Happiness, that often-unattainable life goal, is one of Christine’s central artistic concerns. Her artworks address optimism, pessimism, the pleasures of mundane materials, and transparency of the creative process. For the Present Group’s Issue #21, she created an extra-large sticker sheet: a screen print on cut holographic vinyl. The mirrored images are a festoon, a conglomeration of ten blank ribbon banners resembling packaging flourishes or “I ♥ MOM” tattoos. Underneath black and transparent cyan ink, the fractured reflective surface is dynamic and transfixing.  To achieve maximum sparkly effect, either it or you must move. This is highly recommended.

When I was a child, I had a fairly substantial sticker collection. They were modest, solid colored stickers of the farm animal, flower, balloon, and heart variety. I periodically sifted through the full to semi-full sheets, checking my inventory, hoarding the tiny adhesive symbols. I deferred gratification indefinitely. No art project or birthday card was ever good enough for a sticker from my collection. The thought of sharing them or using them never crossed my mind.

Two decades later, faced with Christine’s Present Group piece Ten Banners for Home and Office, I have a very different impulse. I want to peel the banners from their paper backing and stick them everywhere. I want to use them as labels, pronouncements, and notices. I want them on notebooks, newspaper boxes, and a card to my best friend. I realize now any sense of loss I might feel from the initial removal of a sticker from my possession will be more than countered by the cheer it will eventually bring both me and others. Instead of preserving the sticker sheet as a whole, I want to test the sticker’s ability to dazzle me for days on end. My six-year-old self wouldn’t understand, but Christine’s stickers lead me to understand something of myself and her practice simultaneously: distributing good and cheerful things into the world begets real and lasting pleasure. Happiness comes from sharing ideas and resources, forging new connections within a community of one’s own making. If Christine’s stickers are a present, in my hands they yearn to be re-gifted.

If all this sounds a bit sappy, I blame the effects of holographic vinyl on my brain.

Christine’s work fosters this elevated mood—in everything from her Positive Signs series to ribbon texts, from Flag Snowflakes to mixed media installations. She encourages the viewer not only to be happier, but to question the conditions of that happiness. She is drawn to innocent declarative modes: gel pens on graph paper, hand-sewn banners, cheery office supplies, dollar store finds, and general “knickknackery.” Too often, she argues, cheap disposable materials are seen as depressing. Making this connection allows pessimism to be more commonplace than it needs to be and, in turn, undermines the very real pleasure that can be extracted from brightly-colored plastic objects.

Christine Wong Yap, Positive Sign #19 (When to Use Optimism), 2011, glitter pen with foil print on gridded vellum, 8.5 x 11 in

Much of Christine’s approach to art making is based on her extensive research into the realm of positive psychology. Put forth by its main figures Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, positive psychology is meant to supplement traditional psychology, not replace it. Instead of treating just mental illness, Sligman and Csikszentmihalyi propose, what if we attempt to make ordinary lives more fulfilling? Immersing herself in the literature of the movement (accumulating titles such as The Happiness Hypothesis, Born to Be Good, Flow, and Rainy Brain, Sunny Brain) Christine has latched onto a particular symbolic language of her own. This is most evident in Positive Signs, a series of glitter and fluorescent pen drawings on gridded vellum. In these, she uses the structure of info graphics to explain complex principles of positive psychology to a general audience.

For Positive Signs Christine embodies the role of the cheerleader, the explicator, and the friend, offering up lessons such as this one from Seligman: “Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist and the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better.” Moving beyond Zen-like statements into the actual visualization of these principles, Christine tests the limits of info graphics to clearly relay data. Do they explicate or further confuse? She admits to being deeply interested in futility of her attempts to pin down happiness, chart its existence, and explain the tactics for increasing its probability. Reading Positive Signs en masse, I find myself invigorated and justified in my own artistic pursuits. The graphs and charts give shape to the intangible subjects with which many people—not just creative types—wrestle, supplying tools for how we can shape and facilitate positive thinking. Positive Signs are guidelines for promoting happiness in our own lives.

 Christine Wong Yap, hopexpectation, 2011, 101 x 18 x 1 in

At one level, Christine’s work functions as a barometer of sorts—you are either gladdened or repelled by the fluorescent hues, flowing banners, starburst patterns, and multitudinous kittens. But beyond this surface treatment, she addresses a number of curious aesthetic assumptions with regard to class, economics, and the function of art objects in general. In Christine’s hands, previously disposable materials become art objects that exist indefinitely, their ability to bestow a dose of happiness prolonged and potentially magnified. There is no shame, Christine believes, in the decorative impulse. High or low, cheap or expensive, the results of that impulse rest on your ability to analyze and promote the conditions for happiness in your own life.

Ten Banners for Home and Office provides you with a choice. Use it as you would any sheet of decorative stickers: plaster it about town. Preserve it as a fine art object, intact and on display. How is it meant to be treated? Ask yourself which will make you happier. Then you have your answer.

As the Fonz would say, “Exactamundo.”

Sarah Hotchkiss is an artist and arts writer living in San Francisco. She contributes regularly to the KQED Arts blog and Art Practical. She received an M.F.A. from California College of the Arts and a B.A. in English Literature from Brown University. In 2011 she was the recipient of an Alternative Exposure grant for the curatorial project Stairwell’s. Her artwork has been shown in the greater New York and San Francisco areas, including Adobe Books Backroom Gallery, ATA Window Gallery, and MacArthur B Arthur. Past residencies include the Vermont Studio Center, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Esalen Institute.

Julia Goodman’s work often provides this provocation, enlivening the familiar by making it temporarily strange. Her edition for The Present Group is mysterious and intriguing. At first, you might only marvel at the colors of the beet papyrus: a gentle spectrum of deep reds and purples, along with some yellow or white, plus a bit of dark green or black along the margins. Then comes the question of the material itself: What is it? Beet slices, cut thin to the point of translucency, then overlapped and dried. And then an inspection of minutiae, tinged with pragmatism: Are the slices stitched? How do they hold together? You might be surprised to find that the papyrus is a bit of ordinary magic, conjured from common materials and simple processes to make a symbolic object.

Physically and conceptually, Goodman’s beet papyrus is centered on the notion of overlap. Synonyms for this verb evoke the phenomenal or concrete: imbricate, overhang, protrude, shingle. These words focus on materiality and mass, on the edges of substances that meet in a certain physical arrangement. Yet overlap is also connected to the more abstract concept of coinciding or having in common. Both forms of overlap, the action and the idea, are central to Goodman’s art practice.

When I met her in 2009, Goodman was making work from junk mail, an exploration of materials that grew out of her interest in economics and sustainability. Using these repurposed communications, she created small sculptural objects and wheat-pasted them in urban locations, bringing handmade and ephemeral forms to hard, industrial surfaces. With these works, Goodman juxtaposed fragility and softness to concrete, creating an overlap where, for a time, opposing textures existed in the same space. What has always struck me about her work is that it is made from broken-down or divided and recombined substances. Goodman’s work reduces a material all the way to its basic form, and then rebuilds it into something new.

Goodman is grounded foremost in process, so to understand the idiosyncrasies of papermaking is in some way to enter the mind of the artist, because the process of papermaking may be the ultimate physical expression of having in common. Its manufacture is simple: first, plant fibers are broken down, and then the fibers are allowed to reconnect. Specifically, the fibers are bruised and opened while in a water bath, and then as water is extracted from this slurry the fibers re-bond, linking themselves back together in endless networks that take the shape of the mold they are in, be it flat (as in sheet of handmade paper) or a more sculptural form.

In part, Goodman makes paper because she loves working with her hands and believes in making art that is the result of direct touch. She tells me, “There is nothing between my hands and my materials—no brush or pencil,” and her direct physical engagement with the work is evident at every stage, from the tearing of fibers or cutting of beets to the process for extracting the water from the paper: pressing it with her hands, pushing it into a wooden mold, even stepping or standing on it to push the liquid out of the interlocking fibers.

The making of this edition was no different in terms of physical involvement. Like traditional papyrus, in which the fibers are not bruised or opened but laminated in layers, each beet was harvested, sliced thin on a mandoline, then arranged with other, differently-colored beet segments on a white cloth, and finally pressed and dried. Under pressure, the cut beet fibers rebond, grabbing onto each other and reconnecting to form a new whole. There is no stitching, and no adhesives are used; the process is both deliberate and organic, with Goodman controlling the circumstances but letting the fibers do what comes naturally. While drying, the beet papyrus shrinks and stains the cloth beneath, and that stain becomes evidence of the original form and records a history of the process.

Papyrus is a material that is sensitive to its environment. Expect your beet papyrus to respond to the weather, reabsorbing ambient moisture and re-drying as the barometer rises and falls. At every level, this form of paper is physically reactive and mutable, from the individual cut fibers that reach toward reconnection, to the final piece that shifts almost imperceptibly to match the circumstances of its surroundings. Papyrus is a basic form of paper, and paper is a recording device.

Goodman grew many of the beets for this project and purchased the others from local farmer’s markets. That means that the papyrus was produced in this area, from seed to final paper. It is intensely connected to the geography, climate, and labor of the Bay Area. Further, the fact that it is still potentially edible brings the beet papyrus back to physicality, an overlap between the body, the material, and the process. In her studio, Goodman shows me her bag of food, including beets, from the farmer’s market. “My groceries and my art supplies are in the same place, touching. There is no need to separate my art practice from my life.”

Bean Gilsdorf is an artist and writer. Her exhibition reviews and interviews have been included in print and online publications such as Textile: the Journal of Cloth and Culture, Fiberarts Magazine (2007-2011), Daily Serving and Art Practical. For Daily Serving, she also writes the weekly arts-advice column HELP DESK, co-sponsored by KQED.org and reprinted at HuffingtonPost.com. Gilsdorf is a 2011-2012 MFA Fellowship Resident at the Headlands Center for the Arts. She lives in San Francisco.

However, there are a couple of points in the article that caught our attention, specifically in regards to our project.  In the spirit of keeping the conversation going, we’ve included some responses below:

If an ideal environment of an artists working online lies within the personal computing web-browsing experience, then why the need for relocating these works into another specific website/framing? What is “more accessible” about an online gallery then an artists personal website? Are the tropes from the traditional gallery system still playing too significant a role in the way in which net-art is being presented?

With Art Micro Patronage the idea of the curated group show is central.  We’re trying to encourage criticality about what is happening online by hiring curators to bring together artists whose work explores similar themes.  The internet is incredibly diverse and far flung which makes the process of synthesis and curation that much more important.  I trust some institutions and curators to do the research and outreach to bring to my attention artists whose work I may not have been exposed to otherwise, but also to highlight what is happening more broadly.  So maybe it’s not the works themselves that are rendered more accessible, but rather the connections between them.

To favor one system over the other, or to underscore the supposed ignorance of major cultural institutions for not having more net based art, can position the artist, work, or community as having ingrained entitlement due to its novelty.

I’m not sure I agree that it deserves entitlement due to its novelty.  In the late 90′s and early 2000′s there were quite a few institutions that were collecting and attempting to show net art.  But most gave it up.  At that point there was an exuberance about the novelty of anything and everything that was happening online.    However now I believe we’re at the point where the technology has caught up and the novelty has died down, and because it is so ingrained in our culture, the work that is happening online in a cultural context deserves critical attention.  It was in part the recognition that artists working online isn’t novel at all that motivated us to do this project.

Further, we hope to continue expanding the idea of what is considered “netart”.  We intentionally found curators working in diverse parts of the artworld in order to cull different works and types of shows.   For example, our next show curated by Dena Beard highlights the work of primarily social practice and conceptual artists who use the web to document their more ephemeral practice or as a site of exchange.  While these may not be “net artists”, the internet is an important part of their practice.

The feeling of experiencing a highly mediated work grows stronger in listening to the elegantly executed tracks contained on Hardesty’s record. I’d prior listened to the tracks as mp3s that showed up in my Dropbox folder one day, which was an even stranger encounter than perusing Mr. Hardesty’s website or having this elegant package in my hands. Before the record had even been pressed, I listened to the rising and falling of a stranger’s voice, in headphones, one Sunday morning, via raw audio tracks. Listening to the tracks and knowing a record would be on its way soon, I felt anticipation in knowing that this object would bring about a new dimension to the work. If drawings were once seen as the preparatory work, a lesser-finished product than the studio painting, then listening to Hardesty’s raw audio tracks was akin to listening to drawings, with the clean white record itself serving as a highly controlled final product.

I also explored the work of Joe Hardesty as images online: hand-drawn text that appears to describe the act of creation or the process of another work in progress. His work is photographed in gallery settings or tightly cropped into drawings, mediated further by a laptop screen on which I view them. Hardesty states in his description of the Text Drawings series that he wants to make “the act of imagination… both visible and entertaining.” It is also his clear intent to mediate the acts of making and looking; and to control the experience of time and material for his audience, with precisely rendered text drawings and even more so with these audio tracks. Hardesty, most expressly with the record produced as Audio/Visual, Issue 19 of The Present Group, holds his audience captive in giving them his renderings of the created world around him.  In each audio track, he is seemingly describing a work of art in front of him, but he denies visual access to his listening audience. He uses quite plain language that captures quotidian scenes such as grey cobblestone warmed by sunlight in the opening track, Finest Looking; and more bizarre and grotesque ones, such as anthropomorphic safari animals being observed by a group of obese spectators who are eating Kentucky Fried Chicken, in Lions. With a satisfying economy of language, Hardesty gives the impression that a finished work exists, and he acts as the sole agent of such works. It remains a mystery where or if a finished work exists at all, outside of his text and audio renderings.

Joe Hardesty:  Vikings  2009  Pencil on Paper  27.5” x 39.5”    image courtesy of the artist

Similar to Washington, D.C.-based artist Molly Springfield, there is an aspect of deception in viewing Hardesty’s visual, text-based work. Springfield has spent years creating meticulous drawings of seminal texts, in photo-realistic renditions of photocopies of those texts. Her work brings up a similar tension between text and image; she brings to light the evidence of a hierarchy but then turns it on its head. Hardesty too plays this game with his pronouncements of the works he wishes the viewer to experience through him. He acts as mediator whether he is creating works that describe another work, or reading the poems that populate his drawings.

Molly Springfield:   Page 5   Graphite on paper   11 x 17 inches   image courtesy of the artist

An evolving thought occurs to me as I’ve been learning more about Hardesty’s work: I’m struck by how poetic, restrained and spare it is in its material considerations, but upon continuous listening and viewing there is a great sense of playfulness even in light of how tightly executed and controlled his finished works may be. The forebearers of Hardesty’s practice include poets and artists such as Sol LeWitt, Bruce Connor and Mel Bochner, as well as Ian Hamilton Finlay and other concrete poets who drove the conceptual art and concrete poetry movements of the 1960s. All of these artists investigated their own means of mediating artistic and linguistic experiences, as does Hardesty in the audio tracks accompanying this essay.  All of the aforementioned artists work with the ideas of language and time as material; each of them, even in experimentation, exhibits great control over their material. Hardesty, much like his predecessors, serves his listeners the experience of looking, but in a manner wholly controlled by the artist himself.

Hardesty, in giving us these text drawings in the form of audio tracks, pressed onto vinyl, is dictating the terms of our engagement with the work. The record begins: “This drawing looks down a steep hillside street paved with grey cobblestones…” Suddenly, I remember how time seems to slow down when listening to a record… how it holds your attention, without headphones, without a practical way of rushing from points A to B while still listening. I must stay close and flip the record when it is time and I realize that this is exactly how Hardesty meant for me to experience his sound works.  Hardesty, in every aspect of artistic execution, smartly wields the controls.

With tight, fluctuating hand gestures and repetitive spoken words, Aaron is seen busily occupying five areas of a domestic interior. He seems to be mapping out a kind of disjointed narrative on a kitchen surface, on blank walls and in the air, with some degree of urgency. This is not, however, a story of any linear kind. Instead, Aaron lists and repeats words, in a monotone, and, maddeningly, the narrative goes nowhere. The interactive feature doesn’t help. Viewers, by moving their cursors to the right or left of the screen, can navigate a circular path around the apartment to observe Aaron perform in the five spaces he occupies. Investing viewers with agency further confounds the expectation of locating some narrative progression, making the experience all the more circular.

At times, Aaron has an aspect redolent of an obsessive compulsive, or a malfunctioning robot, reduced to a limited repertoire of physical and linguistic vocabulary. Yet, there is also a sense of intense concentration, of careful method and study to Aaron’s actions. The inclination to subject these collections of human expressions to some order is, for me, irresistible. It is tempting, too, to grasp for familiar media that the performer’s body language recalls. The precision and restraint in the movement of his hands, for instance, conjures sign language, or the art of mime. I imagine a round red ball will materialize between his fingers fleetingly and disappear again. By the couch, he employs a leg to create sculptural spaces, thereby adding another layer to the expression of his voice and hands. But Aaron’s work ultimately defies categorization. After a long period of time struggling to discern patterns in the video, it occurred to me that there might be no narrative here at all—that Aaron’s actions are not an effort to communicate with his audience through any known language.

Indeed if there is a conversation underway here, Aaron is having it with himself. Viewers are silent witnesses to the performer’s outward expressions of internal thought processes. The nature of these expressions suggests the workings of an unconscious mind: his speech takes the form of unorganized and repetitive (and sometimes undecipherable) references and fragmented phrases. In other words, the kind of unmitigated and mundane references and images I find myself scrawling onto a page through automatic writing. In the corridor, for example, Aaron lists a hodgepodge of celebrity names (“Mena Suvari”), brands (“Tylenol,” “Sprint”), television programs (“Entourage”), media-popularized phrases (“trickle-down effect”) and abstract images (“invisible string”) among many others. In the kitchen, Aaron is fixated on describing (what sounds like) a “walk”. The word is repeated over and over again in slightly different phrasal variations. At the same time, his hands negotiate the spaces around him thoroughly, using them as reference points for his nonsensical narrative.

Through this outpouring of everyday references, Aaron’s words absorb weight (not in the sense of meaning, but in the sense of physical presence) and rhythm. With every repetition, the words become less and less meaningful, and take on a material quality of their own. Aaron’s actions are, perhaps, best approached as a multilayered inquiry into human interaction with space; using his body and his voice, Aaron creates space, acts on it, measures it, inhabits it, brings textures to it. He bounces words and sounds off walls and surfaces, and uses his hands to frame and define them, as though to affirm proof of their physical presence. This is where Aaron’s title springs to life. Using his voice to draw forms and reinforcing them with corresponding movements, the artist effectively employs his body to assert the present moment.

The ubiquity of Aaron’s references matches the ordinariness of the apartment setting he inhabits. If we accept (as hard as it is to do), that his words don’t contain meaning, just as we cannot draw any intellectual sustenance from the commonplace white walls and modern furnishings of the apartment, we can begin to approach Aaron’s actions simply as the building of shapes with his arms, and legs, and voice. By using the tools of language to occupy and create space, viewers may fall prey, as I did, to the urge to decode Aaron’s unfamiliar mode of expression through traditional channels of communication. The artist challenges us to unlearn, for a few moments, the trappings of language, and find the message in the medium. Liberated from the cognitive processing of language, I found something far more stable: the tangible, physical occupation of space.

Would it be more helpful for us to start describing these acts in a somewhat different fashion, a fashion more productive to the situation at hand, one that for semantics sake doesn’t degenerate into questions of intent? There’s no shame in admitting that we get something out of giving. It doesn’t dilute the gesture or its value. We create our own values when it comes to unregulated and intangible systems of exchange. Let’s therefore promote a community of reciprocity wherein our return, the exchange in question, is self-determined. Let’s do away with the problematics of generosity for something more anarchic, more complex, more… generous in deed than definition.

Steve Lambert – his person and his work – exists on a continuum in a long line of absurdist provocateurs hell bent on changing the world for the better one sincere, well-formed, slightly ridiculous gesture at a time. Sometimes it’s not intentionally so ridiculous, it’s just that from the outside, for those not already there, it can seem a little far-fetched. But just wait. You’ll see. He makes objects and actions in equal measure, never favoring one over the other – they are all constructed as a means of provoking dialogue around various political subjects, profound and humorous alike. For Lambert these bits of provocation are intended to get people thinking (and talking) about how they act, what they believe, how they imagine the world around them, and how they imagine what it could be. Inaccurately defined, his work is generous. It gives a lot of itself. It also asks for much in return from its viewers and participants. So, from here on out, I’ll use Lambert as an agent for my argument.

Lambert’s newest project is an edition, a simple wooden box with the words, “I Want You to Have This” inscribed upon it. Keep it by your front door. Put that scratched copy of Come On Feel the Lemonheads inside, your old rabbit’s foot, the weed someone gave you and you’ve kept in the freezer for years, in the hopes it will remain fresh, thinking, “I like pot. I’ll smoke this someday. The perfect day…” and yet you just never got around to it. I Want You to Have This allows you to give away the shit you don’t want anymore, the items that follow you, from one house to the next, one phase of your life to another, like a benign demon, a cuddly, lice-free, and not all that heavy monkey on your back. They aren’t too much of an intrusion or burden, these items. But honestly, they take up space and you don’t need them now, and you might not ever have to begin with. Why not give them away? The piece is a very simple gesture that aims at discussing a less than simple subject; the transparency of a gift delivered insincerely. A gift can be a burden, and a burden given in the guise of a gift can really piss people off, as cultural norms state that you have to accept the damn thing without complaint.

These days it seems to call someone out as a Social Practice artist is to say they are doing something, which for one is public, as well as new and difficult to define. Or to call some a Social Practice artist is to say that their work is, again, public and that they aren’t trying hard enough. Lambert is a Social Practice artist, but not quite for either of those reasons. His work is about publics, yes. And his work is not hard to define or difficult. It is deceptively simple. Simplicity, as a methodology, is a great asset in the creation of a public around a piece or practice. It allows those who engage a work to enter into the piece easily, with confidence that they are aware of its place in the world, how it works, and how they are to engage it. From there on out, they gain the agency to consider, deconstruct, and absorb the work as their own. They are aware of the ruse, the trick, the framework, and in the case of Lambert’s practice, their “in on the joke.” His work, in line with a particular stain of Social Practice, is public in that it is often situated outside of the gallery space, but far more importantly it is about galvanizing a group of unknown people around an idea to consider it and make it their own. It is open. It is malleable. It grows from project to project to include others. It continues conversations from one to the next, and encourages the viewer/participant to converge with the work of other practitioners, as well as become one themselves if they do not consider themselves one already. It asks us to do this work till it doesn’t become work any more but life. It asks us to form A Public around our work so that through embodiment and accumulation it may become The Public, i.e., Common Place, Quotidian. It represents itself in a state of becoming, in that it suggests to those who encounter it a possibility of a future, a future which they are part of – with others.

Social Practice accepts and values the influence of other fields and histories outside of the aesthetic realm. Furthermore, contrary to what one might expect, Social Practice values art and aesthetics equally as much as the practices so-called outside influences. And, with that in mind, it finds that the designation of art can allow one to mine fields and hybridize them in a manner to elicit dialogue around issues that are important to the practitioner, and as this work is about the formation of publics, those that gravitate towards the work. Of course this forces one to mention an important issue – there’s a lot of disingenuous crappy social practice work out there that doesn’t work hard enough, that isn’t critical of its own intentions, and yet due to its relative “newness” gets lumped with the rest. This is work that wants to give, wants to be (pseudo)generous, without being honest with its intentions or desires, without being open with its tensions, which are generative and nothing to hide. I say this without a want to be cynical, and I’d argue that my statement isn’t that. It’s to say that to create a space that values the socio-cultural and political intentions of its rhetoric the person or people who envisioned and desired that space need to get naked, fight to relieve themselves of hierarchies, and attempt the creation of an area of questioning as much as an area of statement making. Too much Social Practice continues to value statements over questions. I’d argue though that the questions, in the end, are the slightly more valuable by-product of the two. Good questions provoke more thoughtful statements. Questions, which are of honest concern to those who ask them, are reciprocal in nature.

And this brings us back to my original point. A practice concerned with the formation of publics, the notion of social art as a form of generosity has become increasingly prevalent. For a practice whose strengths, for one, lay within its non-hierarchical stance, this is disingenuous when inconsiderately employed. In response to the work of artists such as Harrell Fletcher, do-gooder work abounds, with more and more works and projects proposing to do this and that for someone. But the imitators and the influenced, as well as Fletcher’s work itself, seem dangerously hollow. I say dangerous because I see and believe deeply in the public possibilities and political efficacy of a certain strain of Social Practice. When a work or worker presupposes that they have something to give to someone without making it plainly apparent that they get something in return for this act, a system of hierarchies is established and allowed to flourish; between artist and participant, between white people and people of color, between middle class or rich and the poor, able and disabled, and so forth down the line. A practitioner working in this way promotes dictation over facilitation in that its more about making statements through their interactions than it is about asking questions of the people who allow that interaction to emerge, or about being publicly questioned ourselves. We need to express, in overt, theoretical, even aesthetics terms that we as social practitioners are part(s) of the public which we are actively attempting to form, not actors alongside or outside the public(s) which we endeavor to help create. And, if it is evident to others that, in certain circumstances we do not consider ourselves part of that public, we need to ask difficult questions of ourselves if we wish to see the work we do as separate from ourselves while continuing to be politically efface-able. Simply put, our concerns and actions need to be reciprocal in some form or another, and this reciprocity needs to be visible. We need to ask, “What do I get out of this,” with as much intention as, “what can I give.” This is a problem that Lambert handles often, and elegantly.

Steve Lambert, “I will talk with anyone…”   January 2006    image courtesy of artist

Whether creating a space to publicly talk “about anything” (as in Lambert’s 2006 work, I Will Talk With Anyone…), or an object that asks its viewer to consider the manners and habits in which we give of ourselves to others (as in Lambert’s newest work), an exchange between maker and participant takes place in the work we make. In this sense, there really isn’t too much of a difference between I Want You to Have This and another work of Lambert’s, a collaboration with The Yes Men and many others, entitled NY Times Special Edition. Each work takes a simple object and presents a set of possibilities and problems in front of those who encounter it. Both are works that are supposed to live with you, rather than you visit them, in that they enter into the most quotidian aspects of our day; our commute, a visit to a friend’s house. While the scale of each project differs, the intentions of both are of a piece. They ask us to question the things in our life that we find most common place and immovable; the material wealth we collect yet find burdensome, our complicity in war’s fought in our name, education and the models we accept for ourselves and others, or our participation in economies of all sorts. With a slight smile they ask, “Well… what if?” They give something to you for free, and yet ask you to do something with the information or object you’ve received. They agitate for us to question our considerations. They are anything but singular, anything but passive, anything but generous as we know it.
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Sam Gould is co-founder of Red76, a collaborative art practice which originated in Portland, Oregon in 2000. Along with his work as the instigator and core-facilitator of many of the groups initiatives, Gould is the acting editor of its publication, The Journal of Radical Shimming. He is a senior lecturer at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, Ca. within the Graduate Fine Arts Dept. for Social Practice and is frequently a guest lecturer at schools around the United States and abroad.

Gould’s work has been activated through projects and lectures on street corners, in laundromats, bars, and kitchen tables, as well as through collaborations with museums and institutions such as SF MoMA; the Walker Arts Center; the Drawing Center; the Bureau for Open Culture; Institute for Art, Religion, and Social Justice at Union Theological Seminary; ArtSpeak; Printed Matter; the Cooper Union; the New Museum/Rhizome; Manifesta8; and many other institutions and spaces worldwide. He was one of nine nominees for the de Menil Collection’s 2006 Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement, is a founding “keyholder” of MessHall, and was the 2008 Bridge Resident at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

“And the landscape will do/ us some strange favor when/ we look back at each other/ anxiously” –Frank O’Hara

How do we listen to each other? Is listening an act of knowing another? Is real, true listening even possible? These are the questions I kept coming back to while reading Lichen Books: On The Road. It’s the story of a girl looking for answers written on post it notes and inserted into Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road. The novel tracks Sal Paradise, a narrator in search of something unnameable, while weaving through a multiplicity of characters constantly traveling and talking to each other. Staying up all night, even, just to talk, in hopes of arriving together at some new understanding of each other that will solve their problems. Rebecca Blakley’s narrator also roams the country in search of another, or a self, or a job, or a decision she can feel certain of. Even when she’s talking to people, it seems as if the landscape or indecision prevents her presence. These characters keep looking for responses from each other that provide any sense of connectedness. The distance of Blakley’s narrator from others in her story indicates, ironically, Blakley’s remarkable ability to listen.

We finish this novel and story feeling like we still don’t know if anyone really hears each other—and there’s a desolate sadness—as large as the dark endless highways that populate this story—in the realization that we might not ever. And yet, Blakley demonstrates considerable trust in our ability to engage with the text, in our ability to listen, by making visible the temporality of our responses through her chosen form—they are just sticky notes, after all, and one could effortlessly discard them, or rearrange them. She’s highlighting the impulse to respond (the desire to conflate one’s story with another’s, to tell one’s own story as an indication of listening), as perhaps the only form of true listening, however flawed. There’s beauty in the humility and faith required to tell a story on slips of paper that we often throw away everyday.

Often in Blakley’s text, I found myself surprised at the quotidian nature of her intrusions—recounting rather plain details of travel that don’t feel especially essential. Retrospectively, those details revealed themselves as an important interaction with, or mirroring of Kerouac’s style—he spends a lot of time getting people from one point to another and in any one moment of the book one could think: is this really necessary to this novel? But that’s the whole point—it’s an accretion process, not a linear building of narrative, any moment is every moment, full of every possible emotion. Any one detail is not important, but instead the heavy and total imprint of their bodily enactment of life. In this way, the novel becomes a kinesthetic experience—I so often felt it bodily, alongside the characters—and it’s an astute and important choice that Blakley interacts with this text in the way she does. It’s as if she’s saying, in our responses to each other, no matter how absurd, there is hope.

While reading her responses, I felt my own presence in a way that was uncomfortable—I wasn’t sure I wanted to be reminded of my self-as-reader in the present moment. Isn’t that partly why we read novels—to escape our bodily experience? Blakley is complicating this convention with the materiality of her chosen form—you must lift her notes off to read the text underneath or interrupt the novel to read her story. And yet I grew to look forward to the notes, because they activated the text in unexpected ways. In a particularly bright moment in the middle of the book, the narrator of Blakley’s story lies down in the salt flats on the same route that Paradise was on a few chapters back, confused as to what to do with her life: “I felt like I had turned into a pile of salt. But it wasn’t a punishment, it was natural. It was where I was supposed to be. It was settled—I would lie in the salt until I knew what to do with my life.” The intrusion serves to build out Kerouac’s work, to emphasize its timelessness, and also contextualize and layer hers. Blakley’s scene recalls the circular nature of Paradise’s journey through the novel, finding himself repeatedly in altered and peripheral experience. Meanwhile underneath her text, Kerouac lyrically comments on the nature of the western landscape: “for the house was in that part of the West where the mountains roll down foothilling to the plain and where in primeval times soft waves must have washed from sea-like Mississippi to make such round and perfect stools for the island-peaks like Evans and Pike and Longs.” Blakley keeps her prose exceptionally flat; she lets Kerouac do the work of lyricism that sets a backdrop of expansive, aerated time, while her story’s similarity to Paradise’s compounds for us the commonality and collective nature of our angst.

Blakley’s experiment provides the sensation of a story being told in rounds—both narrators exploring the same isolation and feeling of irrelevancy in a vast and indifferent landscape—but hitting different notes at different moments, which exposes the vibrant and mysterious urge for storytelling (response) itself. This, in turn exposes the stakes of the first person narration of both—we may always feel confused about our purposes and roam the roads feeling lost, but the urge to make sense of this experience through telling our stories, responding to life, has the capacity to provide a momentary sense of order.

That’s the ultimate success of this intervention—it exposes a natural conflation of those impulses—to know the self and other, and to know a text. The manifestation of those impulses is our responses to each other. Blakley pays Kerouac the high compliment of being his fan and critic; at times she seems to be poking fun at Kerouac’s frenetic lyricism and Paradise’s unconscious privilege through her flat and minimalist prose, at other times she reverently concurs with his insistent portrayal of life as a restless quest after unfulfilled desires.

I think the most we can hope for is, in listening, that we are called to respond. Maybe here, response is the act of love Blakley is exposing. That we’re not in a void, that our words matter to each other. The position of the reader is made more active, because we’re being asked to examine our own stakes in these stories, in a direct physical interaction with sticky papers in a book—we’re asked to find these stories familiar, as something we recognize, as something worth responding to.

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Sarah Fontaine lives in the Outer Sunset of San Francisco, California. She co-directs the studios and project space at the Carville Annex, a site for investigating people and place. She seeks higher stakes. Her writing and other experiments can be found in Plaid Review, Reading Conventions and factorycompany.

Art Publishing Now

is a two-day event dedicated to the investigation and showcasing of art publishing practices in the Bay Area. It includes a day of presentations and critical discussions, an after party, an art publishers fair, library and web archive.

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Participate:

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The Library is still seeking submissions!
Deadline October 1st.

The Art Publishing Now Library is a physical and online archive of Art Publishers in the Bay Area. APNL is a self-defined collection; it is open to any project that considers itself an art publisher or a contributor to art publishing in the Bay Area. The library will be installed at Southern Exposure from October to December 2010 and will go on to find a new home in the Bay Area.

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Join the Conversation!

THE SUMMIT is on Saturday, October 9, 2010, 11 am – 6 pm
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Space is limited so be sure to register to attend!

The 2010 Art Publishing Now Summit invites you to join leading creators of print, online, and experimental publications to reflect on the most urgent issues and exciting possibilities in art publishing today. With topics ranging from “Publish AND Perish” to “West Coast Critical?”, the event will include a series of presentations, conversations, and panels intended to yield insight and encourage innovation in Bay Area art publishing.

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Learn about local art publishers!

Sunday, October 10, 2010, 11 am – 6 pm
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

The Art Publishing Now Fair showcases the breadth and depth of art publishing projects in the Bay Area. The fair hosts Bay Area independent publishing and related projects presenting a diverse range of the best in contemporary art publications ranging from periodicals, websites, editions and more.

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Party with us!

Saturday, October 9, 2010, 6-10pm
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Join Art Publishing Now Summit and Fair participants for a get together at Southern Exposure. Purchase food from some of SF’s favorite street food vendors including El Tonayense Taco Truck. Drinks and libations by donation from Trumer Brauerei, BridgePort Brewery, and Spoetzl Brewery.

Old Tricks for New Monkeys is a vibrant canvas with colors seemingly caught in motion. Beautifully detailed threads create a palette that pulls the viewer in and keeps the eye engaged. Yet even the title of the piece is a juxtaposition of opposites; and this gives a sense of the multiple contradictions that build layers of content beyond the visual itself.

Monkey See and Do, 12″ x 12″, thread on canvas, 2006.  Image courtesy of the artist.

This work began as organic stains on fabric that were then hand embroidered by the artist. The process of embroidery is a laborious one, at once meticulous and fine. So from first glance one sense’s the accidental nature of a stain, and begins appreciating the shape and color, only to find that there is a complicated handiwork involved, one with very intentional impulses. The artist has said about her own work in general,

I love art that encourages a perceptual shift in the viewer, particularly a humorous one. My work in a certain sense is a one-line joke about the rewards of “looking closer,” although obviously it’s really labor intensive and complicated as well. I began this technique as an outgrowth of painting and then collaging with fabric, but I got interested in thread and the tiny, rigid structures of the stitches. I became curious about why stitching was always stigmatized as decorative and crafty – I went about finding the least practical, least structured, least controlled graphic imagery that I could embroider and happened upon the “drip.” I liked the idea that from a distance the pieces would look so fluid and painterly, but contain this surprise of shockingly time-consuming deliberation.

Karen Rosenberg’s 2009 NY Times review places Lubelski’s work in the art historical category of artists who ‘paint’ with thread, such as Ghada Amer and Michael Raedecker. The review also illustrates the relation of masculine and feminine elements inherent in her work, as in the ‘male arts of paint-splashing’ and the ‘female fabric-staining and needlework’. There is a tension between the feminine and masculine aspects of the work that grows stronger with the introduction of the digital medium.

Monkey See and Do, digital tracing, 2010.  Image courtesy of the artist.

In order to produce this work for The Present Group, Lubelski chose to work with a machine to embroider her original design. She began by doing a computer drawing that was a tracing of an earlier piece that she had stitched by hand in response to an organic stain, wanting to see what would happen if she fed that drawing into a computer stitching program without any changes or explanations. In the context of her process, she was letting go of control and trusting the machine to reproduce an image in its own way. Lubelski described this change in process as simultaneously embracing chaos and control.

Is something lost in the translation of the machines paths, something that existed in the hand-embroidered stitches? Or is the translation actually more direct due to the nature of the process? Does the machine embroidery change the value of the piece? Much has been written in postmodern theory about the loss of the original in nearly every medium from film to painting. As Baudrillard referenced,

“The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth–it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true—Ecclesiastes.”

Postmodern theorists often looked to production and reproduction and the inevitable commercialization of art. But the conclusion was that the loss of the original does not signify a bad thing, it opens up progressive possibilities of both process and accessibility.

In Old Tricks for New Monkeys, the beauty and wonder of the handmade is still inherent. In fact, digital media here combines the skills of the artist and the machine and expands the artistic practice. Lubelski successfully integrates the feminine and the masculine, the analog and the digital, the original and the reproduction, not favoring one over the other, but developing an artwork full of seemingly opposite threads that provide room for visual and conceptual dialog.

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Jennifer McCabe is currently Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Museum of Craft and Folk Art in San Francisco, where she has been working for three years to develop new programs and expand the image of the 26-year old institution. She is also an adjunct professor in contemporary art, most recently at Mills College. www.mocfa.org

For Yanagi – the founder of the Japanese Arts and Crafts, or Mingei movement, of the early 20th century – hand-crafted objects were the way to re-connect industrialized society with the natural world. First published in English in 1972 during the birth of the microprocessor, the book’s chapter Pattern formulates Yanagi’s manifesto: How pattern is derived, what constitutes both a good and bad pattern, and the ability for pattern to provoke in man a full capacity to perceive the beauty of the natural world. His argument is hinged on the question: “Why have painting and pattern separated? The same cause underlies the idea that divides art and craft: the growth of individualism.”

Yanagi’s question is based on the notion of a “Viewpoint,” a human perspective that allows the artist to distill the beauty of nature into a more refined pattern. When using the example of translating a bamboo leaf into a “mon” – or Japanese crest-  Yanagi creates his theory of pattern based on some of the following principles:

*A pattern is both true to nature and artificial.

*Pattern is nature plus a human viewpoint, and the viewpoint is what
gives content; All patterns are products of a viewpoint.

*Good pattern is frequently rather terrifying. And any good pattern has
an element of the grotesque.

*Pattern does not explain; it’s beauty is determined by the viewers
imagination.

This theory of pattern underscores Yanagi’s entire philosophy of beauty, and articulates his perceived division between art and craft, individualism and collectivism. However, this system of pattern creates a problematic condition for both contemporary pattern makers and painters alike. Yanagi’s model for pattern production is fundamentally productive except for the variable value of the viewpoint. Yanagi’s post-industrial viewpoint has been diminished; our new viewpoint is post-digital.

For most inhabitants of the “developed” world, the simulacric lens of the computer, where all nature is synthesized into a simulation, has become the new viewpoint. Rivers have been traded for iPhone aps, expeditions for Google Earth, and communal banquets for cocktails in Second Life. And the basis of this digital sublimation is the highly skilled craft of code.

Emerging in 1801 from Joseph Marie Jacquard’s binary punched card loom, computer code has become the densest language mankind has invented to express the narrative of the world. Through it’s abstract syntax and consortium of disjointed symbols, code has created the algorithm to translate reality into a fragmented arena of spectacle that is as thin as a computer screen and as vast as the surface of the globe. If language precedes perception, then code has certainly shifted the “viewpoint” from the natural to the digital.

There is a new generation of artists and pattern makers engaging the structure of pattern from the post-digital viewpoint: Matthew Cella is one of them. Cella, like Yanagi, is nostalgic for the past; for the nature of his youth. The difference is the nature of Yanagi’s childhood is of rice paddies and Mt. Fuji, while Cella’s is comprised of similar subjects represented in the synthetic landscapes of Atari, Nintendo, and Sega. And what Cella does with digital nature is in practice no different than what Yanagi describes in the translation of an actual bamboo leaf into a pattern; he refines it into something more than the original could be. Furthermore, Cella – like Yanagi’s own desires -employs his patterns into utilitarian forms such as rugs. But the question remains: How, if at all, is Cella’s work bridging the craft/painting divide?

As programmer Charles Petzold states in Beautiful Code: “Code is just a smart kind of data – data designed to trigger processors into performing useful or amusing acts.”  One could almost think of this statement in terms of weaving: code is the craft of weaving itself, and the useful act which once produced blankets and baskets, now results in the infinite cloth of pixels that our eyes scour for information. And although Yanagi saw the technological as the bondage of mankind, in what way is this ever increasing craft of code – and all of it’s resulting patterns of pixels – creating a new utilitarian form, new unknown craftsmen, and bringing us together in ways Yanagi had originally only thought possible through our interactions with ceramics and textiles?

In many textile traditions, landscape and narrative are literally woven together through the production of pattern. The socio-technological changes of our world have shifted our forms of representation, transforming our sense of landscape-narrative from the geographic to the sociological. Landscapes and histories have been replaced by networks and communities founded on the craft of code. Perhaps Cella is presenting textile traditions in a new way. Each pixel of Cella’s work represents a collaged fragment of information. It is as if he has cut up the narrative textile traditions of the Pueblo, Celts, and Akan, and haphazardly stitched them back together with the digital pop-culture of the 1980s: The result is the fragmented quilt of the post-modern world.

I wonder what could be gained from a more comprehensive melding of the arts and crafts with digital production? Perhaps Comp-Sci programs could be more experimental within arts and crafts institutions rather than liberal arts colleges and poly-technical schools. Could dot-coms be more productive if they established micro-potteries and looms for their employees rather than ping-pong tables and bi-weekly office parties? In addition to programs such as Google’s local produce initiative, could companies find a qualitative improvement in their employees and product by supporting local artisanal practices? If we accept that our lives have become chaotic and fragmented – largely due to the digitization of our reality – then the incorporation of the ephemerally digital with the haptically crafted seems like a very interesting path to follow.

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Mike Bianco is an independent curator and artist based out of Marfa, Texas, and is the recently appointed associate curator at Ballroom Marfa. Prior to moving to Marfa, Bianco was the co-founder of Queen’s Nails Projects, an offshoot of Queen’s Nails Annex in San Francisco. In addition, Bianco is also the founder of the alternative arts space The Waypoint, in Marfa, Texas. More recently, Bianco has been focused on developing his projects The California Arts Cemetery in Lone Pine, CA., and a contemporary ceramics residency in Marfa, Texas. For more information about Bianco and his work you can visit www.biancoprojects.com