Fresh off the presses
06/09/08 Filed in: Ideas
Immersion in the Land of
Oil is an
article about The Center for Land Use
Interpretation's recent residency at
the Mitchell Center for the
Arts in
Houston, TX. I wrote this article for the Summer
issue of ART LIES magazine, which just hit the
newsstands.
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.
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)
You Are Here highlights
01/10/08 Filed in: Ideas
There are short
highlights from the YouAreHere conference
now online at Vimeo.
YouAreHere was held at the Aurora Picture Show in Houston, Texas on November 30 and December 1, 2007. I curated this program (in collaboration with the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at The University of Houston) which featured contemporary artists and curators exploring the interplay between art and geography, activism and cultural studies.
Presentations included Matt McCormick (Rodeo Films), Nato Thompson (Creative Time), The Institute for Applied Autonomy, and Matthew Coolidge (Center for Land Use Interpretation).
Start with the introduction to Matthew Coolidge's presentation "Points of Disinterest in the Gulf Coast Region", in which he contextualized the work of the CLUI. You will be able to access the other presentations from here.
YouAreHere was held at the Aurora Picture Show in Houston, Texas on November 30 and December 1, 2007. I curated this program (in collaboration with the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at The University of Houston) which featured contemporary artists and curators exploring the interplay between art and geography, activism and cultural studies.
Presentations included Matt McCormick (Rodeo Films), Nato Thompson (Creative Time), The Institute for Applied Autonomy, and Matthew Coolidge (Center for Land Use Interpretation).
Start with the introduction to Matthew Coolidge's presentation "Points of Disinterest in the Gulf Coast Region", in which he contextualized the work of the CLUI. You will be able to access the other presentations from here.
We were here
12/02/07 Filed in: Ideas
Up: Matt Coolidge from The Center for Land Use Interpretation
Down: Rich Pell from The Institute for Applied Autonomy
Yesterday at The Aurora Picture Show
Matt McCormick's blog has great coverage of the weekend
Matt McCormick at the Aurora Picture Show
12/01/07 Filed in: Art
Last night You Are Here was kicked off
with Matt McCormick's performance Future So
Bright: Live. Todays events begin at 1:00
with Nato Thompson's talk about Experimental
Geography, followed by a talk by Rich Pell
from the Institute for Applied Autonomy. There
will be a coffee break around 3:00 that will be
followed by Matt Coolidge from CLUI with his
talk Points of Disinterest in the Gulf Coast
Region. See you at The
Aurora!
Heading back to Texas
11/18/07 Filed in: Art
Heading back to Texas for two projects that we've
been working on
NOV 30 & DEC 1
Aurora Picture Show
DEC 6
Steve Nalepa
Johnny DeKam
Mitchell Center for the Arts
NOV 30 & DEC 1
Aurora Picture Show
DEC 6
Steve Nalepa
Johnny DeKam
Mitchell Center for the Arts
Waiting for Godot in New Orleans
11/09/07 Filed in: Art
Last April at the C6 Symposium Creative Time Director Anne Pasternack mentioned an upcoming project with artist Paul Chan that took my breath away. Together they were working towards presenting Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot in the streets of the Lower Ninth Ward & Gentilly neighborhoods of New Orleans.
I was thrilled to read that Waiting for Godot debuted on November 2 in the Lower Ninth Ward and is being performed tonight in the Gentilly neighborhood. "More than a play, the work is a socially engaged performance at the heart of a national crisis" said curator Nato Thompson. For more about this inspiring multi-phased project go to the Creative Time website.
This statement is taken from Paul Chan's statement about the project:
I have seen landscapes scarred by disasters of all sorts. In Baghdad, I saw kids playing soccer barefoot on a wide boulevard and around the concrete rubble that came from US troops shelling the buildings near the Tigris River. I thought I saw the same kids playing in the ghost town known as downtown Detroit on a side street during an enormous labor demonstration in 1999—with shoes but no shirts. Life wants to live, even if it’s on broken concrete.
New Orleans was different. The streets were still, as if time had been swept away along with the houses. Friends said the city now looks like the backdrop for a bleak science fiction movie. Waiting for a ride to pick me up after visiting with some Common Ground volunteers who were gutting houses in the Lower Ninth, I realized it didn’t look like a movie set, but the stage for a play I have seen many times. It was unmistakable. The empty road. The bare tree leaning precariously to one side with just enough leaves to make it respectable. The silence. What’s more, there was a terrible symmetry between the reality of New Orleans post-Katrina and the essence of this play, which expresses in stark eloquence the cruel and funny things people do while they wait: for help, for food, for hope. It was uncanny. Standing there at the intersection of North Prieur and Reynes, I suddenly found myself in the middle of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
diversion - from our year of hotel rooms
11/06/07 Filed in: Art
Untitled 17 (hotel)
This is one of my all-time favorite photographs & I have a print of it hanging on my wall at home (when I am there). The photographer is Lucas Blalock, who recently relocated from the wilds of North Carolina to concrete & steel of New York City.
Mark Dion on art21
10/31/07 Filed in: Art
Mark Dion's segment in the Ecology episode of Art21 Season 4 will air Nov 11, check your local PBS station for the time.
Other new episodes organized around the themes Romance, Protest and Paradox will air on Oct 28, Nov 4 & 18
You Are Here
09/19/07 Filed in: Rambling
It has been a whirlwind visit to New York City and we
are already re-packing our bags for the upcoming 1.5
month European tour. On Friday we fly into Helsinki
and today I am searching everywhere for my leather
jacket to stay warm on those cold Finnish nights.
I am really excited that the website for You Are Here went live today.
You Are Here will be two days of events that feature contemporary artists and researchers working with mapping and tactical media. I have been dreaming about a mini-festival like this one for years & am thrilled to work with each of the presenters involved with this project. We also could not ask for better collaborators than the inspiring staff at the Aurora Picture Show and the Mitchell Center for the Arts in Houston, Texas. It should be a great weekend- hope you can join us!
I am really excited that the website for You Are Here went live today.
You Are Here will be two days of events that feature contemporary artists and researchers working with mapping and tactical media. I have been dreaming about a mini-festival like this one for years & am thrilled to work with each of the presenters involved with this project. We also could not ask for better collaborators than the inspiring staff at the Aurora Picture Show and the Mitchell Center for the Arts in Houston, Texas. It should be a great weekend- hope you can join us!
Portland or Bust
09/07/07 Filed in: Art
For the next 10 days we will be posting from Portland, Oregon where we will attend the Time Based Arts Festival hosted by the Portland Contemporary for Contemporary Art and catch some of the shows that are part of this weekend's Musicfest NW
Barge Music
09/05/07 Filed in: Rambling
For the past year a few of us have been talking about creating a mobile cinema that will tour the US either via boat or RV. We have been brainstorming about funding sources for this endeavor and dreaming about what it will look like.
So given all this planning for the future- I knew that I just had to stop while I was passing through New Haven, CT to check out Point Counterpoint II. This is the music barge that was designed by the architect Louis Kahn in the 1970s for the conductor/ captain Robert Boudreau and the American Wind Symphony Orchestra. I first heard about this amazing vessel in My Architect, the movie about the life and work of Louis Kahn, made by his son.
The center portion of this 195 foot barge consists of the stage and the living quarters are on either side. The stage is concealed while traveling by a steel canopy that rises up on large hydraulic lifts, creating a roof to cover the performers. There is an echo of this hydraulic stage in the Frank Geary designed Concert Hall located within Millennium Park, Chicago. It is also exciting to think about Jennifer Siegal/ OMD's Globetrotter mobile theater design as a contemporary take on Boudreau & Kahn's vision.
I wish I knew the status of the boat- as it seemed slightly out of commission sitting in the New Haven harbor. Hopefully it will leave the North East before the winters come, as I would love to see this structure come to life!
photo by Michael Martin
Video Killed the Radio Star
08/24/07 Filed in: Art
As we approach New York City and the end of this US tour leg, I am thinking alot about music videos. Maybe it is because I am a first generation MTV kid, reared by Martha Quinn on the "I want my MTV" slogan? Last year when we toured with Thomas Dolby, it was amazing to see the crowd react to his Blinded me with Science video-still fresh after so many years. Dolby is a first generation MTV rock star. But times have changed and MTV's recent shift to "reality shows" holds little interest for me.
Chris Cunningham and Michel Gondry are today's masters of music videos. Also Warp Films, a digital film studio in the UK that is connected to Warp Records and Cunningham is working on some interesting projects. Closer to home, Portland-based filmmaker Matt McCormick has recently made good videos for some West Coast bands.
Perhaps the most interesting development in the genre is how YouTube allows us to mine this evolution in AudioVisual history. The first video to be played on MTV was Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles. Here are a few others:
talking heads - Once in a Lifetime
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYbUCvz1LYE
talking heads - Burning Down the House
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oVuLJS_Eok&mode=related&search=
aphex twin - come to daddy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Az_7U0-cK0
Txt Me L8r is coming to an end
08/14/07 Filed in: Art
This crowdsourced exhibition is coming to its grand finale on August 24 at the Houston Center for Photography. If you cannot attend the opening/ closing party, you can look at the photos throughout the month on the flickr site
Txt Me L8r
07/28/07 Filed in: Rambling
Hello from Berkley, CA! The weather here is cool and overcast and I could smell the ocean as I stepped off the bus.
During the month of August, I will be participating in the exhibition Txt Me L8r, hosted by the Houston Center for Photography and curated by Andrea Grover of the Aurora Picture Show. This exhibition explores the potential for distributed creativity through the use of cell phone technology- in a geographically dispersed collaboration. Throughout the month we receive text message photography assignments, which we are to respond to by shooting an image with our cell phone cameras (mine sucks) and then upload the pic to a photo-sharing site (flickr site). The results of this crowd- sourced project will be projected in the Houston Center for Photography during August.
Above is the result from the warm-up assignment: "What does Sleep Look Like?" Which was taken aboard our tour bus.
unoffical music video
05/29/07 Filed in: Art
BLONDE REDHEAD: There was a period when the band
Blonde Redhead was the soundtrack for my life.
Thankfully that phase has passed, but from time to
time I enjoy revisiting Blonde Redhead's music.
Recently Fette's Flog- Aesthetic Los
Angeles directed me to some "unoffical"
Redhead videos made by Mike Mills.
Here is the LINK to the video for Top Ranking, which stars the one and only Miranda July, doing one pose a second!
Here is the LINK to the video for Top Ranking, which stars the one and only Miranda July, doing one pose a second!
tracking transience
05/24/07 Filed in: Art
Recently artist Hasan Elahi came by for brunch. We sat around talking about life in Houston, mutual friends, art projects and silly YouTube videos. It was all very normal until he pulled out his camera to photograph our meal "for the FBI."
Hasan’s project Trackingtransience uses modern technologies to document every aspect of his life. The project is a reaction to the FBI accusation that he was a possible terrorist in 2002. He subsequently spent 6 months under FBI surveillance, including 9 polygraph tests. Now we are able to track Hasan’s movements via his ATM transactions and flight patterns which appear on this website. His hacked cell phone registers his location and with the help of GPS shows us an aerial map with his location pin-pointed. His meals and restroom breaks are documented with photographs. All this self-induced voyeurism helps us to imagine what life without privacy looks like. In his recent interview on the radio program Studio360 Hasan says: “if we do not take control of our own information, and define ourselves, other people will define ourselves for us.”
glasstire posted our review of Media Archeology
05/20/07 Filed in: Art
Glasstire has posted the article we wrote about the
Aurora Picture Show Media Archeology Festival. Check
out the article here
harry smith in the UK
05/17/07 Filed in: Art
My
friend Robert Blackson is doing some really
interesting curating over at the Reg Vardy Gallery at
the University of Sunderland, where he recently
opened the exhibition Harry Smith: Hobbies and
films in collaboration
with alt.gallery’s Harry Smith Anthology
Remixed.
Harry
Smith was first brought
to Rob’s attention by the writer
David Levi
Strauss.
Rob and I have decided that every 5 years we will get together to launch a new exhibition that addresses the theme of LOVE, a love redux. No doubt the upcoming 2009 exhibition will have a very different feeling from Your Heart is No Match for My Love, the 2004 exhibition we organized for The Soap Factory in Minneapolis.
“Harry Smith, who died in 1991, was a polymath of the highest order. With his coke bottle glasses, slight hunchback and long, bony tobacco-stained fingers, Smith dedicated himself to a life of seemingly infinite interests. He collected Seminole patchworks and painted Ukranian Easter eggs. He was a leading authority on string figures (such as the 'cat's cradle') and made a study of the underlying principles of Highland tartans. He recorded the peyote songs of the Kiowa Indians and in a project entitled "Materials for the Study of Religion and Culture in the Lower East Side", made vast live recordings of traffic noises, children's jump-rope rhymes and city birdsong, as well as the drug talk of junkies and the death-rattles and prayers of hobos in Bowery flophouses (where he himself lived in poverty for some time).
He was one of the most influential figures in avant-garde film, developing new and ingenious methods of animation, and he collected thousands of folk records which later formed the basis for the work he is best remembered for - the Anthology of American Folk Music - the seminal collection of early music recordings that was in a large part responsible for triggering the folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s.”
-- George Pendle
Rob and I have decided that every 5 years we will get together to launch a new exhibition that addresses the theme of LOVE, a love redux. No doubt the upcoming 2009 exhibition will have a very different feeling from Your Heart is No Match for My Love, the 2004 exhibition we organized for The Soap Factory in Minneapolis.
“Harry Smith, who died in 1991, was a polymath of the highest order. With his coke bottle glasses, slight hunchback and long, bony tobacco-stained fingers, Smith dedicated himself to a life of seemingly infinite interests. He collected Seminole patchworks and painted Ukranian Easter eggs. He was a leading authority on string figures (such as the 'cat's cradle') and made a study of the underlying principles of Highland tartans. He recorded the peyote songs of the Kiowa Indians and in a project entitled "Materials for the Study of Religion and Culture in the Lower East Side", made vast live recordings of traffic noises, children's jump-rope rhymes and city birdsong, as well as the drug talk of junkies and the death-rattles and prayers of hobos in Bowery flophouses (where he himself lived in poverty for some time).
He was one of the most influential figures in avant-garde film, developing new and ingenious methods of animation, and he collected thousands of folk records which later formed the basis for the work he is best remembered for - the Anthology of American Folk Music - the seminal collection of early music recordings that was in a large part responsible for triggering the folk music revival of the 1950s and 60s.”
-- George Pendle
pimp my car
05/15/07 Filed in: Art
The Art Car Parade Slideshow
Houston is known for leading the way on two visionary projects from the 1950s: the Interstate System and the Space Program. But anyone who thinks the contemporary residents of this car-city lack creativity, should come on down to the annual Art Car Parade. It is a total freak show for the whole family.
Last month there was a day of protest against the war in Iraq, but the protesters did not gather as pedestrians in the town square holding placards. In Houston they congregate on the Highway 59 overpasses during Rush Hour and drop their banners down for the commuters to read while they sit in traffic. Ingenuity abounds!
Art Car Slideshow
high desert tour with clui
05/09/07 Filed in: Rambling
Creative Constructions in the Morongo Basin
A Center for Land Use Interpretation Bus Tour
9 AM- MOCA Los Angeles
11 AM- Desert Christ Park
12 PM- The Institute of Mentalphysics
2 PM- A- Z West/ Andrea Zittel Land
3 PM- Noah Purifoy Sculpture Park
4 PM- The Intergratron
5 PM- The iT House
6 PM- Pioneertown
7 PM- Dinner & beer at Pappy & Harriet's Pioneertown Palace
High Desert Slideshow
sneak preview
04/25/07 Filed in: Art
MEDIA ARCHEOLOGY
FESTIVAL: BELOW-FI
Aurora Picture Show- April 19- 21
written by Johnny DeKam & Bree Edwards originally for Glasstire webzine
A relatively new April tradition in Houston is the annual Media Archeology Festival presented by the Aurora Picture Show. Now in its fourth year, this festival of live Electronic and Performance Art is emerging from the underground, and is now easily comparable to the mini-festivals and one-night events in cities such as New York, Portland, and Los Angeles. This year’s Media Archeology was guest-curated by New York’s charismatic Nick Hallett and featured three full nights of performances in several of the city’s hippest little venues. This year’s theme, “Below Fi,” featured “hackers, benders and overall fans of the analog” — artists definitively concerned with utilizing non-digital techniques in their work.
The festival kicked off with an “expanded cinema” program featuring performances by Ray Sweeten and Bruce McClure at the Aurora’s own converted church-micro-cinema in the Houston Heights. Sweeten’s set was performed with deft precision using an oscilloscope to visualize his electronic music compositions with generative Lissajous figures. Bruce McClure’s 6’s Two 8’s: Dopes to Infinity was a challenging structuralist performance employing heavily modified 16mm film projectors that sent much of the audience scrambling for their earplugs. The Q&A session following the performance provoked many questions about the artists’ hacked machines, fostering a dialogue ranging from the esoteric to the utterly geeky.
Night two took place in the courtyard sanctuary behind Domy Books, which shares backyard space with the hipster-haunt Café Brasil. As the audience quietly sipped raspberry margaritas, Dynasty Handbag (aka Jibz Cameron) stunned us with her trashy get-up and amazing body language. Summoning feminist performance art tradition, Cameron sang, twitched, and gesticulated in conversation with her recorded voice and a homespun Electro-soundtrack.
The second set, by Nautical Almanac, represented the Circuit Bender movement. The artists brought an impressive array of “bent” instruments, off the shelf technology that’s been thoroughly hacked to produce new, unintended sounds. This performance was particularly anti-musical, involving percussive and explosive noise blips and bleeps. It appeared to be a largely unstructured improvisation intended to fabricate a visceral connection between the sound and the performer’s bodies. We noted an affinity with the early music of John Cage, but flavored with the baggage of new age politic... which we found to be distasteful in combination with the musical assault.
This evening also introduced us to the visuals of Mighty Robot, who supported both acts using an elaborate optical contraption to create moving images. Their setup can only be described as a mad scientist’s VJ lab, including a light-table, water, transparencies, motors, camera, LED lights, slide projector, and various other objects employed to create ‘interferences’ in the projection. Most notably, there was not a laptop anywhere to be seen. This very tactile approach to live visuals was most gratifying, in a Luddite sense.
We returned for the final night of the festival, which was held at The Orange Show, the spectacular folk-art monument in Houston’s East End. Just about any show is great at The Orange Show, because the place is just so uniquely weird and fabulous. Tonight was no exception; it was the perfect setting to end the festival with a bang. By this point a sense of camaraderie had emerged among the festival-goers, and we found ourselves greeting strangers like old friends.
Tonight’s show began with Tristan Perich, who exudes the sex appeal of a rock star with a video game / art damage slant. Wearing sunglasses and a vest created entirely of zippers, Tristan plugged in his limited ‘1bit music’ CD, which is actually a jewel case filled with various circuits that play 40 minutes of ‘live’ music. The sound is akin to a fuzz-boxed Atari, and as the coarse, electro-synth melodies began to pulse, Perich proceeded to play his drum kit furiously, creating a live drum-and-bass track. He plays in a style that emulates what typically only computers can accomplish, which was interesting in that there was always a sense of being ‘off’ – which in the end was actually quite charming.
The grand finale of the festival was a “Swamp-Tech” set by Quintron and Miss Pussycat (shown in the video above.) PopMatters has called them: “The baddest one-man band in America, sure to move your ass and make you laugh,” and they undoubtedly lived up to this claim. Quintron sits at a large organ+Moog trap, complete with Lesley cabinets and car headlights that he lights up on command. Casio-tone beats and a strange light-triggered circuit-bent synthesizer accompany Quintron’s Pentecostal-punk fervor on the organs. Miss Pussycat, dressed in baby blue with a pom-pom on her head, playing maracas while wailing the vocals. A spirited Mighty Robot broke out his film projector, fully keeping pace.
“Everybody stand up!” Quintron yelled, and the audience collectively obeyed. Quintron later beckoned the audience to “join them in the pool”, and gleefully the crowd climbed “into the stage” (see Flckr photos) for some serious bopping. The Orange Show shook with new life tonight that would make Jefferson Davis McKissack proud.
When first reading Hallett’s essay for this years festival, we mis-read the title “Return of the Native” to be “Return of the Naïve”. Not in a negative sense, but rather in the sense of the hobbyist who toils away for hours in the basement. In a time exemplified by “user-generated content” such as YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Flickr, there is a naïve-tech revolution replacing the polished, specialized productions of the Mass Media (music, television and film). Hallett’s title suggests there is something inherently primitive about what we’ve seen here… or perhaps this is evolution. In any case, you should keep your eyes on the Aurora Picture Show: with this year’s Media Archeology Festival, they have cemented their place as headquarters of Houston’s growing new media scene.
See you next year!
Aurora Picture Show- April 19- 21
written by Johnny DeKam & Bree Edwards originally for Glasstire webzine
A relatively new April tradition in Houston is the annual Media Archeology Festival presented by the Aurora Picture Show. Now in its fourth year, this festival of live Electronic and Performance Art is emerging from the underground, and is now easily comparable to the mini-festivals and one-night events in cities such as New York, Portland, and Los Angeles. This year’s Media Archeology was guest-curated by New York’s charismatic Nick Hallett and featured three full nights of performances in several of the city’s hippest little venues. This year’s theme, “Below Fi,” featured “hackers, benders and overall fans of the analog” — artists definitively concerned with utilizing non-digital techniques in their work.
The festival kicked off with an “expanded cinema” program featuring performances by Ray Sweeten and Bruce McClure at the Aurora’s own converted church-micro-cinema in the Houston Heights. Sweeten’s set was performed with deft precision using an oscilloscope to visualize his electronic music compositions with generative Lissajous figures. Bruce McClure’s 6’s Two 8’s: Dopes to Infinity was a challenging structuralist performance employing heavily modified 16mm film projectors that sent much of the audience scrambling for their earplugs. The Q&A session following the performance provoked many questions about the artists’ hacked machines, fostering a dialogue ranging from the esoteric to the utterly geeky.
Night two took place in the courtyard sanctuary behind Domy Books, which shares backyard space with the hipster-haunt Café Brasil. As the audience quietly sipped raspberry margaritas, Dynasty Handbag (aka Jibz Cameron) stunned us with her trashy get-up and amazing body language. Summoning feminist performance art tradition, Cameron sang, twitched, and gesticulated in conversation with her recorded voice and a homespun Electro-soundtrack.
The second set, by Nautical Almanac, represented the Circuit Bender movement. The artists brought an impressive array of “bent” instruments, off the shelf technology that’s been thoroughly hacked to produce new, unintended sounds. This performance was particularly anti-musical, involving percussive and explosive noise blips and bleeps. It appeared to be a largely unstructured improvisation intended to fabricate a visceral connection between the sound and the performer’s bodies. We noted an affinity with the early music of John Cage, but flavored with the baggage of new age politic... which we found to be distasteful in combination with the musical assault.
This evening also introduced us to the visuals of Mighty Robot, who supported both acts using an elaborate optical contraption to create moving images. Their setup can only be described as a mad scientist’s VJ lab, including a light-table, water, transparencies, motors, camera, LED lights, slide projector, and various other objects employed to create ‘interferences’ in the projection. Most notably, there was not a laptop anywhere to be seen. This very tactile approach to live visuals was most gratifying, in a Luddite sense.
We returned for the final night of the festival, which was held at The Orange Show, the spectacular folk-art monument in Houston’s East End. Just about any show is great at The Orange Show, because the place is just so uniquely weird and fabulous. Tonight was no exception; it was the perfect setting to end the festival with a bang. By this point a sense of camaraderie had emerged among the festival-goers, and we found ourselves greeting strangers like old friends.
Tonight’s show began with Tristan Perich, who exudes the sex appeal of a rock star with a video game / art damage slant. Wearing sunglasses and a vest created entirely of zippers, Tristan plugged in his limited ‘1bit music’ CD, which is actually a jewel case filled with various circuits that play 40 minutes of ‘live’ music. The sound is akin to a fuzz-boxed Atari, and as the coarse, electro-synth melodies began to pulse, Perich proceeded to play his drum kit furiously, creating a live drum-and-bass track. He plays in a style that emulates what typically only computers can accomplish, which was interesting in that there was always a sense of being ‘off’ – which in the end was actually quite charming.
The grand finale of the festival was a “Swamp-Tech” set by Quintron and Miss Pussycat (shown in the video above.) PopMatters has called them: “The baddest one-man band in America, sure to move your ass and make you laugh,” and they undoubtedly lived up to this claim. Quintron sits at a large organ+Moog trap, complete with Lesley cabinets and car headlights that he lights up on command. Casio-tone beats and a strange light-triggered circuit-bent synthesizer accompany Quintron’s Pentecostal-punk fervor on the organs. Miss Pussycat, dressed in baby blue with a pom-pom on her head, playing maracas while wailing the vocals. A spirited Mighty Robot broke out his film projector, fully keeping pace.
“Everybody stand up!” Quintron yelled, and the audience collectively obeyed. Quintron later beckoned the audience to “join them in the pool”, and gleefully the crowd climbed “into the stage” (see Flckr photos) for some serious bopping. The Orange Show shook with new life tonight that would make Jefferson Davis McKissack proud.
When first reading Hallett’s essay for this years festival, we mis-read the title “Return of the Native” to be “Return of the Naïve”. Not in a negative sense, but rather in the sense of the hobbyist who toils away for hours in the basement. In a time exemplified by “user-generated content” such as YouTube, Facebook, MySpace and Flickr, there is a naïve-tech revolution replacing the polished, specialized productions of the Mass Media (music, television and film). Hallett’s title suggests there is something inherently primitive about what we’ve seen here… or perhaps this is evolution. In any case, you should keep your eyes on the Aurora Picture Show: with this year’s Media Archeology Festival, they have cemented their place as headquarters of Houston’s growing new media scene.
See you next year!
frontera 450+ review
04/13/07 Filed in: Art
THE STATION MUSEUM IN
HOUSTON, TX
Written originally for Fluent Collaborative's ...Might be Good webzine
Frontera 450+ is the current exhibition at The Station Museum in Houston, a venue that has developed a reputation for being an edgy space that dares to wrestle with the political. Curator Rosalinda Gonzalez and Station Director James Harithas selected 14 artists as the result of their shared engagement with the sexual violence and brutal murders of young women working in Juárez, Mexico. Frontera 450+ does more than just reflect upon these injustices by effectively intervening and disrupting our apathy.
Juárez is located just across the border from El Paso and is infamous for factories, or maquilas, with abusive labor and environmental practices. Since 1993 over 450 young women have been reported missing or discovered dead in Juárez, and the exhibition takes it name from this heinous statistic.
Two artworks in the show distinctly resonated with me. Maya Goded’s photojournalistic portraits make visual the corruption and ineffectiveness of the authorities. Whereas Lise Bjørne’s poetic wall installation documents the social workshops she organized directly concerned with the violence against women in Juárez. Frontera 450+ is an intergenerational mix of mostly women artists, who are working with diverse mediums. The other artists in the exhibition are Coco Fusco, Carmen Montoya, Margarita Cabrera, Teresa Margolles, Celia Alvarez Muñoz, Sara Maniero, Kaneem Smith, David Krueger, Angela Dillon, Teresa Serrano, Susana Plum and Elia Arce.
One photograph from Maya Goded’s series, Justice for our Daughters / Justicia Para Nuestras Hijas, shows an older woman named Carmelita looking down at a worn snapshot of her son David. Her son was the only person accused in the limited murder investigation of his female cousin’s death. False conviction, often of a family member, is a tactic employed by the Juarez police who are overwhelmed by the scale of the problem and internal corruption. In another of Goded’s photos, Daniel and Julia stand under a clothesline holding a framed portrait of their 15-year-old daughter, Maria Elena Chavez Caldera who “went missing” while working as a domestic servant. There is an awkward familiarity to this image that provokes empathetic feelings.
Lise Bjørne’s Desconocida Unknown Ukjent consists of 1023 cotton labels, stick pins and string. The piece documents the extensive workshops she conducted where amateur embroiderers in over 15 countries gathered to act on behalf of the women of Juárez by stitching the names of the missing and murdered onto garment tag labels. The workshops draw upon the social activity of the quilting bee, layered with 1960s feminist consciousness raisings. The garment labels seamlessly connect to the economic realities of labor in Juárez, while the often crude stitching bears the distinct trace of each participant in the project. The threads are multi-colored, except those that record ‘the unknown’. The language of these labels changes based on the location of where the workshop was held; unknown becomes ukjent, desconocida, amas, and onbekend. The collection of labels, arranged in a morse-code musical score depicting the Mexican national anthem, is decidedly haunting.
This show demonstrates that these artists are willing to address a complex and difficult subject. The Station should be commended for orchestrating the exhibition which serves as a Call to Action on behalf of the women of Juárez. For even if art can only provisionally take-on social and political themes, this exhibition provides momentary address to a large and seemingly irresolvable conflict.
Written originally for Fluent Collaborative's ...Might be Good webzine
Frontera 450+ is the current exhibition at The Station Museum in Houston, a venue that has developed a reputation for being an edgy space that dares to wrestle with the political. Curator Rosalinda Gonzalez and Station Director James Harithas selected 14 artists as the result of their shared engagement with the sexual violence and brutal murders of young women working in Juárez, Mexico. Frontera 450+ does more than just reflect upon these injustices by effectively intervening and disrupting our apathy.
Juárez is located just across the border from El Paso and is infamous for factories, or maquilas, with abusive labor and environmental practices. Since 1993 over 450 young women have been reported missing or discovered dead in Juárez, and the exhibition takes it name from this heinous statistic.
Two artworks in the show distinctly resonated with me. Maya Goded’s photojournalistic portraits make visual the corruption and ineffectiveness of the authorities. Whereas Lise Bjørne’s poetic wall installation documents the social workshops she organized directly concerned with the violence against women in Juárez. Frontera 450+ is an intergenerational mix of mostly women artists, who are working with diverse mediums. The other artists in the exhibition are Coco Fusco, Carmen Montoya, Margarita Cabrera, Teresa Margolles, Celia Alvarez Muñoz, Sara Maniero, Kaneem Smith, David Krueger, Angela Dillon, Teresa Serrano, Susana Plum and Elia Arce.
One photograph from Maya Goded’s series, Justice for our Daughters / Justicia Para Nuestras Hijas, shows an older woman named Carmelita looking down at a worn snapshot of her son David. Her son was the only person accused in the limited murder investigation of his female cousin’s death. False conviction, often of a family member, is a tactic employed by the Juarez police who are overwhelmed by the scale of the problem and internal corruption. In another of Goded’s photos, Daniel and Julia stand under a clothesline holding a framed portrait of their 15-year-old daughter, Maria Elena Chavez Caldera who “went missing” while working as a domestic servant. There is an awkward familiarity to this image that provokes empathetic feelings.
Lise Bjørne’s Desconocida Unknown Ukjent consists of 1023 cotton labels, stick pins and string. The piece documents the extensive workshops she conducted where amateur embroiderers in over 15 countries gathered to act on behalf of the women of Juárez by stitching the names of the missing and murdered onto garment tag labels. The workshops draw upon the social activity of the quilting bee, layered with 1960s feminist consciousness raisings. The garment labels seamlessly connect to the economic realities of labor in Juárez, while the often crude stitching bears the distinct trace of each participant in the project. The threads are multi-colored, except those that record ‘the unknown’. The language of these labels changes based on the location of where the workshop was held; unknown becomes ukjent, desconocida, amas, and onbekend. The collection of labels, arranged in a morse-code musical score depicting the Mexican national anthem, is decidedly haunting.
This show demonstrates that these artists are willing to address a complex and difficult subject. The Station should be commended for orchestrating the exhibition which serves as a Call to Action on behalf of the women of Juárez. For even if art can only provisionally take-on social and political themes, this exhibition provides momentary address to a large and seemingly irresolvable conflict.