4 posts tagged “social art”

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.

I like having academics and intellectuals make easy, immediate art. Their discomfort can be palpable. Monika Mokre and Elisabeth Mayerhofer, social scientists and theorists of so-called creative industries, joined me for an evening yesterday. We started off in the Zobl/Schneider SOHO space, just down the street from my space, discussing the various aspects of work in Austria, Europe, and the US that remain de- or under-politicized. The discussion was had while surrounded by fotos and material artifacts that came out of the Zobl/Schneider Berndorf project, which was a multi-year investigation into the culture and milieu of a single manufacturing company in Berndorf, Austria.

Then we moved over to my space to continue talking but also do a little hands on work. To draw or write while conversing. It took a bit for the Monika and Elisabeth to get in the comfort zone, but once there, we made a few text fragment flyers more than suitable for photocopying.

Here is a pic of Elisabeth wielding a broad-tipped sharpie. Notice the skillfully handled cigarette.

Yes, of course. There are millions here. There are people I know. Including many from Chicago, and many who did their time in Chicago. They are in town for the openings of the Signs of Change show at Exit Art and the Democracy in America 'convergence' at the Park Avenue Armory. Those events are why I'm here, too!

I'll be saying something about the MRCC on Monday, Sept 22 at the Armory at 7 PM, as part of Red76's Battery Republic project. I won't have images–just talk. But I will have A Call to Farms books for (very reasonable!) purchase. See the full Battery Republic schedule here. Unfortunately for me, Trevor Paglen will be presenting at the same time, and his presentations are always great. Don't miss it if you haven't seen him speak. You'll never think of shadow players in the same way.

And then Red76 will be eating our way through Flushing on Tuesday, Sept 23:

11.45am – ?pm
LunchTime Topics – Postcards from Flushing.

We are going lunch-hopping in Flushing. We will try new Chinese dishes, maybe some Korean bbq, probably some South Asian, too. While eating, we'll think and talk about, and absorb, the aesthetics and political questions presented by migration. I will have stamped postcards on hand so we can record our thoughts, drop them in mailboxes, and have them be a part of a steadily growing postcard project now on display at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, and also collected online.

http://www.jot.org/projects.php
http://www.droppingknowledge.org/cms/fw/splash
http://www.prairie.org/programs/public-square

Meet at the Information Booth Clock in the main hall of Grand Central Terminal at 11.45am

Still a little jet-lagged, but getting up in the middle of the Budapest night does give me a chance to blog.

I've been trying to process Monday's event at the Depot. The format was somewhat flawed from the beginning. There were three of us: me as presenter, and then Edelbert Koeb, director of MUMOK, and Peter Pakesch, from the Kunsthaus Graz, as respondents. My dear friend Beatrix Zobl was charged with the thankless task of moderating. I was given only 25 minutes to make a case for a different curatorial treatment of new art from China than has become standard on the Euro-American museum circuit in the last ten years or so. What I chose to focus on was the significance of the '89 social movement centered in Beijing, the role of art in the lead up to it, and how the shadow of that event (the mass demonstration phase of which, of course, ended with the martial crackdown in Tiananmen Square) colors the post-89 period, including in China's world of contemporary art, and how

the analysis of this movement is typically only served a superficial treatment in most big survey shows. It was difficult to make my points (although Sarah keeps saying I need to stop beating around the bush) in the allotted time, given that the audience on balance had only a simple knowledge of Chinese history (if at all), not to mention the '89 social movement in particular. And it was basically impossible to directly address the big China–Facing Reality show up at MUMOK in its details, as I had only seen the show that morning. By mid afternoon I was napping, which always results from the combination of jet lag and boring art.

So the stage was set. But there were positives as the event got underway. For one thing, the audience was big. The room was filled to capacity, SRO. Probably fifty people in a space the size of Mess Hall. And everybody seemed engaged as I went through my thing, which I ended more or less on time.

And then, disaster. Pakesch proved to be a mumbler, and a long-winded one at that. His points were not in anyway germane to anything that I had said only moments before, and were mostly general observations about the 'transition' taking place in China nowadays. Which is precisely the ideological trope Wang Hui demolishes in his critiques of the post-'89 period, and which I strongly echoed in my presentation.

Five minutes into Pakesch's response, a bloc of probably ten people conspicuously walked out.

Koeb wasn't much better. Despite the announced event language, he chose to speak in German, against the protests and irritation of the organizers, and especially to the everlasting chagrin of Beatrix, who tried to right the ship several times but was basically ignored. (I was not so irritated; after all, we were in Vienna.) But it didn't even matter because his comments, as well as I could understand them through translated segments and my own elementary German, were about as relevant as Pakesch's. He basically told stories of how he put the China–Facing Reality show together, and what he had intended to do, and how he had some problems managing the artists. He admitted to deficiencies in the show, but offered almost no analysis on why that happened to be the case, and zero evidence of self-awareness as a Western curator trying to work in a cultural world about which he knows nothing. It never seemed to occur to him that the artists in China, as well as his Chinese co-curator, might be playing him like a song, even though he readily admitted that he could never seem to escape the same circle of the same artists who are already internationally known.

More people left before Koeb finished.

The discussion part was better, partly because the drone of the two respondents finally ended. But it wasn't really their styles that bothered me. It was the fact that they didn't actually respond to what I said. Knowing what I know now–that they are basically cultural functionaries, having been appointed to their positions by the government–I am not really surprised. But at the time, I could only wonder, did these guys even listen? If not, then why did they even bother to take part?

But of course, the main thing was having an opportunity to communicate with an audience outside of the mediation of big institutions, to see the Depot, and re-connecting with Martina Reuter, who works as the Depot's manager, as well as with the great WochenKlausur. All of that was terrific, and, in the end, counts as the real work.