Miss Rockaway: Launch

The Miss Rockaway Armada's thrice-delayed send-off finally got underway yesterday. I missed the launch, but Star Tribune photographer Jeff Wheeler was there to capture their excessively accessorized departure and trip through the downtown Minneapolis lock and dam system. Photo gallery here.

Crawford Peace House stickers

Kyle at Bumperactive has created some beautifully designed stickers to support the Crawford Peace House, which was instrumental in hosting Cindy Sheehan and peace activists protesting the war in Iraq. Buy one here.

Y'alternative Snoop Dogg

I'm revealing my altcountry roots here (although I've always preferred the term cowpunk), but this is good: Snoop Dogg singing along with The Gourds' countrified cover of "Gin & Juice."

The kiss and the kiss off.

A folksy, low-fi aesthetic. Biting (or in this case kissing) political comment. Tyler's right: this float, showing Joe Lieberman getting smooched post-SOTU by Bush, is as good as any Thomas Hirschhorn sculpture I've seen.

Speaking of kissing: After losing the Connecticut primary to Democratic challenger Ned Lamont (thanks in part to the netroots), Lieberman is telling voters--not to mention the Democratic party--to kiss off by filing as an independent in the November election.

Gregory Blackstock: Everyday Anthropology

For a 25-year dishwasher at Seattle's Washington Athletic Club, Gregory Blackstock has an amazing skill set: he speaks 12 languages, has mastered the accordion (and can play just about every instrument he picks up), can do spot-on sound effects of dentist's drills and airplanes, and chronicles the objects of everyday life with exacting detail using only a Sharpie and gray crayons. Now retired, he's devoted himself full-time to his twin passions of music and his art, which consists of visual lists of everything from emergency vans and dangerous spiders to historic raceboat equipment and the varieties of Italian roosters. While he's a classic autistic savant, Blackstock's amazingly intricate drawings, because of their craft and obsessive vision, would surely be considered art by any measure. From the website of Garde Rail Gallery:

[H]is autism did not make him become an artist, nor is he an artist because of it… Through his art and his music, Gregory has effectively been able to combat this disability and to meet the challenge with fantastic results… Gregory's drawings are often large, on several sheets of paper pieced together by Greg with tape and glue. Using pencil, crayon, ink and marker, Gregory depicts insects and baskets with incredible precision, straight lines and test executed without the aid of a straight rule. The detail is minute, shading impeccable.

More: Seattle Post-Intelligencier, "Autistic artist brings a methodic intensity to his drawings"

Seattle Weekly, "Anthropologist of the Everyday"

Princeton Architectural Press, Blackstock's Collections: Drawings of an Autistic Savant

Images: The Art Supplies, The Classical Clowns, The Roofs, The Shears, The Hats, The Vacationers' Irish Castles

Transgenic tombstones.

As green burial become more popular, Archinect links to Biopresence, an art collaboration by Shiho Fukuhara and Georg Tremmel:

Biopresence creates Human DNA trees by transcoding the essence of a human being within the DNA of a tree in order to create "Living Memorials" or "Transgenic Tombstones". Biopresence is collaborating with scientist and artist Joe Davis on his DNA Manifold algorithm, which allows for the transcoding and entwinement of human and tree DNAs. The Manifold method is based on the naturally occurring silent mutations of base triplets, this means it is possible to store information without affecting the genes of the resulting tree. Biopresence Human DNA Trees do not modify the genes of an organism. Therefore, they are not genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Rabbit resurfaces

The galloping rabbit I posted on last week resurfaced today alongside Swoon's mural, both as a series of posters and as a stencil. The accompanying words, "boisterously disorderly," appear online mainly as the definition of the word "raucous." (If one googles "Raucous Rabbit," you get a page dedicated to Merlin, "The Thultan of THUMP!")

Swoon in Minneapolis

This piece by NYC-based artist Swoon was wheatpasted to an exterior wall of the fire-gutted Gustavus Adolphus Hall in South Minneapolis. As the glue wasn't sticking, I asked a screamy beer-holding woman to help me get a photo; she complied, but I didn't have the heart to publish it.

Miss Rockaway: David Ellis

Friday night we stopped by the Miss Rockaway launch site to check on their progress. The boat was shaping up for its Sunday launch (which we missed; anyone got pix?), and the Barnstormers had completed the installation of a few dozen custom-painted stereo speakers on either side of the Paul the Plumber's pedal-powered ferris wheel. Barnstormer and artist David Ellis joined me on the ferris wheel, which was amazing, especially as I arced up over the glass-calm Mississippi at 10 pm. Thanks to David (who, to my surprise, is a high school friend of Minneapolis-based dancer and friend Leah Nelson, and was here installing a rubberized break-dance floor with Sanford Biggers during the Walker's presentation of One Planet Under a Groove: Hip Hop and Contemporary Art) for the Barnstormers DVD; see his work--from motion paintings and graffiti-covered chicken houses to his multimedia installation Orchestrion-- here. Here's a sampling of his amazing work:

42-string guitar

From the fascinating Oddmusic.com. [via]

Little help from the locals?

I'm told that before she left town, Swoon did four wheatpaste works in Minneapolis: on the Midtown Greenway bike path, near the corner of Lake and 17th or 18th, downtown, and near a pedestrian bridge in Dinkytown. Minneapolis readers, if you find one, take a photo, send it my way paul(at)eyeteeth.org, and I'll post it, making you famous in a very, very small way.

Thanks.

New Interview: Doryun Chong on Rirkrit Tiravanija

At work today, I posted an interview with curator Doryun Chong on a recent Walker installation by Rirkrit Tiravanija, a "space-stage" inspired by Viennese architect Friedrich Kiesler's Raumbühne. The structure hosted a range of activities during the run of the exhibition, from karaoke battles (below) to a teen "un-prom" fashion show and a primer on surveillance by the Revolutionary Party. A taste:

For me, subversiveness is a problematic term because it's one of those kinds of words we use habitually. I think that's just the legacy of modernism. Impressionists were the first generation of modernists. Before them, the Realists, like Courbet, were completely subversive. In a sense, Modernism is a history of successive subversions: Impressionists followed by Fauvists and then Dada and Fluxus. It's also a kind of a patricidal, Oedipal kind of struggle, that you always have to subvert what comes before you. As this history of subversion accumulates like geological strata, at which point can you not subvert any more? At which point do you come back to the original point? I like to think that Rirkrit's work is completely aware of all the subversions that have happened and tries, perhaps, to swim in it. There's an incredible amount of respect and admiration in it, but it's on a very personal and intimate level. Duchamp and Joseph Beuys and Marcel Broodthaers, all these figures are, in a sense for him, not like statues of Lenin or Saddam that need to be toppled, but are instead more like living spirits that he communes with.

Astroturfing YouTube...

Interesting story via Stay Free!

The Wall Street Journal reports today that a spoof of Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth circulating via YouTube.com is not, in fact, by some moronic amateur but by Exxon's public relations firm.

Rabbit art

Any Minneapolitans know if this sign--spotted on the southwest corner of Loring Park--is street art, advertising, or some kind of warning sign ("Packer bunnies ahead")?

Miss Rockaway: Anchorman

A better view of Kevin's hair tattoo.

Miss Rockaway: Bike Ferris Wheel

The first go-round of the bicycle ferris wheel that'll float behind the armada. Built by Paul the Plumber.

Miss Rockaway: Chicken John

Chicken John is a local punk legend, a "character" even, in San Francisco. For the Miss Rockaway Armada, it was his bus--running on waste vegetable oil--that got everyone to the Twin Cities from New York. He's also in charge of the VW engines that'll power the rafts. As he says on his MySpace account--a sentiment echoed in this shot of him wielding propellers--"I am not one to be trifled with."

Pirate Utopia: Miss Rockaway in Minneapolis

The Miss Rockaway Armada couldn't have asked for a more apt staging ground for building and launching their multi-boat flotilla of sustainably powered crafts: a beautiful rocky beach spanning the properties of four homes. Looking out to the right is the Lowry Avenue bridge and, just beyond it, the smokestacks of Xcel Energy's Riverside Plant, the tenth worst-polluting site in Minnesota. Straight across is a scrap yard that crushes and packages rusty relics of cars, scrap, and heavy machinery. Down the street is a superfund site (as Ellery, a crew member remarks, "that’s superfund with a D not superfun like a party.").

But their impromptu society of 30 artists and activists from San Francisco, Seattle and New York does feel "superfun like a party." The group has been in town for a few weeks, building the functional and whimsical elements of their armada -- from barrel rafts to be powered by VW engines run on biodiesel to a custom-painted sound-system by the Barnstormers art collective, a sail made from discarded umbrella fabric to decorative panels by NYC street artist (and project cofounder) Swoon. Their goal: to float down the Mississippi from Minneapolis to St. Louis -- and, for some, New Orleans -- stopping to camp, give performances and demonstrations, meet people, and raise awareness of alternative ways of living and powering our lives.


Here's what Santiago, a Trinidadian New Yorker, had to tell me about the project and its participants:

What we are is urban, anarcho-environmentalist evangelists. We’re spreading the word of this new different way of life. It’s fair and even and vaguely ungendered — or less gendered than regular society. It’s sustainable to the extent we can be. It’s full of energy and exciting and DIY, and, yeah, we like to do things that seem impossible… It’s not political in the traditional sense of the word, but it’s political in the larger sense, in that we’re trying to create a social landscape here that’s unique from that of the norm.

Art critic Jerry Saltz says this great thing, something to do with the moment of awe in the history of art, where-by in the very beginning, when people were god-fearing for the most part, they made images of the gods and painted them in their chapels and churches, and they were looking up. After a couple of hundred years, people realized that the land existed and that the land was powerful. Shipping began and commerce began, and they discovered indies. They started looking outwards, they started looking at the land, and that was the reason for making art — looking out and seeing that. But it’s sort of come to this place now where it’s personal, and the moment of awe in art and in life, like this, is the interdependent relations between people. That’s what our time of history is defined by…. [River rafting] is the prototypical American thing to do, and as much as we disagree with the politics of the government that’s in power — I’m not saying we all do, but we disagree with certain aspects of the society we live in — but the thing we’re doing is as American as cars, apple pie, grandmothers…

But it's far from typical. Participants have come from various art collectives, from the activist art groups the Madagascar Institute and Visual Resistance to the radical marching bands Infernal Noise Brigade and Rude Mechanicals Orchestra, and backgrounds (Kevin works in an after-school program at an elementary school in New York, while Rebecca is studying public-interest law at CUNY).

What they all seem to share: a sense of community, fun, radical politics, and a degree of cultural autonomy. Kevin, whose bare torso is shaved to reveal an appropriately anchor-shaped patch of fur, says he was drawn to the project both through his affiliation with Visual Resistance and the Toyshop Collective and out of a desire to see parts of the country he's unfamiliar with via a new mode of transit.

“I’ve traveled in so many ways. I used to hop freights for years, I’ve hitchhiked. I’m used to subsisting on a very low income, and traveling by water is a new thing I haven’t done," he says.

But as I notice several flags flying above the boathouse at their host site -- one NASCAR, one Dale Earnhart, an American flag and the Minnesota state seal -- he adds, "I’m not particularly interested in going with the assumption that there’s an average mainstream culture, that people are just watching TV and not interacting with their surroundings, because I think that would be incredibly presumptuous. I want to go into it with an attitude of openness… People are people, and I’m sure there’s a lot of culture of self-subsistence along the river. And I always go into situations with a perspective that there’s something I can learn from it.”

That spirt of openness is held by just about everyone I met. As is a spirit of ingenuity.

Crew member Nick explains the personal appeal of the project: "I build a lot of weird, strange things for theater and for opera and the fashion industry, and I saw this project and saw the model, and I thought, this is completely impossible, and I want to be a part of it. I want to see how far this can actually go. I’m constantly amazed at the leaps and bounds forward."

True, the series of "15,000 steps" they've taken -- from a hugely successful art auction/fundraiser to modifying technologies for boat engines and last night's successful test of a just-for-fun bicycle ferris wheel that'll float behind the armada -- is pretty amazing. For a bunchy of "ragamuffins" (as Santiago jokingly calls the group), they're definitely organized.

Gillian sees links between her work with the band Infernal Noise Brigade and her involvement with Miss Rockaway: "I think it’s good to prove that people with radical politics can still be really organized. We have really tight uniforms and we march well and our songs are really good and we’re really organized, but we still have radical politics… I respect the way [armada participants] look at art and the world and that relationship, and how resources are used and reused and preserved, and the general idea of fun and celebration being a political statement, as well."

The ultimate inspiration is the pirate utopias of the Barbary Coast, as well as the voyages of The Floating Neutrinos, who famously sailed across the Atlantic in a scrap raft. Going the length of the Mississippi should be a comparatively easier ride -- one I wouldn't mind taking myself. To follow the progress of this "Floating Temporary Autonomous Zone" (as Kevin calls it), stay tuned here or visit the Miss Rockaway blog.

Images [top to bottom]: Santiago, umbrella sail, Kevin, detail of Swoon's art, Nick with Sharpie tattoo, bicycle ferris wheel.

For the purrsian gulf.

As Tom Moody says, "If everybody would just look at this [gif of a kitty trying to stay awake] every minute of every day, there'd be no more war."

SFW

Brilliant: workFRIENDLY reconfigures any website (except for Blogger's posting page, it seems) to look like an MS Word document, for easy web browsing without all the telltale last-ditch minimizing of browsers. Nice idea. Here's what Eyeteeth looks like through the app.

Via Metafilter.