The Work of Art in the Age of Onerous Dominant Paradigms

by Sarah Lockhart

While we can easily reach consensus that this is the beginning of this essay, it is often difficult to pinpoint beginnings (and endings) of art movements. Conceptual art, while its roots go back to Duchamp, is generally observed to have risen as a movement somewhere around 1966, during a time of political turbulence and economic prosperity, and to have faded into the art world wallpaper in the vicinity of 1972, when the political turbulence had escalated, and the economic prosperity had descended into recession.

Part of conceptual art's agenda was to distill art into something resilient to commodity fetishization—what curator and author Lucy Lippard termed "the dematerialization of the art object," the physical matter of art becoming secondary, ephemeral, cheap or unpretentious, while the idea behind the work was paramount. Other aims of conceptual art were to critique traditional exhibition practices and contexts and to play with the boundaries of what constituted art. At the dawn of the conceptual art movement, much Marxist and semiotic theory was being translated into English and distributed in America. The rise of Abstract Expressionism and its propulsion of American art to superpower status in the art world (echoing its political status as such) was a relatively recent

development. These and many other factors prompted artists to examine and critique avant garde art's relations to capitalism—its omnivorousness and insatiability.

Conceptual art had a strong presence here in San Francisco where artist and curator, Tom Marioni established the Museum of Conceptual Art at 75 3rd St., a spot which now houses the Yerba Buena Food Court, a parking garage, and a new Office Depot, just two blocks from the SF MoMA. Approximately 30 years later, the San Francisco Bay Area, and the United States, became economically prosperous and in the throes of navigating issues of globalization, increasing the divide between rich and poor—spurring a resurgence of art investigating capitalism, specifically capitalism's ability to appropriate and deploy culture in the service of itself.

While multitudes of artists of late are producing political work— from graffiti, to paintings to documentation of actions, some of the most interesting work being produced is conceptually-based but operates within a socio-political context. These works involve performance, social interaction and intervention with exhibited objects taking the form of documentation. Conceptual art of the late 60s took a somewhat nihilistic approach to art, experimenting with how much they could dematerialize it—Robert Barry's "Closed Gallery" and his release of gasses into the air, Kawara's date paintings, Michael Asher's exhibit which consists only of removing the partition wall between gallery and office, Kosuth's text pieces, and Baldessari's "I will not make any more boring art" and cremation pieces. Perhaps because art had already effectively been reduced to nothing, this contemporary conceptual work attempts to be productive—whether by performing labor, scientific observation, or cultural critique.

In July of 1998, a curious message appeared on BART station

monitors—the televisions suspended above the platforms that run ads, Public Service Announcements and show train arrival and departure information, including the occasional "Train Will Not Stop" message. In the style of one of these, the message, "Capitalism Stops At Nothing" flashed on the monitors for five seconds. The ad ran in the Montgomery and Powell Stations, which serve the Financial and shopping districts—locations with the most highly lucrative relations with capitalism. The message was placed by artist, Andy Cox, and paid for as an ad. Ironically, Metro Advertising put a stop to Cox's ad prematurely, before it had received the quantity of airings that Cox had paid for, in a rare instance of capitalism departing from its egalitarian "Come one, come all" inclusiveness.

Concurrently, Cox and several other artists, collaborating under the name, Together We Can Defeat Capitalism, instigated a campaign of stencils, stickers, posters and modified signage in public spaces throughout San Francisco, including one design implicating the SF MoMA as a force of capitalism, hearkening back to a common conceptual practice of institutional critique. Also disseminating posters in public space was an anonymously- membered collective called Seismic Solution. The Seismic Solution posters often took the form of Public Service messages to communicate apocalyptic warnings of the next big earthquake as consumer society's day of reckoning. While one print referred to SUVs, most were ambiguous about their target demographic.

The Together We Can Defeat Capitalism and Seismic Solution campaigns took place at the peak of the dot com boom (alternately termed, the dot bombing) in San Francisco, in which capitalism, previously viewed in terms of globalization and imperialism took form locally as rampant real estate speculation lead to gentrification of

previously affordable neighborhoods and displacement of low income residents and arts facilities.

The Art Strike's Back project was formulated as a response to this, its name a reference to the Art Strike of the early 90s which protested the hierarchical nature of the art world and its work done in the service of capitalism. The original Art Strike, itself, was a reference to the dialog in the late 60s (during the initial inception of Conceptual Art) of artists as workers which saw groups form like the Art Workers Coalition and protests around issues of artists' control of the exhibition of their works and residual royalties from further sales of their work (e.g. a collector sells to another collector or auctioned). These organized movements around issues of art-as-work, as well as some conceptual art questioned the dominant view of heroic modernism—the artist as prophetic genius above and outside the "system." The original Art Strike was a problematic enterprise, its effectiveness questioned, and it was criticized for its "proletarian posturing".

San Francisco's Art Strike's Back occurred in the summer of 2000, and consisted of public performances around Mission and Valencia Streets, as well as an insistent media campaign, to protest the erasure of artists from the neighborhood. The visibility and often confrontative nature of the performances were useful in the project's aim to place the issue of displacement on political and media agendas, garnering coverage in the SF Chronicle, LA Times, All Things Considered, and Red Herring magazine, a dot-com glossy, which featured a photo of Lise Swenson's concurrent installation, "Fuck You Dot Com," in ATA's window. Conceptually it could be viewed as a political campaign conducted through art.

Primarily organized by Lise Swenson, Megan Wilson, and Gordon Winiemko, the Art Strike's Back Project was conceived as

an inclusive collaboration, and indeed, included a number of local artists and groups, with representatives of Dancer's Group, Galeria de la Raza, Artists' Television Access, and Cellspace. Rene Garcia and Marci Klane clad in white and white face attached obsolete computer hardware to their bodies and performed a death march through the highly acclaimed Slanted Door restaurant, alluding to the weight-burdened spectres appearing to Dickens' Ur- neoconservative, Ebeneezer Scrooge, as well as gentrification's effect of whitening the Mission by displacing the working class Latinos that call the neighborhood home. Swenson coordinated a parade of people dressed in undergarments, who chattered on cellphones, and were connected with a string called "the Emperor's New Clothes." The phone chatter parodied the behavior of dot com workers who frequented the Mission, and also commented on the constructed (as opposed to real) nature of the dot com economy. This piece predicted the bursting of said economic bubble. Gordon Winiemko delivered the piece de resistance of the series by confronting patrons of upscale dining establishments, backed up by a Spanish translator and two bodyguards, and serving them eviction notices from their tables. Upon serving notice, he then instigated a dialog on the rights to space and property and how the pleasurable carrot of ownership is granted and sustained by the threat of the stick of physical force.

Neighborhood Public Radio another collaborative project, also engages with issues of property ownership and rights to space— those of the public airwaves—an even more tightly controlled and scarce commodity than San Francisco real estate. Appropriating the logo of National Public Radio, and broadcasting illegally, Neighborhood Public Radio was conceived as an interventionist project by local artist, Lee Montgomery, no longer able to bear the

dominant paradigm of American politics and mainstream media, in which he includes the original NPR. Neighborhood Public Radio's motto, "if it's local and it makes noise, we want to hear it," illustrates the project's goal of an inclusive platform for opinions, identities, and content, generally excluded from dominant media, and puts focus on the local communities of the spaces in which it operates. Formally, as a temporary installation, NPR negates what theorist Raymond Williams termed "flow," the seamless transitions and infinite continuity of traditional broadcasting. For NPR there are definite beginnings and endings, as well as other formal acknowledgements of the media's construction. NPR also formally deviates from professional standards, allowing and encouraging dead air, off-mic conversation, and difficult content such as foreign language programming, minimalistic music, and conceptual programs like Sean Fletcher's and Isabel Reichert's "All Animals Are Equal," a majority of which was played at frequencies beyond the range of human hearing. NPR's content is provided by artists, activists and other local residents with a multiplicity of approaches to making radio a variance from many alternative radio forays, and privileges either the art approach of formal innovation, artistic or art-focused content, or the activist/communitarian approach of presenting oppositional political opinions, content by underrepresented peoples, and focusing on empowerment through media access. Neighborhood Public Radio began in Oakland, and has operated in San Francisco and Chicago. NPR will travel to Serbia this summer to bring its model of alternative radio to communities there.

Packard Jennings' work is also of an interventionist bent and includes altered billboards, placement of illustrated pamphlets of an uprising against a shopping mall inside products and displays at a mall, and alternate designs for public monuments featuring members

of the Bush Administration. Recently exhibited at Pond Gallery's ShopDropping show was documentation of Jennings' Wal-Mart Project, in which he placed an assortment of artist-created items in Wal-Mart stores and monitored their status. Many of these items were political critiques, such as the Kathie Lee T-shirts, with the celebrity Wal-Mart clothier whose laundry (and reputation) was soiled by the hands of child labor, depicted as Rosie the Riveter. Also displayed were containers of Storm Oil, with Gulf War images on the wrapper. The piece exhibited at Pond featured the Mussolini action figure placed in the toy department and a video taken of the artist's attempted purchase of the toy. Jennings' choice of Mussolini reflects what he sees as the similarities between Wal-Mart's corporate practices vis-a-vis the towns and cities in which its stores are located and fascism, whereby Wal-Mart drives the local small businesses out through underselling and the big box structure of its stores, and then becomes akin to a feudal lord with the locals dependent on Wal-Mart for jobs, products, and much coveted sales tax revenue. Jennings' fake products are impressively designed and packaged to replicate real products, in much the same way as Cox's "Capitalism" ad replicated the actual BART train announcement style.

Not all of this work is directly political. Recent work by Marc Horowitz, Jon Brumit, Matt Volla, Sean Fletcher and Isabel Reichert does not generally play politics, but unlike earlier conceptual work centered on art, itself, its definitions and display, these artists engage things outside the traditional subject matter of art in a conceptual manner.

Jon Brumit's recent work draws on what Allan Kaprow called "Un Art," or, art that works from everyday life rather than its rarefied traditional subject matter. In his most recent exhibition, "Door to

Door," Brumit documents his visits to various neighborhoods offering his services, gratis. Services include musical performance, yard work, repairing appliances, or whatever the neighbor would find useful.

The documentation consists of photos and annotated forms Brumit produced for each client, along the lines of prospect data forms used by salespeople or non-profit fundraisers. Brumit's notes have an abject quality—due to the sprawling handwriting and crude sketches—though his project would take on a different character were his notes to by tidily typed in a more "professional" format. One could read into these forms a clever play-on revealing the hand of the artist—the handmade mark as sign of the individuality and personhood of its maker.

Much of Brumit's work has a foundation in social interaction. Other recent projects include the Vendetta Retreat, where he brainstorms methods of transmuting the desire for revenge into something creatively productive, and the Sixty Second Symphonies, performed at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in which Brumit and Marc Horowitz conducted the audience making sounds with items such as paper, balloons, and bags of cheese crackers. The elements of socializing, generosity, and making art out of life are also found in the work of Marc Horowitz, a frequent collaborator of Brumit's.

Marc Horowitz is best known for his recent National Dinner Tour, which landed him on TV network morning shows. Through his employment as a photo assistant, Horowitz was given the opportunity to personalize a whiteboard advertised in a popular catalog. He jotted down his cell phone number and the phrase "Dinner with Marc". After the catalog was printed and distributed, Horowitz began receiving phone calls from catalog recipients

curious as to whether the phone number was "real". Horowitz then decided to actually take his callers to dinner.

The dinners have ranged from home-cooked to restaurant meals, tete-a-tetes with an individual to banquets with 20+ guests, such as one in Detroit featuring a priest, a rabbi, and an ex-stripper seated side by side. Horowitz' tour is well-documented with video, photos and a blog. One may ask whether Horowitz' project is indeed art or merely a stunt. Is it art merely because Horowitz identifies himself as an artist and claims it as art? This question dates back to Duchamp's urinal and its official replicas, often on tour themselves. The SF MoMA's urinal recently traveled to the Legion of Honor for its Surrealist exhibition.

Matt Volla's work approaches conceptualism from another of its aspects—the process-oriented artwork, which parallels the mid-century musical avant garde practice of serialism. With degrees in both visual art and electronic music, Volla's cerebral projects draw on both media and non-art disciplines: tennis, surfing, cross-country road trips. One of Volla's recent projects is the two-part "Music Tennis" and "Tennis Music". "Tennis Music" derives its scores from famous tennis matches, such the Battle of the Sexes (Billie Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs). Volla systematized the elements of a tennis match—serving, running, different types of swings—and transposed these into a musical score performed by a musical ensemble. "Music Tennis" entailed the opposite transposition, whereby well-known musical compositions became games of tennis that Volla would play out, either solo or with a partner.

While Brumit and Horowitz create art from everyday through openness and uncertainty that other people incorporate, Volla does it through imposing order—alternative sets of rules—either for his daily tasks (such as a road trip in which he planned his route to

travel through towns of a certain size in alphabetical order, or by applying rules or patterns observed in everyday life to his art making—such as his Bartology project wherein he made drawings and music based on human traffic patterns on the Bart system.

Their work engages in one of the aspects of conceptual art—the demystification of art. The work of art becomes a labor of a more familiar sort, or mere labor, as in Brumit's "Door-to-Door" project where he offers to work for the participant or Horowtiz' project in which he ran a volunteer's errands on a mule. Horowitz and Brumit's ongoing Sliv and Dulet Enterprises is constructed as a company providing products and services. With Brumit and Horowitz costumed in zip-up jumpsuits or thrift-store business attire that suggest a 1970s used car salesman or multi-level marketing solicitor.

Two other artists, Isabel Reichert and Sean Fletcher, also do conceptual work as art projects, but generally with less of a blue collar reference. Fletcher got a job as a life insurance salesman as an art project and recently registered as a Republican, attended a church recommended by Jerry Falwell and participated in online discussions on a conservative commentator's website. With Reichert, Fletcher underwent couple's counseling as an exhibited gallery piece. The two artists also hired a business coach (from the Dale Carnegie School) to teach them and the audience how better to market themselves as artists.

This piece was performed at New Langton arts, which predicated a later work, "How to Sue," in which the artists sued Langton and the curators of a performance series, "The How-to Intensive" for infringement of their prior work. They also auctioned the naming rights to their child on Ebay in a piece called "Bait."

Other Local Exhibitions

The Way We Work, Southern Exposure, September - October 2004
http://www.soex.org/twww.html

Take a Number, 21 Grand, January 2003
http://www.21grand.org/20030117.html

The Summer Line, New Langton Arts, June-July 2003
http://newlangtonarts.org/view_event.php?
category=Gallery&archive=1&displayYear=2003&&eventId=59

I Want a Mainstream, Build Gallery, July 2003
http://www.enjoythesign.com/mainstream/

Local Artists Links

Marisa Jahn
http://www.marisajahn.com

Megan Wilson
http://www.meganwilson.com

Jon Brumit
http://www.jonbrumit.com

Marc Horowitz
http://www.ineedtostopsoon.com

Matt Volla
http://www.xaul.com

Jon Rubin
http://www.lizabetholiveria.com/artis...ubin/rubin.html

Steve Lambert
http://www.budgetgallery.org/slambert/