Stop by to see the exhibit for yourself and make sure to pick up a gallery map, whether for wayfinding or coloring or doodling or pareidolia practice…

Ontheboards.tv just posted the edited video from their multi-camera shoot of Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol’s El Rumor del Incendio during TBA:12. Watch it again (with English subtitles to help).

PICA friend and staff alum Philip Iosca opens Moment, Monument at Fourteen30 Contemporary.

The inimitable Meow Meow (TBA:04, :05, and so much more) talks about the history of cabaret with The Guardian.

Glen Fogel (2012) opened a new exhibition at Callicoon Fine Arts in New York. Check the video to see this hypnotizing piece in action:

Jeffry Mitchell (TBA:06) was reviewed by in Art in America

Stephen Squibb reviews TBA:06 alum Trevor Paglen at Metro Pictures for art agenda.

Lawrence Halprin’s Open Space Sequence of fountains in SW Portland (featured in TBA:08 City Dance…) was just listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Our Executive Director Victoria Frey shared a brief history of our DIY venues at the recent ArtPlace conference in Miami, Florida:

There’s always a seat for you at PICA.

Breyer P-Orridge, Red Chair Posed, 2008 | p 15 / 16 | Dead Flowers, ed. Lia Gangitano | Published by Participant Inc. & VOXPOPULI

Posted by Kristan Kennedy, Visual Art Curator

“I want to be with you” I said, to which my friend replied something to the effect of, “ewwwwwwwww!” We were talking about what you might say to someone you’re really into to express your longing. My friend took issue with the word “be.” He thought it sounded too bodily, as if “being with” someone was parasitic and the phrase was too close to “I want to be you,” like wanting to crawl inside someone’s skin sci-fi style. I assure you this is not what I meant. I think of “being” in terms of being on the same page, the same emotional space, getting lost in the love cloud, getting physical, hanging out, you know, the BROAD definition of intimacy. Still he might have been on to something… 

Today on a field trip to Powell’s, the Resource Room Committee was in search of few specific things. One of them—Dead Flowers—is an anthology of writing from various artists and curators that documents an exhibition of the same name. Curator and Director of Participant Inc., Lia Gangitano says of the exhibition, “In an effort to understand a genealogy of influences reflective of the role of the non-commercial, non-institutional space I often look at to artists who seem to have inspired, or instigated their existence.” She goes on to explain that the exhibition, which features thirteen artists, was organized around the work of actor/director Timothy Carey and was made for VOXPOPULI, an independent artist-run space in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I was drawn to the book because Charles Atlas, Paul Thek, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge are all included, and it is no secret I have massive art crushes on all of them. You might say, I want to be with them… in an intimate curatorial way.

Genesis’ chapter links back to this concept of being, in h/er essay s/he runs through the beginnings of COUM Transmissions, an artist and performance collaborative that operated from 1969–1976. Founded in Hull, Yorkshire, by Genesis, COUM’s other members included Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson, and Chris Carter, who together went on to found the pioneering industrial band Throbbing Gristle in 1976. H/er retelling of their move from commune to commune and COUM’s move towards a development of a rigorous, yet morphing set of artistic ideals is nothing short of revolutionary.

Genesis credits the beginnings of COUM’s philosophy as coming from their creative lives within two major communes: Exploding Galaxy, which was founded by David Medella in 1967, and Hoho Funhouse which followed soon after. In one passage Medella is quoted as saying, “I felt a deep dissatisfaction towards all art, all art that derives solely from one single person, and is determined by one person’s ideas and wishes.” Madella had hoped that Exploding Galaxy would usher in a flexibility in art making, community, and perhaps a dynamic new culture that could mean anything and could include anyone.

Genesis goes on to talk about h/er belief that the origins of art come from magic, first through devotion and then through illustration and then finally manifesting as commodified objects and experiences. So too does s/he describe the evolution of COUM: first as ritualistic, then as performative, and finally as an accepted art world being, in constant need of retooling and examining. The influence of the institution had changed them as much as they were changing it. 

“Everything about COUM is nothing, everything about COUM is false, and everything about COUM is true.”

The collective pushed against the institution using transgression to test the boundaries of comfort. Genesis looks back at this time as important and talks about the value in constantly “redesigning” oneself. The artist uses the pronoun “we” throughout h/er essay in reference to COUM, but also to refer to h/erself. After marrying Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge in 1993, Genesis and Lady Jaye began a project to become Breyer P-Orridge, a single pandrogynous entity. They became each other and are now one.

In the final words of the beautifully stirring afterword, Gangitano quotes Genesis as saying, “the most transgressive thing right now is intimacy”. She believes it is still true, as do I. Let’s just be together!

]]> http://urbanhonking.com/pica/2013/02/19/what-were-reading-dead-flowers/feed/ 0 http://urbanhonking.com/pica/2013/02/15/bookmarks/ http://urbanhonking.com/pica/2013/02/15/bookmarks/#comments Fri, 15 Feb 2013 17:59:50 +0000 http://urbanhonking.com/pica/?p=2844 Continue reading →]]> Call it a New Year’s Resolution we’re soon to break, but we’ve been inspired to reboot our blog with some new series of posts. “Bookmarks” is a collection of web clippings, announcements, and random finds on PICA alums and friends.

Matthew Day Jackson (TBA:06) is closer and closer to debuting his dragster.

Edmunds Asks Audiences to Take a Punt on CAP UCLA, from LA Stage Times 

Lisa Radon, Mack McFarland, BOMBlog

Inova Director Sara Krajewski receives Warhol grant to research hybrid art forms at six contemporary festivals around the world, including TBA

Tala Madani (Between My Head and My Hand…, 2011) has a major solo show going up at Moderna Museet Malmö in Sweden.

Continuity Drift, Sara Greenberger Rafferty (TBA:07) at Triple Canopy

Alex Cecchetti (TBA:12) at Shanaynay, Paris

Jeremy Wade (an alum from last week!) talks to Velocity’s STANCEcast about desserts, an impossible score and his cracking shell.

Nature Theater of Oklahoma (TBA:06, 07 and 10!) launched OK Radio, a series of podcasts with theater-makers from around the world.

John Smith (TBA:10) has gone back and re-filmed the entire long take from the Girl Chewing Gum, superimposing it over the original as The Man Phoning Mum.

We’ve had our library up-and-running ever since 2000, but it seems there’s been a recent proliferation of institutional collections and reading rooms at alt spaces across the country. A lot of this boom likely stems from the long (and growing shadow) the Internet casts over our lives. How do we get individuals to engage with the physical spaces we’ve created and not just our organizations’ websites? Where do books fit in the new order?  It’s clearly on a lot of minds. The New York Public Library even hosted a panel today dedicated to the future of art book publishing. Artist-run spaces and projects just might be imagining some of the possible answers to these questions.

In New York, we met up with former PICA staffer Rachel Peddersen, who is currently at work on The Kitchen‘s digital archive. She gave us a very *top secret* peak at their new system, with which they are trying to document all of their events from their 40-year history through video, sound, programs, photos and more. It’s incredible to think that an institution that has presented everyone from the Beastie Boys to Vito Acconci to Charles Atlas to Laurie Anderson could make that content available for viewing online. It inspires dreams for our own archive….

From there, we dropped by the Goethe Institut (3rd floor, elevator, no building signage! We’re not the only ones!), to check out their The Ends of the Library project. As a multi-artist residency exploring the future of book collections, we were interested in seeing how the artists had interacted with a small collection, hoping that it might push our thinking around our own Resource Room Residencies.

The most compelling part of the project we caught was a font called Human Readable Type. Download the file and it creates a new keyboard layout for your Mac that outputs regular typing as a series of dingbats, Greek letters, and other alternative characters that resemble Roman letter forms. In practice, the font can’t be read by web bots and other recognition software, confounding the very databases that the project is in dialogue with. Sometimes working with archives as a material means working against the functionality of those tools.

Our group took a quick detour to see Amy O’Neill’s show at the Swiss Institute, where we fell in love with a clever cover to a simple little publication.

And then we finally wound our way back to visit Artists Space’s new Books & Talks storefront. Artists Space expanded operations to this library/bookshop/gathering space so they could better accomodate all of the critical thought that artists are generating: publications, symposia, screenings, lectures, and research projects like the W.A.G.E. survey. The shelves are filled with their own institutional publications, interspersed with selections by a group of 100 artists and curators who were each asked to choose 10 titles. It’s an eclectic collection with fascinating through-lines and juxtapositions.

Let’s just say we felt at right at home there, but ready to get back and re-explore our own idiosyncratic library.

But it’s decidedly not, and sometimes that’s the fun of what we do. We’re proud of how our events come together—usually on a shoestring budget—so we thought it was time to pull back the curtain and show you a little of our behind-the-scenes action.

One of the skills we’ve honed the sharpest over the years is building out makeshift venues in odd spaces. Though until now, we’ve never built a theater in our own office. For Jeremy Wade’s dance performance this week, we’ve laid a temporary floor, building up layers of foam, wood, and marley. And this is how it went.

*Alternate title: This is how we do it.

Claudia Meza’s Water is intended as an interactive sonic experience. Housed in the White Box Gallery at UO’s Portland campus, Califone tape recorders hang suspended from the ceiling, speaking both individually and collectively. Intuitive gallery behavior suggests not touching, but the tape players are intended to be used. Each contains an “endless” looped tape that can be stopped and started at will by participants. The sound fills the room until it is unclear which element of the composition is contributed by which tape. The experience is immediately visceral; the surround-sound quality of multiple sources envelops the visitor on both an auditory and physical plane. From outside, the occasional Max train adds to the bass vibrations of the collected loops. Each tape offers a specific auditory layer that feels eerie, metallic, ringing. The collective sounds suggest subterranean movement, hinting at the macabre tones of old vinyl sound effects collections. A few players, I’m told on the last day of the exhibition, are broken; rendered mute through use, obscuring part of the once complete score.

Meza created the individual tracks through capturing field recordings of water, editing them digitally, and then outputting them to individual tapes. She collected the Califone players on eBay, one at a time. Many retain inscriptions from their sources, usually middle or high schools, suggesting technology once cutting edge but now nostalgic.

Meza’s work both acknowledges and rejects the loosely-binding theme for End Things, TBA:12’s visual programming. Curator Kristan Kennedy’s concept of how things matter to humans both as objects and as ideas of objects is directly suggested by the fetishized idea of the tape players, meticulously collected and fragile. Meza agrees that “we are constantly collaborating with our materials or objects at hand.” Conversely, she rejects that objects should have such a hold on human  emotions, asking “…isn’t this is what commerce is all about: the fetishization of objects and our interaction with them? We tend to give objects a lot more power than they deserve.”

Inspired by John Cage’s work and coming from a history of unique projects, Meza pursues an eclectic path as a composer, musician, artist, curator, and (duly noted in her artist bio) surfer. As in her work, there is an element of timeless charm and authenticity in her worldview. She doesn’t distinguish between her attraction to Cage’s work and his life as a person; both are equally inspirational. And we are not meant to make distinctions between her work as a popular musician (Explode into Colors, Japanther) and her more abstract New Musics, Mourning Youth, and Sonic City PDX projects.

Kennedy’s visual programming often points towards the personal; how we make meaning for ourselves, how meaning arises, what it means to be human. Meza’s work in various aspects creates a similar authentic resonance; personal experiences are key. Meza refers to Cage’s quote from Kant: “there are two things that don’t have to mean anything [in order to give us deep pleasure]: one is music, the other is laughter.” Water offers a both singular and collective way for participants to make meaning or to simply experience sound as “music”.

Claudia Meza is PICA’s mid-year Resource Room Resident through September 30:
http://www.pica.org/programs/detail.aspx?eventid=884

End Things closes Saturday, September 29:
Washington High School Thu–Fri, 12-6:30pm; Sat 12-4pm
PICA Thu–Fri, 12-6:30pm; Sat 12-4pm

It’s nice when there is a collision between your immediate bibliography and your immediate experience. I saw everything I’ve been reading and more in the actions and reactions of Keith Hennessy and Circo Zero last Thursday night.  And, I saw all the tropes I hate about traditional forms of carnivalesque counterpower and also some troubling and various forms of misogyny on Friday. I saw a piece about the economy that was finally saying something. I saw an attempt at an impossible model, an impossible dance, one about individuals swarming and breaking apart again. I felt myself being confused about the connection between that action and the rhetoric. I saw paintings, live images building and being destroyed. The Raft of the Medusa, human pyramids, romantic structures, bodies bound to fall. I was seduced by the sound of the banjo; I felt like it was a model more than an image or a series of images. I felt like it was an image of what looks like liberation but is distinctly not. I saw a dangerous illusion. I was thankful it existed. Did we see the same show? Yes, I think so, was it…

WEIRD DANCING IN ALL-NIGHT computer-banking lobbies. Unauthorized pyrotechnic displays. Land-art, earth-works as bizarre alien artifacts strewn in State Parks. Burglarize houses but instead of stealing, leave Poetic-Terrorist objects. Kidnap someone & make them happy. Pick someone at random & convince them they’re the heir to an enormous, useless & amazing fortune–say 5000 square miles of Antarctica, or an aging circus elephant, or an orphanage in Bombay, or a collection of alchemical mss. Later they will come to realize that for a few moments they believed in something extraordinary, & will perhaps be driven as a result to seek out some more intense mode of existence… An exquisite seduction carried out not only in the cause of mutual satisfaction but also as a conscious act in a deliberately beautiful life–may be the ultimate PT. The PTerrorist behaves like a confidence-trickster whose aim is not money but CHANGE.*

The People’s Mic, like the news, or the Internet, relies upon the subject’s passivity, while at the same time presenting the dangerous illusion of participatory action. It is the loss of unmitigated communication has created pervasive passivity. The reliance upon a distanced intake of information, and the conclusion of respect for the authority of a speaker behind a podium or at the occupied park, hints at the authority of the event…What would be truly inspiring is if the situation was turned completely around: if the crowds refused this ventriloquism in favor of the hundreds of conversations waiting all around them. Imagine the occupation flipped on its axis, its inhabitants acting together based upon true affinity and setting their spectator role alight; the chaotic environment consumed in a cacophony edging toward real experience.**

Today’s social movements have reversed the order, making manifestos and prophets obsolete. Agents of change have already descended into the streets and occupied city squares, not only threatening and toppling rulers but also conjuring visions of a new world. More important, perhaps, the multitudes, through their logics and practices, their slogans and desires, have declared a new set of principles and truths.***

* From “Poetic Terrorism” in Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism by Hakim Bey

** From Lost in a Fog – Lost Children’s School of Cartography

***From Declaration – Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri

All photos by Gia Goodrich

Chelfitsch’s Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner, and the Farewell Speech is a set of three vignettes that speak to the notion of “work family” with charm, humor and wit. Each part is premised on entirely realistic situations of office politics – Why do the temps have to plan the farewell party? Who keeps turning the air conditioner on high? Why is adorable (if slightly unstable) Erika being let go and what will she do now? – but through repeated speech, stylized gestures and dance moves with props, dramatic lighting, shadows and music, the piece builds suspense, elevates the pettiness and gets the audience to laugh at what they see of their own behavior at work on stage.

According to their website the word chelfitsch was coined by company founder Toshiki Okada and “represents the baby-like disarticulation of the English word ‘selfish’.” Notions of selfishness pervade this year’s festival from Bucky Fuller’s naïve dream that everyone share the world’s resources to Keith Hennessy’s warning on the desperate state of the economy, so it was quite a lovely surprise that Hot Pepper etc. – a piece so literally about work – provided a fresh breath of frivolity for the start of my weekend.

Posted by Laura Becker
Photo by G.K. Wilson