Trans-Love Energies and a Total Assault on Culture

Jeff Hale, in his text "Total Assault on the Culture" traces the evolution of a countercultural movement in the Detroit area that centered around John Sinclair, the Detroit Artists Workshop, Trans-Love Energies, MC-5, and the White Panther Party. I'd like to give a summary of this important history here.

Upon arriving at Wayne State University in 1964 and interested in a "self-determined" art scene, John Sinclair rallied a lively Detroit Artists Workshop. The Workshop was a communal experiment described as “a collective interracial universe of multimedia spinning into many areas of creativity at once.” The Workshop had a structure that was both informal and highly organized. Membership dues were collected, concerts, readings, and exhibitions proposed and prepared.

Every Sunday, the Workshop held an open house with poetry readings, jazz performances, exhibitions of photographs and original art, and screenings of avant-garde films. Over the next two years, the Artists' Workshop developed into an alternative publishing house, producing among others, the first underground newspaper of the Midwest called Guerrilla. While isolating itself from the dominant culture in Detroit, the Artists' Workshop interacted regularly with other bohemian/hip communities on the two coasts and became a countercultural outpost in the Midwest.

Sinclair was arrested several times for possession of marijuana and, in 1966, spent time in jail. At this time the Detroit scene underwent a radical transformation, as a number of core members left the city in fear of police brutality and with a desire to experience San Francisco's emerging hip community. Writing from jail, John advised them against abandoning Detroit: "You have it in your power now to create a vital living situation here in Detroit -- if you have the will and commitment to such a situation... we are all going to have to start working with each other and take advantage of what our local possibilities [are]."

Upon his release, Sinclair began acting on his commitment to local organizing. The fruit of these labors was the eventual creation of "Trans-Love Energies" (TLE), an attempted union of counterculture, student, and other alternative groups in Detroit, named after a line in a song by folk-rock artist Donovan, urging listeners to "Fly Translove Airways, get you there on time" (the song was later popularized in "live" performances by the San Francisco rock troupe, The Jefferson Airplane).

TLE tried to unify a diverse student/hip community into an umbrella organization, or "tribal council." The Trans-Love organization, like most other counterculture collectives, paid much lip service to the egalitarian "no leaders" concept. TLE continued much of what they had done as the Artists' Workshop but stepped up their commitment to underground news, alternative art events, street theater, and several bands including MC-5, which was a politically provocative, and increasingly popular stage show.

The peak of this optimistic period for Sinclair and his group came on April 30, 1967, when they staged a "Love-in" on the Detroit River. Influenced by San Francisco's "Human Be-In" the previous January, as well as the trend of similar counterculture celebrations happening in hip enclaves across the country, Trans-Love Energies promoted the event as a gathering of "peace and love," where hippies and straights could come together to celebrate a new vision of society. The "Love-In" drew police attention and resulted in a full-scale riot.

Thereafter, the hippie philosophy of getting high, creating alternative institutions, and waiting for the capitalist machine to rust away was proving to be an inadequate analysis. Sinclair later admitted: "[We had] a simplistic picture of what the 'revolution' was all about... we said that all you had to do was 'tune in, turn on, and drop out,' as if that would solve all the problems of humankind... and what we didn't understand, spaced out as we were behind all that acid, was that the machine was determined to keep things the way they were... by this time there was a full-scale suppression campaign underway." Sinclair struggled with the realization that the local police were responding to cultural revolt with political repression. Gradually, over the course of the next year, he came to the conclusion that the counterculture forms espoused and lived by Trans-Love Energies were actually political statements.

In response, TLE's activities focused on educating youth regarding both the positive, liberating aspects of the new cultural forms, and also their potential risks. Sinclair began appearing at area colleges, high schools, and other youth gatherings, urging people to join in a "total assault on the culture" -- a William S. Burroughs phrase from the early sixties, popularized by New York poet/artist (and future Yippie) Ed Sanders. The collective also stepped up distribution of its newspapers and other propaganda at MC-5 concerts, warning of police surveillance and hassles. Still another initiative involved assisting high school students with publishing alternative newspapers.

In summer of '67 racial tensions raged, resulting in the apocalyptic riots of late July. This warranted the group's collective move 40 miles west to Ann Arbor where the new Trans-Love Energies commune now consisted of twenty-eight people, including three children and the MC-5 members. New members brought with them associations to the Weather Underground, to SDS, and an underground newspaper called The Argus. Trans-Love Energies' immediate focus was music, which had recently become a local source of conflict. During the winter of 1968, the Ann Arbor City Council had passed an ordinance banning amplified music from city parks, so naturally, Sinclair decided to hold an MC-5 concert in defiance of the law. Thanks to press coverage from the Michigan Daily, the campus community got involved. Two weeks later the City Council relented, granting TLE permission to hold a series of free concerts on the outskirts of town. Freed from the stifling, repressive atmosphere of urban Detroit and fortified by its success in the Ann Arbor free concert struggle, Trans-Love Energies initiated a "total assault on the culture" throughout the summer. The spearhead of its attack was the MC-5.

Each MC-5 concert (MC-5 was short for "Motor City Five') was a multi-media event, with psychedelic lights, rear-screen projection, plus the spiritual rantings of "Brother" J.C. Crawford. The supercharged electric music of the MC-5 was punctuated by Sinclair's radical speeches, urging youth to pursue personal freedom to the utmost extremes. At times they would appear onstage toting unloaded rifles, and at the climax of the performance, an unseen "sniper" would shoot down the band. These concerts were not only cultural assault but also, interestingly, a means of financial support for the entire TLE commune.

Despite their initial victory for free music, the group became increasingly politicized in the face of increased drugs busts and citations for disturbing the peace. As umbrella support for a growing number of newspapers and associated with the newly founded Underground Press Syndicate, the TLE's local power struggles were amplified by circulating news of radical initiatives, particularly the militant anti-war movement and that of Black Power.

The heightened politicization of the TLE and MC-5 was evidenced by the band's notorious performance preceding the outbreak of violent protests at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The group's appearance at the convention is also notable for their lengthy performance -- over eight hours -- and the fact that, of a day's line-up, they were the only band to show up. According to one critic the MC-5 was "crystallizing the countercultural movement at its most volatile and threatening."

Sinclair walked away from the Chicago debacle with two lessons: that the police had acted out in response to the large number of gathered activists and therefore, the emergent Left required greater organization and, secondly, that this organization must be a model for youth on a national scale. The creation of the "White Panther Party" in November of 1968, represented the culmination of these "lessons" as well as a growing alliance with the Black Panthers whose activities were widely respected among the TLE.

At this time, the Black Panthers were actively seeking alliances with "white mother country radicals" in the New Left, counterculture, and peace movements; likewise, the Black Panthers were seen by Sinclair as a model organization with which to be closely affiliated.

At first, the WPP was little more than a paper construct. The organization's "Ten Point Program" displayed a Yippie-esque mixture of counterculture themes and "fantasy politics." The platform included such things as: full endorsement of the Black Panther Party's 10-point program and platform; a "total assault on the culture by any means necessary, including rock and roll, dope, and fucking in the streets"; free food, clothes, housing, drugs, music, bodies, and medical care; and freedom from "phony 'leaders' -- everyone must be a leader -- freedom means free every one." The WPP even had a "minister of demolition." The MC-5 continued to be the vehicle for much of the WPP political propaganda and was publicly amplified by instances like their appearance on the Rolling Stone cover in 1969.

In the atmosphere of mounting political and racial tensions, the White Panthers presented their analysis of a pending revolution in increasingly militant terms. "Pun" Plamondon emerged as the most radical of the group, issuing statements like: "... get a gun brother, learn how to use it. You'll need it, pretty soon. Pretty soon. You're a White Panther, act like one." For his part, Sinclair presented a "youth colony" thesis, which asserted that the hip youth of America were in fact a persecuted "colony," with similarities to both urban blacks and Third World anti-imperialist movements, such as the VietCong (National Liberation Front) in South Vietnam. "Our culture is a revolutionary culture," he stated, adding, "we have to realize that the long-haired dope-smoking rock and roll street-fucking culture is a whole thing, a revolutionary international cultural movement which is absolutely legitimate and absolutely valid."

The WPP's increasingly militant posturing went alongside an escalation of riots, bombings, FBI investigations, jail sentences, and several members going underground. This bit of the story is too importantly complex to simplify or wax over, yet there is not room here for the details. Perhaps the epilogue I can provide is that Sinclair and other members of the WPP, eventually reconvened in Ann Arbor and established the "Rainbow People's Party," a non-militant, grass-roots organization, whose activities mirrored the Movement's entrance into mainstream politics after 1970.

There is much to be said about the story of John Sinclair and his various collective efforts. One thing I find interesting about this narrative is the notion of expanded culture. It is fascinating to see the evolution of an artist's workshop into a militant political party. While the phrase " total assault on the culture" certainly reflects Sinclair's evolving agenda -- and is assumably referencing a total assault on civilization and power -- I'd like to point out that his method of assault was, in fact, culture. Through newspapers, music, multi-media events, and public gatherings, these groups attacked dominant society and asserted resistance with forms that were extensions of cultural/art production. As Stewart Home, in his book appropriately titled "Assault on Culture: Utopian Currents from Lettrisme to Class War" states that the WPP was comprised of "former cultural workers who were leading the radicalisation of Amerikan youth with the newly developed freak style of political agitation." No doubt, this story is part of a much longer history of vanguardist practices that aim to recreate the world through its spectacular destruction. I offer this story here, via Red Legacy, as a yet another example of radical change accomplished through collective cultural production.

Much of the text above has been borrowed directly from Jeff Hale, with thanks.

Copyright©2001 From IMAGINE NATION - The American Counterculture of the 1960s and '70s (section two 'Cultural Politics' chapter 5 The White Panthers' "Total Assault On The Culture") by Jeff A. Hale / Peter Braunstein (editor) & Michael William Doyle (editor). Reproduced by permission of Routledge / Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.

What's in a Name? What is PLAND?

We've done it! We've given the land in Taos a name and some intention. It's called PLAND. Within this odd word is a plan but also land. It may also be read as Plan D -- not Plan A or B, not even C, but sort of a last resort. We tend not to like misspelled words nor acronyms, yet PLAND emerged as both. We enjoy the ambiguity of it as well as the awkwardness; surely this is the sensation of starting a project without end, without specific expectations, without money, water, electricity or shelter. What we do feel certain about is that PLAND will be an opportunity to test a lot of ideas, to share space and expansive possibility with a range of amazing people. PLAND will be a think-tank, a laboratory, an outpost that is defined by its challenges as well as its incredible beauty.

PLAND stands for Practice Liberating Art through Necessary Dislocation and through this land-based residency experiment, we aim to do just that. For me, there is potency in each of these words and linked together (especially in the context of the Taos mesa) there is thundering power.

Other developments: my spring semester Special Topics class at UCCS will be a practicum for developing the basic support structure for PLAND. Students will research the legacy of artist colonies, particularly in the southwest. They'll build a website, create a library, research relevant artists and models, solicit proposals, and undoubtedly visit the land to make something happen. Nina will be on site in Taos learning to salvage, scavenge and collect building materials while getting involved with the local community. Nancy will undoubtedly keep plugging away in Houston; she's writing some grants and talking collaboration with all sorts of fascinating people.

We aim to produce a 2-week long work party with friends and collaborators next summer. This will not only address the current lack of physical infrustructure but will also be an opportunity for incubated conversation around the future of PLAND. The work party is a very important form of cultural and community production, one we will employ as a staple of life at PLAND. All of this is sure to evolve and change, but for now:

PLAND: Practice Liberating Art through Necessary Dislocation is an off-the-grid residency program that supports the development of experimental and research-based projects in the context of the Taos mesa.

Stay tuned!

Barn Raising Revisited

In early American rural life, communities shared the labor involved in erecting large buildings, particularly barns. In sparsely populated areas and on the edge of the frontier, it was not possible to hire carpenters or other tradesmen to build a barn. Many hands were needed to get the work done in a timely fashion.

Barns were raised by might, a strong social framework, and a survivalist interdependence. All able-bodied community members were expected to attend and work hard during barn raisings, yet no one was paid regular wages. Food, camaraderie, a celebration of completion, and a communal labor pool were the main incentives for these events. The barn raisings were a means of getting large buildings constructed, but they were also an important aspect of community life.

Sometimes barn-raisings resulted in disastrous disagreements, like this scene from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

Nevertheless, I'm pretty excited about the notion of barn raising as a method and a metaphor. I’ll help you build your dream then you can help build mine, okay?

More (Than) Building

I've been building structures with groups of people and it has been an amazing experience.

Last month I took a group of students from University of Colorado at Colorado Springs (UCCS) to New Mexico and part of our field trip involved a visit to Project:Unknown on the Taos mesa. Project:Unknown is an off-the-grid artist hideaway-in-the-making. After an involved tour with Steve McFarland, the students were given an assignment: build a shade structure before nightfall. Two sturdy posts had been erected equidistant from a fence line. A pile of discarded lumber lay on the ground. Tools were brought out of the storage container. Total freedom was bestowed upon their design; the only rule being that the work be a collective endeavor. Work began.

The skies darkened as the shelter took form. Storms fumed in the north and south and rainbows appeared against the mountains. At one moment, raindrops fell and gusts blew. "Should we go inside?" the students asked. "Where will we go? There isn't really an 'inside.'" The momentary bluster slowed work, but only for a moment. A collective awareness of time's preciousness and also the desperate need for shelter hoisted beams into place, drill holes into beams, screws into holes. The group worked hurriedly, with only a rough idea of the construction plan.

What happened that afternoon was nothing new; this is how the world has been made, by need and by might. But for us it was extraordinary.

As we stood atop the shade structure that (miraculously supported our weight and) sported a stylish helix curve, a raw, varied edge, and plenty of shade, we felt a sense of awe.

It's incredible what can happen when a group of people work together. Building doesn't have to be a giant project, a long-term plan, an impossible group effort. A weirdly beautiful thing can be built fairly easily in a blustery afternoon.

Just days after being in New Mexico with my students, I went to the Bay Area for a set of events entitled Becoming Commons. The event took place in two parts: first, a discussion and dinner at the Headlands Center for the Arts; then, an experimental retreat/camp-out at a communal house in Bolinas. Jana Blankenship and I collaboratively organized the retreat (which I promise to post about soon) and one of my favorite activities of the weekend involved building an ad hoc structure on the beach. After talking briefly about the unique hand-built history of Bolinas and its legacy of informal communities made from driftwood, we journeyed to the beach to build our own driftwood fort.

The group was not a student group. They were sophisticated adults, renowned artists and curators, famous musicians, superstars, hipsters. I couldn't just tell them to build a structure; it had to come about in a different way. And so I merely started.

I began by dragging logs to a location that was decided appropriate and people slowly started participating. It was fascinating to see the fort evolve. Joseph erected the essential support beam, then walked away. Jana gathered materials continously. Amy crafted a woven roof that supported Stephanie's instrumental plank roof. Once it was started, the momentum carried and a sort of collective intuition (or was it daring, faith, experimentation?) took over and the debris grew into a beautiful shelter.

Olivia and Brook and others began to decorate the structure and that's when the fort transformed into a sort of monument, a veritable sanctuary. And then, at some indescribable moment, it was finished. We backed away from our work with curiosity and pride, fascinated to see what came out of the smallest intention, the littlest effort, the most meager of materials.

I'm reminded of a quote from one of the hard-working folks who helped to build Drop City, the first of the artist communes in the '60s, who said,

“The hardest time in a commune, particularly Drop City, is the time after the building gets done. While everyone is working together on actual construction the energy is centered, there is fantastic high spirit, everyone knows what he is doing all the time. But after the building is done comes a time of dissolution. There’s no focus for the group energy, and most hippies don’t have anything to do with their individual energy.” (Voyd, Bill, “Funk Architecture,” in Paul Oliver, ed., Shelter and Society. New York: Praeger, 1969, p. 158)

It's a different world now and we're not building a Drop City. We aren't building a commune or even functional living structures, but what strikes me about these words in this context is the notion that building can and does mobilize groups of people. Building is an incredibly potent practice. It keeps the world in motion, keeps people in motion. It gives meaning to time and resources. It's a source of agency, collectivity, and functionality.

I continue to learn from these group experiments in building and besides all the esoteric observations, I have fun too. There's nothing that satisfies, fortifies, and unifies quite like the act of building.

Meaningless Work

Meaningless work is obviously the most important and significant art form today. The aesthetic feeling given by meaningless work cannot be described exactly because it varies with each individual doing the work. Meaningless work is honest. Meaningless work will be enjoyed and hated by intellectuals - though they should understand it. Meaningless work cannot be sold in art galleries or win prizes in museums - though old fashion records of meaningless work (most all paintings) do partake in these indignities. Like ordinary work, meaningless work can make you sweat if you do it long enough. By meaningless work I simply mean work which does not make money or accomplish a conventional purpose. Meaningless work is potentially the most abstract, concrete, individual, foolish, indeterminate, exactly determined, varied, important art-action-experience one can undertake today. This concept is not a joke. - Walter De Maria, March, 1960

Werner Herzog's Rogue Film School

Werner Herzog, the Bavarian-born, Academy-award nominated a cult film maker will host a seminar this year called The Rogue Film School. Applications are due in November for the three-day conference hosted at a Los Angeles hotel, in January 2010. The seminar costs $1450 and promises no technical training, but rather a lively discourse on guerrilla tactics, low-budget production, and "the athletic side of film-making." In other words, "The Rogue Film School is about a way of life. It is about a climate, the excitement that makes film possible. It will be about poetry, films, music, images, literature."

Herzog, who didn't use a telephone until the age of 17, has directed over 40 films, published many books, and directed numerous operas. He is known for his epic tales that capture human conflict with nature, heroes with impossible dreams, and extreme journeys. He films on location and often uses local people as actors.

One of his better known films, "Agrirre, Wrath of God" is the tale of Spanish conquistadors in search of El Dorado, the legendary city of gold. was shot with a camera stolen from the Munich Film School, in the Amazon, for less than $370,000. The cast and crew climbed up mountains, hacked through thick jungle, and rode ferocious Amazonian river rapids on rafts built by natives. During the film session, a flood submerged much of the film equipment as well as the rafts; this disaster and the rebuilding effort were then incorporated into the film.

"Grizzly Man" is another Herzog film of note which tells the story of bear-enthusiast Timothy Treadwell who spent 13 summers in Katmai National Park and Preserve, Alaska. Treadwell shot hundreds of hours of film amidst these bears, and the camera was still rolling when in 2003, he and his girlfriend were killed and eaten. Herzog used Treadwell's collection of footage to tell this story. The film has received much criticism but is a testament to the adventurous subject matter and skillful means that Herzog employs.

Interested in attending the Rogue Film School? You can learn more a www.roguefilmschool.com

Applications are due November 13. But be warned, as Herzog states,

"The Rogue Film School is not for the faint-hearted; it is for those who have travelled on foot, who have worked as bouncers in sex clubs or as wardens in a lunatic asylum, for those who are willing to learn about lockpicking and forging shooting permits in countries not favoring their projects. In short: for those who have a sense of poetry. For those who are pilgrims. For those who can tell a story to four year old children and hold their attention. For those who have a fire burning within. For those who have a dream."

Ahoy Maties!

In my search for temporary, art-driven alternative communities, I've come across Swimming Cities, a project by a group of artists called SWOON. They've recently made a voyage along the Adriatic Sea to Venice and the pictures (mostly by Tod Seelie -- http://todseelie.com) of their journey are fantastic. A few short video clips are available on Creative Time TV -- and their website is http://www.swimmingcities.org/

The Swimming Cities website describes the project:

"SWOON’s boats are inspired by dense urban cityscapes and thickly intertwined mangrove swamps from her Florida youth. The Swimming Cities of Serenissima are built from salvaged materials, including modified Mercedes car motors with long-tail propellers. The boats’ crew is made up of 30 collaborating artists from the United States.

As the Swimming Cities move toward Venice, the crew will collect and install keepsakes in an ark-like cabinet of wonders that will be on display on the boats when they arrive. Once in Venice, the boats and crew will offer intimate performances that incorporate music, shadow puppetry, and story.

The vessels are imagined as a hybrid between boats and bits of land broken off and headed out to sea. Watching them approach the shore is like seeing a floating city in the distance, as improbable as Venice itself. To the real life crew, the boats are a place of refuge – both a home and a way of moving through the world. To those who encounter the boats for the first time, they are a reminder that anything that can be imagined can be built."

I'm reminded of the book The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. This book, published in 2000, is an examination of the Hercules-hydra myth that has long been a tale of imposing order and the battle for power. The authors introduce their writing project by stating:

"From the beginning of English colonial expansion in the seventeenth century through the metropolitan industrialization of the early nineteenth, rulers referred to the Hercules-hydra myth to describe the difficulty of imposing order on increasingly global systems of labor. They variously designated dispossessed commoners, transported felons, indentured servants, religious radicals, urban laborers, soldiers, sailors, and African slaves as the numerous, ever-changing heads of the monster. But the heads, though originally brought into productive combination by their Herculean ruler, soon developed among themselves new forms of cooperation against those rulers, from mutinies and strikes to riots and insurrections and revolution. Like the commodities they produced, their experience circulated with the planetary currents around the Atlantic, often eastward from American plantations, Irish commons, and deep-sea vessel back to the metropoles of Europe.”

Although not overtly stated, I read the Swimming Cities as a sort of hydra (with many beautiful - American! - heads) that demands a new context for art and, if only for a time, a different way of life. Ahoy maties!

Becoming Commons/Become Common

Some really amazing people have signed up for this event in California. If you're nearby, you should too.

Becoming Commons:
J. Morgan Puett with Brian Conley, Erin Elder & Allison Smith

Date: 9/24/2009 (Thursday)
Time: 7:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Location: Mess Hall

Ticket Info: FREE Admission
($20 for dinner/$15 for members)

Becoming Commons is a clustering/swarming/gathering of people entangled in the complexities of everyday living and working together. Looking to historical models of communes, collectives, homesteads, experimental outposts, and other forms of collective barn raising, participants are invited to share their stories and ideas in an intimate exchange at the Headlands Center for the Arts. This town hall-style program is collaboratively conceived by interdisciplinary artist co-founder of Mildred's Lane , J. Morgan Puett (AIR '09), artist Allison Smith (SMITHS), curator Erin Elder and CCA professor Brian Conley. These collaborators invite the public to join them for an evening of conversation. This is the first in a series of conversations that will continue in 2010.

Please note that dinner is an integral part of this program, so we strongly encourage you to join us at 6PM.

DINNER AT HEADLANDS
The public is invited to join the Headlands community for a delicious dinner in the Mess Hall at 6PM in conjunction with all public programs. Dinners are prepared by Headlands’ Chef Keith Mercovich, whose meals demonstrate a commitment to innovative and locally sourced cuisine. Dinner is $20 per person ($15 for Headlands Members). Reservations are required three business days prior to an event. Please emailinfo@headlands.org or visit www.headlands.org to make a reservation for dinner or RSVP to a public program.

C O M E T O B O L I N A S : B E C O M E C O M M O N

Putting conversation into action, this retreat will build on Headlands' hosted event "Becoming Commons" through an assortment of events, conversation, convergences, explorations and experiments. On the Bolinas Mesa, participants will collaboratively ask questions, share ideas, learn to forage, bake bread, make food, make music, build a structure, watch films, watch stars, and become friends. A series of informal workshops and activities, as well as the space for unscripted bliss, provides the setting for a deeper examination of what it means to become common.

DATES & TIME: Saturday, September 26 at noon until Sunday, September 27 at 6pm

LOCATION: Bolinas, details available with RSVP

RSVP: $25 for the weekend. All meals, live music and camping included. Space is limited! Email your reservation to Erin Elder -- mserinelder@gmail.com

Do You Remember Community Memory?

Community Memory was the first public computerized bulletin board system. Created by Efrem Lipkin, Mark Szpakowski, and Lee Felsenstein, Community Memory first appeared at Leopold's Records in Berkeley in 1973. Utilizing an SDS 940 timesharing system in San Francisco that connected via a 110 baud link to a teletype, users were able to enter and retrieve messages.

While initially conceived as an information and resource sharing network linking a variety of counter-cultural economic, educational, and social organizations with each other and the public, Community Memory was soon generalized to be an information flea market. Once the system became available, the users demonstrated that it was a general communications medium that could be used for art, literature, journalism, commerce, and social chatter.

Several of these machines popped up around the Bay Area -- at the original Berkeley Whole Earth Access Store and another at the Mission Public Library in San Francisco -- but each one varied in content and physical manifestation. The only photo I've been able to find shows the machine housed inside a large but homespun box (apparently, the machine was very loud and the record store asked that the sound be contained). Users operated the pin-ball shaped object by sticking hands through arm holes in the front of the brightly painted box.

Community Memory eventually disappeared from public life, its function eclipsed by other early iterations of the internet. From what I can tell, the project was more or less abandoned by 1974 yet I've heard rumblings of its creators writing a memoir. I'm so curious to know more about Community Memory -- what it looked like, what kind of information was gathered, if it was useful, how it served as a reflection of the Bay Area in the early '70s, if in fact communities were created by these machines and their archive of messages. I wonder if any part of the half-dozen or so Community Memory machines still exist. Wouldn't it be interesting to revisit Community Memory 35 year later? What would a contemporary Community Memory look like? With the advances of the internet, have we surpassed any need for localized, shared information? How did short-lived, home-grown initiatives like Community Memory usher in a more globalized information network and what are we to make of these legacies?

A few castles in the air

A Midnight Thing

I'm reading an entertaining novel -- White Teeth -- by the young and talented Zadie Smith. I've come across a passage that made me pause.

"To Alsana's mind the real difference between people was not colour. Nor did it lie in gender, faith, and their relative ability to dance a syncopated rhythm or open their fists to reveal a handful of gold coins. The real difference was far more fundamental. It was in the earth. It was in the sky. You could divide the whole of humanity into two distinct camps, as far as she was concerned, simply by asking them to complete a very simple questionnaire:

a) Are the skies you sleep under likely to open up for weeks on end?

b) Is the ground you walk on likely to tremble and split?

c) Is there a chance (and please tick the box, no matter how small that chance seems) that the ominous mountain casting a midday shadow over your home might one day erupt with no rhyme or reason?

Because if the answer is yes to one or all of these questions, then the life you lead is a midnight thing, always a hair's breadth from the witching hour; it is volatile, it is threadbare; it is carefree in the true sense of that term; it is light, losable like a keyring or a hairclip. And it is lethargy: why not sit all morning, all day, all year, under the same cypress tree drawing the figure of eight in the dust? More than that, it is disaster, it is chaos: why not overthrow the government on a whim, why not blind the man you hated, why not go mad, go gibbering though the town like a loon, waving your hands, tearing your hair? There's nothing to stop you -- or rather anything could stop you, any hour, any minute. That feeling. That's the real difference in a life. People who live on solid ground, underneath safe skies, know nothing of this; they are like the English POWs in Dresden who continued to pour tea and dress for dinner, even as the alarms went off, even as the city became a towering ball of fire."

As fires rage in California tonight and in the light of this weekend's Red, White and Brave parade, when the world can't get enough of the Antioch kidnapping, I wonder about the relationship of disaster to the ability to really, actively live life. I wonder how I might answer this quiz (all yeses) and what that says about me. Granted, I didn't grow up in Alsana's Bengal; I haven't lived through war and only the tiniest of earthquakes. But I do believe that anything could happen. The skies could open up, the ground could tremble. An alien could abduct me. I could fall in love and/or become destitute. I could be murdered or permanently disfigured. I could be washed in rainbow light and dance with leprechauns forever and ever.

The basis for my yeses is not that I'm privy to frequent disaster, it's that I cherish imagination and am willing (eager!) to be surprised; thus, it seems to me that there is a third kind of person. In this third space between privilege and disaster, between indolence and reaction, there is a sense of incredibly terrifying possibility. Certainly in the realm of building impossible things -- experimental art outposts, communally owned land, relationships that work and art that matters -- we must cultivate a threadbare sense of self and a carefree attachment to how things turn out. I'm learning that an alternative lifestyle can be volatile; it's tenuous and scary to do things differently. We could be jailed or commodified or shut down or hurt. Yet this love affair with that midnight thing... it's what keeps us believing in possibilities.

Wishing on a Starr

One of my favorite places in Colorado Springs may disappear in the coming months. For decades, I and thousands of others have flocked to Starr Kempf's house on the edge of Cheyenne Canyon to be wooed by the mystical kinetic sculptures that dominate his yard. While the sculptures are well beloved, they've been the subject of an on-going legal battle. According to grandson, Joshua Kempf, the sculptures will soon be removed and the house will be sold.

Starr Kempf was born in 1917 to a family of backsmiths and carpenters near a Menonite community in Ohio. He attended the Cleveland Institute of Art, served in the Air Force during WWII, then settled in Colorado Springs with his German-born wife Hedwig. He built a home and foundry on a small plot of land near the historic Broadmoor Hotel, nestled beneath Cheyenne Mountain. Building a career on small bronzes and paintings, Starr eventually graduated to large wind-powered sculptures called Monumentals. He committed suicide in 1995 at age 78.

The thing that I've always loved about Starr Kempf's house is that, wrapped in mystery and echoing silence, it somehow illustrates the darkness, the talent, the private life of this nationally-renown artist. It is the kind of place that commands quiet respect and whispered awe. I've been to the house several dozen times and until yesterday, never seen anyone there.

When a friend visited from San Francisco this weekend, I took her (as I take all my special dates, adventurous friends and out-of-town guests) to see Starr Kemp's house. I was immediately horrified to witness two of the Monumentals lying on the ground. We saw a truck and heard noise from the garage and decided to boldly inquire. We met Joshua Kempf, Starr's grandson, who appeared to be cleaning out the studio garage and were immediately won over by his warm smile, lilting British accent, and openness to our query. While he was rather secretive about the plans for the property and the art work, he confirmed that the sculptures are indeed being dismantled and moved; the house is for sale.

Admirers of Starr Kempf -- those that know the story and love the art -- have waited with baited breath for over 10 years to see what will become of his contested legacy. Soon after his suicide, Starr's daughter made steps towards turning his home into a museum. Disagreements with the neighbors turned into multi-million dollar lawsuits and infighting between the family. The daughter has now sued both of her siblings and her nephew several times over and has reportedly connived Hedwig (who suffered from dimentia) into signing over the rights to his giant sculptures. Evolutions of the scandalous tale is often reported in the local news; its regionally known, and yet the City of Colorado Springs has been surprisingly passive in helping settle the dispute. The family made the City a deal some years back, hoping to find a more neutral venue for the sculptures, but it was turned down; in fact, the City has never adequately celebrated the career and artistic brilliance of Starr Kampf and owns only one of his sculptures (which was incidentally a gift.)

Some years ago, when I lived in Albuquerque and made frequent trips to Santa Fe by way of Interstate-25, I noticed a few Starr Kempf sculptures on the edge of a deserted parking lot. Near Algodones (the middle of nowhere), at the largely defunct and sprawling Traditions: A Festival Market (a failed factory outlet turned tourist "Indian" market) there they stood! The whimsical sculptures of my childhood were exiled to a culturally bankrupt strip mall! On my last trip past Traditions, I noticed that the Kempfs had been removed. Now as grandson Joshua packs up and shuts down the Cheyenne Canyon estate, the legacy of Starr Kempf seems particularly volatile.

In this town of military bases and mega-churches, Starr Kempf's house has been a respite of artistic inspiration and hometown pride. I don't understand how a family drama could lead to potentially devastating cultural loss. Why has the City been so passive? Why have no local patrons or foundations come to the rescue? What will happen now? Will Starr Kempf become part of the legion of forgotten artists? Hearing more about the legal battles from Joshua yesterday, I was reminded how little the law supports art, that zoning and liens and permits are not contrived to make things happen. It's sad.

When I asked Joshua what he'd like to see happen with the Monumentals, his response actually gave me hope. "I'd like to see them as the basis for a large sculpture park," he said with a flash in his eyes, "I can't tell you what we're up to, but come October or November you'll know!" I guess we'll just have to wait and hope and see and enjoy Starr Kempf's house before it completely dissolves.

Learn more about Starr Kempf and the ensuing battle about his legacy here.

Wondering about the Waterpod™

One of the more auspicious yet mysterious projects going on the New York Harbor these days is the barge-turned-commune known as the Waterpod. The mastermind of artist Mary Mattingly, this solar-powered, water-collecting, food growing, waste composting, glittering and domed spectacle has been afloat since June 12 and generating a bunch of interest, press, and amplifying hype. Read the recent NYT article here.

The Waterpod is an extension of Mattingly's work that articulates visions of the future through designy photos and sustainability plans. Since 2000, she's been showing far and wide, primarily presenting photographs of wearable homes called “Nomadographies” that are "autonomous mobile systems of living that are low-tech, ad hoc, and adaptable." These photos are poetic and haunting in their connoted narrative, bringing to mind a more fashionable Robert Parke Harrison. Learn more at: http://www.marymattinglyglobal.org

Three years in the making, the Waterpod is a major collaboration now sponsored by the likes of Columbia University, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the U.S. Coast Guard, and the United Nations Inspired Futures and is managed by a 22-person staff. The waterpod hosts a jammed calendar of events and workshops, produced in part by their revolving group of artists in residence. This project is huge!

One guideline is that as a resident you don’t need to stay on board; but while on board and off, residents are encouraged to catalog their activities. Mattingly states, "Everyone will have to help out with repairs, gardening, cooking, and composting. Basically, everyone will learn how to take care of everything. I think this is really important––as the first industrial and technological age in the developed world is drawing to a close, people need to relearn how to do a lot of things."

And the Waterpod is certainly about learning to do things. It appears that Mary Mattingly has learned how to make massive things happen in the name of art and science. Part of what makes this project interesting is that it serves several public functions; it is a grounds for partnerships with schools, community groups, and is self-described as a "public access barge" with "aims to collaborate, to share knowledge, and resources to share problems." Sounds great! My question then arises when visiting the project website (www.thewaterpod.org) to note that the Waterpod is actually "the Waterpod™." At every instance, the title of this project is followed by a Trademark symbol. With all this discussion of open ideas, resource sharing, not to mention the undeniable communalist legacy of which this vernacular belongs, I'm confused; why the need for a Trademark symbol?

After a little wikipedia research, I learned that

"the essential function of a trademark is to exclusively identify the commercial source or origin of products or services, such that a trademark, properly called, indicates source or serves as a badge of origin. In other words, trademarks serve to identify a particular business as the source of goods or services. The use of a trademark in this way is known as trademark use. Certain exclusive rights attach to a registered mark, which can be enforced by way of an action for trademark infringement."

It would appear that The Waterpod™ is a trademarked product or good and any knock-off or replica of this product is defensible by law. But surely the Waterpod borrows technology, style, form, and concept from numerous other scientists and makers. What about Andrea Zittel's Pocket Property? Robert Smithson's Floating Island? Swimming Cities' fleet of floating sculptures? Not to mention the Biosphere and various NASA experiments.

Isn't the experiment of sustainability an open source endeavor? Is not the project of merging art and life something to be shared? I'm sure there's some part of this story that I'm missing, but I must admit that I'm rather disheartened to see that a project like The Waterpod -- with all its great ideas, intentions, and resources -- would feel the need to speak the language of profit, ownership, and otherwise greedy business. I guess you could say the Waterpod has sparked my curiosity about the what, why and how of major art-and-life projects. Perhaps trademarking art projects is part of what makes them sustainable; if this is the case, I really begin to wonder...

Tesla in Colorado Springs

Since moving to Colorado Springs a week ago, I've become more interested in one of the city's unsung heroes, Nikola Tesla. A serb, born in 1856 and whom lived all over the world before eventually becoming an American citizen, Tesla was an inventor who made revolutionary developments in the field of electromagnetism. He devised what later became known as the X-Ray and the radio and also experimented with the first wireless energy transfers. In 1893, he and George Westinghouse introduced the world to AC electricity at the Chicago World's Fair. Tesla spent only nine months in Colorado Springs, yet it was here that he made some of his most significant breakthroughs of his career. He moved to the Front Range for its wide open spaces, fueled by dreams of sending wireless telegraphy from the top of Pikes Peak all the way to Paris. Tesla's experimental station was a contraption with a roof that rolled back to prevent it from catching fire, and a wooden tower that soared up eighty feet. Above it was a 142-foot metal mast supporting a large copper ball. Inside the strange wooden structure, technicians assembled an enormous Tesla coil, specially designed to send powerful electrical impulses into the earth.

In the Colorado Springs lab, Tesla observed unusual signals that he later thought may have been evidence of extraterrestrial radio communications coming from Venus or Mars. Tesla had mentioned before this event and many times after, that he thought his inventions could be used to communicate with other planets. There have even been claims that he invented a "Teslascope" for just such a purpose. During one of Tesla's major experiments, assistants threw power switches causing huge arcs of blue electricity to travel up and down the center coil of the lab. Bolts of man-made lightning more than a hundred feet in length shot out from the mast atop the station. Tesla's experiment burned out the dynamo at the El Paso Electric Company and the entire city lost power. The power station manager was livid, and insisted that Tesla pay for and repair the damage.

Tesla left Colorado Springs on January 7, 1900 following the richest experimentation period of his life. It is unclear to me why or in what state he left Colorado. The lab was torn down and its contents sold to pay debts. He went to New York and conducted experiments from which developed flying machines, "directed-energy weapons" and various electromagnetic patents. When he was eighty-one, Tesla stated he had completed a "dynamic theory of gravity." He stated that it was "worked out in all details" and that he hoped to soon give it to the world. Yet the theory was never published. In fact he died alone and destitute in the New Yorker Hotel on January 7, 1943. His closest friend was a pigeon. As Tesla confessed: "Yes, I loved that pigeon, I loved her as a man loves a woman, and she loved me."

There is virtually no trace of Tesla in Colorado Springs and yet the world (and certainly the military industrial complex) thrives here as a result of his inventions. It's interesting to me that Tesla chose to come here in the first place -- he must have sensed something special, beyond the open space, perhaps the same thing that has lured the military, the evangelists, the new agers, Ute Indians, and tourists. It's certainly no coincidence that NORAD and the Christian Right have been speaking to the heavens from Tesla's same vantage point. There's a peculiar energy here in this city that sprawls beneath its giant mountain. As I write, thunders rolls down the Front Range and out towards Kansas. Tesla's words feel bold tonight.

"There is no thing endowed with life—from man, who is enslaving the elements, to the nimblest creature—in all this world that does not sway in its turn. Whenever action is born from force, though it be infinitesimal, the cosmic balance is upset and the universal motion results."

Read more about Tesla's experiments in Colorado Springs in his journals from this time, called Colorado Springs Notes, 1899–1900 (ISBN 8617073527), compiled and edited by Aleksandar Marinčić and Vojin Popović.

Tent City vs. Art Exhibition

It's interesting to note two simultaneous projects involving domed tents in NYC this summer.  

One is Fritz Haeg's installation at X Initiative in Chelsea that involves 8,000 square feet of domed tent space made available for spontaneous, temporary habitation.  Haeg's letter, widely disseminated to his "dearest friends in New York" is an invitation to "make yourself at home." THE DOME COLONY is populated by four large geodesic tents that can be "taken over, squatted, colonized. Set up a clubhouse, a headquarters, a home away from home, a temporary studio, a living room, a lounge, use it as a place to host friends, stage events, make work, rehearse, organize an on-going series of meetings, or regular gatherings, performances..."  Until October 24th, anyone can participate in any "legal" activities within these dome tents.  http://www.fritzhaeg.com/studio/projects/x.html

The other tent city is Nils Norman's project commissioned by Creative Time for their new initiative PLOT09: This World & Nearer Ones.  Placed among the architectural ruins of New York's Governor's Island, the tents are abandoned and empty, intended to resonate with the "nomadic, impermanent architecture of activists-from the sixties counterculture movement to the 2005 camp in Crawford, TX that protested the war in Iraq-as well as the homeless encampments that have recently emerged in Sacramento, Portland, Reno, and other cites." Norman's tents  are intended to act as "a reminder that once-vibrant strategies for activism and alternative living have passed into obscurity, and that structures are sometimes as malleable as symbols."  http://creativetime.org/programs/archive/2009/plot09/artworks.php

The comparison of these two projects articulates a divided reading on the cultural potential of tent cities.  While there is a certain appeal to action in Haeg's indoor work and a resounding echo apart of Norman's outdoor installation, I'm not sure what to make of either project.   Do they do what they intend to do?  How do they operate within the context of an art exhibition?  What is the rift between actual use and symbolic gesture? What is the social history of the tent city?  Is it a collective story or is the cultural significance of tents and tent cities as divergent as these two projects? 

This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land!

On July 29, my sister, Nina, Nancy Zastudil (in absentia) and I became co-owners of a small parcel of land! Our dear friend Steve McFarland (see earlier posts about Project:Unknown) encouraged us to attend a land auction during which arid parcels leftover from a World's Fair land scheme were being sold.  Our team of 8 worked hard for days deciphering maps, listings, GPS, and conflicting information to prepare for the two-day long auction.  It was a stressful but exciting few days, at the end of which our team walked away with neighboring plots and smiles all around.

40-some miles from Taos near the village of Tres Piedras sits our own little patch of sage brush and chamisa.  There is not water or electricity.  The road is rough, but not long.  Powerlines loom nearby and the highway is slightly audible.  From our sloping tierra are views of the Sangre de Christos, junked cars, giant sky, a new-ish yurt and a beautiful in-progress dome home.  Most people would think this land a waste of money but for us it presents great possibility.  

It will be a challenge to work together to sketch a plan for the land.  The harsh environs, our lack of funds, the tight-knit community of locals, and the regional vernacular (hand-hewn homes built from cast-off materials) present all kinds of hurdles for the development of our own place.  But if I can speak for our little team of land owners, this acquisition is not about ease or luxury, it's about the process of figuring it out and figuring it out together.  Stay tuned....! 

Creating an Outpost

Signal Fire is an artist residency program based in Oregon.  Created by husband and wife Amy Harwood and Ryan Pierce—a program director for a forest conservation group and a visual artist, respectively -- what sets them apart is their innovative connection between endangered wilderness and dwindling support for artists.  Their answer to this predicament comes in the form of Outpost, a mobile Do-It-Yourself wilderness-based residency program.  

The Signal Fire website states: Signal Fire provides week and two-week long residencies in the Mt. Hood National Forest to selected artists from a range of practices. Each artist has access to a remodeled trailer studio stationed in a selected location, while maintaining a camp in the public forests of Mt. Hood. The artist is left with maps, a bicycle, adequate food supply and some provided tools for their practice. The residencies from each season culminate in a group show in Portland, displaying works by the selected artists.   

In addition to lending their racing-striped vintage trailer, they provide artists with workshops and hikes knowing that seeing nature firsthand is one of the greatest methods of inspiration and conservation.  Learn more at www.signalfirearts.org 

Dreams of Depaving

This week I moved from San Francisco to Colorado Springs and among many culture shocks, I'm astounded by the amount of pavement, parking lots, and un/mis-used public space in this town of nearly half-a-million.  

Synchronistically, I recently learned about a Portland-based organization called Depave.  Their mission is to remove unnecessary concrete from urban areas and in those reclaimed spaces, plant gardens. Here's how  depave.org describes the rationale:

The problem is concrete. Paved surfaces contribute to stormwater pollution, whereby rainwater carries toxic urban pollutants to local streams and rivers, greatly degrading water quality and riparian habitats. Pavement also disconnects us from our natural world.

For instructions on how to rip up pavement and clear away parking lots, visit www.depave.org.  I wonder if we could plan a depaving day here in Colorado Springs?

Number One and Two

Last week I visited Steve McFarland, Izumi Yokoyama, and Dave at their amazing place on the Taos mesa.   Dubbed Project Unknown, the place lives up to its name.  It's raw and fresh and completely elemental.  Construction has been going on rather continuously at Project Unknown for the last two summers -- a fence has been in progress, a large shipping container acquired and moved to the land, and a very nice studio building is nearly finished -- but I was lucky to be around for a few of the foundational moments the evolution of this place.  

After sleeping under the stars in the back of a giant Chevy truck (above), my sister and I moved into a semi-abandoned camper.  

We didn't have electricity and lived by the light of fire, headlamps, starlight.  We cooked on a propane stove in an outdoor kitchen, ran power tools off a generator and charged our cellphones in the car.  

Izumi and I had the awesome experience of building an outhouse.  We dug a giant hole amidst the chemisa, built a frame, walls with a big window, a burly roof, and enough room for toilet, sink, storage, and peace.  To celebrate the near-completion of the new outhouse, we burnt the previous latrine.  

I was reminded of a few things written by artists involved with the communes of the 1960s. For instance, Bill Voyd wrote in Shelter & Society (Praeger Publishers, 1969):

The greatest impact on communal life upon the artist is the realization that all community activity is equal, that digging a ditch carries no less status than erecting a sculpture; in fact the individual often discovers he is happier digging a ditch, sculpting a ditch.  Life forms and art forms begin to interact.

I have been honestly, truly happy digging ditches these days.  

Project:Unknown

I have been to Project:Unknown and it has changed me forever.  On July 23, my sister and I stopped through Taos  to visit some acquaintances from San Francisco, Steve McFarland and Izumi Yokoyama.  We'd heard a tiny bit about their endeavors on the Taos mesa, something called Project:Unknown.  With a balance of curiosity and trepidation, we showed up with plans to spend 24 hours or so.  I ended up staying 2 weeks.  

Izumi is an incredible installation artist whose consideration of the world is influenced by her childhood in Japan. She went to the San Francisco Art Institute with my sister and although they were not (yet) close friends, they shared a love of New Mexico.  Check her out at: http://web.mac.com/itsuizumi

Izumi's boyfriend, Steve, studied sustainability in college and has been trying for years to "reconfigure the standards of living."  He came to Taos several years ago and quickly snatched up a few acres of land for cheap. He immediately set about building his dream -- a retreat center for artists and musicians that is not only a refuge from society but a testing grounds for experimental building practices and a think tank for like-minded folks who strive to live outside the norm.  With a few structures on the land including an abandoned schoolbus, an artist studio, an outdoor kitchen, an airstream trailer, a sleeping cabin and a defunct storage container, this outpost is beginning to take shape.  

Unknown is situated on Taos's far west mesa amidst sage brush and chamisa.  I've never seen a bigger sky nor as many rainbows.  It's raw there.  The weather is intense; the wind and sun can be oppressive. The surrounding hardscrabble community is comprised of outlaws, hippies, renegade homesteaders, experimental builders, addicts, crazies, recluses, and red necks.  People talk about how to find water, where the gooseberries are ripe, who stole whose firewood, the days when people wove houses out of river willows and the summer of vengeful arsons. They help each other move dirt, build fences, wrangle horses, get high, sing songs. It's a challenging place where the measure of someone's character is based on their ability to survive and survive well.  

I intended to spend only a night at Unknown but ended up spending two of the best weeks of my life there. Something shifted in me.  I helped build a fence and an outhouse.  I harvested water from a spring.  I got really, really dirty and acquired many tiny splinters.  I shat in the ground.  I woke up early.  I learned to identify wild asparagus.  I rode on the handlebars of an old cruiser bike down a rutted dirt road in the dark of night.  I started a large and dangerous fire.  I felt free.  One of the best things about my experience at Unknown is how I was invited into the mesa way of life without needing to leave behind my intellect or criticality.  In fact, there was even more space for thinking clearly, for imagining bigly, because the intention of our hosts was to enter into each of these survivalist moments with artistic inquiry.  They fostered a situation that was real, raw, thought-provoking, open, and genuinely fun.

Project:Unknown is such a vibrant and important experiment.  It left me with a lot of questions  and convictions (as well as a piece of land on which to begin building answers with actions).  How can we create places that put us in touch with the raw elements of life?  What emerges from experiences that mesh intimate survival with creative amplification? How can we provide places for artists, musicians, and thinkers to encounter a different way of being in the world, a refuge from the need to make money; how can we provide a support structure for people thinking outside the box?  How can simply being in a place also help to build it?   How can artists help sustain an outsider lifestyle and culture, one that supports and interacts with the local old-timers and preserves freedom?  How might local skills and stories be harnessed to fuel a new generation of homesteading artists? Who are the people that crave this kind of experience? How do we do all that we'd really like to do; is it even possible? I suppose that continuing this endeavor -- that which is the impetus for Project Unknown and also for Red Legacy -- is the same as building an outhouse or starting a fire.  You just make it happen as you go.  

The Anonymous Artists of America

Yesterday, I visited a commune called the Anonymous Artists of America.  It was a fascinating experience that I won't detail here and now.  But in visiting this extraordinary place and in the week I've been at Libre, a commune across the valley, I believe that the history of these places and people must be considered.  Below is an excerpt from a grant I recently wrote, in hopes of funding research of the AAA and the Huerfano Valley.   In the meantime, I'm slowly piecing the stories together.

As Stanford students in the mid-Sixties, the AAA (or “the Triple A,” as they are often called) were exposed to both sanctioned and informal LSD experiments amidst a community of provocative artists and thinkers. Tinkering with emergent video and music technologies, the AAA formed a rock band that aimed to expand consciousness through immersive music experiences, a regimen of psychedelic drugs, and a collectively spontaneous presence in the world. This very intentional commitment to consciousness expansion and to an art-driven lifestyle eventually led the AAA to southern Colorado where they joined an emerging culture of young artist refugees who were homesteading in the Huerfano Valley. The AAA created linkages between the major sites, people, and ideas of the counterculture but are seemingly under-documented and all but forgotten, and ironically anonymous.

The story of the AAA is fantastic. Their endeavor to be a band was jump-started by several gifts: the first was a full set of instruments financed by one of the artists, Lars Kampman, which was followed by Owsley Stanley’s gift of 100,000 micrograms of (then legal) LSD. They were also given the second music synthesizer in the US by Don Buchla, its inventor, which took a year to build out at the highly influential Tape Music Center in San Francisco. The AAA were one of the first psychedelic bands at a time when rock and roll was redefined through massive advances in amplification technology and by music labels, like Capital Records who commissioned LSD fueled projects. The AAA frequently opened for the Grateful Dead and headlined at Ken Kesey’s notorious Acid Test Graduation. Their performances went on for hours and weren’t especially 

good, involving costumes and a topless bassist, handmade instruments and spontaneous improvisations that mixed with strobe lights and film projections, turning the show into a multi-sensory immersive experience.  

The AAA disintegrated in the mid-80s after their charismatic ringleader, Lars Kampman, died of AIDS. Prior, the collective bought a bus and toured the country making music and mayhem, eventually landing in Colorado where they built homes on several parcels of rural land. Their music crashed into the small towns of Walsenburg and Chama as well as Denver, creating soundscapes for the commune movement that magnetized hoards of youth into the Rocky Mountains. Although the band is now defunct, the AAA still collectively own some 400 acres in Colorado’s Huerfano Valley, situated near Libre, a thriving 40-year old commune. Several people continue to live on the AAA land, old friends come to visit, but the homes and people are aging and the land may one day be in jeopardy. 

The group wove together the likes of Stewart Brand, Nina Simone, Bruce Conner, Alan Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Hell’s Angels, Santana, the San Francisco Diggers and the Mime Troupe. They helped to evolve radical music and art-making practices and were certainly at the center of a major cultural shift. Therefore, I want to analyze how the AAA’s alternative forms of art-making were instrumental in linking people coast to coast and from cities to countryside, ushering in a new set of social, political, and artistic norms.

I’m interested in how the story of the AAA might trace the evolution of an experiential art practice -- one that merged music, visual arts, fashion, and performance, that drew inspiration from Happenings, the Dadaists, and street theater -- that was not so much about making objects, but making experiences. I want to know more about the group’s mundanely spectacular corroboration of a counterculture, and also what experiences or dynamics may have allowed for such authentic self-expression – what was happening at Stanford that fed this vanguard of wildly experimental, yet thoroughly educated youth? I’m curious about the phenomenon that then occurred in Colorado’s Huerfano Valley and how this place, called orphan in Spanish, lured artists from both coasts to experiment with communal living. What about the Huerfano, that until the mid- Sixties was primarily a community of Spanish farmers and cowboys, fostered communal land ownership and a diverse assortment of hand-made homes? How were encounters with the vast southwestern landscape part of a consciousness-expanding program? How is failure a type of generative experience that, over time, transforms into agency? Through a thorough investigation of the AAA we may see evidence of how and why transcendental experiences lead to a more interesting and engaged world. 

Building at Libre

We've been at Libre for six days now and are living life to the fullest.  We're here to enjoy friends, be in nature, and learn more about this fabulous 40-year old commune.  Libre is one of the oldest art communes in the country and distinguished by its variety of architectural innovations. One of the only rules at Libre is that accepted members must build their own homes.  As a result, the community is comprised of do-it-yourself people who know how to do everything.  Their homes range from domes to jewel-shaped inverted A-frames, to barn-style houses to Gaudi-esque compilations.  

For the past 5 days, we've been working with Linda Fleming and Michael Moore on a new workshop behind their house.  They've done a ton of building in the past and are incredible foremen.  Here are a few shots of the work in progress.

It's wonderful to be here -- working hard, learning lots, eating well, and breathing deep.  Everyday I feel a bit more LIBRE. 

Visiting Patsy

Yesterday we went to visit Patsy Krebs at her mountain-top home.  Up above the Huerfano Valley and a 90-minute drive from the nearest post office, Patsy spends part of each year painting, quilting, and staring into the incredible spaciousness of her high-altitude surrounds.  Designed and built by her architect husband Jon Fernandez, the house is a tiny single room with a wood-burning stove, gas lighting, and just enough.  She hauls water and food every few days; just enough for she and her large rottweiler, Banjo.  

At one point Patsy was describing how she came to live on the mountain and stated, "I've never really been a communal kind of person."  Indeed, she does lead a life of solitude but has ironically come to this place through a community of communards.  Once loosely associated with the Anonymous Artists of America and dear friends with the folks at Libre, Patsy fell in love with the Huerfano Valley. Patsy has since built her tiny home on the edge of the Triple A's large parcel of land.  I was struck by this dualism between commune/community and total solitude and how, particularly in Patsy's case, these opposing dynamics can actually support a very livable situation.  

We spent the afternoon picnicing, walking, talking, and even saw her teeny painting studio. Patsy's paintings are gorgeous.  She's been working in a similar vein for many years and having seen where she spends her summer months, I can see that in addition to being formal geometric  exercises, these paintings are also a meditation on light, luminosity, and air.  This landscape is so much in her work; how could it not be?  It was wonderful to see Patsy in her element and to imagine the cumulative effect of such beautiful hermitage.  I feel incredibly grateful to have found the long, bumpy road to Patsy and her perch.  

See Patsy's work at: www.patsykrebs.com

Malachite dreams

On our way to Libre this week we came across the old Malachite Schoolhouse FOR SALE.  It's a gorgeous stone building with a bell tower.  The roof looks fairly new but the windows have gone missing.  The foundation appears solid and the interior measures 1415 square feet.  There are a few little out-buildings and an inconsistent fenceline. 

The old schoolhouse sits on 35 acres of beautiful pasture with stunning views.  It's a few miles off pavement near the small but rather cool town of Gardner.  The property has gas and electricity.  

I'd so love to salvage this piece of local history and use it for something interesting.  Oh, the things we could grow...  Anybody got $90,000? 

The Pirate Utopia, Fiume

The notion of a pirate utopia is poignant these days and is discussed at length by anarchist philosopher, Hakim Bey in his seminal text, "Temporary Autonomous Zone" which was published in 1985. Here is his description of Fiume and the painter-pirate, D'Annunzio.

Gabriele D'Annunzio, decadent poet, artist, musician, aesthete, womanizer, pioneer daredevil aeronautist, black magician, genius and cad, emerged from World War I as a hero with a small army at his beck and command: the "Arditi." At a loss for adventure, he decided to capture the city of Fiume from Yugoslavia and give it to Italy. After a necromantic ceremony with his mistress in a cemetery in Venice he set out to conquer Fiume, and succeeded without any trouble to speak of. But Italy turned down his generous offer; the Prime Minister called him a fool.
In a huff, D'Annunzio decided to declare independence and see how long he could get away with it. He and one of his anarchist friends wrote the Constitution, which declared music to be the central principle of the State. The Navy (made up of deserters and Milanese anarchist maritime unionists) named themselves the Uscochi, after the long- vanished pirates who once lived on local offshore islands and preyed on Venetian and Ottoman shipping. The modern Uscochi succeeded in some wild coups: several rich Italian merchant vessels suddenly gave the Republic a future: money in the coffers! Artists, bohemians, adventurers, anarchists (D'Annunzio corresponded with Malatesta), fugitives and Stateless refugees, homosexuals, military dandies (the uniform was black with pirate skull-&-crossbones--later stolen by the SS), and crank reformers of every stripe (including Buddhists, Theosophists and Vedantists) began to show up at Fiume in droves. The party never stopped. Every morning D'Annunzio read poetry and manifestos from his balcony; every evening a concert, then fireworks. This made up the entire activity of the government. Eighteen months later, when the wine and money had run out and the Italian fleet finally showed up and lobbed a few shells at the Municipal Palace, no one had the energy to resist.

D'Annunzio, like many Italian anarchists, later veered toward fascism--in fact, Mussolini (the ex-Syndicalist) himself seduced the poet along that route. By the time D'Annunzio realized his error it was too late: he was too old and sick. But Il Duce had him killed anyway--pushed off a balcony--and turned him into a "martyr." As for Fiume, though it lacked the seriousness of the free Ukraine or Barcelona, it was in some ways the last of the pirate utopias.

The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism by Hakim Bey; Autonomedia Anti-copyright, 1985, 1991. http://www.hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html

The Institute for Social Research

Just about this time last year I was deeply enmeshed with a group of artists called the Institute for Social Research. I'm remembering our time together with reverie.


The ISR grew out of a pedagogical initiative at CCA that aimed to rethink notions of "the commune" through collaborative art practice. Brian Conley, who was then the chair of graduate fine arts at CCA, invited the conceptual artist Christian Jankowski to the Bay Area, along with his 12 students from an art school in Stuttgart. The international students (as well as several of those from CCA) lived together for 90 days in a communal house on Ocean Beach and there made a tremendous amount of work that blurred boundaries of artist and audience, author and actor, cause and effect, individual and group, art and life.


The ISR produced numerous "projects" everyday. These projects were often organized by one artist, but required the group's involvement to complete, use, enact, or demonstrate the project. There was a dinner party during which everyone wore ear plugs, enjoying food for the sound it makes inside the head. There was a single breath passed from mouth to mouth, through the entire commune as it lined the Golden Gate Bridge. When street-scrounged couches were no longer desired for the group's living room, they were turned into a jacuzzi that served as the centerpiece for a debaucherous Halloween party. The artists slept for a night with their heads at the center of a circle to see if such close proximity would affect their dreams.
Some artists recorded in minutia, the workings of the house -- the decision-making processes, the household objects collected over time, the sleeping patterns, the money matters -- while others scoured the urban landscape in search of utopian leftovers. At one point during the semester, the artists ventured into the outer reaches of the Bay Area looking for examples of communalism. One found a commune in the naval shipyards while another found a commune in northern California amidst a group of Midwestern redneck refugees. Over and over, the ISR's approach to communalism, art-making, collaboration, and California was fresh and vital.


I met the group towards the end of their 90-day stint in San Francisco and was immediately enthralled. I was fascinated by the way they perceived the Bay Area and its hippie legacy. I was intrigued too by the way they made decisions, even conversation. Everything happened by consensus which was difficult given that more a dozen language were spoken by the group collectively. From the start I sensed their fascination with communication and miscommunication, happy slippages and poetic misreadings. Moreover I was captivated by the incredible spirit of the group. They immediately took me in, seduced me. I went to their house to give a lecture on Drop City and to learn about their project and ended up joining a jam session in the music room. I stomped out a rhythm on the floor while pianos and tambourines vibrated together in the dark.


A storm of magical events, a bunch of German art money and the ISR's enduring quest for the ultimate collaboration made possible a set of exhibitions and a massive catalog that were produced over the subsequent 9 months. It feels inaccurate to call myself the curator of these shows. Basically, I helped to organize a bunch of logistics and communications (particularly harrowing was the challenge to find free housing for 8 artists -- turned out to be 24! -- in the East Bay near public transportation for three weeks, but it came together beautifully). What happened during our exhibition-making time together was indescribable, yet left lasting impressions on all involved. Without going into too much detail, I should note a few basic ways that working with the ISR has contributed to my thinking about Red Legacy.

1) Curating a project like the ISR is not about directing or even about art. It's about creating opportunities for things to happen. Nothing goes very far without some level of facilitation, nor does anything happen in the face of too much planning or too many rules. I'm constantly learning about this delicate balance of control and freedom.

2) Most institutions have a hard time with on-site experimentation. It's hard to argue full freedom for artists, and even harder for institutions to follow through with letting this happen. Schools, underground gallery spaces, parties, and foreign soil are some great places to experiment; museums or public non-profits are not. My main job as the curator of these projects was to fight for the artists to have access, freedom, money, time, and respect.


3) Incredible things happen when groups of people are put together for extended periods of time. When a group loses track of the beginning and end of their time together, the middle becomes extremely potent. It's important to get lost in time, but to have a limited amount of time in which to allow oneself to get lost. It's also nice to have repeated periods of togetherness. I loved how the ISR had 90 days of uber-togetherness in San Francisco, six months of quasi-togetherness in disparate parts of the globe, 3 weeks of togetherness in the East Bay, a month apart, and 2 weeks more-or-less together in Stuttgart.

4) Limitations allow things to blossom. Some amount of struggle brings a group of people together. The ISR thrived in the face of their limits and on numerous levels they subverted poverty, language barriers, lack of private space with their innovative adaptations.

5) One of the most important things I did for the ISR, aside from providing occasional food, beer and shelter, was to be a sounding board for their collaboration. Most of my ideas were rejected or ignored (this was life under group-rule after all), but my ideas were material for the group to react against. I asked a lot of questions and made a ton of proposals, but never had the last word about anything. I have learned a lot about choosing battles.


6) As a curator working with a group like the ISR, it was imperative that I serve as some sort of translator between the sponsoring institutions and the artists, as well as between the audience and the presented work. Many people asked, "why is this art?" and although I have a personal aversion to this kind of conversation, it was really important to have an open exchange about the value of making and of doing.

7) Place has everything to do with potent collaboration. The foreign students thrived in San Francisco, because they were not subjected to their daily lives. The local students could not participate at the same level due to jobs, apartments, relationships, and classes. This is one of many instances when I've seen the power of physical removal in empowering a developing group process.

A blog is the not the proper venue to unload my tales and observations of this group. There is much I could say about the experience of working with the ISR and about their work itself. I'm in the process of writing a chapter about the ISR for a forth-coming anthology on California communes and I've written an essay in the ISR's 447-page catalog; more of my ISR-related ramblings can be found there.


The artists involved in the Institute for Social Research include: Michelle Blade, Luke Butler, Donna Chung, Dina Danish, Christina Empedocles, Martina Geiger-Gerlach, Patrick W. Gillespie, Kamil Goerlich, Robert Goerlich, Tanor Hudson, Jana Jacob, Anita Kapraljevic, Byung Chul Kim, Florian Klette, Paul Kramer, Travis Joseph Meinolf, Nicholas Meyer, Helena Rempel, Cristina Rodrigo, Rosa Rücker, Marco Schmitt, Ines Lilith Schreiner, Gareth Spor, Kestutis Svirnelis, Sara Thacher, Christoph Trendel, and Pablo Wendel.

"The Institute for Social Research and the Discovery of Art God" were a set of experimental exhibitions made possible by Ministry for Science, Research and Art, Baden-Württemberg; Rectorship of the State Academy of Fine Arts, Stuttgart; Friends of the State Academy of Fine Arts, Stuttgart; DAAD German Academic Exchange Service; California College of the Arts, San Francisco; Staatlichen Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart; Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart; The Richmond Art Center, Richmond, CA; The German Consulate of San Francisco; Lobot Gallery, Oakland and many more!

Drop! in Trinidad this weekend

If I weren't throwing a yard/bake sale this weekend, followed by a BBQ and a futuristic farewell party, I'd most certainly be in Trinidad, CO for an event celebrating the history of Drop City. My friend Tom McCourt and his film-making partner, Joan Grossman, have received a Graham Foundation grant to finish shooting interviews for their documentary film about Drop City an d an event sponsored by History Colorado and HessArts (a local art space) welcomes their initiative to Trinidad.

Drop City was an extraordinary place built by artists in 1965. It sat on the outskirts of Trinidad, just off I-25, for nearly seven years. The community was made of salvaged junk and countercultural intentions and was stimulus for one of the largest communal movements in the US. While this event seems (from the press release I dug up online) to be rather celebratory and warm, it's worth noting that many people remember Drop City as shaded by failure. The commune ended in kaleidescopic ruin -- meth labs and a murder -- and became a sign-post for the downward spiral of Sixties idealism.

The event is on Sunday, June 21 and will involve a screening of Tom and Joan's trailer and an appearance by former Dropper artist, Clark Richert. The event is called Drop! and promises to draw a good crowd, especially given the fact that Trinidad Brewing Company will be serving up their Drop City beer at the event. I wish I could be there to see what promises to be a complicated and lively debate. I'd hate to for Drop City to be framed as anything less than a cantankerous, colorful experiment that was impetus for Robin-Hood-style-thievery, ruined friendships, unprecedented openness, and amplified art practice. Drop City has undoubtedly inspired countless commune and art projects -- it should certainly be documented and celebrated -- but deserves also to be remembered in all its ruinous glory. I believe this documentary may do justice by presenting Drop City in all its complexity.


Tom was recently asked by a reporter from the Denver Post the following question:
Where do you see counterculture in America today? Could a place like Drop City exist in 2009?

Tom answers:
Counterculture is a lot tougher these days. The ability to live off the fat of the land has diminished significantly. It's harder to drift from job to job until you figure out what you want to do. The biggest change in the last 40 years is the ascendance of marketplace fundamentalism, in which society serves the needs of the marketplace rather than vice versa. This seems to be changing somewhat in the last few months, but there's still a long way to go. People involved in counterculture seem a lot more realistic these days, which may be a good thing. Counterculture today operates more off the radar -- there's no central organizing point, as there was with the draft in the '60s. But counterculture continues to thrive in myriad ways. Kids today are much more media-savvy and aware of the dangers of cooptation. Important work is being done; it's just not getting as much attention, due to the fractal nature of media as well as concerns about exploitation.

There's a long chain of resistance to the established order in America, and Drop City is a major link in that chain. Yet what could be more American than striking out for the West and trying to build a civilization from scratch? Drop City had no leaders and no dogma. The early residents were artists, trying to live their lives as art. They wanted to create their work, have adventures and not get stuck in menial, laboring jobs -- but they lived in utter poverty. I think they saw their community as an existential adventure.

One of the most important things the Droppers have taught me is how to remain true to one's ideals over time. All of the Droppers I've met continue to produce films, paintings, novels and poems that are vital and engaging. I hope this film will show that what the Droppers created is an ongoing project, not a brief period enveloped in an elegaic haze of nostalgia. It is a process that will continue as long as there is hope for possibility in America. We tend to think of the "American Dream" as attaining wealth, but the real American Dream is the possibility of rejecting the slots that are created for us in favor of a productive and meaningful life that we create ourselves.

Go Tom!
Check out the Drop City documentary here. Learn more about the event, Drop!, here.

Lloyd Kahn

Last week I had coffee with Lloyd Kahn, a 74-year old shelter guru who has helped to change the way that people live and build. He is a man that lives to build and builds to live but also lives in the buildings that he has built from a deep passion for life; this cycle of activity and integration most certainly accounts for his youthful vitality.

I was interested in talking to Lloyd for a number of reasons. First of all, he knows lots about the southwestern communes that have so entranced me. He published two how-to manuals about domes before renouncing them as a good way to live. Lloyd was also the shelter publisher for Whole Earth Catalogs and was most likely a regular visitor at Libre and Drop City and maybe even the Alloy conference. Needless to say, he was at the center of it all.

Our time together was short but I was lucky to hear a bit more about his time as Faculty of the uber-alternative Pacific High School (more about that in a later post), about the successes and failures of the hippie generation, and about the on-going project of expanding consciousness. He shared this short film with me. It's made by a Stanford student named Jason Sussberg and captures Lloyd's persona, perspective, and hand-made house. Check it our here. http://jasonsussberg.com/SHELTER.mov

Lloyd's recently come out with a new book, Builders of the Pacific Coast. You can buy it and others of his books at http://www.shelterpub.com

Ecoshack and Cul-de-sac Communes

One of the more interesting initiatives out there now is Ecoshack and the many projects that grow out of it. Their work is geared towards environmental masterminds, commune builders, neo-bohemians, and futurists and has a heavy dose of SoCal glitz mixed in there too. Their work bridges architecture and design but has also been including in several recent art exhibitions. While I love the Twin Teepees and the glow-in-the-dark yurts, I'm particularly interested in thinking about cul-de-sac communes. I was born and raised in a city that's become a living exhibition of suburban sprawl; therefore, I'm invested in re-purposing poorly functioning housing developments, particularly during this unprecedented wave of foreclosures.


Ecoshack, led by design guru Stephanie Smith, will soon launch a new initiative called Wanna Start A Commune? and I'm interested to see what happens. Will it go beyond drawings and blueprints? Will it manifest in long-term intentional communities or be more of a conceptual, temporary experiment? Will it result in yet another product or brand? What about the previous cul-de-sac dwellers; what do they want and how will they be involved? How can the manifestations respond to uber-local conditions? Is it a network or a service, a business or a proposal, brilliant or no? As always, only time will tell... http://www.wecommune.com/

Stanley Marsh III

"Art is a legalized form of insanity, and I do it very well," states Amarillo, Texas millionaire and art patron Stanley Marsh III. For well over three decades Marsh, an 81-year old oilman now interested in wind power, has commissioned work by artists on his large panhandle ranch.

Most famously, Marsh commissioned the art collective Ant Farm to create a site-specific project on his land which resulted in the immensely popular Cadillac Ranch.

Marsh commissioned a project by Robert Smithson, who died that same year ('73) while surveying his site from an airplane. Smithson's wife Nancy Holt and others worked to complete the work, entitled Amarillo Ramp.


Other Marsh commissions include Floating Mesa (artist and year unknown) as well as a fleet of faux street signs with obscure messages.


While I'm certainly appreciative of the great works Marsh has commissioned, I'm most interested in the way he has become an institution of sorts that has helped to fuel the art careers of several generations of Texas panhandle youth. Here are images of two emerging artists (Mad Dog and Larry Bob Phillips) who grew up experiencing and making art via Stanley Marsh's encouragement and personal eccentricity. If you've been to Amarillo you know that art is not necessarily synonymous with its landscape and history, yet Marsh has in his own bizarre (and at times reportedly illicit) fashion, created an institution for art making. I've always wanted to do a project about the artists Marsh has influenced but have so far been derailed by other things. I have a hunch the Marsh story is much darker, more complex, and interesting than the one I find online.

Experiments in Environment

I've recently learned about an extraordinary set of events initiated by post-modern dancer Anna Halprin and her husband, Lawrence Halprin, a landscape architect, called Experiments in Environment.* In 1966 and again in 1968, the couple hosted four-week workshops at their Mountain Home Studio in Marin, CA, testing ideas about how space and movement influence one another through a month of experiential experiments in communication, participation, and collaboration.

The experiments took place outdoors on the coast at Sea Ranch (a community that Lawrence was commissioned to design in 1963), in the Marin woodlands near their home, and in the urban environs of San Francisco. These activities, directed by faculty recruited from the Halprins' artistic community and included architects, cinematographers, lighting specialists, and others, aimed to trigger environmental and self awareness among participants (who were primarily dancers and architects). The activities ranged from exercises in kinesthetic movement and "light happenings" to blind-folded walks during which participants would lead each other first by arm, then using only back-to-back contact, then by leg, then by cheek. One of the later activities asked participants to redesign San Francisco's Union Square on the beach using driftwood. There was also unscripted time when the creative process was explored abstractly or personally. Following each of the activities, participants debriefed their experiences. All together, the workshops brought attention to the process of making while rethinking the nature and value of what is produced.


The founding philosophy for the workshops was what the Halprin's dubbed as the RSVP Cycles. The acronym stands for Resources, Score, Valuaction (feedback, essentially), and Performance. For the Halprins, the Experiments in Environment workshops were a vital testing ground for this system which remains central to their understanding of and continued work with creative process.

Numerous accounts are recorded by artists and designers who participated in the workshops. Chip Lord of the Ant Farm collective attended the 1968 workshop and recalls, "The workshop was a catalyst, was an education, was a trip into my future, was an art form, was a lifestyle, was a freestyle race, was groove."** For many, it seems a pivotal experience in working creatively with people, space, and movement.


* Eva J. Friedberg gave a compelling lecture on this topic at the CAA conference in LA during February 2009. She presented this work during a session called The Countercultural Object that focused on art practices of the 1960s. Eva is a PhD student in Visual Studies at UC Irvine. I wish I could publish some of the images she presented here. Alas.

** San Francisco Museum of Performance and Design, Anna Halprin archives, Box 11 Folder 66.

Extraordinary Nothingness

"Young artists today need no longer say, 'I am a painter' or 'a poet' or 'a dancer.' They are simply 'artists.' All of life will be open to them. They will discover out of the ordinary things the meaning of ordinariness. They will not try to make them extraordinary but will only state their real meaning. But out of nothing they will devise the extraordinary and then maybe nothingness as well."

- A. Kaprow, "The Legacy of Jackson Pollock, " Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958.

Cape Farewell

Last month I attended the Rising Tide conference* sponsored by CCA and Stanford. The keynote speaker was David Buckland whose work I saw a few summers ago in an exhibition at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway. I had not heard about his project Cape Farewell until his lecture at CCA; I am deeply inspired by this model organization.

Cape Farewell came into being when the artist David Buckland was gifted with a scientific seaship. Since 2003 Cape Farewell, funded by British art and science dollars, has led seven expeditions to the Arctic, taking artists, scientists, educators and communicators to experience the effects of climate change firsthand. The project aims to "provoke and evoke a cultural response to the true scale of how the earth’s environment and climate are changing."

While the expeditions are comprised by a mix of artists, research analysts, scientists, and even youth, these teams ford the northern seas with hi-tech research equipment and aims to capture immense raw data, yet the focus of these expeditions is on cultural production. As the Cape Farewell website states, "one salient image, sculpture or event can speak louder than volumes of scientific data and engage the public's imagination in an immediate way." Indeed, climate change is so large and so devastating that the basic facts are too abstract for most people to understand. We need artists and poets and musicians to help make the invisible visible, to make the unimaginable slightly more tangible.

I appreciate that artists are not necessarily encouraged to make art on site. Rather, they aid with the scientific mission and let themselves be affected by the journey. A journey to the Arctic is certain to inspire and terrify, and the organization has faith in its artists (whom include figures like Feist, Sophie Calle, Amy Balkin, Ian McEwan and Laurie Anderson ) digest the experience and respond to climate change in their own timely manner.

I believe this kind of cultural practice is so important. To bear physical witness to the struggle of the planet, of people, of places is so valid and provocative. I want to be involved with artists who travel to the tipping point, the hotbed, the hinterlands to see what is there and let it move them to make culture differently. www.capefarewell.com

* this was a great endeavor too. Learn more about it at: www.risingtideconference.org

Divisadero -- the art of appearing and dissolving

I spent New Year's Eve of this year with extraordinary people at Libre. One of the people there was an architect named John. John had recently finished reading Michael Ondaatje's latest book, Divisadero. It was special to him because he knew Ondaatje well. In fact, John had designed an artist's retreat or residency center in northern California where Ondaatje wrote the majority of this book. As John expounded on the incredible artistry that is Divisadero, he explained the unique joy he feels in creating a place for artists that then surfaces in their art. He could see the influence of his architecture and of the place in the setting of the novel and felt accomplice to it. This conversation profoundly affected me, especially at Libre on the dawn on a new year.


Here is an excerpt from the novel; it doesn't necessarily speak to John's architecture, but to the terrific quandry of art-making.

(pg. 78-79)
What night gave Rafael was a formlessness in which everything had a purpose. As if darkness had a hidden musical language. There were nights when he did not bother to even light the oil lamp that hung in the doorway of his trailer. He reached for the guitar and stepped down the three laddered steps into the field, carrying a chair in his hand. 'I don't work, I appear' -- he remembered the line of Django Reinhardt's and imagined the great man slipping out from the shadows grandly and disappearing efficiently into his craft. The alternative was to arrive, as most musicians did, like an eighteenth-century king entering a city, preceded by great fires on the hills that signaled he had crossed the border, and then by the ringing of bells. But Rafael was not even appearing. Dissolving perhaps, aware of night bugs, the river on the edge of his hearing. His open palm brushed a chord that was response, just response. He had not yet stepped forward. This was the late summer of his life, the year he met Anna, and he had no idea whether he would ever be able to return to the corralling work that art was, to have whatever he needed to make even a simple song. Dissolving into darkness was enough, for now. Or playing from memory an old song by a master, something his mother had loved or his father had whistled, when he accompanied his father on a walk, for there was one specific song his father always muttered or whistled. In the past Rafael had traveled from village to village, argued a salary, invented melodies, stolen chords, slashed the legs off an old song to use just the torso -- but he had come to love now most of all the playing of music with no one there. Could you waste your life on a gift? If you did not use your gift, was it a betrayal?

ALLOY Conference 1970

One notable event that operated as a think-tank/networking opportunity/celebration of community was the ALLOY conference, organized by Steve Baer with Barry Hickman, March 20-23, 1970. It was a weekend event conducted at an abandoned tile factory near La Luz, NM between the Trinity bombsite and the Mescalero Apache reservation and was framed as a conference on new building technologies. Participants were welcomed from a variety of local and national communes and the Whole Earth Catalog was invited to report on the weekend’s events. Discussion at ALLOY ranged from concrete to cardboard to 3M tape to dope to evolution to magic and it entertained questions like “What sort of research do we do to use the technology in order to improve our minds?” and “Am I this 6-foot body or am I something else that could exist beyond it?” Very little of the information in the article is useful or cited, and the piece functions more as testament to the fact that something happened, that people attended, and that a particular spirit was in the air. This manner of stylistically relaying incomplete information is perhaps exemplary of the moment’s priorities. Although inspired by the idea of an information network, the connections being made were primarily social, ideological, aesthetic.

Some outtakes from the article:
"New Mexico is the center of momentum this year, and maybe for the next several. More of the interesting communities are there. More of the interesting outlaw designers are.

Baer had in mind a meld of information on Materials, Structure, Energy, Man, Magic, Evolution, and Consciousness, so he invited individuals with amateur or professional interest in these areas to take responsibility for their coverage in the discourse.

150 people were there. They came from northern New Mexico, the Bay Area, New York, Washington, Cardondale, Canada, Big Sur, and elsewhere. They camped amid the tumbleweed in weather that baked, rained, greyed, snowed, and blew a fucking dust storm. Who were they? (Who were we?) Persons in their late twenties or early thirties mostly. Havers of families, many of them. Outlaws, dope fiends, and fanatics naturally. Doers, primarily, with a functional grimy grasp on the world. World-thinkers, drop outs from specialization. Hope freaks."

I've come in contact with the man who owns the old tile factory and will visit the site this summer. I'd really like to know more details about the ALLOY conference and consider what the present-day equivalent might be. ALLOY 2009? What information would be shared? What would the format for the conference look like? Who would be there? To what end?

Mildred's Lane

Mildred's Lane is a 96-acre compound in the upper Delaware River Valley region of Pennsylvania near New York City. I have not been there but am inspired deeply by the website for this project that is a historical archive, an art school, and a camp where artists can live, make, and research differently.

The place is named for Mildred Steffens, who was born here in 1902 and later farmed the land with her husband and family. When they died the land and house remained as ghosts until the property was discovered by J. Morgan Puett, Mark Dion, Nils Norman and Renee Green in 1998. Mildred's Lane is now a museum and a Historical Society, devoted to archiving this woman's extraordinary life. It is also a site for innovated cultural production and collaboration.

Mildred Lane's website describes their endeavors as a "revolutionary rigorous rethinking (the 3 Rs) of the contemporary art complex." It is a place to "collectively create new modes of being in the world -- this idea incorporates questions of our relation to the environment, systems of labor, forms of dwelling, all of which compose an ethics of comportment – and are embodied in workstyles. As a participant at Mildred’s Lane these issues will be negotiated daily through the rethinking of one’s involvements with food,shopping, making, styling, gaming, sleeping, reading, thinking and doing. This is a program and a place where a work-live-research environment is developed to foster a rigorous engagement with every aspect of life."

Many artists have contributed works to The Mildred's Lane Historical Society and Museum including a set of hand-made canoes by Bob Braine, works by Jorge Colombo, Brian Conley, Gregory Crewdsen, Mark Dion, Moyra Davey, Sean Foley, Hope Ginsburg, Jeffrey Jenkins, Iain Kerr, Julian Laverdiere, Matt Mullican, Nils Norman, Michael Oatman, J. Morgan Puett, Rebecca Purcell, William Purcell, Alexis Rockman, Jason Simon, Allison Smith, Spurse, Jeffrey Valance, Amy Yoes and many others.

J. Morgan Puett will be in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts this coming fall and collaborating with various institutions around the Bay Area. Keep an eye out for her and her work!

Santigold is a hit

I do not want this blog to be a log of my daily happenings, nor do I intend to review much of everything I experience, but it should be mentioned that Santigold ROCKS. I saw her tonight at the Warfield and was massively impressed by the collision of styles, the ingenuity of form, and also her authentic spirit. Her performance tonight (strengthened by that of her nerdy-fabulous band) was a mash-up of Michael Jackson, Devo, and Britney Spears with a curious mix of all things hip. The show was ecstatically entertaining to the wildly diverse crowd -- there was even a small mosh pit during one of the more rowdy tunes -- and was a true exhibition of stage talent and female gusto. At one point Lulu and I turned to one another and said, "This might be the future of music!"

this beginning has been a long time coming

Something is about to start, yet it's not exactly the beginning.

For years I've had conversations about making a place. Nearly everyone I meet is somehow accomplice to the building of this place (which may actually, one day, be a network of places, each distinguished but somehow linked). By sharing ideas, notions of failure, potential model projects, and infectious enthusiasm about this place often referred to as "the farm" or "the commune," a vast community of commoners are talking about how to survive the failing economy, how to live a little more green, how to travel between places, how to build something that is a reflection of collective potential. These on-going conversations have evolved over the years from whimsical fantasy to urgent action. We speak of buying land together, building our own houses or rehabilitating vacant buildings, learning to make electricity and vegetables, tearing down fences, repurposing foreclosed suburban cul-de-sacs, sharing resources like cars and tools, creating movement between places and people, and always always making time and space for art.

It's funny how time works. Three years ago, I wrote my master's thesis about Drop City, a vibrant art project-turned commune in southern Colorado from 1965 - 1973. Enrolled in the curatorial practice program at California College of the Arts, I wanted to write about expanded art practices and their affect on an emergent counterculture. There was very little written then about Drop City and communes were sheepishly unhip. I felt lost in time and knew very few young people interested in both the history of communalism and its possibilities for the future. It seemed that all of my best friends were at least 60-years old. All of this has since changed. It now seems very important and exciting to think about building places that are both about building and about place. The conversation about building places has become exponentially more inter-generational, sophisticated, practical, fun, as well as accepting and interested in failure. This blog is an attempt to help cultivate this conversation, while moving from thinking and talking into real DOING. In lieu of having land or an immediate opportunity to build this proverbial place, I will create a blog.

I will soon leave San Francisco for the Rockies where I will teach about these art-and-place, art-and-life things at the University of Colorado while continuing my research around the Colorado communes. I hope to return to the Bay Area, but am leaving myself open to whatever unfolds... these days feel like new beginnings. I'm not sure what will happen in the coming months, nor is it clear to me how this blog might function but I feel very certain that incredible things are happening each day. These deserve to be documented and shared, analyzed and celebrated. If I cannot yet make a place with hammer and nail, perhaps I can make meaning from the events and thoughts of my days. One thing is certain: this beginning has been a long time coming.