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Is Not Broke Recession Proof Wallet, Co.

Tuesday, August 31, 2010

cubes+hoses wallet, 2010. Limited Edition of 100.

People are saying that the recession is over, but I think its fair to say that despite the small upturn, most of us are not yet feeling anywhere near secure and it will probably be a long time before things get back to normal, whatever that’s supposed to be. Irrespective of where the art market is at and whether the embattled Lehman Brothers will raise enough money for their creditors in their upcoming auction, jobs are still scarce and the taste of desperation remains fresh in the mouths of many who have not yet adopted quasi self sufficient life styles. Enter www.isnotbroke.com, the latest project by Transit Antenna founder and Artlurker contributor, Bob Snead whose characteristically worn and appropriately grubby fingers can be seen above.

The website functions as an online shop and forum, complete with a personal blog and lengthy features on each piece. The product, recession proof wallets. What? Handmade wallets with a twenty dollar bill printed inside. Of course this doesn’t actually prevent you from being broke, wont put food on your table and will more than likely will make you feel worse not better after you kick yourself for not remembering that you bought a recession proof wallet when the excitement of discovering previously unknown funds subsides, but, if the idea doesn’t strike you as particularly clever perhaps this will: each wallet is adorned with a design based on compelling stories of financial resilience.

Crouching Tiger, Knitting Dragon, 2010. Each wallet is handmade in the USA with a hand printed exterior, 4 credit card slots, ID window slot, two hidden pockets (for your business cards), and twenty bucks printed in the bill slot. Full size of the wallet is 8.5”x3.5” and folded 4.25”x3.5”. Developed from a mix of durable canvas, vinyl, and nylon. Limited Edition of 100.

The website says: “Is Not Broke Recession Proof Wallet, Co. was formed by artist Bob Snead to act as a window into the worst economy of our lifetime through wallets and individual stories of survival. The concept of a Recession Proof Wallet is simple. On the interior, a fabric twenty dollar bill is printed permanently inside so the owner always has money. Then the exterior is used to tell a story through abstracted forms, patterns, or illustrations. Each wallet is designed by a selected artist and meticulously hand crafted, usually by Bob himself, in the USA.”

Fields, created by Josef Kristofoletti inspired by the Cern Particle Collider.

Bob, who recently made the brave move to New Orleans on the promise of jobs that have yet to materialize has been busy and the www.isnotbroke.com franchise, which began just a few months ago, now totals nine whole wallets, which considering the amount of bespoke handicraft and experiential content poured into each design is impressive, or at least I think so. Ranging from stories recounting experiences such as living in a vegetable oil powered bus for two years to traveling to Geneva to paint murals inspired by the Cern Particle Collider, these limited edition wallets, each an ironic symbol of resourcefulness in dark times and a work of art of themselves, tell stories that many of us can identify with.

The Suit is the second in the ongoing Upturn series. The goal of each Upturn wallet is to depict with abstracted forms, patterns, or illustrations a story of survival which is hand picked from submissions to the free wallet program.

Tragically for our readers this post comes just a few days too late as www.isnotbroke.com’s first sale has just finished, but at least now Bob and his elves can perhaps enjoy some top-rate windfalls from contentious Miamians looking to buy into some peace of mind. And if you’re really hard up, be sure to check out the free section in which fans are invited to submit stories that if liked will be made up into limited edition wallets as part of the Upturn Series (above).

…and neither can you be! (?)

Please visit www.isnotbroke.com for more information and sales.

This post was contributed by Thomas Hollingworth.

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The Sunday Video: Desorientation of a young man

Sunday, August 29, 2010

Fry:  http://www.archive.org/details/DesorientationOfAYoungMan

that one is the shit
do that one
the last one the last one
fuck yeah
Artlurker:  ok. i like it. especially the comment below about bringing this to miami. want to write a sentence or two about it?
Fry:  fuck you miami bitches
you aint in miami
youre a btich
-cassidy fry
hows that?
Artlurker:  perfect. but don’t you think we should attempt to connect negritude with western philosophical positions? perhaps via bergsonian epistemology and its impact on senghor and césaire?
Fry:  not really. im in a bad mood today.
Artlurker:  cheer up
Fry:  somedays i just want to kill all the iguanas i see
stand under a coconut tree looking up and waiting
take my pants off and jump fences
Fry:  you can put that in
i keep imagining ill go out and a human will be interesting
Fry:  fuck
are you putting that video up?
with my hate text?
Artlurker:  probably, but not for a few weeks.
Fry:  thats a long time
i might be dead by then
Artlurker: hey, i don’t think that embed code works [link]
Fry: i don’t care
artlurker you make me look crazy!

Images of African modern art paintings put on music of Finley Quaye.. La Negritude de Senghor interpretated by Senegalese painters. This movie is part of the collection: Community Video. Producer: Gaston. Creative Commons license: Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Belgium. [link]

This post was contributed by Thomas Hollingworth and Cassidy Fry.

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Dissection of a practice: Ana Mendez on herself

Monday, August 23, 2010

Psychic Youth, Inc. photo by Federico Nessi.

Time and time again, I’m asked the same question, “are you a performance artist or are you a choreographer?”  I hesitate to say that I am one or the other because I don’t feel like my work fits completely into either of these categories. I’d like to think that my process is fluid and can change focus at any moment without depending entirely on an applied strategy. I have never felt totally satisfied with creating choreography to be performed exactly as planned.

TRI photo by Thomas Hollingworth.

Before I began working collaboratively, my solo performances were created with landmarks. I would devise a beginning, middle and end with only an intention to guide me to these points. I always gave myself the space to lose my head – where I could feel like my body was no longer controlled by my mind, but by an energetic projection of an intention or emotion. I have referred to some performances as having been out of body experiences. In some cases losing memory of what I’d just done or experiencing violent physical reactions like throwing up. I am not always successful in getting out of my head, but that has always been my goal through these ritual dances.

Parrucca photo by Stian Roenning.

Two years ago I began working collaboratively as a member of Psychic Youth, Inc. In the collective I was able to create movement scenarios designed for untrained dancers (untrained in the modern and classical techniques of dance). They are brave visual artists and/or musicians that have unique and powerful body-voices. Some of these dancers include Federico Nessi, Aja Albertson, Marcela Loayza, Ricardo Guerrero and Rick Diaz. I find they can sometimes express through their body in a way I could never have choreographed. They are unpredictable.

TRIBUTE photo by Thomas Hollingworth.

Working with these bodies, gives my work so much more range because they will not and cannot repeat what I offer them verbatim. I urge them not to think they have to recreate what I give them, but to do what they think or remember the movement was.

TRIBTUE photo by Christy Gast.

My choreography becomes a suggested guide or a springboard for new movement. I usually give them a series of tasks or actions that, when done in a particular sequence, have no purpose.  This kind of action dance is a reference to Yvonne Rainer’s “Trio A”, which has always been a source for me to reflect on. I am always inspired by my dancer’s interpretations of these task sequences and like my solo work, I also give them the space to lose themselves. I offer them the outline and they fill in the gaps. The act of creating as they perform brings the group together. Recently, I have been creating games to play during performance so that they are not merely going through the motions, but are bringing consciousness into the work.

PSYCHIC YOUTH, INC. presents: TRI: A Living Ritual Environment. First Installment featuring Ricardo Guerrero, Ana Mendez & Federico Nessi at de la Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space, Miami, Florida, March 13th, 2010.

I love performances that flirt with an element of risk. I especially love performances taken out of the safe haven of a theater where everything is perversely controlled to perfection. Site-specific work such as Meg Stuart’s “Revisited” is an example of taking the escape the audience feels in the theater and rearranging it with reality. The escape catches you by surprise in “real life” rather than anticipating it as the lights lower in a theater. I also enjoy using alternative spaces because they come with their own stories, as opposed to the theater’s blank canvas. I am not a theater “hater”, but after having danced in them for so long, the blank canvas seems sterile. I have seen a handful of amazing performances that have transformed the theater’s predictable entrance and exit stage areas and have also manipulated the perspective of the audience. Chicago based theater company Plasticene’s “Come Like Shadows” is a good example of the possibilities of altering the black box, where the audience is tricked into believing they are the only ones observing the show – a second audience is later exposed on the opposite side of the performance space.

TRI photo by Thomas Hollingworth.

TRI photo by Thomas Hollingworth.

TRI photo by Thomas Hollingworth.

This confusion, between theater space and life space, between trained dancers and action dancers, confuses and influences my own blurred version of choreography and performance art. I build stories through dances and “non-dances”, crossing genres of performance through music and the relation of dance and dance space, where music is not just an audio backdrop to the drama of the dance, but is woven into the fabric of the choreography, such as in my latest performance piece “Walking Spell”, which premiered recently at Miami Art Museum[.]

This post was contributed by Ana Mendez.

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The Sunday Video: DANCE FOR CAMERA: a mini-film festival

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Dance sequence from the Josephine Baker film Princess Tam Tam (1935) [link]

Maya Deren’s, Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) [link]

Maya Deren’s The Very Eye of Night (1958) [link]

Clip from Merce Cunningham’s Beach Birds for Camera (1992) [link]

A dance clip from the Bollywood film Devdas (2002) [link]

Clips from David Lachapelle’s dance documentary Rize (2005) [link]

This post was contributed by Annie Hollingsworth winner of this year’s Miami Writer’s Prize.

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Dance for Your Summer Daze

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Ana Mendez, from Tribute: A Summoning (2010).

For these dog days, while Miami’s art world is gearing up for the fall season, it’s all about dance. Not just your average dance on stage, but genre-bending performance and an exploration of the intersection points between dance and art.

On the lower end of the artistic spectrum, Step Up 3D, the third installment of the Step Up series is out in theaters. It’s a shamelessly indulgent dance film, and yes, it’s in 3D. Delicious dance candy, battles galore! I mention this film not only because it’s a great opportunity to turn off your brain for a minute and have a good time, but also because it belongs in a rich vein of cross-genre performance: dance for camera. Stay tuned to artlurker.com for this weekend’s mini-film festival of dance videos including some classic examples from the archives.

In the meantime, big news on the local performance front. Thursday August 19th at Miami Art Museum, the Afterhours program features Talking Head Transmitters, with a broadcast on contemporary dance from their in-museum AM radio station, and Walking Spell, a performance by local performer and choreographer Ana Mendez.

Ana Mendez, from Valley of the Queen (2009).

MAM’s announcement describes Walking Spell as “experimental performance.” Indeed, Mendez’s work, lying somewhere in the space between theater, dance, music and art, is not easy to describe. Consider her the conductor of a series of beautiful games. I use beautiful in the broadest sense because her visually stunning performances can be gritty at times, anguished, and emotionally resonant. The striking sense of presence that characterizes much of her work is due to her construction process – she creates situations and improvisatory scripts rather than strict choreography. As a result, her performers “play” the show, embodying her instructions with their own movement patterns. They seem to experience the performance as deeply as anyone in the audience. The musical background is not canned either – it’s a live soundscape responding to the dancers’ movements or the rules of the game.

Walking Spell will be driven by a deck of cards. Very John Cage. Each card drawn by the dancers prompts a specific sound to be played by the musicians. Every sound then generates a movement from the dancers. Because such a show could not exactly be rehearsed, the attention of the performers will be heightened as they listen for cues and respond to each other. Mendez describes Walking Spell as a meditation – “we intend to lose ourselves.” She will be performing alongside Aja Albertson, with sound created by Richard Vergez and Frederico Nessi and a customized floor built by Richard Martinez. The concept for this show was inspired by Cage’s Water Walk, a 1959 composition for, among other things, grand piano, electric mixer, whistle, tape recorder, five radios, a bathtub and a vase of roses.

John Cage performing “Water Walk” in January 1960, on the popular TV show I’ve Got A Secret.

While Mendez is clearly a talent to watch, one of her greatest strengths is her ability to work collaboratively. She draws generously from the talents of her performers, most of whom are not actually trained dancers, but accomplished artists or musicians in their own right. Tribute: A Summoning, a performance earlier this year based on the life of music producer Joe Meek, was well-developed in every aspect – visually, musically, and performatively – thanks to the contributions of her many collaborators (including both Vergez and Nessi). Each element could easily have stood on its own as a solid and complete artistic effort and so the show, as a whole, was far more than the sum of its parts.

Ana Mendez, from Tribute: A Summoning (2010).

Mendez and Nessi, creative partners for both Tribute and Walking Spell, first collaborated in 2008 for a project called Wire Wire Wire. The strength of their working relationship was later extended when local musicians got involved, and Psychic Youth, Inc. was formed in 2009. PYI’s performances are, like Mendez’s solo projects, structured by a loose set of parameters rather than a rigid set of movements. Psychic Youth Inc.’s recent extravagant three-night happening at the de la Cruz collection earlier this year, TRI, followed an improvisatory script that allowed each performer to fully own his or her movements and position in space. A wild and unpredictable, living, breathing show was born.

Tonight’s event promises to be another memorable addition to Mendez’s already rich performance history. The program runs from 6-9pm. Don’t miss it. For more information, visit www.miamiartmuseum.org.

Walking Spell flyer by Richard Vergez.

This post was contributed by Annie Hollingsworth winner of this year’s Miami Writer’s Prize.

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Artists Activate Abandoned Amusement | Spreepark, Berlin

Monday, August 16, 2010

Spreeblitz coaster.

With one week past and one more to go, artist Agustina Woodgate and curator Anthony Spinello from Miami, collaborators George Scheer, Stephanie Sherman, and Chris Lineberry from Elsewhere in NC, and scientist Dan Margulies of The Neuro Bureau Berlin, are in the throes of an ArtMatters research project in an abandoned amusement park. Miami based Spinello and Woodgate have been collaborators with Elsewhere artists since Woodgate’s residency last fall at the thrift-store turned living museum. The group shares an interest in cultural imaginaries, the poetics of abandoned spaces, process-based productions, and artist communities that foster creative collaborations and public exchanges. Since last Thursday, they’ve been investigating the politics, poetics, and possibilities of a former GDR amusement park located within the sprawling Treptow Park in East Berlin. The artists from Elsewhere knew of the park from a 2007 trip, when they hopped the fence (a rite of passage for Berliners and tourists alike) and discovered a wonder world of trees growing through the center of Roller coasters, graffitied gangs of land-locked swan boats, toppled dinosaurs, and suspended amusement.

Land-locked swans.

Spreepark reflects Berlin’s tangled history of political and economic shifts. The park is a manifest of the cultural effects of those transformations. In 1969, the Soviet GDR built Kulturpark Planterwald in Treptow Park in Southeast Berlin. After the fall of the wall and unification in 1991, the park was sold to the Wittes, a prominent German family, who continued operations under the new Spreepark name. After purchasing many new rides, some from the defunct Mirapolis Park in Paris, the park continued to operate and expand. Ten years later, the park faced insurmountable debts and went insolvent, partly due to Treptow Park being declared a nature sanctuary in 1991, making it impossible to increase parking to accommodate visitors. Upon its closure, many of the rides were sold, others shipped to Peru for ‘repairs.’ One ride, the flying carpet carousel, returned to Germany containing 180 kg of cocaine. Since then, Spreepark has been gated and abandoned with no clear future for re-activation, slowly deteriorating. Amidst the decay, a lush garden is growing, due to fertilization from the adjacent Spree river.

A  giant Ferris wheel looms over the park.

A moss covered lake beneath the Ferris wheel.

Since arriving last Thursday, the group has been undergoing creative detective work–collecting histories and stories of the park, meeting with collectives and curators in Berlin, receiving MRI brain scans, composing memories and philosophies surrounding the amusement theme, and developing a proposal for re-activating the park in a different form.
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Artist Agustina Woodgate gets her brain scanned at the Max Plank Institute For Human Development.

No official information exists regarding current access to the park, so the group started by casing the park perimeter. Many of the rides and attractions, including the park’s iconic Ferris wheel, sinister looking Roller coasters, partly operating spinning teacups, circus tents, more-than-extinct dinosaurs, and head-shaped cars, are visible through the metal fence. The group came across a security guard, EMGE, who offered a private tour of the park. On the tour, they befriended the guard, who, with his dog Basko, keeps out daily fence hoppers, protecting the privacy of Mr. Witte, now living amongst the abandoned rides.

The artists on the Quik Cup spinning tea cup ride, which is still manually operable.

Walking and playing amongst the ruins, the group’s three-hour morning excursion took them directly into the park’s past and presence. The images provide an uncannily still corollary to the exuberance of amusement—floating light bulbs in moss coated rivers, smashed operator booth windows, a ball pit overgrown with foliage, broken bridges, ghostly amphitheaters, hungry concession stands, a parked coaster.

The Spreepark crew (pictured from left: Agustina Woodgate, George Scheer, Chris Lineberry, Anthony Spinello, and Stephanie Sherman) at Kunst-Werke Berlin Institute for Contemporary Art.

The group continued conversations with Emge and others regarding park possibilities, while drawing from a series of pre-existing works about the park. One of these works is a recent piece by Vienna artist Hans Schabus, who acquired two giant fiberglass dinosaurs from the park and re-installed them toppled over in a courtyard at this summer’s Berlin Biennale. The dinosaurs were visible only through the stairwell windows of this five floor exhibition.
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Dinosaurs from another era.

Piece by piece, the park is disappearing as nature dominates forgotten machines, and humans intervene to rescue parts of history from a place left to the throes of time and an uncertain destiny. Berlin is a mecca for artists because of its inexpensive housing, litany of abandoned spaces emerging after the fall of the wall, astoundingly bike friendly pathways, advanced recycling systems, and contemporary emphasis on artistic practices that interweave cultural life, political critique, and experimental social projects. For example, the site of the former Tempelhof airport has been converted into a sprawling and awe-inspiring public park, where young and old alike can fly kites, ride bikes, and play a public piano in the middle of a runway. The place is set to become a full garden and public art museum by 2017.

The former Tempelhof airport is now a sprawling public park.

Treptow Park itself simultaneously operates a vast preserve–filled with lakes, foliage, a Soviet monument built in early Stalinist architecture, and natural vistas– while hosting a variety of leisure activities for boating, boozing, and strolling along the river. Culture, a way of living in public, comes as a mode of existence in Berlin, and art is a part of everyday existence in ‘toy town’. There are scattered lands of industry surplus across the world. These sites contain our childhood dreams and fears and some develop into leisure machines—places where the surreal, mystical, and fantastic converged in a fleeting imaginary. Each one, however, has exceptional forces attached to it, personal and political, and this project marks the beginning of an ongoing investigation into the in-between space that these sites occupy[.]

Spreeblitz coaster parked interminably in its dock.

Follow the tracks of these artists over their next seven days in Berlin at http://musementpark.tumblr.com.

This post was contributed by Stephanie Sherman with collaborators Anthony Spinello, Chris Lineberry, Agustina Woodgate, and George Scheer.

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