DRIFT: A Magazine of West Coast Cultural Production, Issue 3 by Drift Magazine

DRIFT

A Magazine of West Coast Cultural Production Issue 3, Summer 2011

[cover: Nicholas Price, singular multiple, 2011]

Creative Commons 2011 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United States License

DRIFT/CAST Publishing September 2011 http://www.driftmagazine.org

From the Editors /// Dear Readers, As lovers of magazines, we are always doing our homework. We recently came upon the first issue of Tom Marioni’s magazine from the 70’s, Vision, which began by framing each issue with an exploration of a specific place’s art scene. The first issue concerned itself with California. It’s an interesting frame, place, and one with which we here at DRIFT have an affinity. In his introduction, quoted at length here, Marioni asks important questions about the relevance of place to artistic production, toward identifying the ongoing importance of locality in a globalizing world, a sped-up world—he was writing in 1975 at the very head of the shift. He questions the homogenization of artistic practices toward trendy forms, and seems to tentatively posit that embodied, placed experience—one interwoven with phenomenal qualities and cultural histories—is the most formative feature in artistic development. It’s an idealistic, ‘honest’ sort of practice he wants to identify. The issues he engaged and the questions he asked are still resonant and relevant to many cultural producers today. In fact, it’s a history with broad influence and interest right now; just consider the Pacific Standard Time concerted group of exhibitions going on throughout Southern California. Our collective attention to the California artists of this recently past era hint at concerns that are still valid and unresolved. As some of the writers and artists included within the pages of this issue evidence, Marioni’s attachment to a phenomenal and historical place is still a productive, though not exclusive, frame with which to consider the shape of art on the West Coast today. Sean Collins & E. Maude Haak-Frendscho Editors ---

The number of artists in any given place do not make it an art center. As with science, an art center is made by a few people doing original research. It is expanded when by some means (usually called “support system”) the word gets out that something is being done there, and more interested people come. This expansion has gotten out of hand in New York, where thousands

of artists are living within a few blocks of each other in an incestuous Peyton Place where everyone knows everyone’s business. An art world that once looked like it would go on evolving forever has come to a standstill; an art world that for thirty years now has looked only at itself in the mirror is now showing signs of old age. New York is still a center. But for the first time since the Renaissance there are many centers. Artists around the country and around the world are finding their identities where they are, rather than going to New York. Today the most significant work being done is that which is most characteristic of the artist’s region. For a ranger’s son in Texas to paint grids like the buildings of New York City doesn’t make it. The artists of New York, those that made it an art center, are traveling, moving out to do their work in other places, as the support system widens. And artists from other places are traveling, so there is a world-wide interaction among artists. The main thing this accomplishes is that it makes everyone aware of what has been and is being done. This network of interaction is much faster and surer than the support system. Artists find other artists who are of interest to them. Museums and magazines are so involved with fairness to all styles that they cannot sort out what is significant and what is repetition. In fact repetition is more comfortable, so they go with it, finally discovering an art idea when it is used up. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago organized a show called “Body Works” this year that they naively announced as the first such show. In 1970 “Body Works” appeared at MOCA; in 1971 the La Jolla Museum had a show of “Body Works,” also listed in the press release as the first. It never occurred to them to ask the artists; Bruce Nauman, for example, was in all three shows. Anyhow, although “Body Works” has an important place in art history, in 1975 even the notion of body art is an extinct as hippies. ... The happenings that grew out of abstract expressionism in New York, dance in San Francisco, and theater in east and West Europe, were all an extension of theater, even though seen through the eyes of visual artists. It was still an age of painters, and they thought illusionistically. Materials were props, as in theater and the works were usually repeated and scripted. It was an audience-participation activity that was the beginning of an encounter-group consciousness. This was the time of beatniks, poetry reading to music and hard-bop jazz—the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. ... The sculpture of the ‘60s reacted against the anti-intellectualism of abstract expressionism, and created an intellectual art. Sculpture stood flat on the floor an concerned itself with reductiveness. Later, a materials consciousness developed, until by the late ‘60s the materials of the sculptor included light,

sound, language, social and political activities, and the artistâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s body. Because the work of the sculptor became so much like scientific experimentation, using aesthetics as its form, the process became the art, and time, the fourth dimension, became a factor. Sculptors began to make installation or environments, temporarily installed in a space. And they began to make actions, not directed at the production of static objects but rather at itself as its activity. The action is directed at the materials rather than at the audience as in theater. The spiral of art movements and life in general before 1970 had become increasingly tighter and faster. In T.V. the commercial of 1960 was sixty seconds long and in 1970 it took thirty seconds, to convey the same information. The culture in ten years had learned to use up products, information, and personal releationships in half the time. Post-object-art creates a slowing-down process, a real-time consciousness, because the artist knows it is necessary for the culture to become reflective. -Tom Marioni, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Out Front,â&#x20AC;? Vision Number One (September, 1975)

Table of Contents /// Cover: singular multiple by Nicholas Price

singular multiple & repetitions Nicholas Price

A Choreography for Reading Bodies Mimi Moncier

Notes on A Choreography for Reading Bodies E. Maude Haak-Frendscho

Endanger Bus Todd Gilens

Magic Landscape (Whaling pt. 1) Fletcher Tucker

Exhale (Whaling pt. 2) Fletcher Tucker

Matter Out Of Place: Black Rock Desert, November 2010 Nichole Santucci

Place Maker: The Pop Up Museum Meredith Carty MacKenzie

If Ever I Loved you then No Doubt I Gave you a Book James D. Newman

Contributors

SINGULAR MULTIPLE Cover & Artist Project

Nicholas Price

Artist Statement: singular multiple is an extension of an ongoing project titled repetitions that I began in 2010. In repetitions I used high voltage electricity to burn fractal patterns into wood blocks. I placed one positive point and one negative point in each block and the positive and negative electricity try to find each other and create a circuit. In the process of finding that circuit the electricity burns it’s path into the wood. I repeated the same process, materials, and placement of the electricity several times, each time with similar but unique marks as a result. The individual blocks are then tiled to create a larger tableau of repeating patterns. While in singular multiple I created one block in the same way but this time printed multiple copies off of that one block.

repetitions, 2011

Notes on A Choreography for the Reading Body E. Maude Haak-Frendscho

This is a piece about dance. And bodies. And publications. And the act of reading. It concerns itself with the formal qualities of each, and how they could be related. It is also just one foray in an ongoing project played out on the formal boundaries of DRIFT. It was written to accompany a piece by Mimi Moncier.*

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Let us space. The art of this text is the air it causes to circulate between its screens. The chainings are invisible, everything seems improvised or juxtaposed. This text induces by agglutination rather than by demonstrating, by coupling and uncoupling, gluing and ungluing rather than by exhibiting the continuous, and analogical, instructive, suffocating necessity of a discursive rhetoric.

-Jacques Derrida, Glas, p. 75 (1974)

Dance, as a form of artistic production, explicitly muddies the representational possibilities of bodily forms and the contextual qualities that bring that body into being—a blurring of subject and object, sociality and materiality; Bourdieu would add habitus and field. Certainly other forms have a similar capacity to practice both, but dance and other forms of performance have the particular quality of enacting them simultaneously. Reading, like dancing, is embodied. It is a practiced form of movement, both signifier and that which is signified. Practice makes perfect—or at least makes meaning. Hands caress pages, feeling the words, the spaces between the words where meaning can form. These minute expanses, fallow sites of reprieve and of meaningto-be, are the reader’s to write. How does the publication mediate the presence of the reading body? The page shapes the reading in as much as the reader shapes the page. A dialectic of imprint, of response, of discourse. Susan Leigh Foster proposes a bodily writing: writing embodied subjectivity into the page. Barthes’ reader also has a body. Who is this corollary? How does a reader’s bodily writing become discursive? Get read? Where are the bodies that form the public of this publication? How does the reader perform a bodily writing? Gestures are language and the page is a marked site (Rosalind Krauss) imbued with traces of the reading body; thumb print, spine that opens to an oft-read passage, corners bent with repeated visits to and from the bookshelf. The form of the body intersects with the form of the publication. Much like the reading body, the orating body makes good use of the hands to communicate. What narratives do the hands of the reading body signal? How many registers can this simple gesture engage? There is an expressive capacity to the reading body. That which is enacted and the enactor are both necessarily present in embodied performance. The

“In an attempt to transcend this false dichotomy, Bourdieu sought to develop a concept of agent free from the voluntarism and idealism of subjectivist accounts and a concept of social space free from the deterministic and mechanistic causailty inherent in many objectivist approaches… It was within this framework that Bourdieu developed the concepts of habitus and field.”

“A body, whether sitting writing or standing thinking or walking talking or running screaming, is a bodily writing. Its habits and stances, gestures and demonstrations, every action of its various regions, areas, and parts—all these emerge out of cultural practices, verbal or not, that construct corporeal meaning. Each of the body’s moves, as with all writings, traces the physical fact of movement and also an array of references to conceptual entities and events.”

“...whatever the medium employed, the possibility explored in this category [marked site] is a process of mapping the axiomatic features of the architectural experience—the abstract conditions of openness and closure—onto the reality of a given space.”

“…dance’s combined status as depiction and performative generator of relationships.”

“For Benjamin, the arcades launch an exemplary environment in which the tenets of a modern perception and experience are elaborated: a mode of perceiving and a quality of experience that is both forged by and appropriate to the modern age.”

temporalities of reading are not so neat. They are performed by reading bodies, eventually, in time. A publication awaits, and beckons, a reader. The musical timing of the choreography for reading bodies is notated by pages. A score of lines, paragraphs, columns, captions—punctuation to syncopated effect. Reading is a form of passage. It is both temporal and spatial. A magazine is the most labyrinthine of arcades, each article a turn down a new, bustling path. The progression is never quite as linear as it appears to be. There is jostling, and jockeying; always navigating anew. “Virtuosity” is this kind of nimbleness. The reading body is animated by the publication. The publication is animated by the reading body. What capacity has the reading body to extend the publication beyond the publication? What capacity has the publication to extend the reading body beyond the reading body? The emergent relation between readers, writers, artists, editors, and texts-in-hand—in the most utopian terms—belies a historical parallel between publics and publications. Reading is a collective gesture, group choreography, leaning toward an ideality of discourseas-coherent-public. In a deconstructive sense, the publication, this space of relation, provides the stage for its own undoing, too: Its slippery temporalities, its multiple sites, and best of all, the unknown performer-readers and their uniquely unresolved subjectivities. Dance is thus a generative site to consider the interstices of a subjective, reading body and a published object. This is the genesis of A Choreography for the Reading Body, a project requested of artist, architect and dancer Mimi Moncier. Moncier’s diverse disciplinary allegiances uniquely position her to consider body as form, publication as space, and the interstice of the two as conceptually and materially ripe for intervention. She is a dancer adept with the everyday, and trained to perform Yvonne Rainer’s formative conceptual choreography of everyday movements Trio A. She is an architect who can

materially bind a specifically social space. She is an artist whose concerns span the distance between the two. The intervention itself is straightforward and elegant. You turn a page, you read, you see the work, you see yourself, you are in the work. It is readable, but not literal, nor absolute. It is a truth, but it may be truer as fragments, as partial truths. And it, too, carries the seeds of its own, cyclical undoing. //

Addendum: These pieces emerged out of conversation. I was talking with my friend Mimi, who has been studying to perform Trio A at the Berkeley Art Museum, about the piece, how she interprets it, and how that could relate to a magazine as a venue. Inspired by our discussions and wanting to promote the upcoming performance, I asked her to perform a dance intervention, a choreography for the reader. Her idea emerged, a kind of simple and neatly elegant one, to paint her hands and read a piece in the magazine, leaving traces of her own reading. She performed it three times, each in a different colored paint. The digitalized traces are reintegrated into the piece for printing, where readers’ hands will meet the traces of hers. We talked about how you go back and read sections over, or revisit a piece after a time. She needed a piece to work with, and I developed one about the subject, including her involvement with Rainer’s dance, and attempted to formally require readers to tack about in their reading, both physically and intellectually. It is also in part an homage to Derrida’s Glas, which utilized two columns—one for text, one for notes—in conversation with one another; the reader is never able to reconcile fully what’s there, or be in both places at once.

*An interview between Moncier and the other Trio A dancers will appear in the next issue of DRIFT.

Generous Publicness: Endangered Species

Todd Gilens

Transit in the Bay Area is struggling in a structurally weakened system not unlike the systemic stresses at work in adjacent natural areas; but transit may also be part of the solution in protecting that landscape. Some years ago I started developing an artwork to draw out this connection, borrowing from conservation biology and endangered species rhetoric and using the advertising materials native to public transit vehicles. Could the reciprocal relationship between transportation planning and habitat conservation be expressed? Could the landscapes that transit benefits also help transit? The project was built around contradictions. To start, transit through most of the 20th century was an agent of urban expansion and habitat destruction. Only recently, and in certain circumstances, has it been called on as a tool of conservation. Then again, public transit is a commonwealth, but vehicles are routinely overwritten by advertising. Whose space is occupied by the transit rider? What messages do transit vehicles project as they travel through the streets? Meanwhile, at the core of the project I built an artwork that is both activist and generously open. It is a kind of prism, beautiful, perhaps magical, but also a tool for learning. Speeding or lumbering by, the buses call attention to

Butterfly in Hunters Point, Todd Gilens.

themselves, then leave you wondering. But these buses with human-sized tiny animals may also perform an analytic service. They bring together spatially distant but functionally connected systems: urban infrastructure and natural ecosystems, transit networks and information resources, human- and animal-

Salmon at Rodeo Beach, Todd Gilens.

agency. In the experience of this artwork there is little of the concentrated contemplation found in museums or galleries, but neither is it weighted with the puzzling, ambiguous authority of these institutions. One may encounter the buses relatively unencumbered. These two processes—wonder and analysis—are awkward but necessary companions. By housing them together I am trusting in a capable audience. But here it gets complicated. Endangered Species is deliberately set in the murky zone between public and corporate space, on transit vehicles in public rights of way, where individuals and collectives (sometimes literally) collide. And while people are practiced at ignoring advertising, advertisers are cunning at breaking through those defenses. This project is the stepchild of that scramble.

Pelican with Child, Todd Gilens

I’ve been chasing the buses around the city, to photograph them and to see what I could of how people respond. Of course I want the work to be noticed; but I hope the effect falls on the side of invitation rather than manipulation, an interaction that returns pleasure to the viewer as much as it does the opportunity for reflection. Occasionally, I’d hear a comment of curiosity, a remark about a refreshing difference, and sometimes the drivers would engage me, asking about the project and offering a story of their own. Once a friend wrote:

On my bike to work today I noticed two animals not normally on the bus. A small marsh mouse and a butterfly. I only got to read the back of the bus with the mouse. It was a nice surprise and a fun fact to learn on the way to work.

The project has been running now since mid-January, covering the city as the buses are shifted from route to route. Looking through this binocular lens of bus and animal, I’ve watched the competitive tangle of that open system called ‘public space’. The system is looking broader, its grain finer, and my fondness for our efforts, however compromised, is growing. //

More about the Endangered Species project can be found at www.endangerbus.org. Project funding was generously provided by: San Francisco Arts Commission, Potrero Nuevo Fund of Tides Foundation, Zellerbach Family Fund, San Francisco Foundation, Adobe Community Foundation, and Christensen Fund. Buses are provided by the San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Species photographers are Gary Alt, Todd Gilens, Summer Lindzey, B. Moose Peterson/WRP, John Sullivan, and Thomas Wang.

Magic Landscape (Whaling pt. 1)

Fletcher Tucker

We start walking on a narrow trail full of coffee berry and poison oak, and we stop short only a few yards in. The swollen innards of some small mammal lies in the middle of the path; next to them, a clean picked, blood tinged skull; and a very small distance away, the lower jaw. Everything else is gone. No hair, no bones, no flesh, no blood—just the lonely intestine of a recently eviscerated rabbit, and its empty skull. It smells quite pungent, and our thoughts turn immediately to the huge corpse we are on our way to see. If this handful of carrion can smell so badly, surely we are in danger of asphyxiation if we can actually reach the whale. Roughly a month ago, a dead gray whale washed up on the rocky, isolated beach a few miles south of my home at a retreat center on the cliffs of Big Sur. Everyday it grows tanner and tanner, sitting stone still next to an old shipwreck. Whitewater breaks nearby but misses the carcass entirely. It was deposited high on the beach during strong winds and tsunami reinforced waves, dramatically appearing right after the earthquake in Japan. The whale is just a pink spot from our common dining deck, and a slightly more distinct blurry shape from the hot spring tubs that compose the main attraction of our institute. It is a topic of gossip: “did you know Mark saw it up close?”,

the subject of immature pity: “poor, sweet little whale”, and a mysterious temptation: “I will not rest until I stand before it.” It could be a good or bad omen, these rabbit guts. Either way, it is remarkable. Kelsey sprinkles tobacco: a small offering. Sticky monkey flower, tall grass, lupin, and giant horsetail join us on the trail. After the tall grass and horsetail our pant legs are populated with ticks, five or ten species, some enormous. What a strange life, living on the end of a grass blade, waiting and waiting for a hot-blooded somebody to walk by. Once their dream is fulfilled, and they hitch a ride on three soft skinned apes, we just flick them off our pants in disgust. It is hard not to hate them, creepy little sanguinavores. The trail got washed out and was never rebuilt, so we repel the last forty feet. Our timing is not ideal; the tide is somewhere between high and low, and will be getting higher soon. The steep wall to the east overflows with tiny mossy waterfalls, creating fresh water pools full of tadpoles, and (honest to God) a little patch of quicksand. We are forced by the encroaching ocean to climb over boulders and up crumbling rock faces past stinky cormorant nests. Two dead cormorants lie between rocks on our walk. One moldering right next to her nest, possibly not built far enough away from the pounding surf, a grim reminder that we must leave enough time for a return journey, lest we be battered in a narrow passage by the incoming tide. This hike is full of crystals. Great bands of quartz run through the igneous rocks, so loose that big chunks can be removed by hand. Solid sulfur lies in little clumps, recently fallen from the hillside, waiting for an alchemist’s invocation. Crystalline mineral deposits grow like a fungus on some of the boulders, tan and fleshy on the surface and then broken open in places to reveal shimmering cross-sections of pink and white. The gray whales migrate 1,000 miles every year, from Alaska to Baja California passing Big Sur each winter and spring. Stones migrate as well. These crystal cliffs are the terrestrial base of the Lucia Mountain Range, which drifted toward this place from central Mexico over the course of several hundredmillion years. Eventually we reach an impasse. A shear rock face juts out of deep wild water and stands tall and silent between us and the whale. It is pounded mercilessly by rolling giants that clap like thunder against its unyielding form. An attempted scramble over would likely mean broken bones, probably necks; trying to pass by sea would likely mean the same, if a riptide did not drag us

out into the infinite. Thwarted. The tide is really coming in now, so we’ve got to hustle, retracing our steps— running on slippery rocks that were dry on the approach. Occasionally we brace ourselves for potential wave death, but are mercifully spared. The salt spray in my face seems to say: “you might not be so lucky next time.” Thankfully, the beach widens and the ocean is at bay, so to speak. The adrenaline drains away, and Noël spots an otter diving in the breakwater, body surfing, and smashing mollusks to smithereens on an anvil stone. Before the long hike back we conduct a spontaneous ceremony. First a little gentle movement, improv Tai Chi, while Kelsey chants at a distance. A raft of pelicans soar in from the south, coasting through the curl of a wave. I am moved to sing, exclaim in fact, to greet my soaring cousins with my power voice, my loudest and most resonant tones. A song takes shape, call and response between Noël and me, and then uncontrolled free-form shamanic verse. The tide surges in and a magic landscape is revealed, always there, just waiting for us to take a little time to tune in. The rocks and cliffs, the endless water, distant clouds, my friends and me, and all the beings: together again in a song. //

Exhale

(Whaling pt. 2) Fletcher Tucker

This time we come from the north, from beneath the bath-house of the retreat center. We’ll have to be discreet, to access the beach from this angle is strictly forbidden in light of at least one accidental death. First we have to climb a chain-link fence, then creep under the structure of the baths, tie a long rope to its foundation and repel 100 feet down a steep cliff face to the rock beach. It feels like a prison break, or a James Bond movie… if James Bond was ever racing communists to reach the rotting carcass of a gray whale. This cinematic opening marks my third attempt to see the whale body upclose, it is Noël and Kelsey’s second try. My first shot was a bungled tumble from the highway through chaparral thickets, down disintegrating precipices and onto the wrong beach. We strategically plan this assault for low tide, and unstrategically set out during the new moon, so there is actually very little difference between high and low tides. Halfway there, the ocean stops us. Kelsey and I decide to swim past a barrier of rock and wave. Noël elects to stay behind so she can go for help if we become marooned or injured. She waits in a cove with bright green, mossy walls, thick like the pelt of a cold weather creature. I’m so focused on the waves, and avoiding being battered by them, I actually

don’t register the freezing temperature of the water until I am on the next stretch of shore. Now we start a steady trot over the rocks, with no time to waste. The human sense of smell is a running joke in the animal kingdom, but despite my handicap the odor of the dead whale comes into focus well before the image. We stripped down for the swim, of course, but I kept my underwear on so they could be converted into a bandanna as we approached the putrescent threshold. We chant in Sanskrit seed-syllables, and clap as we walk closer and closer. “Sa ta na ma, sa ta na ma:” birth, life, death, and rebirth. Other than the smell, the first thing I notice are the birds. Thirty or forty gulls rest on the whale, and a turkey vulture actually sits in its mouth, tearing strips from the tongue. Turkey vultures have the most powerful olfactory sense of any animal, ever. They can pinpoint small carrion from many miles away, and from high in the air. Comparatively I might as well not have nostrils, yet every cell in my body fights to keep its distance from the carcass, while the world’s

greatest smeller literally sits inside the whale. The difference is that what smells disgusting and dangerous to me smells delicious and vital to the vulture… a bakery is to me as a dead whale is to it. Eventually our presence inspires flight, and I marvel at the inherent poetry of wild cycles: that whale spent its whole life (50 or 60 years) swimming in the ocean, and now it’s flying. Despite the clear profundity of this spiritual journey toward these enormous earthly remains, Kelsey and I have to laugh—this is the smelliest of vision quests. We walk around the body in eye watering awe, and respectively ponder what relic to bring home. Kelsey selects, and removes, the tiniest toedigit-bone from the fin, a humble choice. I choose the second smallest toedigit, a slightly less humble choice. Upon circling the whale we find its penis draped over several large rocks. It would normally be internal, like all mammals excepting human beings, but apparently the muscular release or tension that accompanied death forced it out into the open. It is about the same size as my entire body. Yes indeed, this was a male whale. Huge vertebrae stick out of the rot-widened blowhole. The internal decay is creating a lot of heat, as microorganisms do their good work, and steam billows out of the blowhole continuously, giving the impression that the whale is perpetually exhaling. And in a sense, he is, as he releases all of the minerals, molecules, and atoms that he has been holding onto back into the world. Complete decomposition is the final breath, and the moment of absolute rebirth… when every cell is free to roam in the belly of a vulture, the primitive body of a microbe, or in particles through the air and sea. //

Matter Out of Place:

Black Rock Desert, November 2010 Photography by Nichole Santucci

Following Page: Matter Out of Place: Black Rock Desert, November 2010 Digital Print, 19” x 22”

Place Maker:

The Pop Up Museum Meredith Carty MacKenzie

Part of our mission is to stimulate the creative potential in peoples’ lives, and we believe strongly that happens where we live, where we work, and where we play. –JoAnn Edwards, Executive Director, Museum of Craft and Design

From retail to restaurants, workshops to coffee shops, and this month, pop up wedding chapels for same-sex couples in NYC, the Pop Up trend has made its way into the vernacular of urban culture, and the Arts are no exception. In the last few years, downtown urban landscapes and city centers have become the sites for community members to gather and delight at the Pop Up’s heyday. Galleries and museums are embracing the trend. In the words of JoAnn Edwards, executive director of the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco, “the notion of pop ups has definitely piqued interest in the museum community.” In 2010, The Museum of Craft and Design shifted away from a traditional brick and mortar tourist attraction to a temporary, mobile pop up museum. More recently, the museum joined forces with the Hayes Valley pop up event,

Proxy SF. “Using refurbished shipping containers, Proxy offers a temporary placeholder for rotating food, art, and retail happenings, located in Hayes Valley.”1 The museum’s timely move away from its conventional form confirms the redefining of museums that is taking place in the contemporary moment. In response to the shifting role of cultural institutions, Hilde Hein’s, Public Art: Thinking Museums Differently questions whether or not museums can be understood as public art.2 Hein speaks to the responsibility of museums in today’s marketplace: “Designated the perpetuators of culture, museums have traditionally been charged with passing values from one generation to the next. Now, they are experiencing pressure from outside and within the profession to become social activists, shaping today’s world and influencing what is to come tomorrow.”3 The Museum is no longer defined as simply a place to view, preserve and study cultural artifacts.4 The defining characteristics of public art have also moved beyond the bronze soldier on a horse or a bust of Beethoven in the symphony foyer. So, how can we explain the reinvention of museum identity? Hein suggests that the contemporary redefinition of the Museum is a response to the social difference between public and private art.5 The museum visit is no longer a private, passive viewing experience guarded by marble columns and security personnel. “In today’s museums, a single public is replaced by defined clusters, enclaves of difference, interactively engaged with the museum and each other. Supporting this robust pluralism is the museum’s declared objective.”6 Embracing the audience as an engaged community is vital. In the case of The Museum of Craft and Design, the move from permanent storefront to temporary pop up museum is evidence that the Museum is making a place for itself to interact with audiences throughout the local community. Formerly known as the San Francisco Museum of Craft + Design, the institution opened its doors on Sutter Street in 2004. So, why, after six years did the museum begin taking up temporary residence all over town? The museum’s executive director, JoAnn Edwards explains why the museum left its old home to become mobile. 1 www.proxysf.net 2 Hilde Hein, Public Art: Thinking Museums Differently. (Lanham: AtlaMira Press, 2006), xxvii. 3 Ibid.,145. 4 Ibid., xxiv. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., 157.

In June 2010, just as we began an expansion to our Sutter Street location, construction by the landlord on the floors above caused a major leak that damaged artwork and ultimately led to our vacating the building. Through a nimble and resilient response from the Board and staff, we devised a plan to expand our audience base within the City and to increase public awareness of our programs and mission through a series of pop up museums in temporary locations throughout San Francisco. Before the collaboration with Proxy SF, the Museum of Craft and Design housed its first two pop up locations in 2010, in the Castro and SOMA districts and featured the work of artists, Ethan Rose, Andy Paiko and more than twenty Bay Area architects and landscape designers. According to Edwards, the pop ups received “rave reviews from visitors, great support from neighbors and strong attendance for our programs and events.” Naturally, the museum’s mission, according to Edwards, to “engage the community while stimulating the creative potential in peoples’ lives” fit in well with the Proxy SF happenings. More importantly, the Hayes Valley home of Proxy SF fit the bill for the museum’s “strategy to seek neighborhoods where San Franciscans live, work and play.” Beginning in June 2011, and running through the fall, The Museum of Craft and Design joined Proxy SF to present, Place Making: Installations at Hayes

and Octavia, a series of three temporary outdoor installations located at that intersection, curated by Mariah Nielson. As the major art component of Proxy SF, each of the installations hopes to engage the community through audience participation. “Place Making is part of a whole process that encourages the kind of places/environments where people feel a strong stake in their communities and a commitment to making things better. It can be a creative process that promotes inspiration, happiness, well-being and a way to connect with one another in an accessible way,” notes Edwards. The first in the series of events took place on July 17, with over 160 visitors in attendance. Sculptor Andy Vogt invited the public to participate in the fabrication of his piece, which repurposed salvaged wood from local construction sites as a way to “re-imagine how we perceive our material world.” The installation was on view through August 15, 2011.

The second Place Making event took place on August 21, 2011 and featured artist Jesse Schlesinger. Responding specifically to the site, this installation

All photos courtesy of Andy Vogt.

will be plant-based, utilizing both “established plants and fast-growing seeds that will adapt to the urban environment,” says Edwards. Jesse will also build a wood and stone structure that will serve as a place for meditation or quiet contemplation. The final event in the series takes place September 17, 2011 and features architects and CCA professors, Nataly Gattegno and Jason Kelly Johnson. The Museum of Craft and Design’s alliance with retailers and food vendors at happenings like Proxy SF may invite critique from museum traditionalists. However, the flexibility and readiness of the Museum to adapt to the changing trends in the market may prove to be an enlightened way to reach new audiences. In fact, a growing number of museums and galleries are finding themselves in similar situations, facing radical change. “Many museums no longer have the resources to add to collections and lack sufficient display space to exhibit everything they own. They have little choice but to become more dynamic.”7 Although she challenges contemporary institutions, critic Hilde Hein remains optimistic about “niche programs” and “clever partnering” like The Museum of Craft and Design with Proxy SF. The future of the art scene in San Francisco and beyond may become defined by impermanence. The popularity of pop up museums and temporary, sitespecific installations evidences the importance of temporality in contemporary art practice. Perhaps there are true benefits and possibilities of attracting audiences for a limited time only. //

For more information: Museum of Craft and Design: www.sfmcd.org Proxy: www.proxysf.net

Hein, 145.

If Ever I Loved you

then No Doubt I Gave you a book James D. Newman

“I’ll wait for you in the library, any library… every library.” -Peter Greenaway, The Pillow Book

Part I (asleep at the foot of my desk) A leaf captured and pressed in some 1940 edition of someone to be removed decades later at a lonely desk and twirled between the fingers – momentarily on a raft on the slow rolling dark waves of emotive memory – sweetness and nostalgia I remember you. You have taken your place here in the libraries of time bound symbol amid equations and formulae music and architecture

your face and the facade of a cathedral and the motion of fine aristocratic fingers lightly on piano keys color washes and the scent of fall sloshing together in my head as I roll over slow in a dream sweat awakening briefly to a space with too many dimensions. I reach for a glass of water and clear the syllables of your name from my throat like a rumbling cough. Laying back and rotating my hips I reach over my head and twist my shoulders to stretch my spine, this gesture is ancient. I think that I did it when I was a cat. In bed with a beloved, or the idea of a beloved such a stretch stops time turning and twisting so we become wisps of smoke intertwining and the world outside the window stops when I slide over your haunch and up your side, counting your ribs reaching up and cradling the back of your skull in my hand and pulling firmly down your neck. The world outside my window stops. This is one component of the seizure of my heart that first day when your image passed into me, this is one component: that deep within my whispering insides a voice said that you could stop time. So

I hung about in the doorway. I lurked and looked at you darkly. I painted a picture of spring the violence of flowers opening. I’ll bet the nape of her neck smells like cinnamon. That it would be you is deep in the punch cards of recognition and pheromone 85 years ago no doubt you would have taken my grandfather down. I sat in his living room when I was a boy and leafed through his high school year book “Who’s that?” I asked, stopping on the senior portrait of a lovely dark haired girl with mocking eyes. “That,” he answered “was my first love.” We are sitting atop the sliding plates of patterns which unfold over centuries – neither you nor I are necessary but our meeting was and this is the terror of the blood which rushed to my face when I first greeted you and smiled. I may walk down a street and turn left or right as I choose but 10,000 years of endocrine pressure sounded in my ears to remind me that I am only an instance of a continuum, that the pieces of which I am thrown together contain truths of a different order than that part of me which sorts and names truths. So that, as best I guess is what was occupying my mind the first tenth of a second that I knew you. Pulling back into a ball from my stretch, I sit up in bed in my night darkened room and look at the glowing digital display

of my alarm clock. My lighter is where I habitually leave it – its sparking reflects off a thousand pieces of metal, plastic and glass on my desk, floor and shelves. The flame shows me a blurry hint of the shapes of my belongings and finally the cigarettes’ orange cherry hangs in the blackness. Your smell is still faint in my sheets (or maybe a shirt left, or a brush of your perfume on my coat) and it rises and combines with the warm nutty drag of tobacco. (what year is this?) From the death quiet blackness I can hear the lilting range of your voice singing and spontaneous. Your infectious enthusiasm, your perspectives and analyses all so different from my own. I wince inwardly at the memory of some shockingly stupid thing you said – and plot how I can cajole you out of a hated counterposition. I sort out the dreams I have made for us from the ones we have made together, how unlikely that any of them will be fulfilled amid all this striving to remain awake and alive – do you know how fast time eclipses dreams? I put out my hand for you to pull me from this tangled mass of seaweed, history, shame I take a draught of your imagined voice as a palliative for my failure of vision.

There are days when you command me to be more than myself, when I see the gulf between us and it speaks to all of my inner resources all those powers I have never tried. On these days the doors to the vaults of the world are thrown open and I feel certain that there is nothing which could not be accomplished. I accept the ludicrous oversimplification of the biographies of great men. I know it all was vision and faith and how is it possible that follow-through wouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t just explode out of such a focused intention. There are days when you command me to be more than myself, when it seems likely that dream will triumph over sleep, that the keys are in my pocket, the combinations in my memory. There are days when it seems there is more for me than stale conversation within dingy walls, that there is more to travel than railway station bars than slumping between slaughterhouses of time. There are days when you make me believe I am hanging on for something, not just hanging on to hang on. Listening for a whisper of the magic of your voice I extinguish my cigarette. Part II (Renunciation) Somewhere between the apperception of your image by my eye and the extension of my hand I always manage to become confused as to the nature of space.

A child before a delicate menagerie in a display case I push my hand through the invisible barrier get cut to fuck and knock the fragile objects to the floor. At home with the play of light and reflection I run consistently afoul of the apparently simple (or at least common) laws of manipulation and property. A bull in a china shop the best strategy in the world for me would be to sit very still and be tense the nervous twitching of my tail could do damage enough here not to mention my huge thick skull and obscene top heavy defenses. Drinking you in makes me want to talk fast and a lot. To keep you I have to keep my pace, to stay shy of head spinning speaking too fast a foreign language but I don’t want to keep you. I want to light you up with the fire that you started in me. I want to dance with you in a dervish dance and kick everything clear to hell – the tables and chairs and doors and walls to stamp everything into kindling, light it on fire and make love to you in a field. You don’t want me to control you, or you want to control me, and I don’t even want to control myself.

I think we’re looking for different things here or think we’re looking for different things or everything got really complex all the sudden or I never noticed how complex it all was to begin with and please turn around that’s not what I meant that’s not what I meant at all. I meant starlight in the Midwest when they kill the lights of the carnival tents and we can sit on a hay bale with a bottle of bourbon and some imagination I meant starlight and imagination and a trek wide away from the smooth rolling lawns and evenly spaced streetlights of the suburbs. Not the obvious tragedy of the suburbs of the city but the suburbs of the mind – our expectations. The death ground in your head between what you think you want and what you think I want. Let me make this really clear so I can break out of this made from television Disney special you think I’m living in – I’m not looking to marry my high school sweetheart. I don’t need my opinions echoed or confirmed. I don’t think any person is shallow or simple enough to be described as half of another person better or worse. I want to wake up. Some mornings, I want to wake up next to you. Can you tell me how to capture the cheese

without tripping the trap? Is it just safety we sacrifice to imminence and ignition? Does this have to be about power, control and fear? Let’s turn from looking at each other and push this circuit’s light (circus light) on the world. Right now There are more interesting things to do than thinking about what each other are thinking. Whether we love enough or too much. I renounce my proprietary concerns in you – please you there, feel free to feel whatever you feel. I don’t want anything that isn’t already there and I don’t care if it’s on the way. I want to play but not marbles, and not monopoly. Let’s renounce decency. I don’t have any real estate – sex is great but the harness chafes women aren’t the only ones who need some revisionary theory. Let’s remember what we are doing here And forget Hollywood and Middleton protectionist tariffs and provincial vision. Voids seeking fulfillment in avoidance is a good sit-com but Married with Children is defaulting load unbalanced time to redistribute and hit trip reset. I renounce being responsible for your needs. You’re a grown up take care of that shit yourself.

At some point everyone has to choose between their five own fingers pushed through the gate of their senses and the pleasure of torturing everyone around them with the names of their childhood monsters. This is called self-actualization. I renounce you as a dodge from self-actualization. Jocasta, —I am sorry, yes. But I feel no shock nor even disgust. I will not put out My own eyes. I just didn’t know it was you, There are, after all, other women. I renounce shame. Part III (Literature) Aphrodite is Hephaestus’s wife. Not enough is made of this – that love is the bride of the fusion of fire and work – that the goddess of beauty is the bride of the god of the forge. Language is as plastic as metal and the houses of the Gods, which, we are told, were built by Hephaestus, are obviously built of words. Where else did you discover them? If ever I fell in love with you, then no doubt I gave you a book. It is in the pages of books that

I come to know people, because it is in the pages of books that I have come to know myself. There is no greater experience than the timeless empire of the inward. Thousands of people, thousands of years of conversation most of it having nothing to do with television or sports. The hardening and blistering work of language is the work of my heart. This is the furnace and the golden light I was born for. Everything you have given me or ever will give me is reduced and refined here. Everything that is lasting and meaningful that I will ever give to you will come from here. Conversation will always mean more than sex. The act of writing is a passionate action – the curves of the letters are the same as the curves of your lips this is why I write longhand. The sheets of paper but more, the spaces within the paper (between the letters) are the free play of the mind opening into emptiness. The fluidity, the graceful flow of energy like a limber dancers’ gestures. Our world is not constructed of language, but that which constructs language, constructs our world – so all the uncanny parallel structures how thoughts can seem to speak of things (thoughts and things both being children of the mind, you see.) If ever I fell in love with you then no doubt I gave you a book. That was an invitation to explore things too vast too intense

for simple exchanges over coffee. People have carried on so for millennia. The Vedas, The Bhramanas, The Upanisads and the forest texts. The Torah and the Talmud, The Greeks and The Romans and The Church Fathers, philosophers and natural philosophers, there is no room to be glib here. These forms come to us as well handled tools designed by master craftsmen. They are holy objects to be handled with reverence. If ever I fell in love with you, no doubt I gave you a book. And don’t think I can give you anything better. I gave you a book to learn something of you. To see if we could dance the sacred dances of a thousand peoples calling down and praising foreign gods. Neither crush nor marriage. I am working along a different axis here (which is why I know that I’ll surprise you when you finally see me.) I am searching for something called intimacy – a meeting between individual and context a call and response between points of view. A sharing with a breathing human that engages me with the warmth and purpose of the surface of my desk. Can you come to me with intention? I’m not fucking around here. There is so much to be done for people with open hearts and imagination, there are worlds to be forged from the fires we carry in our spine. I am hungry for an exchange of energy

I am starving for an active vision – Have you ever really wandered through a library? There is a whole section on Marine Biology! Marine Biology! There is History and Governance and Medicine and Mathematics. There are people who spend their whole lives building bridges. There are hundreds of languages, there are billions of others. What would be the possibility if love were brought to bear on this? What if the awakening I feel on beholding you were awakening me to this? If we built of desire a compound lens for the focusing of aspiration for the clarification and magnification of vision? Can you be for me a refiner’s fire, a purifying passage for my soul? Can we make from our bodies a love like the love of a saint for God? This warrant – I ask your trust. Trust that I am saying something here, that I am doing more than warming empty air because I’m lonely or bored. Trust that I have seen something of you and that I am speaking to this. That somehow amid all this tension there is something to us that seeks more than mere survival—that seeks shared meaning, communication. Part IV Dance Architecture, Music, and Sculpture we come together here

dissipative structures of bloodlust a shared inwardness.

Like this, faith. Also like this: Love.

While the food is growing and the bombs are falling we come together in a listening and an ordering an ordering and a re-ordering. Like this we sing, like this we love. From the swirling flood we have gathered these sticks and carved them so there will be something for our children and time will hold the shape of our passing. There are cultures with three counting numbers one, two, and many. I have seen the coastline to this continent. That the love of the other is the anvil on which civilization is wrought by will. I cannot humble myself before God. Without implying that some kind of effort is involved. When on the beach at night I stood and tried to wrap my mind around the immensity of stars, and the distances between them and a voice spoke in my ear saying “Only a teaspoon of an ocean.” I fell to my knees. I fell. Like this, humble. I do not have faith in the ground. That implies a lack of experience. I stand on the ground. It is the ground that it is, and on it are places where I stumble.

I know this is a very dangerous concept I’ve watched you struggle with it for years but let’s play a game let’s open to each other as if we already knew let’s open as if everything were at stake and there was nothing to lose no lip service no compromise only the fate of the world and you as if something – anything (everything) depended on our (lights) (camera) *action*

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Contributors ///

Todd Gilens works as an artist, curator, and designer of places and things. He is currently developing a project about shade for the UC Berkeley Botanical Garden, and has just begun a collaboration with the Aquarium of the Bay at Pier 39 in San Francisco. His website is www.follywog.com. E. Maude Haak-Frendscho is a writer, editor and curator who is working with the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery to produce a catalog accompanying the exhibition SHIFT: Three Projects Constructing a New Dialogue about Race in America. She received her MA in Urban Studies from SFAI, and co-edits DRIFT. Meredith C. MacKenzie is a San Francisco based freelance writer and editor specializing in media, art and design for print and digital publications like dwell.com, SFAQ and PBS’s Art21 blog. She is the author of Honeydove, (www.honey-dove.blogspot.com) a lifestyle blog dedicated to art, design, culinary arts and decor. Meredith spends her free time practicing hot yoga, hiking and making homemade pizza. San Francisco artist Mimi Moncier focuses on producing trans-disciplinary work that spans the visual arts of painting, sculpture, architecture and installation, and recently, animation, sound and movement. Her interest in merging and moving between mediums is based on the idea of breaking down and reconsidering formal systems, which she deliberately integrates within her studio practice and in the production of her work. James D. Newman writes and performs in Seattle, Washington. He performed regularly in the Salon Productions series of readings, and was often featured in Spread. Poetry is free. James can be reached at bootslack@gmail. com. Nicholas Price has lived in Michigan, Wisconsin, Idaho, Henan, China, and California. His three favorite senses in no particular order are hearing, seeing, and tasting with smell and touch closely behind. He currently lives in

San Francisco, California with his wife and has no cats, dogs, other pets, or children. Nicole Santucci recently earned her BFA from CCA with an interdisciplinary emphasis in social practice, media arts and architecture. She grew up in the unincorporated, windswept Altamont Pass and largely owes her outlook on art and life to knowing the middle of nowhere like the back of her hand. Fletcher Tucker was born in twenty-two minutes. His first word was “goggy” (doggy), which he identified for anyone interested in a baby led zoology lesson. Fletcher’s love of animals persists, as does his love of pointing things out. He creates music and art, writes, teaches, and grows food in Big Sur, California. Music and more writing can be found at www.gnomeliferecords. com.

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