Mar 2008
Texas reprise
03/31/08 Filed in: Art
Steve Nalepa posted a few new videos (with great audio!) from the DeKam VS Nalepa performance in Houston, TX. Video shot by John Carrithers & photo by Katya Horner.
More collaborative video performances from Johnny DeKam can be found here.
House of the Century
03/29/08 Filed in: Art
In honor of the Ant Farm retrospective in Sevilla, which I just read about on the fantastic blog We Make Money Not Art, I could not resist reblogging this video of Ant Farm's The House of the Century, 1972. One of the major disappointments of my year in Texas was that I never visited this house. While the house is in ruins, it would be worth a trip back to the Bayou City (Houston) to visit.
Closest we got was when Johnny did a live video performance in collaboration with the talented and lovely (and radical) string quartet ETHEL, in the Media Room from The House of the Century. This room construction was salvaged and re-created inside the University of Houston School of Architecture during the Blaffer Gallery's 2005 Ant Farm exhibition. If you happen to be passing through the UH campus, go and ask for a tour from someone in the office of the School of Architecture.
Musing upon what I would do, if I had the personal funding to commission my own house of the century. I would likely call upon the collaborative Simparch, because I am enamored with their Quonset Hut rehab, Clean Livin'. This is a self-contained live/work space that employs renewable energy and is a functioning part of the artist in residence program at the CLUI South Base in Wendover, UT. (shown below)
Plans to Mix Oil Drilling and Art Clash in Utah
03/26/08 Filed in: Art
Today the NY Times
reported on the controversy surrounding the proposed
oil drilling close to Robert Smithson's
Spiral
Jetty . Plans to Mix Oil Drilling and Art
Clash in Utah had some astute quotes, such as
this one:
What Mr. Smithson might have thought about the drilling plan is among the issues in dispute. State officials and some art historians, pointing to Mr. Smithson’s own writing about the “Spiral Jetty,” and the film he made about its construction, said he reveled in the juxtaposition of industrialism and beauty, decay and rebirth, rot and permanence.
“The sense of ruined and abandoned hopes interested him,” said Lynne Cooke, the curator at Dia. “He didn’t look for beautiful places, but rather despoiled landscapes where industry and the wild overlap.”
Spiral Jetty photo from my trip to Utah last month with grad students from the California College of Art Curatorial Practice Program. See the February archives for Smithson's 1970 Spiral Jetty film.
What Mr. Smithson might have thought about the drilling plan is among the issues in dispute. State officials and some art historians, pointing to Mr. Smithson’s own writing about the “Spiral Jetty,” and the film he made about its construction, said he reveled in the juxtaposition of industrialism and beauty, decay and rebirth, rot and permanence.
“The sense of ruined and abandoned hopes interested him,” said Lynne Cooke, the curator at Dia. “He didn’t look for beautiful places, but rather despoiled landscapes where industry and the wild overlap.”
Spiral Jetty photo from my trip to Utah last month with grad students from the California College of Art Curatorial Practice Program. See the February archives for Smithson's 1970 Spiral Jetty film.
I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original
03/20/08 Filed in: Ideas
Reyner Banham, the British
architectural critic and historian, keeps coming
up. I am currently working on an article about
CLUI's recent residency in
Houston,TX and read that Banham felt that city
was 'like a real life-life version of a Monopoly
game', as he saw 1970s Houston as
'simultaneously wide open and impenetrable' and
felt the renegade city made "Los Angeles in the
Chinatown epoch seem like a socialist
economy" because Houston's "property wheels and
deals operated with less restrictions than
anywhere else in the Anglo Saxon world".
This morning as I was preparing to buy the new book Polar Inertia: The Migrating and Emergent City, once again Reyner Banham came up. In the book summary as he was quoted as describing Los Angeles as a city in which "mobility outweighs monumentality". All this Banham synchronicity is simply a great excuse to post this quirky but seminal video "Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles". Originally produced as a TV documentary by the BBC after Banham's "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies" was published in 1971, thanks to ArtTorrents and UBUweb it has become a cult favorite, an alternative "LA101".
"I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original"- Reyner Banham
This morning as I was preparing to buy the new book Polar Inertia: The Migrating and Emergent City, once again Reyner Banham came up. In the book summary as he was quoted as describing Los Angeles as a city in which "mobility outweighs monumentality". All this Banham synchronicity is simply a great excuse to post this quirky but seminal video "Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles". Originally produced as a TV documentary by the BBC after Banham's "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies" was published in 1971, thanks to ArtTorrents and UBUweb it has become a cult favorite, an alternative "LA101".
"I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original"- Reyner Banham
Johnny Video
03/12/08 Filed in: Rambling
The tour of South America has come to an end. This time out we logged 11 flights in and out of 5 countries to do 8 shows. And as I add up the ticket sales (or venue capacity) for this tour, it is mind blowing to realize that we created a live video show for 73,932 people.
The past 48 hours have been the most extreme of this two weeks on the road. On Thursday we left Bogota, Columbia at 10AM and arrived at the airport in Caracas, Venezuela at 6PM. We then boarded a bus that took us over the mountains and arrived in Valencia, Venezuela at 10PM. On Friday morning we boarded a van at 10AM that took us to the venue and that night had a 9PM show for an amped up audience of 6,000.
Immediately following the show we broke the stage down and loaded the trucks. By 12:30AM we were boarding the bus that would take us back over the mountain to Caracas. We checked into a hotel at 3:30AM, showered and then checked out at 4:15AM to catch the last van ride of the tour to the airport for our 7AM flight home.
Not much deep reflection about the tour is available at this time. Now I am looking forward to unwinding at home while writing an article about Houston for the upcoming "Urban" issue of ArtLies magazine. Later this week we will be doing video for two club shows in LA. Wednesday night's show is with DJs Steve Nalepa (LA) and MattB (Tokyo) who will be rocking the house with their Bass Science collaboration and on Thursday night we will be at Spaceland in Silverlake with the Bay Area band Film School .
Not so glamorous
03/10/08 Filed in: Rambling
Sometimes the accommodations touring through South America are less than glamorous. At one venue in Brazil, the production office was a repurposed shower room and this left the toilet area as the default dining room. (photo: R. Dorion)
Cable Untangling Championships in LA
03/09/08 Filed in: Art
Xeni from Boing Boing TV visits the first-ever "Cable Untangling Championships" at Machine Project in Los Angeles, where knottiness abounds and speedy-fingered sysadmins own the world. "Cabling" is a new sport founded by Steven Schkolne in which competitors must race to detangle bundles of CAT-5 ethernet cables. (NOTE: This event took place in early February)
Her name is Rio and she dances on the sand
03/05/08 Filed in: Rambling
Arrived in Rio de Janeiro just in time for sunset
Loud in Chile
03/03/08 Filed in: Rambling
It was brought to my attention that the time has come
for me to post to the blog from South America. But
until I can take some nice photos of something other
than the airport or a hotel room, this LOUD video
will serve as a place holder and introduction to how
enthusiastic the South American audiences have been.
This low quality video is from the first show of the
tour in Santiago, Chile. Check out that crowd- WOW!
WARNING: Turn down your speakers before hitting play
Loud in Chile from bree edwards on Vimeo.
WARNING: Turn down your speakers before hitting play
Loud in Chile from bree edwards on Vimeo.