Bad Moon Rising

The United States of America is both a nation and an idea. Since its inception, the nation has built itself around contradictory narratives such as freedom and imperialism, justice and oppression, opportunity and classism, or creativity and cultural hegemony to name a few. Two international curators working in the U.S., Jan Van Woensel and Hou Hanru, examine the icon of the United States and apply their unique perspectives in concurrent exhibitions within the country in question.

Ben Shaffer and DJ VIOLENT VICKI, Mixed media sound machine by Ben Shaffer

Belgian curator Jan Van Woensel orchestrated the dense and eclectic Bad Moon Rising at Silverman Gallery. Purporting to expose the underside of America, this exhibition dwells on works that are counter examples to the image of America as a freedom-loving, democracy-exporting, hyper-capitalist, city on a hill. The works in the exhibition fight for your attention- multiple audio pieces compete at high volume, viewing spaces for videos overlap, paintings lean backwards against the wall, empty shelves and artworks on the floor clog walkways. Some works rise above the cacophony- Ben Shaffer and DJ Violent Vicki's giant stereo system mounted on a tricycle is charming in its homemade sincerity. The exhibition includes found and produced objects in addition to artworks, like some sort of contemporary wunderkammer, including a Rage Against the Machine track, the controversial pixel-porn Atari 2600 game Custer's Revenge, and a vinyl banner printed with a Tariq Ali quote. Vennesa Albury and Marte Fortun's performative intervention Primal Scream is documented in triplicate within the exhibition. On February 28 2007 the artists traversed New York and delivered single primal screams in random locations. In the main space, unobtrusive speakers periodically break the flow of the gallery with a blood curdling scream. Video monitors in the second room document the artists' travels though Central Park between screams in tandem continuous point-of-view shots. To codify the intervention as contemporary art, Van Woensel published a press release the following day declaring the action to be an artwork. This seems to be an unnecessary assertion both politically and conceptually, which ultimately undermines the intervention itself. To meet their objective, the screams needed to instill alarm and fear as they broke the social norms of city life. By formally defining them as artworks via a press release they became institutionalized performances, robbing them of their destabilizing potential and rendering them as simply safe.

Custer's Revenge, Mystique, 1982

In the accompanying essay Van Woensel says the exhibition is "a show about the Americans, for the Americans," which begs the questions: Which Americans? And what are you actually telling them? The works in the exhibit are not intended to educate, rather they push an idea of a dark cultural undercurrent that exposes the hypocrisy and hubris of the righteously outspoken nation. While most of the gallery attendees in the Dogpatch may recognize that the United States image of freedom is false, they certainly understand that the polyglot of cultures that make it up paint a dark picture. In most cases they are part of that darker picture by deliberate choice. This exhibition is beyond preaching to the choir- it's trying to tell the choir what a song is. Bad Moon Rising presents violence, sex, rock and roll, suicide, etc. as evidence of the underside of America. Unfortunately the exhibit does not make a successful argument, its meaning ends in a culture of debauchery and despair. Without the curatorial interventions in the form of essays, press releases and the printed banner, the show fails to communicate its primary objectives. The United States has a history of cultural dissent as long as its history of political self-righteousness. Van Woensel's aggressive hand demonstrates that Duchampian principles of art making do not directly correlate to curatorial practice. You can classify anything as art because art's fungible definition allows it; but the same is not true for what the artwork actually means. Meaning is created by the tangible specifics of the work in conjunction with its context. To use a sloppy analogy, you can take an elephant and call it art -and it will be- but calling it an eagle will not make it fly. While the critique of the image of America is pushed onto this group of artworks, the works lend themselves more to a melancholy survey of countercultural behavior than a subversion of the image of the United States.

In the Walter and McBean Galleries of the San Francisco Art Institute, Jens Haaning's United States of America and Other Stories looks into the United States in the era of globalization. The exhibition was curated by Hou Hanru, the Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs at SFAI, better known for his work on the Istanbul Biennale. Unlike the density of Bad Moon Rising, the show consists only of 5 works sparsely spread in the cavernous galleries. The primary oblong gallery is empty except for a site specific wall painting United States of America, which consists only of its title in black block type. This work challenges the construct of the U.S. directly. Its scale dominates every activity in the gallery, creating a feeling of cultural power, yet the text's simplicity allows only a fleeting feeling of understanding. The words form a geopolitical Rorschach blot, projecting back only the meaning the viewer places in them.

Pieces of paper can hold great power inordinate to their simple materiality. Artists like to equate this to the power of the persuasive image, which can be true, but the primary power of flimsy paper is money. Collected masterpieces are seeded by the quality of the work, but their astronomical values are purely financial speculation. In a second gallery off of the main space, a simple work on paper radiated a power unavailable to the typical artwork. American Passport, Valid until 29.7.2012 is simply that, a valid American passport unaltered in any way by the artist except to present it as a readymade. Its value is beyond aesthetics, fashion, art history, or money. A passport is the closest thing to a physical vessel of citizenship, and acts as a key to accessing all of its privileges. The presentation of it here not only denies its owner its use, but practically invites its acquisition and exploitation by another. As a regular museum attendee, one becomes accustomed to looking at objects that can be worth millions of dollars, allowing for a suspension of disbelief into the viewing experience of the work alone. The passport, however, resists the illusions of presentation and can only be seen as a manifestation of the United State's cultural and economic power. Its utility becomes a focal point of the colliding ideas of the United Sates, a locus point of economics and identity. This categorical difference of raw power makes this readymade one of the most transgressive artworks presented in years.

The curatorial strategies of these two exhibitions are revealing of the relationships curators cultivate with the work they promote. The question is one of trust: does the work advance the agendas they desire? There is a limit to how much context a curator can place upon the works in an exhibition. Artworks are rebellious little creatures, manically reaching out and communicating in unexpected ways. Just because you want them to say something doesn't make it so. Van Woensel adopted a 'more-is- more' approach, cultivating his argument out of a cacophonous hive. Hou Hanru trusted the art to tangle the viewer in its deceptively simple complexities.

Michael Rakowitz: Enemy Kitchen

"I view my projects as performing a necessary disturbance or jolt in everyday experience that will maybe slowly change our relationship to a crisis or a problem."
- Michael Rakowitz -

Who knew that the journey of a truck full of dates could render in such poignant terms peoples lives and connections with Iraq? But these rarified khestawi dates, one of over a hundred cultivated varieties, as artist Michael Rakowitz claims, came from the Hilla region of Iraq and were therefore some of the finest on earth. They were the delicious subject of an engrossing slide presentation, though not really, forgive us, the “meat and potatoes” of our experience. We were in the home of Triple Base Gallery co-director, Joyce Grimm, and this was temporarily at least Michael’s Enemy Kitchen, a kind of social practice art based around cooking and eating as a group.

A glass of wine in hand, we were urged to join the group in the kitchen, where branded “Michael Rakowitz: Enemy Kitchen” aprons were donned, ours for the keeping, each emblazoned with the Iraqi flag. Michael’s family are Iraqi Jews and he was born in Brooklyn. Currently he teaches at Northwestern University, Chicago and was visiting the Bay Area as part of a residency at the Montalvo Art Center. This residency was under the umbrella of their “Iraq: Reframe,” an ambitious series of events, performances and talks sponsored by Montalvo and other organizations to explore "the significance of the current circumstances of Iraq in a global and historical context." The recipes we’d be preparing were inherited from the artist’s mother, and included amba and kubba bamia. One was a fresh salad, full of onion and peppers, similar to many Mediterranean salads. Another was a breaded meatball, boiled in broth, which also brought to mind hearty Hungarian meals. But why cook?

The humor of Enemy Kitchen is obvious and the diffusing of tensions implicit in food preparation is self-evident. But there’s more. Enemy Kitchen began as a kind of subversion, a subversion of the American popular media’s portrayal of the country of Iraq as an impersonal, almost video-game-like perpetual battlefield, dehumanizing and conducive to apathy. Enemy Kitchen is an attempt to kindle the imagination of participants to envision the quotidian lives, mostly marked by shared meals, of real people who pass down recipes and share stories. To this end, the overall project, we learned from the artist, has expanded into New York’s schools, where Rakowitz teaches children how to cook these recipes. Many of these children have relatives serving in the military in Iraq. Ultimately, the experience humanizes the mixture, the border of American and Iraqi cultures, through an experience rather than an argument, through eating rather than violence or images related to bloodshed.

Before returning to the kitchen to chop and mix, we were invited to watch a slide lecture in the living room. On a large screen Rakowitz shared a previous project centered on the aforementioned sweet Iraqi dates. We learned of the long history of cultivated dates in the region and of all forms of cultural dissemination from Mesopotamia, within present day Iraq. Brief history lessons were punctuated by the artist’s personal experiences, such as his meetings with Dr. Donny George, former President of the Iraq State Board of Antiquities and Heritage and Director General of the National Museum in Baghdad, who fled the country and recently took up residence in New York. We learned of Rakowitz’s research into his own family’s history and a business his grandfather had run in New York, one he now revived as a rather elaborate piece of social art.

Many of Rakowitz’s projects exist just as comfortably in the "real world” as they do in galleries or museums. In “Return,” for example, he has recreated his Iraqi grandfather’s import/export business. With the help of a grant from Creative Time in New York, Rakowitz rented a storefront in Brooklyn and proudly advertised the impending arrival of real Iraqi dates. The dates became proxies for Iraqi refugees and almost all Iraqi products, encountering hurdles, requiring bribes and ultimately “dying” on a road in the middle of the desert on their way to Syria. Their expiration was due mostly to time in the heat of the large truck in which they traveled. The death of the dates was a real tragedy, as we all found ourselves rooting for their survival and eventual sale to customers in Brooklyn, mostly Iraqi immigrants who in photographs seemed deeply touched by the almost absurd gesture of their eventual availability. Every Iraqi product seems treated with toxic-proof gloves by every checkpoint and uniformed authority figure. And those products that do make it to export ships in places like Lebanon are often falsely labeled as Lebanese, to avoid suspicion about the danger of their contents. The irony was not lost on the audience, considering the vital need of such exports’ safe and easy movement, and what this would do to boost the Iraqi economy in ways that would benefit everyday people and stabilize the political situation. Dates could be to Iraq what pistachios have been to Iran, wine to France or cigars to Cuba. But so long as the bombs continue to pop up at random, any package labeled Iraqi is effectively the same as poison. Again, the parallel with treatment of Iraqi refugees is implied, but never named.

Well, the food was delicious and the conversation topical and rich. Rakowitz inhabits a “cutting edge” of social practice that relies heavily on institutional support to exist at all. It’s egalitarian, sincere and intelligent and surprisingly resilient to charges of sentimentality or simplification. Enemy Kitchen does not provide so pat an answer as “it’s hard to fire a gun while cooking,” though that’s certainly part of what we took away. The success of Enemy Kitchen has more to do with Rakowitz’s savvy and intelligence, coupled with his empathy and desire to further an agenda of cross-cultural understanding, than with the volatile history embodied by his family’s journey and the current violence in Iraq. We can all hope to see more such “art with an agenda” supported and participated in by curious Americans with empty stomachs.

Co-written by Raman Frey & Kimberly Johansson

Scott Oliver: Want Nots

SF Recycling and Disposal, aka the Dump, is an unlikely and in some ways ideal situation for an artist residency. The program was created as a way to highlight creative re-use of discarded objects and to raise public awareness of conservation and recycling. The Dump residency provides artists with a stipend and full-time access to a studio and the enormous Solid Waste Transfer and Recycling Center, from which they can remove anything they find. The residency culminates in a show lasting only two days—which is unfortunate when you can’t make the trip out in time, but makes each show feel like a secret, shared among a knowing few.

Bench Curl, 2007

Scott Oliver’s practice of dismantling and rebuilding found objects is a natural fit for this environment. Oliver’s interventions both disable the functionality of the objects he appropriates, and preserve some element of their original purpose. For example, a piece which he made for the Dump’s sculpture garden which maintains the structure of two benches connected to the picnic table between them, thwarts that use by curling up on itself in a graceful wave. A block made of beautifully shaped chair legs, truncated and shaved into a rough square, retains no seat but still appears solid enough to support a body. A sandwich board becomes a screen, patterned with cutaways so that its message is lost but its recognizable form remains.

The most striking piece is Core Column, a circular tower of wood, carpet, foam, insulation and other building materials, which looks like a core sample taken from a house that had been flattened. Approximately as tall as its maker, this object engages in a dialogue with Minimalist “specific objects,” as well as with the deconstructionist actions of Gordon Matta-Clark. Another work that engages with precedents from the 1960s and 70s is a pile of dust and debris in the corner of the studio, which Oliver collected by sweeping the sidewalk in front with a broom made from tree-trimmings. Some of the dirt he collected made its way into a large hourglass formed by two large water cooler bottles in a wooden armature. The remaining matter becomes a Robert Smithson-inspired non-site—an anti-monument to the Dump itself.

Core Column, 2007

Smaller objects that Oliver created during his residency include a pile of hand-shaped wooden “rocks,” in which the textures of particle board and the striations of plywood are revealed to be similar to those of sedimentary and metamorphic rock. A ladder sprouts branches, becoming a tree trunk. Clear plastic clothes hangers are arranged in a cascading chandelier that descends from the ceiling. A series of wall works incorporate found panels, into which threads are curve-stitched into a geometric lattice. The threads remain connected to their sources, rugs and blankets, which lay in piles on the floor below.

Wood Rocks!, 2007

Artists have an important civic role to play by emphasizing social responsibility through their working methods. Oliver’s work restores the act of making by hand to mass-produced objects, and invests them with the power to provoke thought. Each unique form that he creates draws attention to the callousness with which we accumulate, use and discard the things around us. One man's trash is another's treasure.

For more information about the SFR&D residency program, past artists-in-residence, the current artist-in-residence, and upcoming exhibitions visit www.sfrecycling.com.