“Courage is the great enabling virtue that allows one to realize other virtues like love and hope and faith. To have courage is to be willing to look unflinchingly at catastrophic circumstances and muster the will to overcome the fear, never to fully erase and eliminate the fear but overcome the fear, so that fear does not have the last word or so that fear does not push one into conformity, complacency or cowardice. ”- Cornel West

I don’t know how to be courageous. I don’t think that I am now but I know, at least I feel, that I must be in order to make it through this moment. Recent months have seen us, as Americans, wrestling with the baseline hatred and oppression that we had so naively believed we had moved beyond, a desire we know now to be a desperate fantasy. I believe Cornel West to be true when he tells us that courage will lead us to other virtues, other strengths that might enable us to not only make it through our time but to imagine a real alternative, a utopian dream no farther than our beds. What I mean to describe here is not a kind of free imagination but, as Žižek has described, “a matter of the innermost urgency”, an imagined alternative to a situation whose solution is so far outside the coordinates of the possible that one is forced to imagine an alternative space.

There is a courage to performance, as there is a courage to poetry and criticism, to those forms whose goals, from the outset, are a freshly imagined future. Not just the courage of those taking to embodied action but a courage to witness those acts. A willingness to be changed by something, to allow oneself to feel what John Martin calls muscular sympathy. A kind of sixth sense that gives the viewer access to the work through the performers body. Not simply the courage of the stage but the courage of the street and bar. The courage to stand beside one another, to allow oneself to feel responsible for each other, for ourselves. Too often the heady dialogues surrounding the production of aesthetic experience call to mind a kind of aimless drifting identity. An abstract subject, tethered to nothing and no one, submerged in the machinic realities of our time but this is not true for all of us. For those of us operating from a place of difference, whose lives are not simply shaped but are out right controlled by social and economic oppression,  there are other ways of being. New ways to gather, to love, to share. New economies. Strategies of resistance. Alternatives simultaneously imagined and enacted between sweaty down beats on crowded dance floors in rooms that are forced to accommodate us as we are.

I wish that I could tell you how to be courageous, that I had some great strategy for us, but I don’t know. All I have is a feeling of urgency, a sensation that drives me towards hope, towards an alternative. I can tell you that the work will be courageous and that with it so will we. I can tell you now that we will be in this together, as a community, as a collective. We who feel strongly, we will be the ones to make a practice of resistance. To turn ourselves towards a tumultuous present of catastrophic circumstances, where revolution and change are palpable events, the tyranny of unaccountable elites runs rampant, and the violence of our city howls just beyond our walls. We will be the ones to turn towards this moment, our moment, to face our oppressors courageously for each other.

“Who will fight the bear? No one? Then the bear has won.”  - Bas Jan Ader

Last week we talked painters on and off the podcast! Featuring interviews and studio visits with Everest Hall, Mara Baker and Steven Husby — in addition to our usual treasure trove of cultural insights….Here’s a play by play —

Amanda Browder, interviews painter Everest Hall, who describes (among other things) the value of being raw in the studio:

“There is a responsibility that comes with being an artist to be naked and open and free. Let’s bring the audience to another place. Come with me. On this journey, I don’t know where we are going, but I see a clearing in the woods. Let’s go for a walk together and maybe make love in a pine forest. I think that sounds delicious.“

The week began with our latest guest contributor, Jaime Kazay. Kazay co-curates the Revolving Door Reading Series has a poetry collection out from  Dancing Girl Press. This week she reflects on all things Barbie, asking a question I have continued to trip over all week — “I wonder if Barbie likes peanut butter?.”

Duncan and Richard made appearances on a WBEZ panel featuring a “panel of local critics [discussing] their role in the new media landscape.” #fahntsie

I reposted a little sumthin’ sumthin’ from Triple Canopy (<3 <3 <3)

New York correspondent Juliana Driever published an interview with Social Practice Queens (SPQ), “a collaboration of the Art Department of CUNY Queens College and the Queens Museum of Art with the goal of developing an MFA pilot program in Social Practice.” Here is one excerpted Q&A:

“Juliana Driever: Unlike other social practice MFA programs, SPQ is in direct partnership with a major museum, which is a unique set-up for an MFA program to start, but even more so given that much socially-engaged art typically takes place beyond museum and gallery contexts. Does the QMA’s investment in this program also signal a shift in the role that museums play in support of such work?

“Prerana Reddy/Jose Serrano: At the Queens Museum of Art, we are constantly striving to examine whether the avant-garde in the realms of art and politics can actually meet. Can an art project simultaneously address aesthetics and concrete social goals in public space? This is a constantly evolving process, one that must be responsive to shifting demographics, economic conditions, political will, unplanned crises, and a constantly unfolding definition of art. Unlike the confines of the gallery or contracted set of artistic services rendered in non-museum spaces, engaging in complicated social relations in the “real world” involves a surrender of control over outcome as well as some amount of risk. This is not something that all museums want to enter into or are well-positioned to do.”

Monica Westin, wrote about Mara Baker, Mara Baker, “a self-described student of deterioration and residue” about her upcoming show at Sidecar:

“In the ‘residue’ series, spray paint and glass create transparent layers that give recycled materials ‘a new history,’ Baker says, ‘creating a sense of space without building up.’ She’s deeply interested in the interplay between the real and the representational in mixed-media work, and the paintings often employ representational images like blurred photographs that formally reference abstract elements. Where previous two dimensional work has been sculptural in its formal approach, she finds such materials can create space and depth without losing the surface of the picture plane. ‘Still, I’m most successful when piling, wrapping, and removing something.’ She points out a few paintings that have abstract white space, either scraped off or added to the top of her layered images—what Baker calls ‘the conceal, something underneath you can’t see’ that creates somewhat ‘quieter objects.’”

Stephanie Burke’s TOP 5 Baby!

Some great coverage from another new contributor Robert Burnier this week. Burnier took the time to review Steven Husby’s show, BRUTE FORCe at 65 Grand, “a studied exercise in emergence and the way that severe restrictions can somewhat paradoxically throw subtle expression and gesture into great relief.” In a subsequent interview with Burnier, Husby says:

“I would say that I’ve flirted with pictorial recursivity, deductive structure, and something like absolute opacity for years. The house–painterly way I work really started in undergrad as something to aspire to and something to work against. A kind of pop–inflected formalism was in the air – and I was young and impressionable. Over time I’ve generally found it to be worthwhile to give myself over to the more excessively restrained aspects of my practice, probably because I’m not a particularly neat, linear, or orderly person, but I like what happens when I try to behave as though I were. I think I was first attracted to limits both as things to provide traction and as things to be subverted in some way. I found as soon as I practiced these things, the force generated through restraint was greater than I could ever achieve without it. The channeling, focusing, and projecting of force – whether from inside or out – is absolutely key to the whole project.”

Kickstarter is bandied about once more, as Adrienne Harris discusses the ethics of Zach Braff’s recent success in raising money for his film, on his terms”

“I worry that the success of campaigns like Zach Braff’s… is going to change the way that studios and producers expect ALL film to be financed in the future. I worry that I will take my next screenplay into a meeting which I am lucky enough to score with Sony Picture Classics and they will say, ‘We love it Adrienne. Now come back with $2 million and we’ll see what we can do.’”

Which seems like the self-same conversation that came up a while back as far as art institutions go — will government funding similarly dry up in lieue of these public charity campaigns? Which I suppose furthers the question: who is responsible for footing the bill in creative enterprises? Where do we draw the line between entrepreneurial investment, friendship pennies, fans pitching in, and government support?

Public Collectors is a self-proclaimed paper blog, as well as a website and Tumblr feed, that seeks to archive and make freely available material that may have no other venue: lists, conversations, collages, notes, fliers, temporary tattoos, classified ads, etc. “Public Collectors” is library, museum, zine, reference center, and studio simultaneously (and probably – necessarily – it is more then that as well).

I may have been largely attracted by the gold sparkly cover when I picked up a copy of “Public Collectors” at Zine Fest a few weeks ago. The glittery paper is wonderfully complemented by the diagram of a fragmented and grimacing human face – shown both frontally and in profile, and topped by the caption “FEELING AND EMOTION IN EVERYDAY LIFE” (the image is scanned from “Psychology: The Fundamentals of Human Adjustment,” published 1946).

A disparate and well curated collection of images and ephemera, it includes such gems as a handmade flier for a lost hat, and a photo of a sign featuring an image of the drag queen Divine.

The project is run by Marc Fischer of Temporary Services. The material included is gleaned from Fischer’s own collections, but also is donated for public accessibility. The website version of “Public Collectors” is an amazing reference for – well, probably things that you didn’t know you had to be referred to yet but maybe, somehow, you always wanted to be. It has links to a woman’s blog on which she has posted PDFs of all her notes from college, a link to a fantastic video of Danzig discussing his book collection, a link to photos someone posted somewhere on the internet of the inside of their mother’s house (she’s a hoarder). There is a list of links to web documented collections, including cigarette lighters, “do not  disturb” signs, hip hop party fliers, the sound of cats purring (a personal favorite of mine), pictures of celebrities playing tennis, and creatively designed periodic tables. The world is a wonderful place.

I don’t know what Fischer’s curatorial restraints are – perhaps it’s purely intuitive – but the general trend is towards subcultural ephemera, such as the poster for an Alice Cooper tribute band or the page from “New Dominant,” a British publication of dominatrix classifieds.

What strikes me most about “Public Collectors” is the nurturing formation of alternative collections – collections based on, formed and informed by a unique and maybe not coherently logical set of interests or constraints. I don’t know if I entirely agree with Fischer’s assertion in his curatorial statement that the material in “Public Collectors” is passed over by libraries and museums. I myself work in a library where one of my responsibilities is to file additions to our collection of ephemera related to the history of printing. This includes finely printed broadsides and prospectuses, but also just a lot of what would generally be classified as junk mail. Additionally, several collections from CPLs Harold Washington Library are referenced; the cover of the collection of non-musical recordings in included in the issue I own.

Also, an interview with the former curator of Harold Washington’s picture collection is included on the website in a download-able PDF booklet.

I think more to the point is the culling of these materials from their disparate locales into new aggregate collections. It is this method of collecting – both a relic of the victorian era and/or a focused re-interpretation of the image overload received daily from the internet and digital media – that is not fostered by many institutions. It is D.I.Y. collecting at it’s finest and most articulate. In scanning these images and re-blogging them, I guess I am adding “Public Collectors” to my own collection, and to the collection that is Bad at Sports.

Bailey Romaine is a printmaker and bibliophile (and maybe a collector of sorts) currently living in Chicago.

I am typically one who shies away from meaning. I am more interested in use and value. What might we do with dance, for example, or how might we begin to revalue devalued objects and methodologies? Meaning, as Avital Ronell has pointed out, has “historically and intellectually very often had fascist and non-progressivist edges, if not a core.” Meaning is a preventative measure that keeps difference from gaining mobility, from entering into dominant culture. It for that reason that I find value in the usefulness of things, it is through an understanding of use that we might better grasp how to counter various forms of power, to develop tactics and strategies of resistance.

“I tell you, old weapons go rotten: make some new ones and shoot accurately.“ – D.H. Lawrence.

I am typically one who shies away from discussing meaning, I say typically because it is in this moment that I am motivated, after reading an article by another Bad at Sports contributor on ASCO, Kitsch, and The Foreigner, to discuss the meaning of terms like “Kitsch” and “Foreigner”. To discuss how the use of these terms, along with the meanings ascribed to them, perpetuate misrepresentation and misunderstandings of the unique legacies of those being labeled as “Kitsch” or “Foreign”.

The Los Angeles based  art collective, ASCO, have been the subject of numerous exhibitions and publications. They have emerged and reemerged several times over, as museums and curators, become more and less interested in the experience and expression of the Chicano movement and the art it created. ASCO, which translates into English as nausea, operates in multiple mediums but are perhaps best known for their performance and film works which have an activist tendency.

ASCO formed in 1972 at time in which the Chicano movement in the southwest began to gain traction. Chicano, while a somewhat contested term, is used here to described those “born from the blood of the Spanish sword and the Indian temple.” It is a term used to describe politicized Mexican-Americans, who, while born on American soil, are attempting to reclaim a lost indigenous heritage. I point this out to remind us of the complexity of citizenship.

For those of non-white heritages the price of assimilation, even if the encounter between indigenous population and colonizer is no longer conscious in the minds of formerly free subjects, was no less than entire histories of colonized civilizations. While it is true that some empires opted to incorporate the beliefs of the colonized, more often than not, the role of the colonizer was to eradicate these histories through the use of fear, language, brutality, and the introduction of ownership and property. For some Mexican-Americans, particularly those in the southwest, the relationship between country of origin and chosen (or not) country of occupation is complicated by the redrawing of borders that occurred following civil and national wars. Texas for example was under Mexican rule until independence, at which time it became a sovereign nation, until of course it is made a part of The United States of America. How are we to describe the generations who lived through this transition? Mexicans? Texans? Americans? It’s also important to keep in mind is that freedom, independence and statehood is won only for landowners and the ruling elite. It wouldn’t be until the Chicano movement, when there is a shift in consciousness among America’s Hispanic population, that greater political mobility would be attempted by farm workers and urban dwellers living below the poverty line.

What does it mean then to label these Americans, many of whom are several generations into citizenship, as “Foreigners”? And what might one mean by “Foreigner”? If given the benefit of the doubt, one would have to suspect, as ridiculous as it may be, that the “Foreigner” would designate an other outside of one’s own country. That is a person who, after having developed up to a certain point abroad in some expansive global void, has found their way onto one’s Country of origin, whatever that might mean. Of course one could also consider the “The Foreigner” as a position from which one chooses to operate. This might be used to express some deep feeling of otherness rooted within an individual’s psyche. A feeling of not belonging, of being outside. A feeling that might motivate individuals to look towards an eradicated heritage as a place from which to become empowered. We could consider this a strategy of self-making. My point here is that in any scenario, imagined or unimagined, “Foreigner” means not from here. Here being the place of the main subject, the one speaking, the one in an ultimate position of power. It is a designation of otherness that indicates one’s place as not belonging. This is an internalized reality. One that is difficult to escape from.  Even if one were to use the term with good intentions in an attempt to illuminate some greater understanding of how typical Americans understand particular histories through Art, to label some Americans as foreign because they have a different heritage and speak a language other than English, is to perpetuate an understanding of American citizenship that excludes not only non-whites, but anyone who has a legacy of speaking a language other than English.

The article I am writing in response to, is not only guilty of ostracizing and essentializing an entire social group, of which ASCO is a part, but manages to dehumanize them as well. It does this in an attempt to describe the way in which “U.S. Culture” looks to the “Foreigner” as a “Kitsch” figure. They are “thing-like.” Again, I am left to ponder what might be meant by such an accusation.

“Kitsch” tends to be used to describe the mass produced, market driven, empty object that in some conversations has historically represented  the aesthetic of “low” culture. Putting aside the unproductive binary of “High” and “Low” for a moment, designations that do nothing but contribute to a cultural value system that has slowly been dismantled over the last 20 plus years of Art Historical and Cultural criticism. The use of the term “Kitsch” here is not attempting to subvert a traditional hierarchy but instead seems to imply that “Americans” still feel this way. To be more accurate, it seems to suggest that White Americans of a certain statue feel as though non-English speaking non-whites are “thing-like“. If this is true, it is a reality only because it has been written into being. “Kitsch” as a go to term to describe the work of a group like ASCO, while it may be attempting to speak to pervasive cultural opinions, does nothing but legitimize their work through a traditional hierarchical system of value. This is to say, that while they may be “thing-like”, we’ve been given the go ahead by the author to appreciate them as “things.”

The power of what we do as cultural critics and producers lies in our ability to make real our aspirations. Our power lies in our ability to simultaneously imagine and enact realities. This is the reason why, so many of us are drawn to the work of groups like ASCO, because they made real the nausea they felt in a time of war and social strife. The plight of the Chicano movement is not some isolated “Foreign” experiment. It is a social movement against violence, oppression, and unnecessary death, during a time in which other American collectives were also publicly struggling for their livelihood.

“But these forms of persistence and resistance still take place within the shadow-life of the public, occasionally breaking out and contesting those schemes by which they are devalued by asserting their collective value. So, yes, the ungrievable gather sometimes in public insurgencies of grief, which is why in so many countries it is difficult to distinguish the funeral from the demonstration. “ – Judith Butler

To banalize them, to other them, is to render them powerless, to prevent their history from becoming American history. It is to prevent their struggle from being incorporated into the democratic pursuit. The struggle of the Chicano movement means too much to let that happen.

Rachel Whiteread, “Untitled (Library)” (1999) installed at Hirshhorn. Dental plaster from polystyrene mold and steel mounting.

So you may have noticed that I’ve started posting a “week in review” column — as a way to tie different posts together and map what has taken place on Bad at Sports. Usually I post this column over the weekend — on Saturday or Sunday. However, this week/end I was out of town, so even though Mondays are about moving on and looking forward, I thought I’d pause to look back a moment. And, unlike my usual style, this week I’m going to go BACKWARDSzzzz.

The theme I found had to with books and book love and catalogues and the material of records.

Caitlin Warner, “The Commodity, (image courtesy of SPARE)

Bailey Romaine (Happy Birthday, Bailey!) posted a really lovely interview between herself and SPARE, an artist residency and bookmaking project in Chicago’s SouthSide. It is run out of Kyle and Shannon Schlie’s apartment, where the two have reserved one room for artists to live and another for their Risograph printer — which, btw, I deeply deeply covet. As a lover of artist-run-project spaces, a bibliofile and a bookmaker, you can imagine why I would get so excited about this conversation. At one point Kyel Schlie says:

I came to books through art, so I often think of them in that context. Because I’m interested in how objects, and the ideas they carry, move and live in the world, books open up a lot of options that aren’t as likely for other art-type things. I feel like books have a potentially wider, or at least different, reach that interests me. Books circulate, books are distributed, and so on, which to me, feels like an exciting active process; one which I would like to take beyond just books.

Liz Sales, “Steam,” 2010

Carrying on with the theme of books, Monica Westin interviewed Jessica Cochran, Columbia’s Curator of Exhibitions and Programs at the Center for Book and Paper Arts Gallery, about their current show  “Structures for Reading: Text, (Infra)Structure, and the Reading Body in Contemporary Art,” — which opens up the conversation about artist books per se, connecting them to the body and the process of reading:

 Now that the physical book’s very existence is in flux once again, the discourse around their fate and role in our lives is, one might suggest, incongruent to their reality as inanimate objects. If you read or listen to discourse around disappearing bookshops, or talk to a reader who is defiantly holding out against that “inevitable” Kindle purchase, you’ll find that these conversations are incredibly passionate—it’s like we think of these books as living things! This helps explain the currency of the book itself as a visual signifier of our contemporaneity, or what Terry Smith calls, “our passing present” particularly when it is sited within contemporary art projects.

Stephanie Burke did it again with everybody’s favorite Top 5 Weekend Picks.

Thea Liberty Nichols posted about The Stockyard Institute, using a text that will be published in  an upcoming catalogue about their work, translating their very material, installation and situational interests into a book. In her closing paragraph, Nichols writes:

From the beginning, SI’s students have also been their teachers. Through a marriage of art and politics, they have acted transparently, embraced inclusivity, and stayed true to their belief that there’s plenty to go around. Above all, they appreciate a good spectacle, and this has been their trademark maneuver for reeling us in. The deal is sealed however, as soon as we realize that, through sheer force of will, they have the power to transform the ideal into the real.

California 17 January 2006: Had a last meal of buffalo steak, a bucket of KFC white-meat-only chicken, sugar-free pecan pie, sugar-free black walnut ice cream, Indian pan-fried bread and whole milk (ice cream was left out one hour to thaw, and turned into a milkshake by hand).

I felt like there was a interesting, ambient connection between SI’s interest in material, and the presence of books this week (which I’ve started to think more generally as records, or placeholders of memory) in Julie Green’s work — a Northwest artist that Sarah Margolis-Pineo interviewed. Green has been working on an on-going series of blue and white paintings on porcelain dishes, painting the last meals inmates:

Corvallis-based painter Julie Green has opted to address the deeply flawed system of capital punishment head on. Her ongoing series, The Last Supper, has been a twelve-year pursuit to reveal the humanity on death row through intimate portraits of last meal requests painted on ceramic plates.

The plates, currently numbering 500, are a dissonant accumulation of lives lived and lost. Displayed in clusters along the perimeter of The Arts Center, (Corvallis, OR), each constellation speaks to an ad hoc arrangement of family portraits, a domestic sensibility that is amplified ten-fold by the use of readymade tableware as canvas. Despite the gravity of the subject matter, there is a touch of whimsy to Green’s project. Her meticulously rendered pizza slices, honeybuns, and hamburgers are most often completed without any visual referent. Filtered through the artist’s memory, the foods are imbued with an illustrative quality that borders on cartoony, speaking to the endearing texture of Maira Kalman rather than the inherent gloom of the memento mori. Further, each object in The Last Supper is painted in the tradition of blue-and-white china, a hue that is simultaneously absurd and significant, drawing from one of the most recognized traditions in ceramic worldwide, from Jingdezhen ware to Willowware.

The Last Supper, an exhibit with 500 of these aforementioned plates will be exhibited at The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, (Eugene, OR), in March, and travel to The Art Gym, (Portland, OR), in April, 2013.

California 17 January 2006: Had a last meal of buffalo steak, a bucket of KFC white-meat-only chicken, sugar-free pecan pie, sugar-free black walnut ice cream, Indian pan-fried bread and whole milk (ice cream was left out one hour to thaw, and turned into a milkshake by hand).

I reposted an essay about performance by Amy Sherlock, and strangely feel like it also ties in to this overview, or memorialization or events particularly as it pertains to performance. She writes: “The Abramovic phenomenon in particular has come to exemplify the complicated alliance between performance, the museum, and institutional and commercial gallery spaces. For all its professed immediacy and the emphasis on the ephemeral ‘present,’ MoMA did a good job of packaging up  ’the moment’ and circulating it. There are photographs, official catalogue and the feature-length film.” Which is exactly what books do, or (it would seem) plates.

Last, but certainly not least — there was a great hub-bub on Monday between the lush and vibrant images of Paul Germanos and Dana Bassett’s Edition #3 of T (Guess what’s Trending: COUPLES), with a new and fancy pants layout that makes it feel almost like a print publication.

As always — thanks for reading, Chicago et al. We Love You.

Stay Tuned for some writing on performance, Object Oriented Ontology, New York, London, and more coming up this week.