Now that national poetry month is nearly over, we’re ready to have our next event on Saturday, May 4 at 7pm featuring LA-based literary artists Joseph Mosconi and Ara Shirinyan. This reading will be bittersweet—This isn’t the last Agitprop reading, but it is the last reading we’ll have in our current space. So this is your last chance to sit in the mezzanine or gaze fondly at the KFC across the street! We do hope you’ll join us to say goodbye to the space and to celebrate the publication of Joseph Mosconi’s new book, Fright Catalog .

Joseph Mosconi co-directs the Poetic Research Bureau in Los Angeles and edits the art & lit mag Area Sneaks. His books include Fright Catalog (Insert Blanc Press, 2013), But On Geometric (Insert Blanc Press, 2010), WORD SEARCH (OMG! Press, 2010) and Galvanized Iron on the Citizens’ Band (Poetic Research Bureau, 2009). As Above So Below, a children’s book illustrated by Scoli Acosta, is forthcoming in 2013.

Ara Shirinyan is a poet and editor from Los Angeles. He edits Make Now Press. With Joseph Mosconi and Andrew Maxwell, he curates readings at the Poetic Research Bureau. He is the author of several books, including Syria Is in the World (Palm Press, 2007) and Your Country Is Great (Futurpoem, 2008) the second volume of which is forthcoming from Edge Books.

As always, there is no cover charge for reading, but libations and donations for the readers are always welcome. We hope to see you there and for festivities before and after.

Agitprop
Saturday, May 4, 7pm
2837 University Avenue in North Park (Entrance on Utah, across from KFC. Map)
San Diego, CA 92104

Contact: K. Lorraine Graham: klorraine(at)gmail(dot)com

February 2, 2013 at 7pm

We hope you can join us this Saturday, February 2, 7pm for the first reading in what promises to be an outstanding Spring reading series. This month, we’re hosting two writers recently featured in Jacob Steinberg’s Alt Lit Cityscapes anthology: Ana Carrete of San Diego-Tijuana and Aurelio Meza of DF-Tijuana-Mexicali.

Ana Carrete is the founder and editor of New Wave Vomit, an experimental online literary art magazine. She’s a graduate student and teaches Spanish at SDSU. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Baby Babe, came out last Thanksgiving from Civil Coping Mechanisms. She has things online.

Fiction author Janey Smith writes: “Flighty, full of speed, and fostering its own no-future, Ana Carrete’s Baby Babe is like reading Juan Rulfo, if Juan Rulfo were Barbie. At some point, you’re going to have to make a decision as to what you want: teeth-whitening toothpaste or the ends of civilization. Baby Babe marks that point.”

Aurelio Meza has participated in several literature festivals and conferences in Mexico and the US. He has translated to Spanish some of the work by American poets Ben Dollar, Mark Wallace, Jesse Ball and Tony Tost. Since 2010 he is chief editor at the independent publishing collective Kodama Cartonera in Tijuana. He recently finished a research project on art collectives in the Tijuana-San Diego border region. Poetry books: Sakura (2008), La droga (2010) and Sombra (Unpublished). Essays: Shuffle. Poesía sonora (2011).

Alt Lit personality Beach Sloth writes: “Aurelio Meza digs deep into the words…One earthquake and everything went into a deep dark place. Despite the worry and fear of the city it beat the death of the countryside. Heat eats people alive. They die dry-mouthed. Mexico City tries to bring them into her loving arms. It seems extremely bleak. Aurelio is the sun. Aurelio laughs at the ruin.”

As always, there is no cover charge for reading, but libations and donations to the gallery are always welcome. We hope to see you there and for festivities before and after.

Agitprop
Saturday, February 2, 7pm
2837 University Avenue in North Park (Entrance on Utah, across from KFC)
San Diego, CA 92104

Contact: K. Lorraine Graham: klorraine(at)gmail(dot)com

This month, we’re thrilled to host poet and editor Sophie Sills in her debut reading at Agitprop. We’ll also welcome back former San Diegan Frank Montesonti to celebrate the publication of his first book, Blight, Blight, Blight, Ray of Hope and his soon-to-be-released second book, Hope Tree.

Sophie Sills’ collection of poetry, Elemental Perceptions: A Panorama, was released from BlazeVOX Books in the winter of 2010. Her poems and literary criticism have appeared in Elimae, Cricket Online Review, thethe poetry, Jacket2, and other journals. She completed her MFA at Mills College, lives in Los Angeles, teaches at National University and publishes Peacock Online Review.

Dear Friends,

We hope you can join us this Saturday, November 3 at 7pm for a reading by poets Genevieve Kaplan and Joseph Harrington at Agitprop. Before and after the reading, you can check out some of the events hosted that same day by the There Goes the Neighborhood collaborative in conjunction with the Living As Form (Nomadic Version) exhibit at the UCSD University Art Gallery. For a full list of events see the

Facebook event page:
https://www.facebook.com/events/544203208930557/

Joseph Harrington is the author of Things Come On: an amneoir (Wesleyan Univ. Press 2011), a mixed-genre work relating the twinned narratives of the Watergate scandal and his mother’s cancer; it was a Rumpus magazine Poetry Book Club selection. He is also the author of the chapbook Earth Day Suite (Beard of Bees 2010) and the critical work Poetry and the Public (Wesleyan 2002). His creative work also has appeared in Hotel Amerika, No Tell Motel, 1913, BathHouse, Otoliths, Fact-Simile, and Tarpaulin Sky, among others. He is a Professor of English at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

“What’s the Use?”
November 3rd 2012

Organized by the There Goes the Neighborhood collaborative
A day of programming in association with Living As Form (The Nomadic Version)*

http://theregoes.org

You are invited join us on November 3rd for “What’s the Use?”; a day of programming organized by the There Goes the Neighborhood collaborative.

The first event of day will include a workshop called “What Goes Where and Why” from 2-5:30pm on November 3rd, 2012. This workshop is targeted at local advocacy organizations working various fields in the city of San Diego.  At this workshop all attending organizations and individuals will participate in a collaborative workshop to delineate the organization’s current initiatives and obstacles with the intention of sharing these with other attendees.  Ultimately a document will be produced that outlines your specific initiatives in relationship with the larger goals of the attendees as a whole with the intention of producing connections between each group that can help further each other’s endeavors.
This document will be blown up to a large scale (in size, not number of pages) and handed over to whatever mayoral administration takes office after the election on November 6th.  It will also become a concise record of the specific actions that are important to those organizations as well as a general outline of what needs to change at the most broad level. This workshop will take place at the Linkery.  Free snacks and drinks will be provided. Unfortunately there are only 30 spaces available for this event so please RSVP asap to info@theregoes.org with the names of the individual from your organization that will be attending and organization name (please limit this to 3 people from each organization maximum).

After this workshop you are invited to join us for the rest of the day’s public events taking place at Art Produce Gallery.  These events include “You Are What You Eat” a free dinner hosted by TGTN in which the contents of your meal correlates to how you view yourself as an active community participant.  After “You Are What You Eat” TGTN will hold a second iteration of “Critical Postcards”.  Critical Postcards is a series of short (20-30 minute) interviews that take place via Skype with artist and activists from around the country whose work engages public space in innovative ways.

The Schedule for the day is as follows:

“What Goes Where and Why”
2pm to 5pm
@ The Linkery 3794 30th Street, San Diego, CA 92104
RSVP required for this event only (30 spaces available)

“You Are What You Eat”
6pm to 7pm
@ Art Produce Gallery Garden 3139 University Ave, San Diego, CA 92104Free and open to all
Free and open to all

“Critical Postcards”
7pm to 9pm
@ Art Produce Gallery Garden 3139 University Ave, San Diego, CA 92104
Free and open to all

Critical postcard are live skype conversations with artists and activists from around the world working on publicly engaged projects. Postcards that night include:

Jake Levitas:
Research Director for the Gray Area Foundation For the Arts (GAFFTA).  GAFFTA is an organization that brings together the best creative coders, data artists, designers, and makers to create experiments that build social consciousness through digital culture. GAFFTA is the nation’s leading organization dedicated to furthering the use and advancement of creative technology for social good and artistic advancement. In this capacity, we maintain relationships with the world’s top academic researchers, innovative corporations, visionary artists, and civic leaders. By continually engaging and connecting this diverse community with challenges and opportunities, we extract forward-thinking technological solutions with proven capacity to create positive change. http://www.gaffta.org/

Glen Wilson:
Having included his recent film in the last iteration of There Goes the Neighborhood, Wilson will discuss the art space he operated on Ray street in North Park in the late 1990’s. The space led to a film project included as part of InSITE ‘97 called ‘You Are Here” (named for the space itself).  Wilson’s film captures a snapshot of what the neighborhood was like before current gentrification. Recently Wilson has been revisiting North Park in order to continue the work on the film started some 15 years prior by examining changes from his time in the neighborhood through the current moment.  We will discuss Wilson’s film and these changes over time.

Reception and live Music by Island Boy
9pm
@ Art Produce Gallery Garden 3139 University Ave, San Diego, CA 92104

Free and open to all

What’s The Use?* is a neighborhood colloquium organized by There Goes the Neighborhood (TGTN) collaborative. (http://theregoes.org)  TGTN is a group of artists that facilitate creative forums for activists, advocacy groups, artists and concerned citizens to discuss issues relevant to the organizational strategies of our cities; to rethink how this planning is done; and to make connections across individuals and organizations in hopes of finding solutions to some of our common problems. We do this by mixing the spontaneity and fun of community arts festivals with the probing analysis of academic conferences to produce an artful forum for discussion.

Core TGTN organizers on this project:
David White, Stephanie Lie and Jessica Sledge.

TGTN collaborative members are:
Micki Davis, Elizabeth Chaney, Stephanie Lie, Jessica Sledge, David White & Megan Willis

*What’s The Use? is programming developed by TGTN for Living As Form (The Nomadic Version) at the University Art Gallery at UC San Diego.  Living As Form is sponsored by Creative Time. Chief Curator of Living as Form is Nato Thompson. http://www.creativetime.org/programs/archive/2011/livingasform/about.htm

With tunnels fear is a given, and the standard solutions for addressing the issue — the security esthetic of gates, intercoms, and billboard-intensity signage; or the distraction esthetic of applied public art — only seem to increase the anxiety.

For these reasons tunnels are a rarity in San Diego* — most were closed decades ago, and city policy now favors bridges.
 
*The exception, of course, being the border.
 

Silver Strand

Old Town

Mission Valley

Enabling Neighborhoods

Visitors with relevant knowledge to share with either of these projects are also encouraged to attend these meetings.

Dates and times of meetings:

• Oct 9th 10am-12pm – Agitprop – “Person Centered Plan”
• Oct 30th 12pm -2pm –  How to begin CSD?
• Nov. 13th 10am-12pm – Other strategies of asset mapping?  
• Dec. 11th 10am-12pm – CSD/Agitprop combined final meeting.

Some images of the installation:

photos courtesy of Joy Boe

Michael Maas is a Fallbrook-based painter. Over the past 15 years he’s shown extensively in Southern California, most recently at L2Kontemporary in Chinatown. He has another show this month at Bunny Gunner in Pomona.

Maas is best known for his Alhambra series, over 200 paintings which deploy a common abstract motif — a synthesis of jigsaw puzzle and Islamic art  — in sizes ranging from 12 inches to 12 feet. 

Beside its ability to scale, what’s notable about the Alhambra series is its restless visual energy, the result of a complex game of trompe l’oeil:

— In color, geometry, and repetition the motif draws deeply on Islamic art: in particular, mosaic.

— The forms are often heavily modeled, which depending on the viewing distance can yield visual readings ranging from flat (induced by the optical buzz of the repetitive patterning) to sculptural relief (reinforced by the allusion to mosaic) to alarmingly biomorphic (due to their occasional resemblance to human limbs).

— Most subtle and intriguing of all, across the entire series large to small, the depth depicted by the modeling never exceeds the actual thickness of the physical painting, which supercharges the sculptural reading by never violating the integrity of whatever the 3-D analog of the picture plane is. The result is not just paintings depicting sculpture, but paintings trying to be sculpture.

The Alhambra series has been variously described as “biomorphic abstraction” or (per the series name) “Moorish”.  Why not come right out and call it “Islamic”?

The paintings leading up to Alhambra — especially the Summer series and Winter series — had very strong biomorphic elements which carried over into Alhambra, and which are especially noticeable to people familiar with my earlier work. I do think many of the Alhambras could fit right into a show of Islamic art (any invitations?).
 

I like the idea of doing this, not just for being a loaded move in a post-9/11 world, but also for saluting Islam’s historic contributions to world culture: in art, in computing.

If you make a Venn diagram of the world’s religions, I like to think of my paintings at their best as falling into that one place where all the circles intersect, being just as Islamic as Buddhist as Christian as…
 

Did you appropriate the Alhambra motif from a historical work? Or is it your own?

It wasn’t until I had done a dozen or so of the Alhambras that I started being asked about the connection, if any, to Islamic art. At that point I didn’t know what people meant so I started getting books on Islamic art, tile work, and architecture. I immediately felt an affinity for it, and it wasn’t until that time that I came up with the idea of calling them “Alhambra”. Since then I’ve incorporated specific motifs into some of my paintings, such as the geometric background in Alhambra #96. I’ve also incorporated some of the ancient ceramic tile glaze colors used in Islamic tile work into the color combinations of my paintings.
 

One of the mysteries in visual art is the wide range in generativity of specific visual ideas: some yield a single work before exhaustion; others entire shows; and others still entire careers.  200 paintings in, how’s Alhambra holding up for you?

I feel like there is still a lot more to do. Some of them are composed of just a few simple shapes, maybe against a plain background. But I just completed one with over 1400 little flat shapes aligned in columns, which look like 13 stripes from a distance, but 47 stripes up close. I’m very excited about doing more of these, and couldn’t have anticipated them a couple years ago.
 

Another mystery: the effect of scale. Some artist’s styles seem wholly immune to it, while others suffer dire fates when pushed too large or small.  What led you to explore scale?

I don’t think it was until after I started working big that I came across an interview with Mark Rothko which put it into words for me, but I’d intuitively realized that viewing a large painting can be a more intimate experience than viewing a small one. With a small painting you’re outside looking in, but a large painting which takes up your field of vision can surround you and take you into it. While my large pieces do different things when viewed from different distances, I do mean for them to be viewed from up close too.
 

You’ve done work outside Alhambra — how does it relate?

Between 1979 and 1997 I did a couple hundred paintings in a tight realistic style — landscapes, seascapes, sports, portraits, botanicals — and there is certainly something that work has in common with my “mature” work. Since July 1997, when I started the Summer series, most of the 500 or so paintings I’ve done relate to each other on one level or another. Some refer back to previous ones, or incorporate earlier elements or themes. While my intention is always to make each painting able to stand on its own, I’m nevertheless conscious of how the individual pieces make up something bigger. I’ve been able to do exhibits where I presented a whole gallery of interrelated pieces as a single integrated work, and that’s really what I like best.
 

Any last words?

In 1996 my wife Carmen encouraged me to walk away from a six-figure income in the financial services industry and become a full-time artist, in order to “do something worthwhile” with my life (her words). Ever since then, I basically just work every day whether I know what to do or not, and somehow one thing leads to another and things get done. I don’t try too hard to understand it.

 
Alhambra #151, 20″x40″, acrylic on wood panel, 2011

Alli Warren

Alli Warren is the author of Grindin (Lew Gallery), Acting Out (Editions Louis Wain), Well-Meaning White Girl (Mitzvah Chaps), and Cousins (Lame House Press). With Michael Nicoloff, she wrote Eunoia (Abraham Lincoln) and Bruised Dick. In 2013, City Lights will publish her first book. Recent writing appears in Lana Turner Journal, Where Eagles Dare, and Saginaw. From 2008 through 2010, she co-curated The (New) Reading Series at 21 Grand. She co-edits the Poetic Labor Project, and lives in Oakland.

Brandon Brown

Brandon Brown’s first two books were published in 2011, The Persians By Aeschylus (Displaced Press) and The Poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus (Krupskaya.) Poems and prose have recently appeared in Sprung Formal, Postmodern Culture, BPM, Model Homes, and Art Practical.   In 2012, his debut play Charles Baudelaire the Vampire Slayer was staged at Small Press Traffic’s Poet’s Theater. His third book, Flowering Mall, is forthcoming from Roof in the fall of 2012.

There is no cover charge for reading, but libations and donations to the gallery are always welcome. We hope to see you there and for festivities before and after.

For more information about the Agitprop Reading Series and Agitprop Art Space, visit our webpage, join our Facebook group, or sign up to receive email announcements from us.

UPCOMING READINGS

October 6: Brandon Brown & Alli Warren
November 3: Joseph Harrington

Chikle and Lalo Alcaraz talk:  
7 pm, G101
 
Favianna Rodriguez talk:  
Monday, November 5, 9:30-11 am, H117-118 
 
 
Lalo Alcaraz is the creator of the first nationally syndicated Latino daily comic strip “La Cucaracha.” He has produced editorial cartoons for major newspapers and has been featured by Rolling Stone magazine.

Chikle is a San Diego artist who voices concerns related to immigration, the media and the environment. His work has been shown at the Oceanside Museum of Art, Lyceum Theatre, Centro Cultural de la Raza, Voz Alta, Alexander Salazar, The Spot, Roots Factory and Thumbprint Gallery.

Favianna Rodriguez is a celebrated printmaker and digital artist based in Oakland, California. Her vivid images reflect issues related to migration, the global community and civil rights. Rodriguez has exhibited her work at the Museo del Barrio (New York), de Young Museum (San Francisco), Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco) and many others.

Oakland-based Melanie Cervantes and Jesus Barraza create graphic works as the collaborative Dignidad Rebelde. They see art as a way to empower communities by expressing their struggles, dreams and visions. 

San Diego Mesa College Art Gallery is  located at 7250 Mesa College Drive (D101) 
San Diego 92111
Gallery Hours: M – Wed 11– 4 pm and Thurs 11 – 8 pm.   
Closed on weekends, Fridays and school holidays.

FREE PARKING ON RECEPTION NIGHT ONLY IN THE FACULTY A LOTS!

DURING REGULAR GALLERY HOURS:  You may purchase a permit for the visitor’s metered spaces located on the upper level on the south side of the street across from the flagpole.  Or, if entering through Marlesta, purchase a $1.00 per hour permit from the machine by the information booth, to be used in the student lots.

Let no man go out of his place on the seventh day.

– Exodus 16:29
 

The wall encloses an area south of UCSD, roughly two miles long and one mile wide. On the north it borders La Jolla Village Drive, on the south La Jolla Parkway, on the west Torrey Pines Road, and on the east, I-5.

The wall is artfully constructed, consisting almost entirely of canyon slopes appropriated from the community landscape, and pre-existing walls and fences.

Where roads make a wall impossible – at Gilman and Via Alicante, Nobel and I-5, and along much of La Jolla Village Drive – symbolic walls are constructed by suspending wire over the roads. Here again appropriation is evident, with existing light poles serving as bases for the suspended wire.

In the few places where light poles are unavailable, stainless steel poles are erected specifically to suspend the wire. These poles are a step up in quality from the typical utility pole, and resemble the poles used in Robert Irwin’s Two Running Violet V Forms.

The purpose of the wall is to symbolically transform the enclosed public space into private space, enabling the traditionally observant Jewish communities who live there to lead better lives on the Sabbath.

The symbolic transformation of community into home… this is perhaps the best definition to date for public art.

Hard Shoulder – Closing Reception
Exhibition by Shane Anderson

Saturday July 28th 2012
7pm to 10pm
Agitprop

2837 University Ave.  (entrance on Utah St.)

Hard Shoulder is a series of photographic images that depict now obsolete objects disregarded on the freeways throughout Southern California after they blustered out of the owners vehicle. Each image from the ongoing series isolates one found item, photographed at the high speed of freeway traffic. Hard Shoulder captures neglected detritus that has lost its original function or use. The debris, fragmented, smashed, and splintered as it makes it way to the concrete parapet, has washed up on the shore of the freeway.

Shane Anderson is an artist and educator based in San Diego, California. His work explores issues related to landscape use and how it is viewed and utilized. Shane’s work investigates our relationship to our environment, and ways in which we occupy, build and shape the contemporary landscape. Shane was raised in Montana. He currently lives and works in San Diego, CA.

www.shane-anderson.com

The artists tend to blame this on the weather, without considering that the problem may be their art. San Diego has beautiful light, and people are outdoors enjoying it. For art to be an integral part of the regional culture, it needs to follow the people outdoors.

To a remarkable extent this has already occurred: art’s outside in San Diego, thanks to community action, private foundations, and city art programs.

But the region also has a history of civic controversies over public art: several high-profile proposals have crashed and burned, and in a few cases installed work was removed. Sometimes the fault seemed to lie as much with the artist as the unhappy public. Artists and audience alike need to learn: good art is hard, good public art harder.

And even the controversy itself needs to be put into perspective: about the proposed Statue of Liberty, the New York Times opined that “no true patriot can countenance any such expenditures for bronze females in the present state of our finances.” Parisians hated the Eiffel Tower. Veterans hated the Vietnam Wall.

To date most media coverage of San Diego public art has been event-driven, focused on proposals, installations, and any ensuing controversies. What’s been missing is a directory of public art: something that not only helps interested viewers find the community gems and learn more about them, but also shows just how much good public art there already is. This book reviews selected works from around the region, with the criterion for inclusion being that the work be worth the trip.

— From San Diego Public Art, a free ebook on www.sandiegopublicart.net

Sun God, Niki de Saint Phalle

 
1.

In 1983 the historian Paul Fussell penned a minor classic of social satire titled Class: A Guide Through the American Status System. In it he dissects a myriad of class signifiers – housing, decor, transportation, diet, dress, posture, physiognomy, demeanor, vocabulary, religion, career, education, recreation – and from this deduces the following:

– Nine distinct classes (top out-of-sight, upper, upper-middle, middle, high proletarian, mid proletarian, low proletarian, destitute, bottom out-of-sight)

– Gross disparities in how each class defines luxury (extensively mined for humor by the author)

– The relation between class and income (itself a function of class)

– Class anxiety (a middle affliction)

– The phenomenon of prole drift (the societal tendency for all things to undergo proletarianization)

Three decades later many of the cultural specifics have changed, yet the underlying principles remain firmly in effect. (In a 2009 essay, Sandra Tsing Loh beautifully channels Fussell in her analysis of the subsequent rise of hip and fall of the economy.)

Beside the principles, what else remains unchanged is the predominant role of the visual in class signifiers. The reasons for this are evident, especially in American society, where a putative democracy combines with a historically wide distribution of economic wealth to result in rich interactions between agents of differing class. To preserve one’s social capital in such an ecosystem, it’s obligatory for said agents to quickly and efficiently categorize any others they choose to interact with (or not). And vision as a perceptual domain offers both the richness of stimuli and the all-important operation at a distance that are prerequisite for efficient class sorting.

 
2.

In the same year Class was published, Jean Lowe received her B.A. from Berkeley. She went on to receive an M.F.A. from UCSD, and her subsequent career as a visual artist is based on a body of work which works notions of class as they manifest in the visual deployment of class signifiers. Interestingly, Lowe’s signature humor perfectly echoes Fussell’s dry satirical style in Class.

This begs the question of whether class is ever explicitly invoked in the critical/curatorial description of Lowe’s work. The answer – perhaps anticipated by Fussell in his noting of class as the great unmentionable in polite discourse – appears to be “no”. Lowe is represented in Los Angeles by Rosamund Felsen Gallery. The gallery website helpfully includes a collection of twenty-two reviews and press releases covering Lowe’s work in the period spanning 2003 to 2011. A search for the term “class” in these texts yields precisely one reference: “the grandeur of French high class society”, which misses the point since the body of work in question is unspeakably clear in its ultimate referentiality to class-dependent notions of American luxury.

The rule-proving exception appears in a separate text, not on the gallery website, by former SDMA director (and fellow Berkeley alumnus) Derrick Cartwright. His brief essay on Lowe – ironically for the San Diego Art Prize – invokes “conspicuous display”, a core term in the work of Thorstein Veblen, whose Theory of the Leisure Class was a model for Fussell’s book (not to mention a must-read for any ambitious artist).

 
3.

Lowe’s work through the 90′s and 00′s – which referenced McMansions, SUVs, and an endless stream of self-help books – focused on the middle classes, which (per Fussell) offer the best material both in their active striving for the next rung up, and simultaneous anxiety over slipping in the opposite direction.

Then the great recession hit, peaking in 2008 with the collapse of the housing market and failure of several major financial institutions. Among the collateral damage: the visual arts, and the American middle class.

Faced with this double blow to her practice, Lowe responded by going down-market. The first evidence emerged in 2010 at the Lux Art Institute, which launched a pop-up art store co-founded by Lowe and Kim MacConnel. The store, titled J & K Souvenir Inc., offered selected work by Lowe in the low-to-mid two figures. And the content referenced was now distinctly prole: decorative mugs, cups, plates, in sum the typical inventory of a 99-cent store.

Similar work has since appeared in shows at Rosamund Felsen and at Quint Contemporary Art in San Diego. At a recent Quint show the low-end work had edged up to a still-affordable low three figures, even while the large paintings remained firmly parked at a solid five digits.

Seeing such work in a high-end space like Quint can be dizzying. Is the aggressive insertion of prole esthetic into a rarefied upper venue a trenchant commentary on American caste? Certainly. Is it offensive to some viewers? Apparently. Or is it merely an opportunity for the 1% to amuse themselves over the bad taste of their inferiors? Apparently.

(Perhaps the only decidability proof for the latter is to wait patiently and see if Lowe ever offers a future show of, say, Lowe-fied Roman de Salvo‘s.)

 
4.

Lowe’s pièce de résistance of class gymnastics: Discount Barn, a 99-cent store simulacrum presented by the upper-class Quint Gallery as part of the relentlessly middle-class San Diego Art Fair.

 
 
Photo credits:   © Jean Lowe,   photo courtesy Quint Contemporary Art

Koren has been a publisher of interesting books about design and aesthetics since the 1980s but what makes this book compelling is the insight with which he looks back on his singular experiences withWET. There is much to learn here for creative minds beginning on their path of growth and development. As honestly as possible, he has tried to evaluate the decisions he made along the way in an ethical light, whether they be aesthetic decisions, business decisions, or decisions made in relations with staff, friends and partners. The result is a book that is as critical of its author as it is beautiful to hold–filled with thoughts, ideas and images that will stay with the reader long after the book has been laid down.

Illustration: Back and front cover design by Emilia Burchiellaro and Leonard Koren.

As a young UCLA architecture student, Leonard Koren became obsessed with the physically built environment of the bath, including the rituals that support it and the truths that give bathing its metaphysical reality. “Every bathroom,” writes Koren, “no matter how crude or sophisticated, comes equipped with all elements of a primal poetry. Water and/or steam, hot, cold and in between. Nakedness. Quietude. Illumination.”

Illustration: Bathing cap people photographs by Guy Webster. Design and Art Direction by Elizabeth Freeman. From WET July/August 1978.

A fluid publication of creative visual production, critical thinking and intersecting obsessions, WET developed organically from Koren’s individual efforts into an experimental collaboration among his ephemeral community of friends and artists living in Venice Beach, California. Before starting WET Koren had no prior publishing experience, but was blessed with a daring approach, a strong sense of aesthetics influenced by Japanese culture, his architectural studies and his love of photography. Under his guidance, WET the Magazine of Gourmet Bathing became a legitimate expression of hip beach culture. It gave voice to a kind of bohemianized water-course way that had taken hold among Venice Beach’s most creative minds. At its best, WET offered its readers a self-aware and watery hedonism (and some cases skepticism) based on the myriad possibilities of bathing as a metaphor.

Illustration: Contents pages designed by Leonard Koren.

Marshall McLuhan famously noted the similarities between taking a bath and reading a newspaper – both being relaxing interludes given to randomness and reflection. Browsing through the pages of Making WET invokes the essence of WET Magazine’s original appeal through playful design characterized by the non-linear approach implied in McLuhan’s observation. It is a story told predominantly through a stream of images: photos, drawings and illustrations of all kinds, while the element of language floats through the book like bubbles clustered on the surface of a visual bath.

Koren has described himself as someone who makes books “not intended for electronic devices,” and Making WET has a distinct hand-made quality. As e-books have have become more popular, the physical characteristics of paper and the tangible experience of holding a book have gained traction among a discerning community of artists, writers and designers dedicated to preserving the bookmaking tradition.

Illustration: “Concerning the Metaphysical Nature of Cigarettes” by Sharon Hennessey. Photo by Larry Williams. Design by Roy Gyongy. From WET November/December 1979.

WET’s editorial slant was always an exercise in the balance of many cultural influences and contradictions. Koren defines his vision with succinct clarity in a chapter titled “Gourmet Bathing: A Long Overdue Introduction.” He writes, “In a state that is the capital of the monetary, the capital of the self–the inventoried and reconceived self, the disguised and decorated self, the conceptual fun self–the only season is Open Season. On Columbus or Sunset or the Venice boardwalk, the shifting cast of vacancy–faced rock punks, S&M tragedian, cowboys, lumberjacks, vestigial hippies, and attentive trend collectors, there is an unsortable repetoire of styles and counter-styles. There is such camp drollery here, such androgyny, such runaway eclecticism, that there emerges a ruling aesthetic of Whatever Works–whatever evokes the almost terminal dislocation of this long intermission in history; the feeling of having no particular place, time or person to be.”

Illustration: Covers. November/December 1979 with Sissy Spacek. Photography and illustration by Lisa Powers and Taki Ono. Typography, design and art direction by Roy Gyongy. Cover and back cover, March/April 1981. Collage and design by Bob Zoell. Art Direction by Leonard Koren.

WET covers consistently presented strong and unforgettable statements. Koren did not shy away from intellectually challenging or controversial material. The image of the copulating pigs that appeared on the March/April 1981 issue is visually unforgettable but caused great anxiety among the ad sales team who feared it would make their job more difficult. By this time, WET was beginning to penetrate the mainstream so it was sold inside a brown paper wrapper to avoid giving offense at the supermarket checkout line.

Much of the WET’s iconic identity stemmed from its remarkable logo which passed through several iterations before settling on the final version shown above. Using sheets of Letraset rub-on type, Koren mocked up multiple versions. “I liked the rendition in the all-uppercase Kabel font best,” Koren writes. “Then I tweaked it a little. The W, fashioned out of two Vs, had a defiant energy similar to a swastika–but without the horrible associations. The E was frisky. The middle tine was cut off at a 45 degree angle; it felt sexy in a reductive sort of way. (I thought it was the typographical equivalent of a sly erection.) The T possessed a magnificent solidity. Together, all three characters conveyed a distinctive Teutonic strength, toughness, and linearity–the exact opposite of the soft, fluid suggestions of ‘wet.’ ”

Illustration: Max Palevsky and Leonard underwater in Malibu “sealing the deal” to secure capital investment for the magazine. Photograph by Guy Webster.

Making WET sometimes reads as a morality play on the limits of sustaining a community based on common creative goals. Koren traces the changes in his personality and his relationships with his friends and collaborators as WET became more successful. The pressure to generate advertising dollars gradually forced him out of his role as creative director and into the role of business manager. The creative side of the magazine was being left more and more often to others. The final chapters describe how WET’s essence inevitably began to dry up. By the end of its run there was “…a profound existential crisis looming. WET had evolved out of an art-making impulse: a spontaneous response to a need for a particular kind of artistic expression. For the first four and a half years, making the magazine was intensely engaging, both creatively and intellectually. But now the learning curve had flattened out. The once vibrant WET project had metamorphosed into a marketing exercise.” Koren decided to fold the magazine soon after, choosing to go out while the magazine was still on top and to prevent a painfully drawn out decline. Six months after closing the magazine Koren packed all his belongings into his VW Rabbit and moved to San Francisco to begin a new life.

This reading takes place in conjunction with There Goes the Neighborhood, an annual, four day event that positions “the neighborhood” as a fluid institution of creative production, critical thinking and intersecting interests. Collaborations among artists, residents, small businesses, universities and local activists will culminate in a series of workshops, talks, installations, performances and tours that center around the North Park neighborhood of San Diego, with satellite events at the UCSD campus and the San Diego Museum of Art (in conjunction with the opening night of the Summer Salon Series). You can see a schedule of other events in There Goes the Neighborhood on the Agitprop website.

John Gibler

John Gibler is a writer based in Mexico and California, the author of Mexico Unconquered: Chronicles of Power and Revolt (City Lights Books, 2009), and a contributor to País de muertos: Crónicas contra la impunidad (Random House Mondadori, 2011). He is a correspondent for KPFA in San Francisco and has published in magazines in the United States and Mexico, including Left Turn, Z Magazine, Earth Island Journal, ColorLines, Race, Poverty, and the Environment, Fifth Estate, New Politics, In These Times, Yes! Magazine, Contralínea, and Milenio Semanal.

Daniel Alarcón

Daniel Alarcón was born in Lima, Peru in 1977 and raised in the southern United States. He is the creator of Radio Ambulante, an online radio project that enables thousands of stories from every corner of the Western Hemisphere where Spanish is spoken to be told and listened to.He is associate editor of Etiqueta Negra, a monthly magazine based in Lima. His short-story collection, War by Candlelight, was a finalist for the 2006 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. His first novel, Lost City Radio, is published by HarperCollins in the US and Fourth Estate in the UK. He currently lives in Oakland, California, where he is the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Mills College.

Cristina Rivera Garza

Cristina Rivera Garza is a native of the border, and has lived and taught both in Mexico and the United States. Author of transdisciplinary works, written both in English and Spanish, she has received numerous awards, including the 2001 Iberoamerican Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz-FIL and the 2005 Anna Seghers in Berlin. Some of her works have been translated into English, Italian, Portuguese, German and Korean. Professor Rivera-Garza writes La mano oblicua/The Oblique Hand, a weekly column for the cultural section of the Mexican newspaper Milenio. She also maintains No Hay Tal Lugar, her blog: www.cristinariveragarza.blogspot.com. Professor Rivera-Garza is Professor of Writing at UC San Diego and MFA Writing Program Director.

There is no cover charge for reading, but libations and donations to the gallery are always welcome. We hope to see you there and for festivities before and after.

Agitprop (Map)
Saturday, June 2, 8 pm

2837 University Avenue in North Park (Entrance on Utah, behind where Glenn’s Market used to be)
San Diego, CA 92104
619.384.7989

For more information about the Agitprop Reading Series and Agitprop Art Space, visit our webpage, join our Facebook group, or sign up to receive email announcements from us.

UPCOMING READINGS

October 6: Brandon Brown, Alli Warren & Company
November 3: Joseph Harrington

There Goes the Neighborhood! is a four day event that positions “the neighborhood” as a fluid institution of creative production, critical thinking and intersecting interests. Collaborations among artists, residents, small businesses, universities and local activists will culminate in a series of workshops, talks, installations, performances and tours that center around the North Park neighborhood of San Diego, with satellite events at the UCSD campus and the San Diego Museum of Art (in conjunction with the opening night of the Summer Salon Series).

This year the focus of the There Goes the Neighborhood is “the neighborhood” as a nexus of global conditions which manifest themselves in local, everyday, situations. These issues range from transportation networks to means of food production to how information (and knowledge) is disseminated publicly. The first iteration of There Goes the Neighborhood! took place in June of 2010 and focused on issues relating to gentrification and how art can play a role in neighborhood revitalization and can also be complicit in the displacement of existing groups by those moving in. There Goes the Neighborhood takes as its “fundamental organizing assumption the notion that individuals are inherently active, thoughtful, innovative and engaged citizens.” So please join us in examining these issues. The project is not complete without your participation!

There Goes the Neighborhood! May 31st – June 3rd 2012

Schedule of Events

Thursday May 31st

Friday June 1st

Saturday June 2nd

Sunday June 3rd

For the past two years Agitprop has had the great pleasure of working with the San Diego Museum of Art to establish and co-curate the Summer Salon Series.  Entering its third year, this summer looks to be the best one yet.

Here is a complete schedule of the line up for this year and information about this year’s theme:

Summer Salon Series 2012

 Beyond the Banner

There Goes the Neighborhood! is a four day event that positions “the neighborhood” as a fluid institution of creative production, critical thinking and intersecting interests. Collaborations between artists, residents, small businesses, universities and local activists will culminate in a series of workshops, talks, installations, performances and tours that center around the North Park neighborhood of San Diego, with satellite events at the UCSD campus and the San Diego Museum of art (in conjunction with the opening night of the Summer Salon Series).

The first iteration of There Goes the Neighborhood! took place in June of 2010 and focused on issues relating to gentrification.  It examined how art can play a role in both neighborhood revitalization as well as also be complicit in the displacement of existing groups by those moving in. This year the focus of the There Goes the Neighborhood is “the neighborhood” as a nexus of global conditions that manifest themselves in local, everyday, situations. These issues range from transportation networks to means of food production to how information (and knowledge) is disseminated publicly.

A rough schedule of the event:

Thursday May 31st

Location: UCSD campus

Event: “Relocating the University” installation and panel discussion

Friday June 1st

Location: The San Diego Museum of Art

Event: “Relocating the University: part II”  performance, workshop and panel discussion

*note: this event is in conjunction with the opening night of the Summer Salon Series:

http://www.sdmart.org/programs-events/summer-salon-series-2012

Saturday June 2nd

Location: North Park (with excursions to South Park and City Heights)

Events: “Breakfast with Strangers” a meal with someone you don’t know; Photography workshop; Thrift Store bike tour; Street-Car Reenactment – talks addressing issues of urbanism accompanied by music on a hired trolley tour car that runs an old street-car line from 1918; Photography exhibition at Agitprop featuring work by artist Shane Anderson; Post Office conversations; Literary Arts and more.

Sunday June 3rd

Location: North Park

Events: Brunch from Santos Market; Multiple workshops examining the proposed park for the lot behind North Park Theater as a potential green space; DIY publication workshop; a procession through the neighborhood; weekend finale reception and more…

All There Goes the Neighborhood events are FREE.  Donations gladly accepted.

For more information check back for schedule updates at http://theregoes.org

Also, Check out our collaboration with the journal PROS*- a publication documenting the last There Goes the Neighborhood in 2010.

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Thursday 7:30 pm at Space4Art

A touring program of recent San Francisco Bay Area Shorts, featuring work by Caitlin Denny, Gregory Kaplowitz, Jen Kirsten, Alex S. Lukas, Jessica Miller, Dan Olsen, Skye Thorstenson, Virtual Pubes, and Nightmare City.

Space 4 Art

Charles Alexander

Charles Alexander is the founder/director of Chax Press, author of five books of poetry, most recently Pushing Water, from Cuneiform Press in 2011; and 9 chapbooks. He is the editor of Talking the Boundless Book (Minnesota Center for Book Arts), and former director of Minnesota Center for Book Arts. Alexander also is Senior Lecturer at University of Arizona South (where he co-directs the program for English majors), and he teaches at the Naropa University Summer Writing Program. In Tucson, he is a co-founder and one of the several directors of the organization POG, which has presented poetry and prose readings, visual art presentations and lectures, musical performances, and more. He is married to the visual artist Cynthia Miller, and has two daughters, Kate and Nora.

Aaron Kunin

Aaron Kunin is recently the author of The Sore Throat and Other Poems. His other books include a poetry collection, Folding Ruler Star, and a novel, The Mandarin. Grace Period, a collection of aphorisms, sketches, and fragments, is forthcoming. He lives in Los Angeles. You can hear several recent recordings on Kunin’s PennSound author page.

There is no cover charge for reading, but libations and donations to the gallery are always welcome. We hope to see you there and for festivities before and after.

Agitprop (Map)
Saturday, May 5, 7pm
2837 University Avenue in North Park (Entrance on Utah, behind where Glenn’s Market used to be)
San Diego, CA 92104
619.384.7989

For more information about the Agitprop Reading Series and Agitprop Art Space, visit our webpage,  join our Facebook group, or sign up to receive email announcements from us.

UPCOMING READINGS

May 5: Charles Alexander & Aaron Kunin
June 2: Zyzzyva Magazine celebration with John Gibler & Oscar Villalon
October 6: Brandon Brown, Alli Warren & Company
November 3: Joseph Harrington

Mujeres Mixtecas, CAFE and Cog•nate collective invite you to share in a night of exchange! Mujeres Mixtecas, a female Mixtec sewing co-op will share their language and culture as they will unveil a sewn mural created in collaboration with cog•nate collective, and give a short talk on their history and culture. The event is a way of inciting dialogue between the various  ethnic and economic groups at the border.

There will be music and the co-op will prepare a Mixtec meal for everyone. $7 donation suggested for lunch. Our hope is that each of us will teach a bit of our own language(s) as we learn a bit more Mixtec, Spanish, or English through conversation and social exchange.

Located between the northbound lanes of traffic at the Mercado de Artesanias, Linea in the San Ysidro Port of Entry, Cog•nate Space/Espacio Cognado has hosted various arts and cultural events since its inception last year.

Directions to Cog•nate Space:

The space is located at the foot of the pedestrian bridge on the Mexican side of the border on the median between border car lanes.

From the US:

Cross the border, continue straight through the turnstiles. There will be a set of turnstiles to your right, DO NOT GO RIGHT. Instead, continue straight ahead until you cross a set of turnstiles that will lead you to “La Concha,” a silvery shell-like building that will be on your left. Walk past the building toward the taxis, which should be in front of you. Before reaching the taxis make a left onto a footbridge that will take you to the port of entry. Cross the bridge and walk down at the first exit point as you walk east on the bridge. The market is the set of red stalls on your right.

From Mexico:

Go to the San Ysidro port of Entry and take the pedestrian bridge that goes over the cars west. Exit the bridge before you get to “La Concha”. The market is the set of red stalls on your left.

For more information about cog•nate collective’s collaboration with Mujeres Mixtecas visit:

http://cognatecollective.tumblr.com/

Tu’un davi / Español / English : Language Exchange at Cognate Space

Saturday April 28

11am – 4pm

LAXART: 2640 S. La Cienega Los Angeles, CA 90034 and CABINET: 300 Nevins Street Brooklyn, NY 11217

A one-night, bicoastal screening of video works by Skowhegan alumni spanning nearly 15 years of Skowhegan alumni.

The Double is primarily a visual phenomenon making video a natural medium for its exploration. The earliest silent films recognized the inherent doubling that occurs through picture, investigating notions of an uncanny second self in films such as the The Golem and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Through doubling or mirroring, one is confronted with the illusion of wholeness, a dispersion of the self, and perhaps revelations or repressions of fears and desires kept hidden within the body. The Double can also represent an alter ego, a copy or forgery, or a false twin or Doppelganger. However, doubles are not exclusively physical in a bodily sense. Doubling may also be traced to the mode of production of the work, reminding us that the replication and dissemination of image is physical in its duplication as well. This lack of the original and multiplication of the double across the screen is exemplified in the bicoastal screening of The Double at LAXART in Los Angeles and Cabinet in New York.

Featuring works by:

Mike Calway-Fagen ’11
Jonathan Ehrenberg ’11
Amy Finkbeiner ’01
Victoria Fu ’06
Meredith James ’11
Andrew Ellis Johnson ’99
Siobhan Landry ’11
Sarah Lasley ’04
Dan Levenson ’09
Ann Oren ’09
Chris Sollars ’98
Cheryl Yun ’03
Bryan Zanisnik ’08

Space 4 Art is a thriving community-designed, volunteer-built art space that provides 37 affordable studios for San Diego’s finest artists, designers, and craftspeople. The facility has an abundance of natural light, spacious galleries, multiple community spaces, a multi-level stage, and performance areas.

Mark Dery

Author Mark Dery will discuss and sign copies of his new book, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams, at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, CA on Thursday, April 19th at 11:00 AM in Rm L238.

From the cultural critic Wired called “provocative and cuttingly humorous” comes a viciously funny, joltingly insightful collection of drive-by critiques of contemporary America where chaos is the new normal. Exploring the darkest corners of the national psyche and the nethermost regions of the self, Dery makes sense of the cultural dynamics of the American madhouse early in the twenty-first century.

“Always provocative, often humorous, Dery has a keen eye for absurdity, tragedy, and everything in between. ” —Publishers Weekly

I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts by Mark Dery

Mark Dery has been exploring the shifting sands of American sub-cultural trends for almost twenty years. He has built a reputation as an engaged and voluble critic hailed for his urbane, funny observations delivered with clear-eyed reason.

His new book, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams features thirty-two pungent essays covering a range of topics such as Madonna’s big toe, the link between zombies and white supremacists, the selling of Nazism and the cultural appropriations of Lady Gaga and Jack Chick.

In the introduction to his book Dery invokes as his talisman André Breton’s epitaph, “I seek the gold of time” . Dery explains that Breton refers to “the ineffable mysteries of lost time, of time passing, of things to come” which recalls Dogen Zenji’s description of time as lending a “resplendent brightness” to all phenomena. Dery would reject any comparison to religious thought (Dogen was a thirteenth century Zen Buddhist monk), but because Dery himself searches for gold in the most unlikely of temporal and spatial places the intersection of these two ideas makes an intriguing entry point into the complex matrix of his thought and writing.

I walk out onto the desert floor in the middle of a bright April afternoon. I stand still in the sun, fully exposed, surrounded on all sides by cactus, sand and rocks. I feel the heat all around. I close my eyes long enough for my thoughts to stop their tossing and turning. Gradually, new sensations begin to impress themselves on my senses. I hear the wind. I hear the buzzing of flies and the drone of faraway traffic.

Time passes. After ten minutes in a state of suspension I open my eyes. I am confronted with a stark wavering prickly electric green thing shooting up out of the desert floor. Ten minutes ago it was an ocotillo tree but now all I see is its indescribably glittering essence. In an instant I am vomited beyond the boundaries of language. Beyond the “flaming wind-hairs of thought” where time turns to gold and everything becomes rich and strange. This other shore is where Mark Dery’s writing will take you. Where no thoughts are too alien, to bizarre or too bad to be turned to gold.

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Mark Dery

AGITPROP: In the introduction to your new book, I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts, Bruce Sterling calls you a “botanist of the counter-culture” who samples the Kool-Aid carefully but never fails to spit at the end. What are the origins of your thirst for sipping the dregs of human thought-juice?

MARK DERY: I’m not sure the subcultural margins are synonymous with society’s dregs, but that may be my punctilious Inner Felix Unger talking. As a cultural critic, I’m drawn to subcultural ethnography in the Dick Hebdige mode, or what David Brooks called “comic sociology,” although my variation on that theme is more of a black-comedic sociology. (And when I say Brooks, I mean the David Brooks of Bobos in Paradise, not the Neo-Tory Neuroscientist who offers moral homilies from inside the Beltway, via the New York Times [ Dery is referring to different aspects of a single author, David brooks] . I liked Brooks better when he was a conservative comedian, taking the piss out of lactose-intolerant, cruelty-free yuppies, as opposed to Brooks the self-appointed morality wonk.) I’m drawn to cultural extremes—fringe thought, perverse practices, Manson-approved sociopathologies, consumer culture at its most bodaciously depraved, Bizarro-World Web memes—partly because they’re the strange attractors in our chaos culture, so to speak. In the sciences of chaos and complexity, it’s when systems are far from equilibrium that things get interesting. Not necessarily good, mind you, but inarguably fascinating. They mark the gnarly edge, as the chaos theorist (and Phil Dickian SF novelist) Rudy Rucker would say, where one state transitions suddenly into another.

My fascination with edgy phenomena also has a lot to do, I suspect, with having grown up hard by the U.S.-Mexican border, in 1970s Chula Vista—on the edge of America, in two senses: California is “where we run out of continent” in the Westward-migration sense, as Joan Didion famously observed, and San Diego—one of the most hysterically Anglo, impregnably Republican border cities in our fair Republic—is where white America draws a line in the sand between Nixon Country and that Disneyland of donkey-show depravity, Tijuana. (At least, that’s how it loomed in the gabacho unconscious of my day.) Border consciousness is edge consciousness, and even in the circle-the-wagons all-white Chula Vista suburbs of my ’70s youth, there was a percolating fear that America’s Finest City would be sucked into the libidinal attractor of Tijuana or, inversely, be overrun by the brown hordes presumably massing on the other side of the border (for which the much-feared killer bees were a tabloid metaphor), switchblades and shopping bags at the ready.

But my interest in extreme cultural phenomena has equally to do with the fact that they hyperbolize America—caricature it, melodramatize it, push the envelope of the depravity, the sociopathy, the sheer weirdness hiding in plain sight until there’s no way to avoid it. Through exaggeration, they make the subliminal liminal and, ultimately, push it into mainstream consciousness. As I say in the book’s introduction, I believe in the theory of American exceptionalism, just not as my dear friends in the Tea Party and neo-con thinktanks understand it. America is exceptional, which is to say profoundly weird: it reeks to heaven of flat-earth fundamentalism (which makes us the laughingstock of Europe, where most well-educated urbanites view religion with embarrassment); it seethes with glittery-eyed Neighborhood Watch paranoia; it incarcerates and executes more of its own citizens than any other supposedly civilized nation; it elevates radically deregulated capitalism to a state religion; it criminalizes a ridiculous drug like cannabis yet allows the whackjob survivalist fringe to conceal and carry guns in bars; I could go on. It’s gothic, it’s grotesque, it’s over the top, it’s got TruckNutz dangling from its undercarriage, it thinks Obama is a Muslim and the moon landing was faked and 9/11 was an inside job and Darwin is a rotting heap of secular-humanist hooey and anthropogenic warming is a conspiracy theory foisted on us by the Sierra Club. How can you not love this place?

My cultural criticism patrols the borders of the American unconscious because America is extreme, and the only way to understand it is to venture as far as you can, out onto its wild edge, because that’s where the purest expressions of American dread and dreams live.

AGITPROP: Arguably the most hyberbolic legacy of the twentieth century belongs to Adolf Hitler. Your book has two essays dedicated to the appropriation of his image and the impact American advertising had on Nazi propaganda. Can you delve into your findings?

MARK DERY: The essays in question, “The Triumph of the Shill: Fascist Branding” and “Endtime for Hitler: On the Downfall Parodies and the Inglourious Return of Der Fuhrer,” look at the Nazis—specifically, Hitler and Goebbels—as pioneers of branding and marketing, fiendishly artful in their use of design and the media to manufacture mass consent through misinformation, disinformation, and potent myths conjured up out of the fog of fear and hatred hanging over the German unconscious. I was struck by the Nazis’ appropriation of market-tested tricks of the P.R. trade, employed by early public-relations Svengalis such as Ivy Lee and Edward Bernays. Goebbels, especially, was a careful student of American advertising and public relations, which had taken the lessons of Freudian—and Pavlovian—psychology to heart. With a little help from Albert Speer and Leni Riefenstahl, he stage-managed the dream life of the Third Reich, dramatizing the virulent prejudices and half-baked theories that resulted, ultimately, in a Germany-shaped smoking hole in the map of Europe, not to mention the incineration of at least six million people.

Hitler, a failed painter and architect, emerges from the horrors of the 20th century as an Architect of Doom who dreamed the nightmare of Germany’s Gotterdammerung into awful reality and a Murder Artist on a genocidal scale. In using the term “artist,” I’m not mythologizing Hitler, and certainly am not applauding him. I mean, simply, that fascism (as Walter Benjamin argued) represented the aestheticization of politics—with unspeakably horrific results. Hitler’s dream was the dream of an antiseptic, genocidal utopia, a Wagnerian Germania populated by the kitschy Aryans in Nazi propaganda and purged of all ugliness, which is to say the troglodytic “subhumans” who teemed in Hitler’s anxious unconscious. It’s the Bayreuth-opera fantasy of a daydreaming sociopath who failed as an artist but managed to turn all of Europe into the stage for his dreams…and nightmares. And he did so through an unprecedented and, it must be admitted, virtuosic use of propaganda, stagecraft, and a bizarre theatrical talent that to the 21st-century eye looks laughable in newsreels but in its day whipped crowds into a mass orgy of adulation (for the Fuhrer) and ecstatic loathing (for the Other).

Not for nothing did David Bowie call Hitler the first rock star, a penetrating observation that earned him a fusillade of flak but was nonetheless dead-on. Hitler lavished endless thought on the insignias, banners, uniforms, movies, and above all architecture of the Third Reich, and branders and marketers and advertisers ever since have nursed a secret awe, even envy, for the Nazi branding machine. I mean, are Disney’s mouse ears, the McDonald’s golden arches, or the Apple logo as universally recognized as the swastika? Do any of them carry its third-rail jolt of fascinated horror (or is it horrified fascination)? The techniques perfected by Hitler and his henchmen are still used, albeit more subtly, by branders and marketers and advertisers. Long after the “thousand-year Reich” was reduced to rubble, the original mustachioed “Mad Man” continues to cast a swastika-shaped shadow over Madison Avenue, not to mention our political campaigns, reality TV, right-wing radio, and of course the attacking heads on Fox News.

AGITPROP: Two things…First, Hitler’s early life as a failed artist certainly adds a sickening twist to the origins of his need for control. How much should we rely on it as an explanation for his animosity toward the so-called degenerate artists of the Weimar period and marginal members of society in general?

Second, You seem to have a fascination with the intersection of conservative, even reactionary thought, and art. Your essay “The Prophet Margin: Jack Chick’s Comic-Book Apocalypse” is about the evangelical comic book artist Jack Chick. His “tracts” (pocket-sized comic books for the non-believers) were a staple in the Bible Belt churches of North Carolina where I grew up. Can we draw a direct line between him and the likes of Cotton Mather, or is Chick sui generis?

MARK DERY: I wouldn’t want to reduce Hitler’s moral depravity and psychopathology to an operatic tantrum over the fact that his hand-painted postcards didn’t go viral. I’m more inclined to the argument that sees him as an ectoplasmic manifestation of the uglier aspects of the German cultural psyche, at that historical moment. This isn’t to absolve him of personal responsibility, or to deny his unique evil. But Hitler gave shape to a toxic cloud of economic anxiety, bred-in-the-bone bigotry, right-wing fears of the Red Menace, and pervasive resentment over the punitive reparations demanded of Germany, after WWI, by the Treaty of Versailles. But this is the stuff of another argument. Interested readers will want to dig deep into Ron Rosenbaum’s masterful Explaining Hitler, which looks at the contesting theories about who Hitler was, and why he was.

As for my interest in conservative, even right-wing strains in American society, especially when they bubble up in the form of cultural expression, well, I believe in sleeping with the enemy. Meaning: I like to know what dark dreams trouble the sleep of the Michael Savage-Tea Party-survivalist-Alex Jones fusion-paranoia fringe, the better to understand our national id.

As well, I’m interested in art that’s marginalized by the transnational art economy and the curatorial and critical apparatuses that legitimate that economy. No less than the “lowbrow surrealism” showcased in magazines like Juxtapoz and Hi-Fructose or the fan-culture illustrations featured on DeviantArt.com or the sorts of “happy mutant” neo-retro art spotlighted on Boing Boing, the evangelical tracts of Jack Chick can be seen as a form of pop art produced and distributed outside conventional channels of art production, consumption, and critique. I should italicize the point that I’m not necessarily interested in the aesthetic merits of any of the stuff I’ve mentioned, but rather its implicit (and largely unintended) critique of the highbrow artworld and the conspiracy of curatorial and critical opinion that underwrites the market value of certain forms of commodified expression, and not others. Why Damien Hirst’s pickled sharks, and not vernacular taxidermy? Why Christian Marclay’s “The Clock” (which I happen to think is brilliant, by the way), and not some of the fan-culture mash-ups on YouTube? But this isn’t just some Duchampian dialectical move on my part. I’m equally interested in Chick as a mutant cartoonist, appropriating the commercial mass-culture form of the comic book and turning it into a vector of transmission for his virulently hateful strain of evangelical Christianity. At the same time, as you point out, Chick sits not only within the historical continuum of popular media but specifically within the tradition of Christian media, whose earliest forms include the evangelical tract, and which has now appropriated the look and feel of godless consumer culture to produce its own looking-glass world of Christian pop culture, including a defanged, evangelical-friendly take on teen culture replete with heavy metal bands, Lollapalooza-style rock festivals, movies, YA fiction, and the like. What fascinates me about Chick, and about evangelical America’s canny use of the media tropes of consumer culture, is the weird spin they put on this notion of semiotic guerrilla warfare. Critical theorists are enamored of the cultural dynamic exemplified by Situationist and punk detournement, anti-consumerist collage music by bands like Negativland, and politicized appropriation artists like Banksy, all of whom rip off and repurpose, to politically subversive or social-satirical ends, the signs, symbols, and narratives of official power or consumer culture. But by hijacking mass-media forms like the comic book or pop-culture genres like heavy metal and the YA novel, Chick and the rest of the religious right remind us that two can play this game. The irony is delicious.

Sezio & LWP Group are teaming up to present COLLIDE, a one-night take over of a newly-renovated
1912 apartment building on 9th & Broadway in San Diego’s East Village. Art, music, craft beer & cocktails
will fill the hallways and rooms of the five-story Community @ Carnegie building on Saturday, April 14th.

Vintage apartments will be transformed into art installations, pop-up shops, and mini bars. There will be
beer bars from Karl Strauss & Stone Brewing, cocktails from El Dorado, and street-side grub from MIHO.

Here’s the complete artist roster: Exist 1981, Spenser Little (pictured below), Charles Bergquist,
Michael Delaney, Neko, Walker McCullough, DieKuts, James Noland, Angella d’Avignon, Matthew
Bradley, DOUBLE BREAK, Wes Bruce, Morgan Manduley, YELLER, Louis Schmidt, Christina Tsui,
Mike Maxwell, Abel Guzman, Katherine Powers, & FEELIT.

The event will last from 6-10pm and will be open to all ages. There will be a $5 cover charge that will go
directly to Sezio, helping us continue to feature San Diego art & music on our website and at our events.
We hope to see you there!

Brice Bischoff
Matt Sheridan
Maria Walker
Ryan Perez

Opening Reception

A DOUBLE BREAK EXHIBITION ANNOUNCEMENT

Everything, All the Time, Always

New work by Sadie Barnette

Opening Reception: Friday, April 13, 2012 (6-10PM)

Double Break is thrilled to announce Everything, All the Time, Always, a solo exhibition of new work by Sadie Barnette. Using drawing, photography, and objects, Barnette constructs “a visual language system out of sub-culture codes and West Coast vernacular, economic formalism, text, and abstractions.” Her work stems from an investment in place and location, though it is the notion of specificity itself, rather than any specific locale that she is most compelled by. Projecting outwards from a place, say Oakland, California, she is invested in the study of location, the “weight and content of the specificity of the local.” This study begins in one place, but it can go anywhere. Specificity is universal; Barnette’s findings are urgent. The poetics of her gesture and the fineness of her line illuminate this urgency, these fragile yet tenacious binaries. It is within the sumptuousness of brilliant, saturated color in a lush tumble of sneaker-laces; the allure and impossibility of a sky made of glitter; the harsh perfection of the grid, flexible but absolute; and the velvet, tactile softness of graphite that an uncompromising yet generous commitment to the real and the specific lie. In Barnette’s work, what is at stake is “the gravity of the urban as fantasy; extra-legal economies; luxury as drug; counterfeit capitalism; glitter as hypnotic; outer space as head space; the everyday as gold, family, and lived identity experience; and the party.”

For Everything, All the Time, Always, Barnette will take over the entirety of Double Break–from front window to back wall–filling the space with a combination of large-scale graphite drawings, color photographs, site-specific wall-works, editioned multiples, and discreetly altered found objects. Furthering her explorations of place and location through the specificity of the gallery/shop context,Double Break–gallery and shop, local arts venue and regional/national cultural space, microcosm and macrocosm–will serve as an “inset” of focused investigation within the territory of Barnette’s broader personal and cultural purview. In taking over the space entirely, she will highlight and attend to the symbiotic nature of the gallery/shop relationship, creating a unique viewing experience unlike anything yet seen at Double Break.

Sadie Barnette is from Oakland, CA. She received her BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2006, and is currently an MFA candidate in Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. Her work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Recent shows include More Real Than Life at Southwestern College (San Diego), Last Time It Was Gray at Park Life (San Francisco), and Light/Weight at Zughaus Gallery (Berkeley, CA). She was a 2011 artist-in-residence at UCSD’s Thurgood Marshall College, and her book Plus Onewas released in 2010 by San Diego-based publisher Gravity and Trajectory.

Opening Reception: Friday, April 13, 2012 (6-10PM)

Exhibition runs through Saturday, May 12, 2012

Free and open to the public!

SAVE-THE-DATE:

Drawing Jam #2: Monday, April 30, 2012 (8PM-Midnight)

Ten local artists, including Sadie Barnette, will be at the Tin Can Alehouse all night drawing, listening to music, chatting with the crowd, and selling their creative labors for affordable prices!

Special Closing Party with Broken Heart Tattoo: Saturday, May 12, 2012

Double Break

1821 5^th Ave

San Diego, CA 92101

619.238.2325

info@doublebreakstore.com

www.doublebreakstore.com

www.facebook.com/DoubleBreak

www.twitter.com/DoubleBreakSD

(Map: http://g.co/maps/ge5x9)

If you teach, please bring, or send, your class.

For more information about Matthew Coolidge and the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI): www.clui.org

Matthew Coolidge is the founder and director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation, an education and research organization based in Los Angeles, established in 1994. The CLUI takes a broadly interdisciplinary approach to the investigation of land use, drawing on the natural sciences, sociology, art, architecture, and history in order to increase and diffuse knowledge about how land in the United States is apportioned, utilized, and perceived. The Center produces public programs such as tours, lectures, and events, publishes books, and web resources, including a web site with a searchable database of “unusual and exemplary” land use in the United States. The work of the Center has been presented in museums, universities, and noncommercial exhibit spaces across the United States, and Europe. Coolidge teaches in the curatorial practice program at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. He is the author and editor of several books, including Overlook: Exploring the Internal Fringes of America with the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and The Nevada Test Site: A Guide to the Nation’s Nuclear Proving Ground.

www.clui.org

Kartik Seshadri

World-renowned sitar master and music faculty member KARTIK SESHADRI performs April 11 at 7 pm at UCSD’s Conrad Prebys Concert Hall.

Kartik’s CD “Sublime Ragas” was named one of the Top of the World Top 10 CDs by Songlines magazine. The Washington Post has praised his music for its “expressive beauty, rich tonal sensibility, and rhythmic intricacy.”

Kartik collaborates with world-renowned artists including Philip Glass, and he is dedicated to authentic Indian classical music as introduced to America in the sixties by his mentor Ravi Shankar.
Kartik is a prolific composer whose Concerto #1 for Sitar and Chamber Orchestra received its world premiere in San Diego last October. He heads the Indian Classical Music program in the Department of Music at UCSD.

For tickets to the April 11 concert, call the Department of Music Box Office: (858) 534-3448.

Kelli Anne Noftle

Kelli Anne Noftle grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia. She has a B.A. in Visual Art and is a graduate of the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. Her first collection of poems, I Was There For Your Somniloquy, was selected by Pulitzer Prize winner Rae Armantrout for the Omnidawn Book Prize. Her work has appeared in several literary journals including Colorado Review, The Journal, VERSE, Blackbird, Cream City Review, Conduit, and Harvard Summer Review among others.

Both musically and lyrically, Kelli has collaborated and performed with several bands in Southern California. Her singer/songwriter project is Miniature Soap and her debut solo album, I Don’t Like You, is a collection of songs sonically divided into sets of three.

Julia Bloch

Julia Bloch grew up in Northern California and Sydney, Australia,  earned an MFA at Mills College and a PhD at Penn, and is the author most recently of Letters to Kelly Clarkson (Sidebrow Books). She is an editor of  Jacket2 and lives in Los Angeles, where she teaches literature at the  Bard College MAT program.

Architect Luis Aldrete is from Guadalajara, Mexico. He established Luis Aldrete Arquitectos in 2007. His practice comprises of a body of work related to public and residential comissions and international competitions. Particular projects include a public shelter building along the traditional La Ruta del Peregrino pilgrimage in Mexico. The work is series of contemporary concepts taking advantage of traditional materials and methods of construction.

http://www.archdaily.com/184189/pilgrim-route-refuge-luis-aldrete/

Saturday, March 24, 2012

6:00pm until 10:00pm

As an artist working in the field of repurposed electronic devices, I usually work with second-hand or found objects. An old suitcase gets filled with the chopped innards of a boom box and becomes a cold war karaoke machine. A World Atlas with a walkie talkie hidden in it’s hollowed out pages becomes an oversized talking text. While transporting these hand-held devices from place to place, I am often asked to explain my creations to concerned authorities or curious passersby. As one might imagine, reactions range from amusement to alarm. This installation features an array of custom-made gadgets (known as “snuitcases”) and the stories of how they have traveled far and wide to get to where they are now.

fmath lorenz is an educator, veteran, and technologist.

Wines, Snacks. The usge.. ;p

1925 30th st SD CA 92012 ~ unLocation.com

Tuesday March 20, 2012 at 7pm

Art North Room 412, SDSU

https://www.facebook.com/events/201901556581546/

http://art.sdsu.edu/news_and_events/events_calendar/event/2609/

Exhibition Announcement:

Product Etcetera™ Brands, Gangs, Teams & Clans

Opening Reception: March 22, 2012 (6—10pm)

Double Break is very excited to announce an exhibition by San Diego’s own Product Etcetera™.

Showcasing Product Etcetera’s latest in-house brands and products. Brands, Gangs, Teams & Clans investigates branding, its role in society and personal identity. On display will be original paintings of Product Etcetera’s newest marks, as well as a preview of their upcoming line of product. Their influences range from sports pageantry, corporate identity, religious iconography, national symbolism, gang graffiti, and a general study of semiotics.

Product Etcetera™ is a San Diego-based design studio that specializes in full service design and branding. Operating in all forms of visual communication (web, print, broadcast, and the fine arts) their client projects widely range from brand development for small business to institutional identity systems.

When not designing for their clients, Product Etcetera can be caught producing artwork, stirring up passion projects for their San Diego community, and designing merchandise under their PRDTetc™ label.

Originally born in 2004 as a place to house Jordan Stark’s portfolio online, it wasn’t until he teamed up with Tony Martinez in May 2009 that Product Etcetera officially launched as a commercial design studio. A year later, after developing an exclusive project for a high-profile New York boutique retailer, they launched their PRDTetc™ label and first line of graphic T-shirts and hats.

Since launching their first line of product in June of 2010, Product Etcetera has developed pop-up shops in boutique retailers throughout the West Coast and has collaborated with other high profile brands, stores, and organizations to produce exclusive projects and events. In March of 2011, Product Etcetera organized and launched the Bring Back The Brown campaign, which is an ongoing campaign created with the grand objective of fostering a stronger loyalty to San Diego and its sports culture.

Opening reception: March 22, 2012 (6—10pm)

(With music and refreshments)

Show runs March 22—April 7, 2012

Double Break

1821 Fifth Ave

San Diego, CA 92101

619.238.2325

info@doublebreakstore.com

http://www.doublebreakstore.com

http://www.facebook.com/doublebreak

http://twitter.com/DoubleBreakSD

Hours:

Tuesday—Thursday 12pm—8pm

Friday—Saturday 12pm—9pm

Rendering of the current state of the public art program at the Port of San Diego

The Port of San Diego is not historically known for making good decisions related to art. And today they made sure that this reputation was not sullied.  The Board of Commissioners at the Port of San Diego voted 4 to 2 in favor of accepting a permanent copy, to be cast in bronze, of the statue known as “Unconditional Surrender” by Seward Johnson which is to be donated by private interests associated with the Midway Museum. Those donating the piece have a year to raise the nearly one million dollars it will cost to have the fiberglass piece recast in painted bronze. It is a sad day because it again shows, whether in art or not, that if there is one thing you can rely on in San Diego is that monied special interests, especially those related to the military, will always beat out rational arguments made by studied professionals.

For the past year, and beyond, the Public Art Committee, which works in an advisory capacity to the Board of Commissioners at the Port of San Diego, and Port curatorial staff have worked hard to develop a curatorial strategy that, if implemented in its full capacity, has the potential to be one of the most dynamic and interesting public art programs in the country.  Because of the Board’s decision “Unconditional Surrender” will be the first piece of the Port’s new collection- despite the fact that the Public Art Committee voted 6 to 4 not to accept it.  It is difficult not to think that the acceptance of this stolen piece of intellectual property, which has gotten off on a technicality, has set the art program and the new curatorial strategy at the Port back a year, if not years or even indefinitely.  Many of the members of the Public Art Committee who went into this past year feeling hopeful that real change was going to take place at the Port’s art program (changes that included requirements that members of the Public Art Committee actually be credentialed arts professionals), now feel that it may be pointless to continue with a Port Board whose majority essentially stated today during deliberations that the fiduciary standards for art in the Port district should be nothing more than oceanside amusements to attract the masses.

Giant balls of twine, eat your heart out:

A stolen "Kiss"

Below is a letter that I sent to the commissioners this morning.  Additionally, five members of the Public Art Committee (including myself) attended the meeting and read statements against the acceptance of the piece. Two others, who could not attend, sent letters arguing against the piece as well. All of these arguments did everything that you are supposed to do in arguments: cited the Board’s voted upon and approved Curatorial Strategy, argued thoroughly why this work is sub-par and does not meet the Board’s approved standards, referenced precedents, pointed to the derivative nature of the piece, potential problems in its transference to another material, the inability of the donators to raise the money up to this point, and so on.  What is most disturbing in this whole process is that the only argument I can discern that has been levied in favor of the piece is that “it’s popular”.  Well, so is McDonald’s.

Given what this decision implies I think we should be on the look out in case any of the commissioners who voted for this piece, associates of the Midway, or anyone else in favor of this piece ever publish a book.  If they do, I would assume, based on this decision, that they would have no problem with someone resizing it, printing it on a different kind of paper and, as long as it’s popular, selling it as their own work. Maybe that person could co-author with Seward Johnson….

—–

Dear Port Commissioners,

I am a member of the Public Art Committee for the Port of San Diego.  I was in attendance at the last board meeting on February 14, 2012 and am writing to express some concerns regarding “Unconditional Surrender”.  First, I would like to give a brief description of my background so that you can place into context my following comments.  I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture from the Ohio State University.  This spring I will be awarded a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of California, San Diego with a focus on Multi-Media and Public Culture. I have shown in the Museum of Contemporary Art, The New Children’s Museum, am currently co-curating the Summer Salon Series at the San Diego Museum of Art and was featured in 2010 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art.  My work has been cited in international publications such as Wired and ArtForum magazines.  Locally I have been involved with the development of multiple art supporting projects and community events including a local art festival, called “There Goes the Neighborhood”, and spent two and a half years as the Lead Art Instructor at St. Madeleine Sophies’s Center, a day program for adults with developmental disabilities.  I am currently an Adjunct Professor at the NewSchool of Architecture and Design in downtown San Diego.

Second, I would like to commend the board on the debate that took place at the meeting on February 14th.  Several times during this deliberation I heard speakers and board members alike make comments or jokes to the effect that they “did not know much about art” etc.  I would say that from the complexity of the argument surrounding this statue, those comments seem self deprecating more than actual.

I fully understand and am in agreement as to why people feel so strongly about what this image stands for in relationship to the original work of art, the photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt, and the euphoric historical moment he captured on that day in 1945. This is one of the most publicly meaningful images in our nation’s collective memory.  My concern with “Unconditional Surrender” is that it is so derivative from this original, meaningful, photograph that the work raises ethical issues in regard where, exactly the real meaning of this object comes from (item (e) in the Evaluation Criteria).  I would submit that the popularity and meaningfulness that people are responding to in this work reside in the original work of art, the photograph, and recollection from the original historic moment. Seward Johnson’s statue panders to this memory and to the original work of art in order to produce it’s meaning.  By any artistic standards copying the work of another artist as a shorthand for producing a meaningful object of their own is ethically questionable at best, and potentially legally problematic at worst.  This aspect of the production of the piece also raises issues in regard to other Evaluative Criteria approved by the board, especially in regard to innovation (item (c)).  A work of art cannot be considered innovative if it is simply taking the meaningful work of another artist and replicating it in an over-life-size form.

While in attendance at the meeting on February 14th it was clear from comments made by both speakers and board members, many of whom were in favor of the piece becoming permanent, that acknowledgement of the disputable nature of this object as a quality work of art was duly noted (Evaluation Criteria item (c)).  This aspect of “Unconditional Surrender” has also recently been cited in the press by an article in favor of the work remaining permanent (Union Tribune Feb. 11th 2012 UT Editorial Staff).  If it is acknowledged by even those in favor of it becoming permanent that the quality of the piece is in dispute, then this object does not meet the criteria approved by the board regarding the new Curatorial Strategy.  Removing and/or overlooking quality as a standard sets a dangerous precedent if the goal of the new Curatorial Strategy is to produce a world renowned collection for the Port of San Diego and the city of San Diego as a whole.  I feel strongly that the dismissal of these standards in favor of this object’s popularity ultimately does a disservice to the men and women which this monument hopes to commemorate.  If the questionable nature of quality and innovation of this object are recognized by even those in favor of it remaining on site, I would argue that what is ultimately being endorsed is a policy of acceptable mediocrity in favor of popularity. I do not feel that what the sailor and nurse in the original photograph from 1945 were celebrating with that kiss was, in part, the defense of mediocrity in the public sphere and in individual self expression.

In response to comments made at the meeting that accepting works of this nature does not have a detrimental effect on the cultural community of San Diego as a whole I can say from my experiences being embedded in the artistic community that this is not wholly accurate.  Over the last several years I have seen a significant number of very talented artists migrate out of the city based, in part, on the reputation San Diego has as a place that allows for less than the highest quality works to define it’s cultural identity.  I would also venture to say that in terms of international cultural reputations both Los Angeles and Tijuana are thought of in higher critical terms than San Diego regionally.  I think an internationally acclaimed public art program would be a major step in reversing this image and that the criteria and policies outlined in the new Curatorial Strategy are important steps in defining the standards that will accomplish this goal. While it may be true that it will always be possible to find someone to take a large commission, it seems to me that the ultimate goal should be to attract the most original and most innovative artists possible to produce the most innovative and original works of art.

At this time I would like introduce a case study as an argument for fidelity to the curatorial process that the board approved in the Evaluative Criteria and to the new Curatorial Strategy as a whole.  Anyone who is familiar with the history and controversy surrounding the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington D.C. will be familiar with the overwhelming unpopularity of the proposal when it was awarded with the commission in 1981 by a jury of credentialed arts professionals.  If you are not familiar with this history I would highly suggested looking into it for yourself as it is a dramatic story and a fascinating piece of American history. As this controversy unfolded, activists against the Maya Lin monument advocated for a set of figurative sculptures representing images of striding soldiers to be placed adjacent to the black walled memorial proposed by Lin. While the sentiments of this addition are understandable, this grouping of figurative bronze sculptures placed on site to appease popular demands are now all but forgotten in the national mind, while the black granite wall, so much initially reviled by the general public is now recognized as being, arguably, one of the most significant, critically acclaimed, publicly attended and, most importantly, meaningful monuments of the twentieth century.

One of the basic tenets of living in a free society is the right of individual, unique, self expression.  In no other field is this right more symbolically celebrated than in the arts. The un-creative use of another artist’s work by Seward Johnson to derivatively appeal to the legitimate sentiments of the public cheapens this fundamental tenet.  By endorsing non-innovative work simply because it uses the predictably popular formula of appropriating an image of national sentiment from another artist and simply making it monumentally large trivializes the efforts many people have made to allow such important rights, such as innovative free expression, to exist.  The question I would like to leave you with is this: Shouldn’t the ultimate goal of the Public Art program at the Port of San Diego be about advocating for what gets placed in the public sphere be of the highest artistic excellence as a way of honoring the right of free expression defended by those in public service and so fundamental to a democratic society?

Sincerely,

David White
Public Art Committee

—–

Chris Kraus

Thursday, March 8th, 7:00 pm

UC San Diego, Visual Arts Facility Performance Space on Russell Lane, La Jolla, California 92093

Free and Open to the Public.

Chris Kraus will read from her 2011 book WHERE ART BELONGS, that examines recent artistic enterprises that reclaim the use of lived time as a material. Expanding the argument begun in her earlier book, VIDEOGREEN, Kraus argues that “the art world is interesting only insofar as it reflects the larger world outside it.”

Moving from New York to Berlin to Los Angeles to the Pueblo Nuevo barrio of Mexicali, Kraus examines the uses of boredom, poetry, privatized prisons, community art, corporate philanthropy, vertically integrated manufacturing, and discarded utopias, revealing the surprising persistence of microcultures within the matrix. For all its faults, she concludes, the art world remains the last frontier for the desire to live differently.

The Glasgow Review of Books describes WHERE ART BELONGS as “an incitement to find art, to read in a heroic way, and to create a moment;” Bookforum has praised its “poeticism and daunting theoretical undercurrents.” “In WHERE ART BELONGS,” Alina Astrova writes, “art theory becomes political philosophy … a means of establishing a way of life outside capitalist conventions.”

Chris Kraus is the author of four novels and two books of art essays. The recipient of a Frank Mather Award in Art Criticism and a Warhol Foundation art writing grant, she has been described by Holland Cotter in the New York Times as “one of our smartest and original writers on art and culture.”

http://lectures.visarts.ucsd.edu/VALS_WI2012/artists/about_kraus.html

For questions, contact VALS Coordinator Jessica Sledge at jsledge@ucsd.edu

“Home” is understood at multiple scales—at the level of the individual, backyard, community, border region, and homeland. The San Diego region is featured prominently and regional issues are explored as exemplars of global phenomena. The exhibition also departs from any strict interpretation of the form that a drone must take; the project expands on the “unmanned” nature of the drone as symbolic of a larger condition–ecologies where the status of the human is called into question, distributed and embedded in a wider field of shared intelligence.

Drones at Home will be presented in three phases. Phase 1 includes an exhibition; Phase 2 consists of panels and a workshop; and Phase 3, which continues through the summer, will include the creation of new drone projects in collaboration with invited artists and research groups at Calit2. Co-curated by Sheldon Brown, Jordan Crandall, and Ricardo Dominguez, this first phase will feature the work of Matthew Battles, Trevor Paglen, The Periscope Project, Alex Rivera and Angel Nevarez, along with additional work drawn from research in the field.

Matthew Battles is a poet, writer, and co-founder of HiLobrow.com. His forthcoming books include Letter by Letter (W. W. Norton), a sentimental and natural history of writing, and a short story collection, The Sovereignties of Invention (Red Lemonade). He is a research fellow with metaLAB, an academic and creative collaborative devoted to the exploration of technology in the arts and humanities, hosted by Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society .

Alex Rivera is a New York based digital media artist and filmmaker.  His first feature film, SLEEP DEALER premiered at Sundance 2008, and won two awards, including the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award.  Rivera is a Sundance Fellow and a Rockefeller Fellow. His work, which addresses concerns of the Latino community through a language of humor, satire, and metaphor, has also been screened at The Berlin International Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, The Guggenheim Museum, PBS, Telluride, and other international venues.

Angel Nevarez is an artist, musician, and DJ. He has produced works which investigate contemporary music, dissent, and public fora, and move between the spatial simultaneity of performance and enunciation, reflecting upon the projection of political agency through transmission and song. His interests lie in the formation of mobile, performative, and discursive-based social spaces, along with the re-articulation of communicatory systems within such locales. Nevarez is also a faculty member of MIT’s Art, Culture, and Technology Program.

Trevor Paglen’s work deliberately blurs lines between science, contemporary art, journalism, and other disciplines to construct unfamiliar, yet meticulously researched ways to see and interpret the world around us. Paglen’s visual work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Tate Modern, London; The Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis; The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; the 2008 Taipei Biennial; the Istanbul Biennial 2009, and numerous other solo and group exhibitions.

The Periscope Project is a space and co-operative based in downtown San Diego committed to the transdisciplinary nexus of art, architecture, and regional urban issues. Operating by the efforts of its resident practitioners; Drone Readymade represents the first discreet project (outside of The Periscope Project itself) undertaken collaboratively. The project’s primary authors are James Enos (M.Arch, NSAD, MFA UCSD, Visiting Assistant Professor, FSU), Molly Enos (M.Arch NSAD, AIA), Charles G. Miller (MFA UCSD), Keith Muller, Andrea Ngan, David Kim, Jon Barth, Jason Durr and Jay Ojeda; with key contributions from Jon Zuppan. For Drones at Home, The Periscope Project is collaborating with Owen Mundy (MFA UCSD, Assistant Professor FSU).

All gallery events are FREE and open to the public.

Please RSVP to Trish Stone, Gallery Coordinator, tstone@ucsd.edu
Media Contact: Tiffany Fox, tfox@ucsd.edu

March 8-April 12 at Southwestern College Art Gallery

This exhibition will present 11 contemporary artists, from California to France, currently using scissors and glue rather than a mouse and a printer to create works that question our perceptions of common reality and provoke discussion about collage’s increased relevance. 
Related Programs:

Public Reception: Thursday, March 8
Artist Talk 6-8 p.m.
Light refreshments provided
 
Public Reception: Tuesday, March 13
Artist Talk 12 p.m., Reception 11-1
Light refreshments provided

Collage in Context: A Symposium: Thursday,  March 22: 11:00-1:00 p.m.

Collage in poetry, Mark Wallace: 11-11:20

Artist Talk, Joshua Tonies: 11:25-11:40

Roundtable Discussion: 11:45-12:15

Q&A with Audience 12:15-12:30

This symposium program will present collage as a strategy both in art and literature, as well as position the practice within a larger context of current analogue approaches in art.  The first presentation, from Mark Wallace, will discuss the collage practices of William S. Burroughs and their continued legacy.  Wallace is the author of more than fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays, and won the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award for Temporary Worker Rides A Subway.  The second presentation will feature artist Joshua Tonies speaking about his own collage work.  His contributions to the exhibition highlight some current approaches to utilizing both analog and digital collage within a single work, and how the two differ or complement each other.  The last presentation will consist of a roundtable discussion between Michael Trigilio, Alexander Jarman and May-ling Martinez. May-ling Martinez is featured in the exhibition.  Besides creating analog collage, she has built outdated or impractical machines from old mechanical engineering manuals as part of her art.  Michael Trigilio is a Professor at University of California San Diego and a multi-media artist who has worked extensively with sound.  His independent radio project, Neighborhood Public Radio, has been featured at The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and the 2008 Whitney Biennial.

Exhibiting Artists:

Sadie Barnette  http://www.sadiebarnette.com/  Based in San Diego, CA.

Mike Calway-Fagen http://mikecalway-fagen.com/  Based in San Diego, CA.

Troy Dugas http://troydugas.com/   Based in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Lola Dupre http://loladupre.com/  Based in Avignon, France.

Chris Kardambikis http://www.kardambikis.com/ Based in San Diego, CA.

Gordon Magnin http://gordonmagnin.com/ Based in Los Angeles, CA. 

Morgan Manduley http://morganmanduley.com/   http://sezio.org/feature/Morgan-Manduley.aspx  Based in San Diego, CA.

May-ling Martinez http://www.maylingmartinez.com/index.html Based in San Diego, CA.  

Arturo Medrano http://convulsive.tumblr.com/  Based in New York City, NY.  

Jason Sherry http://www.jasonsherry.com/  Based in San Diego, CA.

Joshua Tonies http://www.joshtonies.com/ Based in San Diego, CA.

The Southwestern College Art Gallery is located in Rm 710B
900 Otay Lakes Rd, 
Chula Vista, CA 91910.
Gallery Hours 
are Monday through Thursday 10:30am-2:00pm,
Wednesday & Thursday 5:30pm-8:30pm.

Tel. 619-421-6700 x 5568
Fax 619-421-6700 fax 5368

Free parking is available in Lot J on the days of the related events

scott b. davis has earned a national reputation for his night photography. The San Diego Museum of Art is currently exhibiting a survey of his work from the past decade. And a show of recent work opens in March at jdc Fine Art.

A recent profile of davis in the Summerset Review offers a wonderfully detailed account of his process in the field. But it didn’t address what has intrigued me most about his work: namely, the material properties of the work itself. Ordinarily this isn’t something one is concerned with when viewing a photograph. But in davis’s case the material properties of the work seem to embody its content in interesting ways.
 

Your work is noted for its use of platinum printing.  What are the specific properties of this process, and how does it suit your subject matter?

platinum printing is a 19th century photographic process, closely related to traditional printmaking in terms of technical expertise and the choice of materials at one’s disposal. it was heralded by turn of the century photographers, and considered by alfred stieglitz to be “the prince of all media”. it earned this distinction for an ability to render exquisite tones, but also because it was kept as a kind of ‘private reserve’ by master printmakers for their finest work. photographers historically used the process to capitalize on nuanced, delicate tones in their images. as a 21st century artist i’m interested in exploring ideas untouched by previous generations of photographers. night photography, first and foremost, is an act of discovery and one that invites a keen sense of perception. platinum printing, simply put, most closely replicates the experience of how i see at night. the combination of the two opens a minimalist dialog i find important.
 

What about the choice of paper?  In describing your work the New York Times noted how the “grainy, velvety quality makes them seem almost painterly.”  As a viewer I’m fascinated by this textural quality—which is strongest in the areas of “pure” dark that frame the imagery—but  I’m unable to determine whether the texture is a product of the paper, or the process.

the texture you see is platinum. it is the process drawing you in to a physical experience. i don’t say this to be facetious, more so to reference the fact that platinum prints appear three dimensional when compared to other photographic process (anaglyphs notwithstanding). in essence the physical work of a platinum print is painterly—it is applied as a wash, really—since every print is hand coated one at a time using a brush. the pure dark areas you refer to are the ones i’m most concerned with, the negative space that defines each image and challenges viewers perception. both the paper and the process are idiosyncratic from a maker’s standpoint… they are victim to heat, humidity, age, and a half dozen other things that would plague the average photographer/printmaker. what i’m left with, and what you see, is a unique print that holds its own surface quality, which is, of course, part of the image itself.
 

Related to the previous question—the work in the SDMA show exhibits significant variation in the visual homogeneity of the dark skies that frame your landscapes. For me this is where the complexity set in, as I realized the texture of the sky was potentially due not just to paper or process, but to the very source imagery itself: the low lumpiness of a coastal marine layer, or the silken purity of a desert night sky. And yet some of your desert images appear to have low clouds overhead!  Why?

simply put, they might. but what you’re responding to is an edge i’m consciously working with every time i exhibit the work. viewers bring their own connection to visual art, this much is a given. by taking the medium to its physical and literal limit (printing pure black), the work takes on its own physical life, responding to light as much as anything else. it’s a wonderful oxymoron, though it can be a bit vexing for my work as an artist, i’ll admit. to create a tally of our conversation, we’re up to one nuanced photographic process, an artist exploring the limits of that process, the state of the physical environment the work was made in, the lighting the prints are shown under, and the viewers own capacity to look carefully. the latter being one of my primary motivations… to have people engage with the work as a physical object.
 

The source imagery in your night work seems lit entirely by dusk or human light.  Since you’ve worked in the desert, you know moonlight. Can you use it?  Or is there some formal reason why it doesn’t appear in your work?

photographers can use moonlight with great success, but for me it’s something of a gimmick. when i was a kid our neighbor had one of those framed posters with a black and white image in it. the image showed boats on the chesapeake bay by moonlight, but it was clearly a daytime shot made to look like the night. it was obvious to me then, but is a good analogy to your question. if you accept the fact moonlight tells us about a world we already know (one that kind of looks like the day but with deeper shadows, less color, and a little more mystery) then i’m not much interested in it. i’m most interested in looking at what we can’t see and what we choose to not look at, then figuring out a way to make others take note. while i’ve worked a lot in the desert at night, it is more often than not that human light defines each image, and increasingly images made in urban environments. it is this intersection that has, above all else, defined my work. working at night—moonlight or otherwise—was a starting place to expand a view of vernacular landscapes and in the process engage with the act of looking. 
 

The typical lighting in a museum or gallery seems antithetical to what you’re trying to achieve—when this work gets exhibited, do you specify any nonstandard lighting requirements?

not really. i’ve found there’s a magic light level that makes the work pop, probably around 7 foot-candles. too much light kills the experience of negative space, too little light doesn’t allow the prints to glow as they should.
 

Edison to Kodachrome to Vegas: bright light is deeply embedded in the American psyche. So it’s perhaps unsurprising that the foremost apostles of darkness are a Japanese writer (Junichiro Tanizaki) and a Hungarian film director (Bela Tarr). Have either of them influenced your work in any way?  Do you have an affinity for theirs?

i’ve only scratched the surface of each artist, and i’ll be honest in saying they haven’t influenced me directly… which isn’t to say they’re not vastly influential! it may appear a strange practice from the outside but i often work in a kind of artistic celibacy. early in my career i found i was drawn to emulate the work of other artists i admired, consciously or unconsciously. once i tapped into a language that felt like my own it freed me in a way, and allowed me to focus more on the work itself and less looking for inspiration from beyond. it was a bit like sand through an hourglass… as i concentrated more and more on what i was doing it eventually opened an entirely new world for me. today, when i look at the work of bela tarr, joan didion, eric orr (the list could go on) it’s an enriching experience to ‘see’ and engage with other, wonderful dialogs i was never aware of.
 

Any last words?

turn off the computer. there’s a big world to discover.
 
 

TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 21 @ 5:33 – 7:06 PM
CAMINO HALL 153

Hasan Elahi (born 1972, Rangpur, Bangladesh) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work examines issues of surveillance, simulated time, transport systems, and borders and frontiers.

His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions at venues such as SITE Santa Fe, Centre Georges Pompidou, Sundance Film Festival, Kassel Kulturbahnhof, and at the Venice Biennale. Elahi recently was invited to speak about his work at the Tate Modern, TED Global, The Einstein Forum, and at at the American Association of Artificial Intelligence. His work has been supported with grants and sponsorships from the Creative Capital Foundation, Ford Foundation/Philip Morris, and the Asociación Artetik Berrikuntzara in Donostia-San Sebastián in the Basque Country/Spain. His work is frequently in the media and has been covered by The New York Times, Forbes, Wired, CNN, ABC, CBS, NPR, Al Jazeera, Fox, and has also appeared on The Colbert Report.

Currently, he is Associate Professor of Art and Director of the Digital Cultures and Creativity Program at the University of Maryland. In 2010, he was an Alpert/ MacDowell Fellow and in 2009, he was Resident Faculty and Nancy G. MacGrath Endowed Chair at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

This event is co-sponsored by USD’s Social Justice Living and Learning Community