OPEN SPACE

………………………………. "Only dull and powerless artists defend their art by reference to sincerity" —Kazimir Malevich……………………………………..

An area of ongoing interest and research for Rebar is an exploration niche spaces, loopholes in systems of regulation, fragmented sites and liminal territories within the spatial systems of the city. We tend to trace the contemporary origins of this type of work to Gordon Matta-Clark’s “Fake Estates” project from the 1970’s. For Fake Estates, Matta-Clark acquired rights to small, oddly shaped fragments of Queens, NY that had been created due to surveying errors and other glitches in the matrix of civic organization and regulation. Matta-Clark proposed a series of interventions for these sites that were never realized due to the artists’ untimely death. (Cabinet Magazine organized an exhibition around Fake Estates a few years back, and their website provides a good summary of Matta-Clark’s project here.)

Picking up were Matta-Clark left off, UC Berkeley Architecture professor Nicholas de Monchaux recently created the “Local Code/Real Estates” project as a submission for UCLA’s WPA 2.0 competition. Professor de Monchaux proposes to utilize abandoned, city-owned parcels – including San Francisco’s “unnacepted streets” – to improve local ecological and social conditions, and to reduce the burden on city infrastructure. Using geospatial analysis and overlays of other public data sets, de Moncheax reimagines these fragments of our city as a new form of urban system – a discontinuous network of social-ecological niche spaces; or as he puts it, “a distributed immune system for the 21st Century city.”

Have a look at the video and ponder: In addition to producing desirable ecological outcomes, could these sites be networked to support a citywide system of cultural and artistic programming?

A modular, citywide performance?
A decentralized, interlocking happening?
A networked sculpture?

What sort of programming would you propose for these sites?

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Fake Estates, Gordon Matta-Clark, Local Code/Real Estates, Nicholas de Monchaux, possibilities, San Francisco, urban planning

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Andy Vogt & Joshua Churchill, Sustained Decay, 2009

I sat down with Andy Vogt recently to talk about his work, including the “Sustained Decay” installation he created with Joshua Churchill at Adobe Books last month. (My post about this piece can be read here.)

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Adobe Books, Andy Vogt, Gordon Matta-Clark, Joshua Churchill, Operation Re-Information, Sustained Decay

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In May, Joseph Del Pesco and I posted a critical reading of the Art and Education Papers archive, which had then just been announced. In it, we contrasted that project with a site whose constitution we liked better, called AAAARG. AAAARG is many things, but is probably known best these days as a kind of digital library and radical public amenity, devoted to the history of art, architecture, theory, political writing, and pretty much whatever else its community’s members decide to scan and upload. Based in Los Angeles, artist Sean Dockray is the principal of AAAARG. What follows is a dialogue on the history and ideas behind the site, followed by links to several readings relevant to its origin.

JD: Can you say something about the history of AAAARG? When did it begin, and with what impulses or ideas in mind?

SD: Generally speaking, it has always been about sharing knowledge in the form of text. Currently the web address for AAAARG is a.aaaarg.org (2009); before that it was just aaaarg.org (2007) and before that it was aaarg.e-rat.org (2005, with Aaron Forrest). Before that, there were a couple more that didn’t even have any A’s in the title (beginning around 2001).

JD: Have there been significant changes in direction or shifts in concept?

SD: Originally it was kind of a proto-blog, with people able to write essays and have discussions through a message board and possible even work on projects together. I think the library part of it first started informally in 2004 because discussions and projects often referred to texts. Now most people see AAAARG purely as a library, which I’m not opposed to.

JD: So it began as something more discursive?

SD: I think it’s still discursive. If you’ve ever tried to get your friends to read or listen to something you know that that act of sharing is a kind of communication and it almost compels reciprocity – so I think there is still a discussion happening, but it’s not really in the words. Most people describe AAAARG as a “resource” and I think that’s appropriate. I find that I’ve spent a lot of time working on things (alongside AAAARG, The Public School, Distributed Gallery and Berlin; and some more bounded ones: Games for 5 Joysticks, The Fundraising Show, and Chung King Common) that might be described as infrastructures or resources. In a way, I think it is in the same spirit as that restaurant Food (started by Gordon Matta-Clark and Carol Goodden in 1971), in that it provides something that we as progressive cultural producers need, while at the same time supporting the social generation of ideas. (more…)

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AAAARG, Architecture, Berlin, design, Distributed Gallery, Food, Gordon Matta-Clark, library, reciprocity, scans, Sean Dockray, The Public School, urbanism

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Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about home. These thoughts travel from my recent curatorial endeavors, to my involvement with tenants rights in San Francisco, to my unrelenting personal investigation into my role as a young, white artist in the Mission District. Of course, the housing crisis and economic recession has everyone thinking about home and property; whose homes are valued and therefore protected, and consequently, who is valued. (There is much more to be said about this and recent local legislation that exposes the vulnerability of renters, however this may not be the place). To consider home as solely attached to the built structure of a house is a limiting definition. Home means to belong to a people as much as it does to place. It is the accumulations of actions and experiences in one place. It is also a contested site; a place many people must distance themselves from and a destination we are often searching for.

In this post I briefly discuss five artists—some internationally known and others local and emerging—whose work investigates home in one way or another. I refrained from discussing Rachel Whiteread’s  “House” or Gordon Matta Clark’s “building cuts” although both projects are important examples of site-specificity and architectural interventions that address issues related to home. Only one artist featured below speaks directly to today’s housing crisis, however they have all been influential for me in considering the multiple ways to define and understand home.

Josef Jacques:  Gateway to Yosemite

Josef Jacques, from the series “Gateway to Yosemite” documenting the incomplete subdivisions in Merced, CA.

In his series Gateway to Yosemite, Josef Jacques photographs the city of Merced, located 50 miles from Yosemite National Park in California’s San Joaquin Valley. Merced was hit especially hard in the housing crisis. In 2005 it was considered prime real estate with the construction of the new University of California campus, however as the prices of homes dropped, investors, developers, and subsequently, many families left the area. Many subdivisions still await completion; some houses are lived in and others show signs of vacancy, such as dried up lawns and incomplete construction. Merced was a popular destination during the California Gold Rush and Depression era migrations—a history that makes Jacques’ documentation of the city in limbo all the more haunting, as it is a city that seems to still be waiting to fulfill its promise.

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Andrea Zittel, Gordon Matta-Clark, Josef Jacques, Mabel Negrete, Megan Wilson, Rachel Whiteread, The Counter Narrative Society

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