, to "The Forgotten Space" (2010), the extraordinary film he made with Noel Burch.

The website for the film, which includes essays and photographs, as well as a trailer that allows us once again to hear Allan’s voice, can be found at www.theforgottenspace.net.

Excerpted from East of Borneo.