propositions press

Hope some of you can make it out to this event. I will be there at night. Looking forward to seeing friends and collaborators, meeting new people, and visiting with keyholders, current and past. Matthias the radical poet activist is gonna be working the grills!

MESS HALL SUMMER PARTY

What happens when you launch acts of generosity into the world? How can they form the basis for growing circles of reciprocity and trust? Almost 6 years ago, the founders of Mess Hall, receiving the offer of a $1-a-month storefront, committed the space to this and subsequently many other experiments in culture, conviviality and exchange. The originary gift arose from property owner Al Goldberg’s desire to further incubate the arts community of Rogers Park. Given this opportunity, we make space and time available to projects not likely to pass the test of marketability or even authorized fundability. Come celebrate generosity with us at the best summer party ever!

SATURDAY JUNE 27, Mess Hall, 6932 N. Glenwood
4:00 pm - ?

DON’T MISS IT!! Come celebrate generosity with us at the best summer party ever!

Savor the flavor of Bobby Seale BBQ recipes! http://www.bobbyqueseale.com/
Pick up a copy of the book Let’s Re-Make the World: http://letsremake.info/blog/2009/04/a-new-book-project/
Bring kids and plastic bottles with caps to make Lava Bottles. Eat! Drink!
Toss into and grab from The Swap: bring stuff to give away/take stuff home with you.
FREE FAMILY PORTRAITS! ETRATOS LIBRES DE LA FAMILIA! 무료초상화들! libérer les portraits de famille! freien Family Porträts! RETRATOS DE FAMILIA! GRATUITOS WOLNY RODZINA PORTRETY! ...teach us how to write “free family portraits” in other languages!
ReFab Happening from noon to 5:00

DETAILS BELOW…

Featuring culinary & political recipes of Bobby Seale, as found in Barbeque’n with Bobby.
Here’s an excerpt:

DECLARATION: BARBEQUE BILL OF RIGHTS
WHEN IN THE COURSE OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT it becomes necessary for us, the citizens of the earth, to creatively improve the culinary art of barbe-que’n in our opposition to the overly commercialized bondage of “cue-be-rab” (barbecuing backwards); and to assume, within the realm of palatable biological reactions to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle us, a decent respect for all the billions of human taste buds and savory barbeque desires; we the people declare a basic barbeque bill of rights which impels us to help halt, eradicate, and ultimately stamp out “cue-be-rab!” As the commercialized backwards “bottle-back” recipe methods pursue and invariably evince a design to reduce our backyard-picnics into burnt, half done, bland, badly seasoned, improperly pit-qued entrees, then it is the right of we the barbeque lovers of the world, to alter the cue-be-rab phenomenon and creatively change our recipe process for a more righteous saucy, down-home, wood-smoking, delectable, baste-marinating, barbeque’n methodology.

THE BASIC “RIGHTS” OF HICKORY SMOKE PIT BOBBY-QUE’N
CERTAIN “RIGHTS” ARE ABSOLUTELY BASIC to pit-smoking. You’ll see them repeatedly in the recipes that follow, but here they are in summary form. If you follow these basic steps, your barbequed meats will always come out tasting qued down to the bone.
1. Preparing Baste-Marinades: Always use recipe amounts of hickory liquid smoke.
2. Marinating Meat Entrees: 30-minute hot marinade, or 4 hours at room temperature or overnight in refrigerator.
3. Baste-Soaking Hickory Wood Chips: Spread out over white-ash-hot charcoals for smoke-flavor barbequing.
4. Sear Seasoning: Browning and sealing in any coated meat seasonings before pit-basting.
5. Constant Basting: Baste meat entrees with blended hickory flavored marinade (do not use sugar content sauces).
6. Cover Top Pit: Keep down after each basting method and adding more baste-soaked hickory wood chips as needed.
7. Glaze on Barbeque Sauces: Only after meat entree is mostly cooked and/or done

From the intro of the book: Let’s Re-Make The World
This book is a collection of documentation and writing around exhibitions and seminars that took place over several years and one ocean. It represents collaboration between the organizers, Ydre Nørrebro Kultur Bureau (YNKB) and The Library of Radiant Optimism for Let’s Re-make the World (Brett Bloom + Bonnie Fortune), and the participants at those exhibitions and seminars. It represents ideas bubbling up and then fading or conversely, gaining traction and sustainability among a dispersed group of practitioners. It represents a beginning. The book will serve not as a definitive guide to a movement, but as a compendium of ideas for social change, cultural work, organizational strategies, and poetic gestures that have been brought up at the four events catalogued here. Those events are:

The Radiantly Optimistic Poster Show, YNKB, Copenhagen, Denmark, December 16, 2006 – February 15, 2007.
The Radiantly Optimistic Poster Show II + Ungdomshuset Poster Show (co-organized with Malene Nielsen), Mess Hall, Chicago, IL, June 2007.
What We Know of Our Past. What We Demand of Our Future: A three-day gathering to talk about socially-engaged, political, and critical artwork, its international
iterations, history, and future, Mess Hall, January 18-20, 2008.
Let’s Re-make the World III: For 3 days YNKB was transformed into a seminar installation with, a kitchen (Folkekøkken) serving free food, a dining room, a hotspot, and
a seminar space with a “democratic wall” constantly collecting statements from the participants. Six invited international speakers from England, Germany, and the
United States, presented and discussed critical art projects for social change, followed by statements from the participants and the Sunday workshop worked out a joint
statement. Havblik Audio and Peter Dacke played experimental music closing long days of discussion, YNKB, February 22-24, 2008.

Start with a ReFab Happening, noon-5:00: What is ReFab?
ReFab uses the talents of book artists and new media artists to repurpose objects that otherwise might just go to the landfill. Here’s how it Works: Part exquisite corpse, part homage to Henry Ford, ReFab is a collaborative art workshop that seeks to repurpose unwanted items and give them new life. YOU bring an unwanted item to Mess Hall, anything from a gum wrapper to a broken television set – no object is too insignificant or too unwieldy – and place it on a conveyor belt. WE will then work on it in an assembly line of sorts, each of us will use a set amount of time to manipulate the object provided. The objects may be painted, burned, encased in wire, printed on, exorcised, pierced, decoupaged, filled with candy, anthropomorphized, photographed, gift wrapped, played like a musical instrument, written about and/or dipped in wax. The item will be documented as it undergoes its transformation, and before-and-after pictures will be displayed on the ReFab website.

Today on WORT's noon time show, A Public Affair, host Chris Dols had a much needed conversation by phone with Bob Quellos, an architect and Chicago citizen who is helping with the activist effort No Games Chicago. This was the first time I've heard in Madison a critical discussion of the City of Chicago's effort to woo the International Olympic Committee and the 2016 Summer Games. The reason it is important that this analysis be heard in Madison is because our city has become part of Chicago's official Olympic bid, having officially been named as the site of several competitive events. The governor and the mayor are on board. There has been virtually no voice on the issue other than that of those who are already sold on the idea. Predictably, from the get-go they have deployed the usual boilerplate about tourism and economic boons.

Missing is any analysis that takes into account what hosting the Games will probably mean for Chicago, and, in turn, how the crushing fiscal burden left on Chicago by the Games might affect the surrounding region. Including Madison. This lack of analysis is major problem given the anxiety bourgeois Madison feels regarding poor and working class people moving to Madison from the nearby big cities of Milwaukee and Chicago. How the economic and living conditions in those cities are managed and, in this case, maybe worsened substantially, should be of concern to people (and activists) here precisely because the demographic shifts in Madison probably correspond to those changing conditions.

Instead of blindly considering a Chicago Summer Games an automatic good, and, in the worse cases, simultaneously bemoaning the outsiders who are bringing to Madison new levels of violence and lawlessness, we should be thinking through the operations that make the nearby big cities unlivable, driving poor people out. This would include such strikingly neoliberal developments like hosting a summer Olympics. Unfortunately, even during the conversation on-air there wasn't much time spent on the regional ramifications, but it was a good start.

You can listen to the broadcast here.

And speaking of World War II, check out this video I shot the other day, over at Lewis Koch's East Side work studio.

Lewis Koch shows WW II posters from Dan S Wang on Vimeo.

For about the past year I had a copy of William Shirer's Berlin Diary sitting on the shelf, in the reading queue. I was turned on to this book by my friend Sam Gould, whom I once caught with it on a trip, toted along as his casual reading. Later my brother-in-law told me that this book became a popular assigned book in many college European History courses for the generation born in the decade before World War II. And that explains its frequent availability in secondhand bookstores and rummage sales.

Upon my latest return from Vienna, I was feeling the need to process my experience through some reading and so finally cracked the book. I'm now getting into the three hundreds, where Shirer leaves Berlin to cover the Western Front, which the Germans had only days ago pushed westard into Belgium and the Netherlands. On his way to the front he passes through Aachen and later Louvain. He tells of the Germans having deliberately destroyed the University Library there, and of them burning the irreplaceable books. And then, the High Command lying about it, declaring that the British did the deed, in an attempt to fabricate another excuse for Geman aggression.

And then today received in my inbox from a friend this link, to hip hop poet Kevin Coval's blog. He's composed a poem in response to the Israeli Defence Force's closure of a literature festival that was to be held last month in Jerusalem.

The opening epigraph says it all...

Reflection on The Israeli Army shutting down The Palestine Festival of Literature
in the month of May in 2009: Burning Books, A Bebelplatz in Jerusalem

Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too.
Heinrich Heine

From there, he goes into something sad, outraged, and beautiful.
Check out the whole thing here.

Last Sunday I got to deliver a rough but fresh report on my doings in Vienna to a small audience at Madison's Project Lodge. This coming Monday I get to do it again–a little less fresh, but probably a little more coherent–in Chicago at Mess Hall. So come join if you want to know more about what I've been blogging about, mostly, for the past few weeks.

7 PM
Monday, June 15, 2009
Mess Hall
6932 North Glenwood
Chicago
Morse stop on the Red Line

There I'll have the time to give the overview, hit the high points, the deficiencies, and the odd and ends I've not had the time to relate here. For example, saying something about the Kunsthistorisches Museum, or maybe commenting what I saw of the Asian Village weekend-long project, with its performances by artists like Daito Manabe.

daito in vienna

This past Saturday, the ongoing collaborative creativity between artists and the Tamms Year Ten organization reached another high water mark. Some thirty activists took to the streets and plazas of Chicago, publicizing the campaign to end torture in Illinois and shut down Tamms. These folks used a method of stencilling developed by Milwaukee street artist Jesse Graves. The coloring agent: mud, a new/old medium for legally uncontrollable expression, and absolutely green (or rather, brown). I love that they took their messages to the museums, as in the last pic, outside the Museum of Contemporary Art. This is urban earthworking at its best and most politically engaged.

Chicago-mud-6

Chicago-mud-8

TAMMS-mud-SB-3

Part 1 of a short interview with Ula Schneider, a Vienna-based art worker who initiated the SOHO in Ottakring festival.

Today, another SOHO highlight!

Beatrix Zobl, my indefatigable curator-collaborator helped me make the acquaintance of Margit Appel, an activist for what they call Grundeinkommen, or a basic income. And today Margit and a crew from the self-organized, grassroots group with which she works, Runder Tisch Grundeinkommen (the Round Table for Basic Income), came by for nearly a full day of collaborative text-writing, prop material production, public dissemination, and then an evening review/evaluation/discussion session. The whole thing was an experiment, none of the activists being art identified or trained. But open-minded, willing to try something new, and even a bit anxious for a fresh group and public exercise. They have spent most of their time and energies 'til now focused on conferences, panel discussions, studying policy, and the like. No creative public action.

So we got together and riffed on the various rationales for a basic income.

We talked, and wrote, together:

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Then we put the text into visual form, via lo-tech methods and by hand. In other words, we had a little drawing party, with photocopying, folding, and tearing, too.

The natural next step: dissemination, on the streets.

And after that, a little break for food and rest, and then regrouping for review, evaluation, debriefing. All in all, a very useful exercise for all. For the Runder Tisch Grundeinkommen, a lesson in fast, cheap, practical group creativity, and perhaps more to the point, experimenting with a new way to relate to each other, a different way to collaborate. (Up 'til this event, the group's activities have mostly been about conferences and policy.) This, I told them, is one simple way the group can cultivate itself as a culture.

 

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So there have at least three kind of intense things happening while I've been in Austria. One was the sudden disappearance and subsequent discovery of the drowned artist-organizer Barbara Pitschmann, who had some role in organizing the art events happening in Linz a couple of weeks ago. Another is the violent attack that took place in a Sikh temple, setting off unrest in Punjab. But the thing I've been following with most interest remains the upcoming European Parliament elections.  

This pic is of the same line of FPÖ posters I blogged on more than a week ago. I've noticed that as the June 7 election approaches, their posters are getting increasingly defaced. Here's what they're looking like now. So, clearly, somebody is not having any of the FPÖ crap.

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And better yet, there are some 'wanted' posters being added right on top of the FPÖ placards.

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This polemical work is beautiful, wouldn't you say! Stefan Nussbaumer did the lovely cloud form stencil and I cut the wording. Visitors remarked on the fin de siecle/Jugendstil flavor of the lettering. I cannot deny it; you still see this stylized lettering all over Vienna. After being here so many times, I seem to be absorbing the style.

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