Book of Lenny

I recently saw Jonathan Marshall's work at AMOA, a video with accompanying installation called the 'Book of Lenny' a chronicle of one survivor of a fictionalized apocalyptic-scale weather phenomenon called El Nada. Lenny the protagonist, builds among other things, this cycle-boat. It's a converted Schwinn Varsity married to a floorbase of salvaged fenceplanks on top of pontoons. Attention to detail is in no small supply: for example, rudder functions are taken into consideration, by connecting guidewires to the bike's front fork.

The amazing thing about this cycle-boat is that it is not all fiction. From the video, we see that it actually functions on water.



There is a certain way in which the contemporary cycling community values itself as a DIY bastion. "If the shit hit the fan, we could fix things ourselves." Or at least we could fix our bikes ourselves. If everything ran on bike principles then we could fix everything. The bike rider and the survivalist are not so distinct in society, Marshall brings attention to that connection through his fiction.

NAT23 @Arthouse TX

Last week i went to Arthouse to see their New American Talent show juried by Nato Thompson. It was a pretty good smattering of what one might expect to find in a contemporary art show.

What stuck out for me was the video above by Susan Lee-Chun entitled "Will You Tell Me All Your Ancient Chinese Secrets." What is obvious from the start is that this person is young. What Ancient secrets could she have to share? As it turns out, she has none.

In fact through a series of one-line questions we find that she is not even Chinese. We see her inquisition unfold with more and more discomfort as she is tortured by tickling every time she gives an unsatisfying answer to questions designed to glean added-value from her ethnicity. "Do you know where I can get good chinese food?" and every other question are evidently inspired by true events.

What is novel about Lee-Chun's video is not necessarily the realization that Asian-Americans often face subtle, ignorant, and humorous racism in America. Rather, what is useful here, is the apt reaction of her protagonist. Hers is a laughter uncontrolled, painful, without remit, leaving no chance for any other expression, speechless. Such is the exact reaction that so many ethnic-Americans must have when confronted with similar questions. Although i hope that i will not be violently tickled in my lifetime, a sly smile and an unwilling chuckle will always be the first reaction i have when asked, "How come you speak English so good?"

me myself and "i"

a few years ago i was assigned the task of making or in some way putting my signature on a secret santa exchange gift for my friend josh. in desperation i searched for insight into what i was capable of creating or in some way embellishing. i came up with a shirt that had the letter "j" on it. this was before gap started monogramming everything. anyway. this past weekend i was a part of a craft fair called acknowledge-me which was the latest project of ilovemikelitt.

i wondered if i could bank on a "fact" i heard in a fictional film. in lars and the real girl, lars claims that it's been proven that people enjoy hearing the sound of their own name over any other sound. extending that logic, could i assume that people enjoy wearing the first letter of their own name over any other icon, symbol, or image? and so i set about creating various shirts each with a single letter on them.
was lars's fictional "fact" true?
in my experience on saturday: amy bought an "A". mitchell was interested in "M". maggie was also interested in "M".

narcissism, solipsism, call it what you will, as far as sartorial self-adornment goes, self-reference sells. (but not as well as daniela's crocheted animal beer bottle cozies. but that's another story.)

in some ways i think that my product fit perfectly into the theme of acknowledge-me which i think derived its name as sort of explanation. (are our generation's efforts at DIY dovetailing efforts at acknowledgment?) my shirts perform that work of self-acknowledgment. eh?

gay ghetto?

so i've been volunteering at treasure city on mondays and some thursdays....and most days i ride my bike there from my house.....on the way i pass down navasota. and just north of long branch inn and bar is an abandoned or in any case dilapidated house with peeling paint. and on the side of it is a stenciled spray painted mural of two waif-ish lesbians in an intimate embrace, kissing. Not only are they waif-ish but they are scantily clad. Such are the wet dreams of east-side graffiti artists.....

what i didn't notice until a few hundred glances was that these lesbians aren't wearing lingerie exactly, but rather more demure hanes or some other granny-panties....so maybe they're not a wet dream after all......

on closer inspection i discovered that there was no shading at all on any of the figures. the entire composition is compiled from flat areas of grey, white or black.....so my hunch is that there was some kid out there who wanted to put up a painting of two lesbians at whatever cost. but in the end, fully naked or g-string wearing lesbians would require too much detail and technical attention to form. so, in the interest of time he flattened the forms with t-shirts and briefs.
such are the exigencies of street art.

the materials are pretty hardy. the lesbians have been kissing at least since march.

5X7

the last show at Arthouse was 5X7. many pieces were entered that met the single criterion of fitting in a 2D 5x7 space.

this was my favorite entry. mainly because the word "hippie" has diverged in meaning and can alternately inspire admiration in some and scoffing disregard in others. every time a visual artist decides to take on semantic symbols rather than iconographic symbols as his subject, he is rocking the bridge that joins two different literacies. visual literacy and linguistic literacy have different origins in culture and motivate different sensibilities. the humor, if indeed this piece invokes humor, is made possible by the fact that "hippie" can no longer be rendered as an icon: there is no readymade media image of "hippie" in contemporary culture. not since the publication of the Whole Earth Catalog has such a thing been accessible to the collective cultural imagination. In fact for the generation of young artists making, showing work now, "hippie" has been around so long that it can mean no one thing. Hippie-life for some is a politicized, holistic way of life that encompasses many aspects of sustainable resourcing. For others, a hippie is a do-nothing, ambitionless, smelly freeloader.

this piece in 5X7 relies exactly on that ambiguity to interpellate the art-viewer into a "hippie" decision. is hippie-life something that should indeed die, not only iconographically but semantically as well? or is it something that can still be salvaged, and if so for what purpose?

grindhouse

i saw grindhouse on monday and i wonder a few things: did tarantino screw daryl hannah's stand-in during the filming of kill bill? or did he want to?

pomo movies. do we need plots anymore? all elements of this double feature existed outside of all narrative. narrative generic devices (cliches? odes? allusions?) were still necessary, at least formally. cars needed blazing car crashes. zombies needed oozing pustules. but the joke of "reel missing" is that in fact it doesn't matter for these two films if plot elements are deleted. and perhaps rodriguez and tarantino are saying that for b genre films plot was never necessary, but i think they do a disservice to filmmaking by so offhandedly doing away with the nuances of narrative such as character development, etc. i wonder if i'm the only one who thinks this.....

community murals

i've been volunteering at treasure city thrift store for a few weeks, and i think i'm in love with all the people who volunteer there. tcts is a community project invented as a fund-raising experiment for other grass-roots community projects in the area, especially in austin's east side.
but more to the point: there is this mural on the side of the building. it features maya angelou, angela davis, bob marley, and richard pryor. the mural itself is a detourned mt rushmore of famous black folk. and although they make sense enough as a passel of folk heroes, there has been something nagging at me since i first saw the mural. and i was unable to identify the source of the nag, until recently. i realized that all four are famous for enterprises in the arts, writing/music/comedy, except for angela davis. davis's claim to fame, from my perspective, is primarily as a political activist.
and so i wonder what it means to claim activism as an "art" of the same ilk as the arts that angelou, pryor, and marley engage in. (and i don't mean to imply that angelou, pryor, and marley did not have politically motivated aspects to their art-making.) i just wonder if anyone would call davis an "artist." were the media events that davis helped organize as a panther and then her prison writings the fruits of a creative mind? certainly yes. but, was artistry her main concern? probably not. and yet we can all agree, i think, that she has affected the terrain of american consciousness as much as the other three. so in the end, the question is, "how do we recognize an 'art'?" is it by the consciousness it raises? by the new forms it deals in? by some other marker?

i like the idea of activist as artist. i just wonder if i'm the only one who ever thought of the two as two distinct functionaries.