Pogoshovels and Victory Gardens: Amy Franceschini at Gallery 16

The rhetoric of war loses meaning when the enemy's "last throes" are announced years before actual victory, and when the citizen "war effort" involves a presidential plea for more shopping.

So it's refreshing to see artists picking up the shells of apparently discarded terminology and refilling them. Case in point, Amy Franceschini's efforts to revive Victory Gardens, the citizen-maintained gardens of World War I and II that grew some eight billion pounds of food nationwide. On our last day in San Francisco this week, we dropped by Gallery 16 to see a show by Franceschini, a nice counterpoint to her work on view in SFMOMA's current 2006 SECA Art Award show.

A founding member of Free Soil and Future Farmers (she also contributed interviews to the book Land, Art: A Cultural Ecology Handbook and collaborated on the follow-the-money website They Rule), Franceschini's work melds activism, graphic design and community organizing. And gardening. For her Victory Gardens 2007 project, she created a system for San Franciscans to seed their own gardens in backyards, rooftops, and vacant lots through the help of seed banks, training, materials, and the ancillary publicity her art can bring. (Her pogo shovel, a Duchamp-meets-Beuys symbol of the fun of gardening, could be seen as emblematic of the project's goal of connecting pragmatism and play.)

Like Beuys or Tiravanija, Franceschini's work is environmental but also inherently process-based, a fact former (and future?) Green Party mayoral candidate Matt Gonzalez picked up on in a San Francisco Chronicle article (he helped Franceschini get the project off the ground). "Art is not all oil and canvas; it can be about the transformation of an idea," he said. "An artistic idea, which is like a political act, is now re-characterized as art."

Her G16 show features used (and restitched) gloves in pristine museum frames, seed bag labels, and a system the artist and Michael Swaine devised to recycle gray water and harvest rainwater for agricultural use (left). Her section of the SFMOMA show included the Bikebarrow, a flat-green bicycle fused with a wheelbarrow front, allegedly to be ridden by "secret gardeners."

The Victory Garden project has signed up gardeners at plots located in each of San Francisco's three microclimates (sun belt, fog belt, transition belt). Each garden team leader received a starter kit (delivered by a VG2007 tricycle), plus a lesson and follow-up instruction on harvesting and seed-saving. Three gardens is a great start, but well short of San Francisco's World War II Victory Garden production, when 200 gardens were maintained in Golden Gate Park alone.

But as VG2007 web site states, victory isn't about total domination but about connecting communities to each other and to their natural surroundings. It also defines "victory" in terms of "independence from corporate food systems," a definition of freedom presumably at odds with the one used by those prosecuting the war in Iraq.

Related: Practical propaganda: Amy Franceschini reinvents the Victory Garden

Practical propaganda: Amy Franceschini reinvents the Victory Garden

Ever since stumbling upon an exhibition by Amy Franceschini in San Francisco in 2007, I've wanted to talk with her about her artistic practice and, specifically, her mission to revive San Francisco's famed Victory Gardens program, which were used during the World Wars to grow food for citizens. Guest-blogging at Art:21 provided the perfect opportunity. The founder of Futurefarmers, Franceschini set out to create everything she needed to attract would-be gardeners and help them get started: seed kits, promotional propaganda posters, uniforms, and both symbolic and functional sculptures, hybrids like the "pogoshovel" and "bikebarrow" (above), which she calls "playful sculptural invitations."

An excerpt from Art:21:

Wanting to welcome the broadest range of people, she struggled with what role aesthetics should play in the project. “I tried to convince myself that aesthetics could get in the way of a potent message,” she remembers. “Some people maybe would only go to the surface and not go any further. And I think in the last couple of years I’ve tried to figure out a balance. If you look at Futurefarmers’ work, the aesthetic is always very strong, and that’s been a really positive thing. But I think it can also be a negative thing where certain people only see that surface layer…Right now I’m very much like: aesthetics are really important. That’s what people respond to, it lures people in, it lures in people who maybe wouldn’t have looked at it in the first place, and if they only get to that surface level, fine. At least they got there.”

She sees objects like the pogoshovel as propaganda in sculptural form. She wanted to create a “wonderful and fantastical image —that if someone saw a bike and a wheelbarrow connected, it would make them do a double-take,” she says. “Just to provoke people through a playful image was interesting to me.” (Some of these pieces are functional, as well. When a family is selected to be part of the program, the project delivers their starter materials, fittingly, via pedal-power in a VG Trike/Wagon.)

Read it all.

Bits: 02.09.10

Sue Coe, Helping Hands (2010), via Graphic Witness and Provisions Library

• The new issue of the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest includes Futurefarmers founder Amy Franceschini in discussion with Spanish organic farmer Javier Perez about "whether it's possible to undertake projects outside the market" and the "social banking" Perez and Coop 57 do.

• RIP Bob Noorda, designer of the NYC Subway's iconic signage.

• Art critic Jerry Saltz makes art cry: He says he took so long talking to a girl who was "performing" a Tino Seghal work at the Guggenheim that she broke down in tears. It's "the only time in my life I ever wrote a letter of abject apology to a work of art," he says.

• Read: Susan Sontag's 1967 essay, "The Aesthetics of Silence."

• A sculpture that endlessly tries to sell itself on eBay: "Every ten minutes the black box pings a server on the internet via the ethernet connection to check if it is for sale on the eBay. If its auction has ended or it has sold, it automatically creates a new auction of itself."

• Yes Man in Minneapolis: Mike Bonanno, co-founder of The Yes Men, will be in town for a screening of The Yes Men Fix The World this Friday night at Oak Street Cinema.

• Minimalist posters for Star Wars planets and moons -- like Endor!

• The haters at Westboro Baptist Church shouldn't have all the sign-making fun. And a WBC counter-protest outside Twitter headquarters gets delightfully absurd.

• Artboobs, via @TylerGreenDC.

Bits: 08.14.10

• SMSlingshot (above), "a handheld digital slingshot device for spreading information on public screens," is:

equipped with an ultra-high frequency radio, hacked arduino board, laser and batteries. Text messages can be typed on a phone-sized wooden keypad which is integrated in the also wooden slingshot. After the message is finished, the user can aim on a media facade and send/shoot the message straight to the targeted point. It will then appear as a colored splash with the message written within.

Here it is in action.

• The Takeaway interviews Roseanne Cash on famous parents, death and why it's hard to make great art when you're happy.

• The New York Times on museum directors pulling in big salaries, getting free housing, and not having to pay taxes on the value of that housing. Via Unbeige.

• Conference: The Creative Time Summit: Revolutions in Public Practice, Oct. 9-10, NYC, with presentations by Futurefarmers' Amy Franceschini, Minneapolis-based FEAST organizer Jeff Hnilicka, experimental geographer Trevor Paglen, curator Nato Thompson, Superflex, Eyal Weizman, and others. Via Greg.org.

• A job for you: The Brooklyn Museum's hiring an associate editor.

• Event: Lewis Hyde, the anthropologist who wrote the excellent books The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property and Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art is coming to the Walker on Sept. 2 to discuss his new book, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership.

• A statue of Hernan Cortés, the conquistador who conquered the Aztec empire, was splashed with red paint in Medellín, Spain (before, after), and a vandalized Louise Bourgeois sculpture is leaving New Orleans.

• Love it: Gumball machines filled with seed-bombs.

Bits: 03.02.09

A map of "Philippe Gonzalvez Island" via Strange Maps.

• MoMA has fired ad guy Doug Jaeger for authorizing Poster Boy to alter its ads in a Brooklyn subway station. As Gawker puts it, "MOMA has 'completely severed' its relationship with Jaeger, because he went and let this stupid artist mess up their perfectly good ads."

• "You never call, you never write..." Jackie Chan is tired of waiting for Hong Kong to respond to his request for a site to exhibit seven antique homes he owns (including one that's 480 years old). He's been asking for a decade, to no avail. When he asked Singapore officials if they were interested, they got back to him in a week.

• Following up my Art:21 post on Amy Franceschini's Victory Gardens project in San Franscisco, here's an in-depth interview with the artist in the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest. (Thanks, Kelly.)

• Paddy Johnson declares Art in America "officially relevant" for hiring former Curbed.com San Francisco editor Sarah Hromack as its managing editor for online. She's in turn brought in writers like Grammarpolice's Kriston Capps and Paul Laster of Artkrush. (Kriston has more.) My suggestion for giving them more relevance: Add RSS!

• The trailers for the documentary Brooklyn DIY (via updownacross) and for Art Spiegelman's new collection of sketchbooks, Be a Nose!

• A gallery of bad paintings of Barack Obama.

Farmadelphia

Farmadeliphication (fahr'muh'deli'fi'kay'shun), n. 1. The process of turning all of Philadelphia's vacant and abandoned lots into urban farms: The 'Farmadeliphication' of once decrepit buildings into farm structures advances fresh ways of seeing old structures as well as allowing for an organic transformation of history that contributes to the present day fabric. 2. What might happen if the Front Studio team's entry to the Urban Voids competition moves beyond the conceptual stage.

Farmadelphia proposes a break down of the divisions between ecology and the built environment - a pretty standard mission among urban revitalization advocates these days. But Front's vision doesn't merely sprinkle a community garden here and there; they want to Farmadelphify the whole city...

Inhabitat, possibly my new favorite blog, has more.

And: Gizmodo interviews artist Amy Franceschini, cofounder of Free Soil and Futurefarmers.

Art/ecology blogroll additions

A few new ones: Free Soil, "an international hybrid collaboration of artists, activists, researchers and gardeners who take a participatory role in the transformation of our environment," by artists Amy Franceschini, Nis Rømer, Stijn Schiffeleers, and Joni Taylor; and Strange Weather, "a resource hub about climate change for artists, writers and activists," by First Pulse Projects. Also, a shout out to Pruned, a journal on landscape architecture and related fields.