#MayDay

Posters spotted in Minneapolis

Interview: StaticMade on "curating," the Walker website, and more

I had a nice conversation with Jeffrey Inscho on his excellent StaticMade podcast last week:

"In this episode, we discuss the Walker’s institutional approach to publishing dynamic and compelling web content, the democratization of the word 'curate,' and what inspires Paul to create great work at the intersection of contemporary art and journalism."

Thanks for good discussion, Jeff!

Ecology Now!

A poster, created by Earth First in 1970, for the first Earth Day, 42 years ago today. Designer unknown.

Palin as art/oven

A sculptural depiction of Sarah Palin's head that also functions as an outdoor oven has finally found a home. Created by Chicago artist J. Taylor Wallace, it'll be relocating to the Bridgeport Sculpture Garden near Chicago. The artist says making We're havin' a Tea Pear-ody over three months was "cathartic" during times he felt Palin's political celebrity was distracting from issues the country was facing. At the unveiling ceremony at the park later this month the oven will reportedly "cook a suckling pig," seen here. 

Tax Deductions for War Art

What artist Chad Person does for his art--cuts up U.S. currency to make collages--isn't what's unique about it; it's what he does next: After completing his pieces, which have recently depicted the machines of war, he takes a tax deduction for the bills he's used.

He writes of the "TaxCut" series:

In 2002 I was teaching digital photography at a University near an Air Force Base. I’d had several talented and creative soldiers come through my class. And while I tend to forget the bad students pretty quickly, Harold is one I would always remember. 

Three semesters after the course ended I got a phone call from an administrator at the base. Apparently, Harold had used Air Force money to take the class. Since he had failed my class, the cost of the tuition (around $400 with fees) was to be reneged. This meant that Harold would have to repay the military out of pocket so they could reassign the funds elsewhere. 

In a time of war, we all need to make tough choices. I chose that day to change a grade, passing a failed student with an A+ to ensure that his tuition fees – which had fortunately found their way into education via a defense allocation, would remain there. He didn’t deserve to pass based on his performance, but I saw it as a rare opportunity to take a little back from our government’s excessive defense spending, even if it might have been just enough to halt the purchase of one box of ammunition. 

This series, playfully titled TaxCut, functions in much the same way. I have been destroying currency for my work for the past two years. As a professional artist, I deduct my material expenditures as a write off. If I slice up a hundred dollars to make an image, or a thousand, or just five, I am taking it out of the IRS coffers. Imaging the weaponry that I’m not buying with those dollars is a reminder for me that a little creativity can be quite empowering.

A Lost Art, by Julien Berthier

Julien Berthier, A LOST, 2011 (via Booooooom)

Presidential Street Art: Gerald Ford in Michigan

Stenciled street-art images of Gerald Ford have been popping up in the late president's childhood town of Grand Rapids, Michigan. One features a running Ford, while the other bearing Ford's words in 1974, right after being sworn in: "I am indebted to no man." The images have been appearing along I-196, the Ford Freeway. Ford was born Leslie Lynch King, Jr., but changed his name in his early 20s to that of his adoptive father.

Could this be the start of a series of street-art homages to obscure presidents? Probably not, but Adrian Hopkins, who sent the link, suggests the next in the series: "A portrait of William Henry Harrison that's incomplete." 

Walker Art Center nominated for 2012 Webby Award

Whoa! The Walker Art Center's new website, which I edit, has been nominated for a 2012 Webby People's Voice Award under the category of "best art site." Competition's tough: we're up against the Google Art Project, among others. Check out our site, some of the ideas behind it, and some of the reviews, and--hopefully--vote for us!

Found Caricatures: Pascal Fellonneau's Photos of French Campaign Posters

Pascal Fellonneau, a photographer based in Bordeaux and Paris, has been watching the French elections eagerly -- particularly the presidential campaign posters plastered on an array of surfaces across Paris. While he documents how the postings get altered by passersby -- a Hitler moustache drawn on Left Party candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon's face; ketchup lipstick on Jean-Pierre Chevénement's visage -- it's the other shots that are of greater interest to me: the posters that are torn away to reveal startling pairings of images, and the photographic imagery wheat-pasted over contoured surfaces, transforming what are supposed to be stately, assuring images of politicians into ghoulish, comical, or Pinnochio-esque caricatures.

Reached by email, Fellonneau says he can't say yet whether his aim is commentary or documentation. "I'll write a statement later, once I really know what it is," he promises. "Of course, it has something documentary, but not only I hope."

Keith Haring in Minneapolis, 1984

From my new piece at walkerart.org:

...Twenty-eight years ago this month, from March 12 to 16, Haring was an artist-in-residence at the Walker, where he created the giant mural. Now existing only through photographic and video documentation, the orange and green wall piece was created to commemorate the completion of the Walker’s then-new underground education center, and remained on view through December 1985.

Video: Jeff Frost's stop-action interventions in Utah and California

Anaheim-based artist Jeff Frost says one of his favorite things to do is "roam the deserts in search of abandoned buildings." After one recent exploit, he came home with some 40,000 hi-res photos of the night sky and of his artistic interventions into vacant spaces in California and Utah. I emailed him recently about the resulting stop-action and time-lapse animation, which he says involves little or no enhancements. His reply to my questions:

It's all old school photography, painting, audio and video. I almost never use photoshop, and there is not a speck of CGI or graphics. In fact, I do most of my batch processing and color correction in Lightroom. I use all sorts of lights: headlights, taillights, flashlights of all shapes and sizes, camping lanterns, speedlites, and basically anything else that I can find. It's a real challenge to understand and color balance each light, but it's worth it to me to be able to interact with the scene. It's a bit like people waiving flashlights around in front of a camera on a long exposure, but taken to ridiculous, quasi-scientific lengths. I haven't used any projectors yet. The birds on the trees are absolutely real, they were lit by the moonlight,

Bradley Manning streetart

Army whistleblower Bradley Manning--who allegedly leaked classified documents to Wikileaks--faces arraignment on Feb. 23. Manning was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize by three Icelandic parliamentarians early this month.

Via Vandalog.

Bits: 01.31.12

 • This weekend is the last for the 2012 Art Shanty Projects, in which artists transform icefishing shanties into creative hubs for community. Read my piece about it at the Walker website. 

• Accra Shepp on why he started photographing individuals participating in Occupy Wall Street: "The press said the movement was predominantly young and white. And I kept seeing Asians, Latinos, blacks. This doesn't look so homogenous. There were people in their 60s and young children with their families. And I thought, this is what people need to see. "

• Neil Young: "Piracy is the new radio. That's how music gets around."

• Antony Gormley: "Squatting is a very good way of preserving properties while at the same time putting them to good use. It's a no-brainer that properties that are awaiting renovation or don't have commercial tenants can be of use for creative things, and indeed to provide shelter for the homeless."

• Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., told artists last night: “If all you want to do is sing and dance and paint, that won’t be good enough. You’ve got to be part of a political movement that would make sure that we do have public support for the arts.”

• Printeresting digs up Chris Jordan's 2009 artwork The Great Wave, in which he renders Hokusai‘s The Great Wave off Kanagawa using ”2.4 million pieces of plastic, equal to the estimated number of pounds of plastic pollution that enter the world’s oceans every hour.”

• How does a 5-year-old view the GOP's logo? A designer's daughter, analyzing various logos, looked at the Republican elephant and said, "That is a parade outfit."

• Your moment of: decommissioned WW2 planes repainted by street artists.

• A pop-up park in NYC.

Found art: Striped tree

Memories of Marfa: "I smell like a campfire"

File under: Found art (of sorts).

I found this note in Craig Phillips' studio last week. Craig is a "media concierge and analogue bon vivant" and, most importantly, host of MAKESH!T, a weekly art-making get-together in St. Paul. He tells me he kept a journal last time he visited Marfa (home base of the late, great Donald Judd), and eventually jotted some of his musings on hotel stationery. While it'd be great to see these compiled somewhere, it's also nice to find his notes-to-self amid the sedimentery layers of his well-used and rather magical studio.

3 from '11: Ai Weiwei, Nadia Plesner, John Yang

With 2011 gone, I'll spare you the self-serving top-10 list. But in the spirit of self-reflection, I have been looking back at the year at Eyeteeth. What I noticed: the most-read stories weren't really the best ones. And the best ones weren't really... ones.

So, if you'll indulge me in a quick wrap-up of 2011, here's the three topics I feel best about from the past 12 months.

Ai Weiwei: You'll recall that the Chinese artist's detention and captivity for 81 days in early spring took up a lot of space here. The vigils, open letters, and street-art his detention sparked. The responses from art-world figures to it (my favorite: Dia director Philippe Vergne's ballsy reaction, which he later expanded on for ArtInfo.com). The Change.org petition that was targeted by Chinese hackers (a fact I was the first to confirm). The way Ai's arrest and imprisonment without charge drew attention to other artists and dissidents who've been detained or disappeared in China. Anyone who's read this blog for awhile should be able to see why it captured me so: Free expression and the ability of artists to bear witness to social problems and imagine different worlds are recurring themes here.

Nadia Plesner: Ultra-profitable and ultra-sensitive, Louis Vuitton tried to silence Danish artist Plesner this year, for artistic appropriation that was clearly fair use. Her gigantic painting Darfurnica included a likeness of an LV Audra bag slung on the arm of a Darfuri boy--Plesner's rather overt way of chastising the developed world for being focused on celebrity and consumerism at the expense of people dying in the region of Sudan. Although Plesner's motive wasn't profit, Vuitton wanted to collect 5,000 euros for each day the image remained on her website. At the Hague, however, the company's copyright infringment case was tossed out, the court  finding that "the importance of Plesner (freedom of expression through her work) outweighs the importance of Vuitton (protection of property)." "Today is a great day for art," Plesner told Eyeteeth following the ruling. "Now we have won back our freedom to make reference to the modern society we live in."

John Yang: Biking around Minneapolis in July, I spotted a graffiti stencil that looked familiar. I'd seen the image of a sleepwalking boy two places: spraypainted on the wall of an art squat in Berlin in 2005 and on the sleeve of a Sigur Ros album. Digging into the image, I unearthed a curious story. The stencil is based on a photo by the late John Yang, who shot it in France during a tour of duty that included time playing with the 7th Army Symphony, as I discovered after contacting Yang's archives and connecting with his daughter, Naomi, a designer and founding member of the band Galaxie 500. She told me that the band Sigur Ros used a stencil version of the image, Blindman's Bluff, on its album ( ) -- but her dad never got officially credited or compensated. I love this story not because I want to stick it to Sigur Ros -- although it seems like they could stand some of that -- but because it suggests there are similarly deep stories around many of the images we find around us every day. I'm glad I spotted this rabbit hole on the side of a boxcar passing through Minneapolis and dove right in.

Happy 2012, all.