Red Legacy

A View From the Tower

2010-11-19T17:48:00.006-07:00

“As a craftsman, a journeyman artist, he is not without his guile; he has come to decide that if you would see the horizon from a forest, you must build a tower. If the horizon will reveal most of what is significant, an hour of examination can yet do the job – it is the tower which takes months to build.” - “The Armies of the Night” by Norman Mailer, 1967

I swept the floor, cleaned out the stove ash, rolled up the blankets and closed the door. I tied a leather strap through opposing eye hooks not knowing when this makeshift lock would be undone or who would do its undoing.

For the last five months I have lived in a building fondly dubbed The Tower. It’s not much of a tower but it is the tallest structure as far as the eye can see. The Tower was built as a play fort by a teenager some 15 years ago and has been largely unused for the majority of that time.

The Tower is part of a complex of homesteads built by Tom* in the 1970s. In the past 40 years, Tom has made a handful of homes on the Taos mesa and he generously invited us to rehabilitate and live for the summer in a cluster of these handmade structures. For the past five months, Tom’s homes have been our home and as both physical structures and testament to a lived philosophy of resistance, these homes have introduced us to some very real possibilities for alternative, off-the-grid living.

We founded PLAND (see www.itspland.org) as a way to better understand how the world works. We wanted to learn how to build things, how to live with extremely limited resources, how to insert ourselves into a community of intentional isolation, how to start a non-profit organization. While building our own house just over the sage-covered hill from Tom’s, we took refuge in his wood and earth structures.

Tom’s homestead is made of stacked lumber and mud plaster. Discarded windshields serve as windows that look out over the vast mesa. An underground cistern is filled with water, trucked in from town, and extracted through a hand pump as needed. Water is also collected from the roof in large barrels and an old bathtub; we use this water for bathing and to water the sunflowers. A wood-burning sauna, dug into the ground with a skylight looking out to the stars, affords the mesa’s most luxurious bathing and a way to stay warm. Two solar panels harness enough power to light each room through a string of car headlights; yet candles, lanterns and headlamps provide much of our daily lighting. Tom built the homestead a little bit at a time and each room, alive with character, represents a different moment in time when resources became available to Tom to house his family of five. He has spent much of his life well below the poverty line, bartering for and scavenging building materials throughout the years. The yard is covered with piles of tools, wood, cars, tires, bottles, and other treasures, collected over the years with a promise of one day proving useful.

Tom is a basket weaver and he wove shelters for his children to play in; his daughter spent many nights sleeping out, 100 yards from the main house in one such shelter. Similarly, Tom's son's Tower sits on the edge of the property, beyond the outhouse and the adobe pit.

When I first moved to Tom’s the Tower was a pack-rat palace, filled with a decade’s worth of rat shit and debris. My sister and I shoveled out the mess, washed the walls, and repaired the floor. The lower level of the tower is dug-out, with a tiny door and three steps down to the earthen floor. The room is octagonal and eight feet in diameter, with a tiny wood-burning stove in the center of the space and two small windows filling it with light. In this room, I built a bed. Upstairs is a similarly shaped space with tiny windows puncturing the walls. Here, I built a desk and a chair. I set up my shrine and unpacked some books.

Off the second floor of the tower, we built a small deck from which you can see the rock formations to the west, San Antonio Mountain to the north, the open desert that stretches to the west and south with the Sangre de Cristos creating a ring of peaks in the distance. The main thing visible from the Tower is sky. It was here, on the deck, that I learned to see the color variation of night-time clouds. It was here that I saw countless storms roll in, casting rainbows to the west and heavy fog on the horizon. It was here that I learned about the variation between the speeds of sound and light, that I witnessed the northern migration of the moon throughout the changing seasons. I marveled at traffic passing on the highway, reveled in the tone of silence, felt myself confronted with so much space.

Sometimes you need to leave your hometown to know where you're from. Sometimes you need to go without coffee to know its affect on you. Oftentimes it is necessary to create a space away, apart, without to really see the way things work and the value that they have in your life. For me, the Tower was this kind of space. After five months without running water, living 35 miles from the nearest amenities and with such an expansive view, I see more clearly the essentials of daily life.

As we move into town and back on the grid for the winter, I feel both relief and nostalgia. Like climbing down from a mighty tower, it feels good to be on familiar ground but I miss the great view from above. Life off-the-grid is both terrifying and meaningful. There was a time when we ran out of water. Another time, the coffee was used up. The wind blew so hard and so consistently that my sanity nearly flew away. Yet, I took pleasure in learning to wash my body with cups of water and sunshine. I felt the power of making our own electricity. Time became a multi-dimensional thing and money lost a bit of its currency. Every moment, every action, required a level of intentionality that took nothing for granted and infused everything with potential.

Our summer was spent building a tower – a structure for seeing our surroundings more clearly. The act of building continues to be a means of experiential truth by seeing things how they really are. We have spent those months cultivating a way of life that is sensitive to limited resources – from water to money, from time to personal motivation – yet open to big possibility. Over the year, PLAND has evolved and for us it has become about celebrating our unique vantage point. Life off-the-grid requires infrustructure and know-how, creative problem solving and loads of perserverance. The best moments of the summer occurred when we were able to share our vantage point with newcomers. “Look what is visible from here! Do you, too, see that another way is possible?”

Like Norman Mailer’s craftsman, we spent the summer creating a structure that would allow for an expansive and new point of view. There is still much work to be done on our proverbial tower; we are ambitious and these constructions take time. At PLAND, we are building a house, a community, a school, an art space, a garden, an electrical system; we are creating a way of life. This, we hope, will allow us to see the forest for the trees. And then the horizon beyond.

* names have been changed for sake of privacy

** photos by Molly Danti and Carrie Thompson

All That is Solid Melts into Air

2010-09-22T17:13:00.002-06:00

If you're in San Francisco this month, check out the debut of Red Legacy at Queens Nails Projects. The exhibition is curated by Zoe Taleporos and is about the legacy of 1960s counterculture.

All that is Solid Melts into Air: Nightmare City with Copy Lake, Erin Elder and Sam Green

Opening and Reception on Friday September 24, 2010

7:00-10:00 p.m.

Free and open to the public

Special performance by Nightmare City with Copy Lake at 8p.m.

Exhibition Dates: September 24, 2010 – October 24, 2010

Gallery Hours: Fridays and Saturdays from 1:00 to 6:00 p.m. or by appointment

Press Contact: Zoe Taleporos, queensnailsprojects@gmail.com

“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” – Karl Marx

All that is Solid Melts into Air: Nightmare City with Copy Lake, Erin Elder and Sam Green is an exhibition that brings together three investigations into the legacy of 1960s counterculture and its effects on contemporary life and art practice.

Nightmare City (Carol Anne McChrystal and Keturah Cummings) present a new work in collaboration with Copy Lake (Alex S. Lukas,) an interdisciplinary performance piece, NIGHTMARE CITY COPY LAKE THE HORDE. The work explores the process by which 1960s counter-culture, despite its former political and cultural potency, has become a flaccid caricature of its own values in popular culture. The performance reinterprets the songs A Home is Not a Motel (Love), Hotel California (The Eagles), California Dreamin’ (The Mamas & the Papas), and Dreams (Fleetwood Mac.) Seamlessly merged, the songs are performed with lyrics intact but accompanied by and filtered though mangled amusical tape loops and washes of noise. The performance is punctuated by psychedelic projections, in which retro aesthetics and form are mediated by digital interventions such as wipes and pixelization. Vibrant dashiki costumes are spray-painted dull beige, tambourines and hand-made, pan-ethnic, mysterious percussive instruments turn prop-like, becoming totem-poles of multi-dimensional and occult-based dream catchers adorned with strings of Tibetan bells. The performance was recorded at sites historically significant to the 1960s counterculture movement in California, including Altamont, People’s Park (Berkeley), Golden Gate Park (San Francisco), and Monterey and will be performed at Queens Nails Projects for the exhibition’s opening.

Erin Elder is an independent curator and writer based in New Mexico whose research is centered on Drop City, an artist commune formed in Colorado in 1965. She is a co-founder of PLAND, Practice Liberating Art through Necessary Dislocation, an off-the-grid residency program that supports the development of experimental and research-based projects in the context of the Taos mesa. Elder currently writes the blog Red Legacy, a collection of notes on the possible intersections between commune building, land use, and art practice. For this exhibition, she provides a library of her source material that has influenced her writing and curatorial practice. In her own words, Elder describes the materials as “…basically any books about communes, the 60s, alternative living, LSD, DIY living/building, anarchy, back-to-the-land, nudity, psychedelia, activism, community organizing, underground newspapers, hippies, San Francisco, alternative education, early computers, rock and roll, social change, radicalism, trash, recycling, toilets, adobe, domes, free love, summer of love, groovy, Haight Ashbury, Woodstock, health food, The Situationists, everyday life, protest, and consciousness.”

Sam Green is a documentary filmmaker best known for the Academy Award nominated, feature-length documentary The Weather Underground. For this exhibition he presents Lot 63, Grave C, a short documentary film about Meredith Hunter, the teenager killed at the Rolling Stones’ Altamont concert in 1969. Hunter’s death has come to signify the collapse of 1960s utopian idealism, but little is known about Hunter as an individual. Buried in an unmarked grave, Hunter’s personal story appears to have been forgotten while the event of his death remains an important moment in American history. Lot 63, Grave Chas screened at film festivals such as Sundance, Rotterdam, Ann Arbor, San Francisco, Black Maria, Nashville, Los Angeles, Seattle, PDX, Tekfestival (Rome), Silverlake, and the Dallas Video Festival.

From the Earth, a Home

2010-08-13T12:51:00.008-06:00

Adobe! It's a time-tested building method indigenous to the Southwestern United States as well as other arid parts of the world such as West Asia, Northern Africa, and parts of South America. Making homes from earth is resourceful, inexpensive, long-lasting, fun, and an opportunity to handcraft physical space.

Here is an image of the largest abobe structure in the world: the citadel of Bam in Iran.

Here is an image of the Taos Pueblo near to where I now live. The pueblo is made from adobe and has housed the Tewa people for nearly 1200 years.

I've wanted to learn the craft of adobe making as a way of understanding my surroundings, honing a skill, and appreciating the local architectural vernacular. The following images create a visual narrative of my recent attempts to make bricks from earth. As these images relate, making adobe is also a practice in trial and error and tenacious experimentation.

Adobe brick making is best produced with a large group of people. Here are a few images of the Reality Construction Company, a commune that lived near Taos in the 1960s; their cottage industry was adobe bricks. Images courtesy Roberta Price.

I will be leading two earth-mixing workshops at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs in conjunction with an exhibition at the Gallery of Contemporary Art entitled Hypothesis. The exhibition pairs artists and scientists in an examination of inquiry and research. Learn more here.

Start Your Own School!

2010-05-17T23:24:00.008-06:00

This week Colorado passed Senate Bill 10-191, one of many legislative moves aimed at standardizing American education. As my friend Sue remarked, it's part of a movement that "takes the craftsmanship out of teaching."

In response to this wave of limitations and standardizations, Sue is starting a school. The Little School on Vermijo is a "village school for gifted and talented sixth graders" who will "become a true community of learners." Sue's school is based on classic academics -- they will study Latin -- but encourages curiosity, wonder, social interaction and public performances. She's starting the school with eight students, including her son.

Perhaps it's no coincidence that the art world is hosting more and more projects that take the form of alternative school and attempt to creatively reconfigure public education. One such project I recently learned about is School of the Future.

The website for School of the Future (www.schoolofthefuture.org) opens with an online form soliciting feedback. What do you want to learn? It goes on to state:

School of the Future is a project about what a school can be. We'll open this July as an inter-generational free school for the community around Sgt. Dougherty Park, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. From solar-powered lighting to a giant scrabble board, giant Tyvek mountains and experimental food sculptures, the School of the Future is an invitation to experiment and analyze learning through the arts. Each class, performance and student-teacher exchange provides inspiration for a curriculum that allows a community to respond to a particular site, encouraging the use of under-utilized public space as a way to learn and question cultural constructs and personal responses to school and education.

During the School's July semester a research document will be created and distributed in collaboration with the School's student body and teaching staff. This curriculum will draw from the process of building the school and will act as a resource to support the creation of new models for future education.

What strikes me about these two projects is that the process of creating the school is, in fact, a collective effort, one that shapes and is shaped by learning how to learn.

In thinking about the craftsmanship of teaching and artist-run schools (see also Red76 , Bruce High Quality Foundation University, Sundown Schoolhouse, Acurious Summer: Extraordinary Workshops for Children, and The Public School for just a few examples) I've dug up another rich resource from the Sixties.

The Rasberry Exercises: How to Start Your Own School (And Make a Book) was written and self-published by Salli Rasberry and Robert Greenway in 1970 and is a collection of texts and images about just that. Ironically, the book is difficult to use and proves more inspirational than instructional (this, however, may be the intent...) The book is reportedly inspired by the Whole Earth Catalog and other DIY manuals of its time. It reads like a catalog, contains resources, books, quotes and photos, broken into chapters:

1) In Search of a Context -- makes a case against public schools

2) Getting Started -- discusses various models and also the needs of parents, teachers, and students

3) Details -- basic taxes, laws, issues of money, records, incorporating and transportation

4) Doing It -- big ideas and curriculum

5) People and People Problems -- structure, visitors, discipline

6) Alternative High Schools -- case studies of various community and free schools

7) There Are No Limits

I have yet to read the book in its entirety but have pulled a few quotes and images for consideration:

"Our aim is to create a learning environment where the individual and his needs will be most important, and where learning can again become the natural and exciting process that it was... This means that students must be allowed to take responsibility for their lives and their learning."

"With our foolish pedantic methods we are always preventing children from learning what they could learn better by themselves while we neglect what we alone can teach them."

"It seemed to me that much boiled down to the relative absence of fear... they seemed to be less afraid of what other people would say or demand or laugh at... perhaps more important, however, was their lack of fear of their own insides, of their own impulses, emotions, thoughts."

"The chief task of educators is to see to it that the activities of society provide incidental education, if necessary inventing new useful activities offering new education opportunities."

"We will share what we can share. There are no limits. We'll make lots of books and change lives -- and thus our children will have lives instead of schools."

"The way to get into free schools is to do it. (Studying, analyzing, planning, thinking about them either delays the plunge or skews the evolution of what could be a free learning place -- with us fully into it, Here and Now."

There are certainly a lot of problems with Sixties models of free education (see earlier post on Pacific High School) but there are riches to uncover as well. Luckily, we can decide to do things differently, based on their flounderings and successes and on a unique set of contemporary conditions.

As I finish my first year of teaching at University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, I feel exhausted, inspired, disappointed, and resolute to continue teaching. It's been fascinating to see the industry of public education from the inside and I can understand, more than ever, the need for reform. While budgets are cut, students are underserved, teachers are underpaid, and tests take the place of direct experience, I hear the rumblings of change. Let's hope the collective work of artists, of our predecessors, of women like Sue might provide manifold, contemporary visions of how to better school.

* top image borrowed from acurious.org, from a 2009 workshop Cardboard City.

Hosting Twists and Other Little Revolutions

2010-04-16T22:43:00.005-06:00

I was recently sent an article by Jan Verwoert entitled "Gathering People Like Thoughts: On Hosting as an Unorthodox Form of Authorship Dedicated to the Practice of Anton Vidokle." I don't know much about the practices or either Jan or Anton and I can't seem to find the proper citations for this essay (therefore, I don't know when it was written or where it comes from.) Still, I find the ideas in this nine page article about social practice some of the most compelling I've read and I hope to create a legible pastiche of this wonderfully provocative essay.

Verwoert starts with these questions:

"What is the relationship between hosting and authorship? Is a host an author? Is hosting a form of authorizing something? Authorizing what? A social process? With what authority? That of an author? Gathering people like one would gather thoughts? Perhaps. But if a host should be a little like an author, would an author then not also be a little like a host? Gathering thoughts like a host would summon guests? Maybe. If this, however, should be so, what does it mean for our understanding of hosting and authorship as forms of cultural production?"

He goes onto defining terms as they relate to authorship and authorization:

"To authorize also means to inhabit the space you open up through your voice, your discourse, to spend time in this space, furnish it and turn it into a place for living (which is what followthrough means: to learn and live with the profane reality of your works and words, once they are born, and stand by them.)"

He follows this discussion with an important point about resonance: the author must set something in motion or, as Verwoert says, "lay down a rhythm" and that rhythm must resonate with others who join in, making the thing that is authored audible. Although this audible voice is the result of collective joining, it is still somehow authored by the one who lent the space and the initial momentum by which it is reverberated.

"Hosting in this sense is the act of lending a body, a mind, a soul to this consciousness for it to actualize itself under specific material conditions of space, time, and money. This particular consciousness couldn't exist otherwise."

Although these conditions are particular to a time, place, and intention, the collective experience is only invoked when the spirit is right. Likewise, the spirit is authentic and vibrant only when the conditions are conducive to its collective flourishing.

"... The magic of hosting would lie in mastering the forms, formats, and formalities that enable one to summon people, spirits, ideas, and images." And behind this mastery is a tradition that is grounded in ceremony, ritual, rite. Yet for many contemporary hosts, the desire to break with this tradition results in defiant acts of unorthodoxy.

"... What modernism placed at stake is the dream and demand of autonomy: the hope and claim that the power of a cultural practice to truly make a difference was inseparable from the freedom to determine its own conditions."

Verwoert has a fascinating take on this paradox of unorthodoxy and talks about the twofold challenge of unorthodox hosts: that of creating a proper occasion that is a pretext for gathering as well as that of hosting unorthodox spirits in an unorthodox manner. In other words, the unorthodox host must not totally rebel against tradition in order to gather a collective force. He or she (or they) must have faith in the potential inherent in gathering extraordinary people who are asked to work together in uncommon ways. It seems to me that Verwoert is talking about the tension between the collective will to self-organize -- the shared desire for autonomy from a dominant paradigm -- and also the necessary spark of motivation. While unorthodox hosts can provide the context for this rebel spark to alight (how exciting to consider!), its flame is dependent on the bated breath of an expectant and desirous constituency.

In the right context, the collective desire (alongside a healthy dose of anger and/or alienation) motivates a manipulation of the status quo, or as Verwoert calls it: the twist. This twisting of laws, of expectations, of social norms, is carried out with a spirit of unorthodoxy and in the pursuit of autonomy. "It is in and through the performance of this twist that the authority of this kind of authorship is founded. It resides in this twist, in the joy, pain, anger and laughter emanating from this twist: in the spirit of your twisting."

It should be noted that the performance of this twist is a collective effort, therefore the authority of the twist is disseminated. The authority takes hold when those involved in creating the twist begin to think and act differently, when they begin to experience thinking and acting differently together.

"The authority of the twist lies in its credence. This credence can only be generated and investigated by an association of people who, together, validate a shared experience as credible." This credence is born out of the moment of authentically shared experience.

There is no substitute for lived experience and therefore no two twists are alike. Have you found yourself in a moment -- a discussion, a brainstorm, a demonstration, a party -- in which the collective suddenly (and confidently) became a force? Was there a moment of terror, glee, recognition, heart-pounding inspiration, in which you imagined that things might henceforth be different? Did you lose yourself in sorting out the details of who said what and who arranged certain elements, but were instead overwhelmed by the sheer power of your shared difference?

"It's the momentum of this moment. It's the momentum of different spirits authorizing the experience they have produced together, through realizing that it has had an effect on -- and in this sense acquires a certain authority/credence in relation to -- the way they experience themselves and the mode in which they are together, differently, from now on."

As cultural producers, self-proclaimed radicals, and simply inquisitive people, I think we all share some desire to see great change. What keeps you from being an author of change, the host of an unorthodox twist? What keeps you from joining in the momentum of a spontaneous moment in which everything could shift, even just a little bit? I believe that Verwoert is telling us that creating change and asserting autonomy is a craft, an art form, one which requires astute awareness of context and subjectivity. To create change, we must learn to decipher authenticity and allow that genuine spiritedness to be the signature on our work. We must release ourselves from heroism yet be willing to set things in motion. It's an intoxicating idea, one that I hope I can understand better through lively and regular practice.

TOGETHER. DIFFERENTLY. FROM NOW ON.

There Are No Ends, Only Processes

2010-04-05T22:48:00.003-06:00

"We found ourselves going more and more back to basics, starting again, relearning everything we knew, not sheltering ourselves from our natural environment but learning to live with it. The alienation of Western man is partly due to his having lost contact with all natural functions: the reality of being alive. There are no ends in life, only processes..."

"The artists' 'life' as a member of industrial civilization has rarely become 'art.' The nature of his activities alienates him from the mainstream capitalist society and its market values, because the production of art is not inspired by consumer demand but by cultural necessity. When the necessity of survival forces the artist into participating in society, the contradiction in values destroys the man to preserve the artist; it often destroys both."

"We installed conventional flush w.c.'s but have decided to revert. The stool -- which is ridiculous and ugly -- uses too much water and demands a room itself. It has become obsolete. The ideal is a fly-proof hole. From this ideal several simple structurally pleasing outhouses have been designed and built; one is not enclosed but consists of a hole in the ground with a lid, surrounded by brush."

These quotes come from Bill Voyd's essay about Drop City written in 1969.* As we begin to plot our future at PLAND, we find ourselves following a similar train of thought. Going back to the basics leads to a consideration of art's value in society as well as the constant trouble of toilets...

* Voyd, Bill. "Funk Architecture" in Shelter and Society, Paul Oliver, ed. New York: Frederick A. Praeger, Publishers; 1969.

PLAND is launched! Off-the-Grid and on the web.

2010-03-22T20:45:00.005-06:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: March 22, 2010

Contact: Erin Elder pland.info@gmail.com

NEW INITIATIVE PROCLAIMS:

PRACTICE LIBERATING ART THROUGH NECESSARY DISLOCATION!

www.itspland.org

TAOS, NEW MEXICO - Announcing the formal launch of PLAND, an off-the-grid residency program that supports the development of experimental and research-based projects in the context of the Taos mesa. PLAND was conceived of and founded in July 2009, when creative trio Erin Elder, Nina Elder, and Nancy Zastudil banded together to acquire a small parcel of land near the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the Rio Grande Gorge. The arid plot is currently void of amenities such as water and electricity, with terrain defined by sage brush, chamisa, and breath-taking vistas of open sky. The region is home to alternative communities including the Taos Pueblo, several Earthship developments, and a scattering of off-the-grid homesteaders.   

The three founders describe PLAND as:  

“A program that focuses on open-ended projects that facilitate collaboration, experimentation, and hyper-local engagement. We do not hold expectations about prescribed outcomes. We privilege process over product. We believe artists can do amazing things when supported and encouraged in new contexts. We believe that no context exists like that of the Taos mesa.  

We find our inspiration in a legacy of pioneers, entrepenuers, homesteaders, artists, and other counterculturalists who – through both radical and mundane activities – reclaim and reframe a land-based notion of the American Dream.”  

During Summer 2010, PLAND will host a motley crew of thinkers and doers in a series of work parties, idea-testing workshops, and inaugural project-based residencies in order to transform the land into a more inhabitable outpost while challenging artists to create, experiment, and produce their own work within this unique context. These activities are funded in part by The Idea Fund and supported by the hard work of students at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.  

For more information visit www.itspland.org

ABOUT THE FOUNDERS

Erin Elder is an independent curator, writer, and teacher interested in collaboration, sense of place, and expanded notions of culture. Her research has focused on Drop City, the first of the ‘60s era artist-built communes and continues to do research and write on the countercultural activities of the American Southwest. She has produced projects with a variety of institutions including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Württembergischer Kunstverein, Creative Time, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver. She currently teaches experimental art practices at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Erin holds dual self-designed BAs from Prescott College and an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts. She enjoys hiking, hot springs, and building forts. She has recently learned the art of making wine from scratch. 

Nina Elder is an artist who examines the visual evidence of post-industrial culture, and its distinctive cycles of production, consumption, and waste. Her work is concerned with banality and the proliferation of commonplace objects. She scrutinizes the aesthetic mitigation that often camouflages sites of production, use, and disposal. Her artistic inquiry responds to the friction between humanity, the natural world, and industrial proliferation. Nina's research is executed through hiking in the Rocky Mountains, exploring factories, mines, and dumps, reading Western novels, and while driving down desolate highways. In 2009 Nina received her MFA in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute and she holds a BFA in Painting from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. She has exhibited across the nation, including California, New Mexico, New York, and South Dakota.   

Nancy Zastudil is an independent curator and freelance writer whose research focuses on collective art practices that operate in the service of revolution and social progress. She held the position of Associate Director of the University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts from Fall 2007 - Spring 2010; has collaboratively curated exhibitions in numerous cities including Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Houston; and is co-founder of Slab, an exhibition method that collaboratively facilitates artists' projects and events. She is managing editor of the forthcoming art journal 127 Prince; is co-editor of On the Banks of Bayou City: The Center for Land Use Interpretation in Houston (March 2009); and her interviews and reviews have been published in Proximity Magazine, spot, …might be good, and Curating Now. Nancy holds a BFA in Painting and Drawing from The Ohio State University and an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts. She is a WWOOFer, a barefoot-running marathon enthusiast, and lover of cowboys.

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It Only Takes a Spark to Get a Fire Going

2010-03-19T22:33:00.004-06:00

I'm about to have my first Houston experience -- beginning tomorrow and lasting for 9 days -- centered around an exhibition called Proposals for a Socialist Colony. This project is particularly exciting because it was spawned by this-here blog, Red Legacy. While I've always heard weird, unsightly things about Houston, I'm terrificly excited about this trip as I believe it will be a gathering of radical artists, each invested in recreating the world through the practices of art.

Here's a little preamble for the exhibition:

In the mid 1800’s a box of national archives went missing during the Archive War causing Skydive’s land to revert to its original deed. It stipulates that the land be granted to any group starting a socialist colony on the property. The works in this exhibition are proposals for this new colony. They contribute a variety of perspectives on the fruitful paradoxes that reside in the quest for individual freedom and the necessity for social contracts, collective processes and their sometimes authoritarian implementation.

Mounted in Houston, Texas, the exhibition is set against a backdrop of the state’s historical independence from Mexico and the United States, and in which a libertarian spirit persists and is legally protected. There are no zoning laws in Houston: any enterprise can exist within any building or neighborhood. The premise of this exhibition takes advantage of this lenient civic stance (without it the proposed colony could never exist), to designate a zone for debate about where personal necessity ends and public life begins, and what role self-organization can play in the development of collective processes.

An Exhibition of Proposals for a Socialist Colony has been built fromproposals for systems, tools, communities, communications, resource use, historical research, democratic gestures, implementation, and a public relations campaign. To produce this project the artists and curators engaged in a collaborative practice, where artists could operate as organizers and decisions were subject to the group.

My project for the exhibition is called Each Campfire Lights Anew and is the second in a series that considers Hakim Bey's notion of the Temporary Autonomous Zone in the construction of momentary communities and ad hoc spaces. Sunday evening I will take a group of University of Houston students camping and we'll build a campfire. It will be unscripted to an extent, but I've prepared a grouping of rounds that I intend to teach the group to sing. We'll roast marshmallows and tell stories -- the students have been asked to read Bey and prepare their responses in the form of a campfire offering. Remnants and influences of this initial campfire will show up elsewhere throughout the week. In a sense, the campfire provides a spark for many other things/groups/ideas/happenings/collaborations/conversations/loves... More about my project here: http://skydiveofficeofculturalaffairs.blogspot.com/

An Exhibition of Proposals for a Socialist Colony presented by Skydive Office of Cultural Affairs at Project Row Houses and is organized by Sasha Dela, Benison Kilby, Elysa Lozano for Autonomous Organization, and Nancy Zastudil. Artists include: BAW, N55, Aharon, Amy Balkin, Zanny Begg, The Copenhagen Commune, Chto Delat/What is to be Done?, José Filipe Costa, Erin Elder, Amy Franceschini, Alex Lockett, David Mabb, Anna Pickering, The Public School, Jon Sack, Temporary Services, Chin Xaou Ti Won, and Duncan Wooldridge.

Hope to see your round the campfire this week!

NORAD, our biggest local oddity

2010-03-15T17:57:00.007-06:00

Since moving to Colorado Springs, I've become (re)enchanted with some of the local oddities. We have a fake cave dwelling, Santa's Workshop (a north pole-themed amusement park), a castle-like shrine to Will Rogers, a cog railway that takes tourists to the top of Pikes Peak where a donut shop and other curios await. There are thousands of attractions within a day's drive of Colorado Springs and countless festivals (like the annual Coffin Race in Manitou Springs or the famed Fruitcake Toss) to entertain and amaze. Getting its start as a resort town, Colorado Springs has always thrived on tourism. We have one of the only 5 star hotels in the state, one of the best zoos in the country, and ready access to astounding parks, views, mountain drives, waterfalls, historic towns, and much more.

One of the weirder (yet nearly invisible) oddities in Colorado Springs is NORAD, which is essentially a military base inside of Cheyenne Mountain. North American Aerospace Defense Command was built in the 1960s during the height of the Cold War to protect the Arctic from attack. It has since been repurposed to fight the drug wars and the war on terror, but was decommissioned as a military base in 2006.

Although it is supposedly unused today, it still boasts a crown of blinking red lights atop Cheyenne Mountain, creating an ever-present constellation in the night sky. If you live in this town, you've wondered about NORAD at one moment or another. Its scale is hard to determine and public access is forbidden. The power of NORAD may have something to do with satellites and lasers, but it is also empowered by collective imagination. As children who grew up at the foot of NORAD, we used to speculate what it was like inside and what sorts of activities went on therein. I imagined that NORAD filled up the entire underside of Cheyenne Mountain, that cities on giant springs housed millions of radars and maps and men who never saw the light of day. At one point I feared that NORAD could read my mind, that it was tracking my thoughts or watching me through the light fixtures.

One of my new favorite things about Colorado Springs is a program on Radio Colorado College called The Big Something. I've started receiving their daily email posts because they include free songs, local announcements, public interest stories, newsy tidbits and more. Its another local oddity that makes me proud to live here.

This week The Big Something notified readers that Popular Science Magazine has recently made their entire 137-year archive available online and although the collection is not yet searchable, the editors of TBS found an illustrated article about NORAD just before construction was completed in 1967. I suggest you read the article yourself as it discusses the massive bomb-shelter still housed inside our "lumpy" mountain. You still can't pass through its 43-ton steel doors, but this article will give you entry into one of our nation's strangest Cold War oddities and the logic behind the continent's "most elaborate and important" defense installation. Read it here

I like to imagine a new future for decommissioned NORAD. What might it become? With numerous military bases being repurposed as parks, artist residency centers, historic landmarks, and more, I wonder what can be done with one of the world's largest and most outdated bunkers? Perhaps NORAD -- the inter-mountain luxury hotel, the artist commune, the underground farm, the world's largest movie theater, the greatest planetarium ever -- will become another favorite local oddity. Even though NORAD is now defunct, this village inside a mountain still conjures the imagination.

Smash. Rot. Wait.

2010-03-14T17:05:00.002-06:00

For a recent student-faculty exhibition at UCCS, I decided to teach myself to make wine from scratch. Smash. Rot. Wait is one in a series of projects that utilizes Do-It-Yourself techniques to produce everyday objects. Encouraged by the process and outcome of this project, I will continue to make wine from foraged seasonal fruit.

HOW TO MAKE WINE

3-4 lbs fresh fruit

2-1/4 lbs finely granulated sugar

1/2 tsp acid blend

1/2 tsp pectic enzyme

1/8 tsp grape tannin

7-1/2 pints water

1 tsp yeast nutrient

1 crushed Campden tablet

1 package wine yeast

3-gallon bucket (for primary fermentation)

3-gallon glass jar (for secondary)

airlock

racking equipment

wine bottles

Pick only ripe berries. Combine water and sugar and put on to boil, stirring occasionally. Wash and de-stem berries. Put in nylon straining bag, tie, put in botton of primary fermentation container, and thoroughly crush berries in bag. Pour boiling sugar-water over berries to set the color and extract the flavorful juice. Add acid blend, tannin and yeast nutrient. Allow to cool to 70 degrees F. and add crushed Campden tablet. Cover primary with plastic wrap secured with a large rubber band. Add pectic enzyme after 12 hours and wine yeast after additional 12 hours, resecuring plastic wrap each time. Stir daily for a week, replacing plastic wrap if it looks like it needs it. After a week, remove nylon bag and allow to drip drain about an hour, keeping primary covered as before. Do not squeeze bag. Return drippings to primary. Continue fermentation in primary another week, stirring daily. Rack to secondary, top up with water and fit airlock. Use a dark secondary or wrap with brown paper (from paper bag) to preserve color. Ferment additional 4 months, then rack again and bottle into dark glass. Drink after one year.

Fire Shelter

2010-01-28T23:22:00.010-07:00

I came to the woods of Caldera with the first month of 2010 reaching out, like a blanket of untouched snow, before me. I had every intention of beginning a book project about the Anonymous Artists of America and/or some of the other topics discussed on Red Legacy. I brought a suitcase of books and a few changes of clothes. I stocked up on wine and stoked a fire in my cozy A-frame and let the swirlings of my mind settle, scatter, ignite, glimmer, rest. I wandered through the burnt up forests and through weeks of unscripted time.

I felt adrift, without a shred of interest in research, much less that which focused on goings on of other places and other times. In my confusion, I revisited one of my favorite texts – it wasn’t one that I brought in my suitcase, rather it’s one of those that I keep bookmarked online and refer to with frequency. Hakim Bey, an American anarchist philosopher wrote The Temporary Autonomous Zone in 1985 and ascribed it an anti-copyright status alongside the note: “May be freely pirated & quoted-- the author & publisher, however, would like to be informed…”*The Temporary Autonomous Zone is not an especially well-written text but influenced the Cacophony Society, the makers of Burning Man, and many music and social theorists. Despite its intermittently vague and flamboyant language, it gives me direction too.

The Temporary Autonomous Zone is a potent but rather abstract concept; it is a phenomenon that challenges dominant culture and may be a model for thinking about daily freedom. Bey does not define the Temporary Autonomous Zone, or the TAZ, as he refers to it; rather, he talks circles around the TAZ, assigning characteristics and giving examples of moments that might somehow inform a larger understanding of what he describes as “a suggestion or a poetic fancy.”

Bey talks about the TAZ as a tactic to be used against the State and its all-encompassing spectacle. He also describes the TAZ as being invisible, something that arises spontaneously and then dissolves to reform itself elsewhere, in order to maintain true freedom. The TAZ is constantly happening: everywhere, always, if not forever. Yet it is imperative that we keep intentionally carving out autonomous spaces – cracks in an otherwise planned development – and to do this through acts of self-determination, no matter how small. These actions of are what move culture forward and are the basis for both personal and widespread liberty. This is the revolution of everyday life.

Bey compares the TAZ to pirate crews and dinner parties, rock festivals and spiritual awakenings. He relays the incredible story of the artist Gabriele D’Annunzio who, after WWII, captured the Yugoslavian city of Fiume (see earlier post on Pirate Utopias) and created an artists state. He designated Fiume as an independent nation with music as the highest order. For 18 months – until the money ran out and the Italian army lobbed a few grenades -- he read poetry from the balconies every morning and threw parties complete with fireworks every night. It’s really quite amazing that Fiume stayed soveriegn as long as it did but the longevity of its independence is not the point. For Bey and for me, the tale of the independent artists state is about a sense of possibility that comes from knowing and creating momentary freedom.

I first came across this text a few years ago and the notion of the Temporary Autonomous Zone has since shaped nearly everything I do.

Caldera has been a provocative place to consider the TAZ, for in winter it is wild and empty and the days stretch on without expectations. There, amidst the devastated forests and the wilderness of my mind, the TAZ dashed my original plan to read and write books, forcing a spontaneous reorientation to my environment and to what is possible. The TAZ took on a different dimension entirely and manifested (temporarily) in the form of Fire Shelter.

Fire Shelter is a place I made in the forest. Fire Shelter is something to which I surrendered. It has been a source of investigation, a muse, a practice, and an object. I have built something that will not last long with only my hands and intuition and with materials found along the way.

What is Fire Shelter? Is it a shelter from fire? for fire? of fire? with fire? It’s certainly not a place to live, but it may be a place to weather a storm. It is something to be discovered. It is something that deteriorates. It is somewhat of a secret. It could easily be overlooked or forgotten. It’s a pile of sticks and rock. It’s a way to pass the time. It’s more than a shelter; it’s a shrine.

Just a few years ago 900,000 acres of forest near Caldera burnt down in the B&B fire. Now the forest is a skeleton, a graveyard of corpses. The blackness of this forest is startling, terrifying, horrible. We all know the enlivening process of fire -- that with fire comes new life. But what strikes me about these forests is the present nature of these trees – they are dead but upright, not yet logs or fuel. These trees are stuck in a sort of purgatory, waiting to fall. They have been burnt into irreversible death, yet they must wait for the scars of their desecration to become useful. I want to push these trees down. I want to burn them up more. I want to light a match and with it, all of the blackness and regret that this forest harkens. I want to stop this waiting and move towards new growth, new life. But this is the forest; this is the way that it is, with all its ghosts and memories and terrible blackness.

And so this fort is about the wreckage of fire. It is built from the very waste and want of burning. It is about mistakes, about nature, about the precision of control that differentiates the forest fire from the innards of my wood-burning stove. It is about time and healing and darkness and soot. It is about the unguided act of creation that results from sheer desire.

As a teacher, a writer, a curator, a woman, Fire Shelter is a defiance of my own expectations and also a test of my basic abilities. Can I meet my own needs while evading the assumed plan of action? Can I – through the act of building a fort in the woods – honor the slow, painful, natural, waiting progression of things while still encouraging my life forward? And how can this manifestation of my considerations -- that are physical, philosophical, evolving and hopeful -- eventually become a home for someone else’s dreaming? Finally, can I let my creation disintegrate slowly and quietly, deep in a forest far far away?

Fire Shelter may be a sort of Temporary Autonomous Zone. For me, it was that and much more. As long as it stands and perhaps thereafter, I'd like to think of Fire Shelter as a moment or space in which unscripted things can happen and in which the convergence of human self-determination and natural order might find a fleeting balance.

Bring your boots and hats, your water and a map. Are you ready for a journey into the woods?

*Find the TAZ here: http://www.hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html

Three Words to Live By

2010-01-26T23:59:00.006-07:00

I've just returned from a gift of a place. CALDERA.

Caldera is 90+ acres of incredible forests and lakes in Central Oregon. During the summer it is a camp for under-served youth; in the winter months, the grounds are given over to a set of artists in residence. The facilities are wonderful and the landscape is ... well, breath-taking.

A few years ago, the B&B fire burned down 900,000 acres of forest and the damage from that mighty fire is still remarkably visible. In fact, it's a bit of a miracle that Caldera survived at all.

Caldera is built along the edge of Blue Lake, a steep 300-foot deep lake and is the only thing that came between the fire and the camp.

A caldera is "a cauldron-like volcanic feature usually formed by the collapse of land following a volcanic eruption." I love this description because, to be there is both an eruption and a settling. It is a surrender to the natural order of things.

Artists are invited to Caldera for month-long residencies during which they/we live in A-frame cabins overlooking a creek. We are given free reign over our time and all of that open space to explore. We are not expected to pay or work or donate anything to the place. There is a real understanding that artists make significant contributions to the world and that their creative processes must be supported and unhinged. It's rather extraordinary to consider this concept. It's entirely generous and forward-thinking, important and true.

The story behind Caldera is sweet and it starts with Dan Wieden, of the famous Portland-based advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy. W+K is the mastermind behind loads of marketing genius but are best known for their work with Nike. JUST DO IT. I heard this and was dumb-struck. Although I've grown up with Nike and seen the ads a zillion times, I never really thought about that phrase coming from somewhere, someone, and that millions of dollars were rewarded for its articulation in the marketplace. JUST DO IT... it seems so plain and simple, so absolutely elemental. Certainly this is a phrase that courses through the minds of every human and is the very instinct that drives evolution and culture forward. How odd that someone could market these three words. It's almost like marketing breath or water.

As skeptical as I can be about marketing, etc. I am in awe of this phrase and very grateful to those who coined it. It's interesting to think that three words can make a person rich and that the fruit of those three words can support an admirable non-profit that advocates for youth and for art. The more I considered these words (while working in my A-frame or circling Blue Lake), the more I heard their incredible power. There were moments of uncertainty -- when I couldn't decide how to spend my unscripted time or if I should veer off the beaten path when "JUST DO IT" would rumble into my head. Not only did the words speak to me as a sort of cheer or mantra, but I began to see the brilliance of the phrase as a marketing scheme. I'd like to think that Dan Wieden has had moments like I have. Even though he's a millionaire now, he's probably struggled through creative process and turned to nature in his times of confusion. It wouldn't surprise me at all if it was in a nature-filled moment, in a flash of uncertainty, that his best-seller came to mind. Isn't this where the best and brightest ideas are born? From our collision between our raw, helpless human nature and the desire to really make the most of ourselves?

I am so grateful for Caldera. The gift of time and space is unlike anything else. And while that gift can be offered by other people, it requires a certain surrender to allow the time and space to do its magic. So often JUST DO IT meant, just do nothing. I had to own my experience; I had to really live it. And so the place, the gift, the forest and the phrase all came together in a fascinating month that I will never ever forget.

Learn more about Caldera here: www.calderaarts.org

Flush with Wildness

2010-01-15T13:49:00.007-07:00

"I felt its urgent demand in the blood. I could hear its call. Its whistling disturbed me by day and its howl woke me in the night. I heard the drum of the sun. Every path was a calling cadence, the flight of every bird a beckoning, the color of ice an invitation: come...

"This book [Wild by Jay Griffiths] was the result of many years' yearning. A longing for something whose character I perceived only indistinctly at first but that gradually became clearer during my journeys. In looking for wilderness, I was not looking for miles of landscape to be nicely photographed and neatly framed, but for the quality of wildness, which -- like art, sex, love and all the other intoxicants -- has a rising swing ringing though it. A drinker of wildness, I was tipsy with it before I began and roaring drunk by the end.

"I was looking for the will of the wild. I was looking for how that will expressed itself in elemental vitality, in savage grace. Wildness is resolute for life; it cannot be otherwise, for it will die in captivity. It is elemental: pure freedom, pure passion, pure hunger. It is its own manifesto.

"So I began this book with no knowing where it would lead, no idea how hard some of it would be, the days of havoc and the nights of loneliness, because the only thing I had to hold on to was the knife-sharp necessity to trust to the elements my elemental self.

"I wanted to live at the edge of the imperative, in the tender fury of the reckless moment, for in this brief and pointillist life, bright-dark and electric, I could do nothing else. By laying the line of my way along another, older path, I would lay my passions where they belonged, flush with wildness, letting their lines of long and lovely silk reel out in miles of fire and ice.

"I felt my that my blood could only truly flow if it coursed into red, red earth. That I would only know my deepest glee if I could dive in an oceanful of trilling fish. I wanted to climb mountains till I cracked with the same ancient telluric vigor that flung the Himalayas up to applaud the sky. I was, in fact, homesick for wildness, and when I found it I knew how intimately -- how resonantly -- I belonged there. We are charged with this. All of us. For the human spirit has a primal allegiance to wildness, to really live, to snatch the fruit and suck it, to spill the juice. We may think we are domesticated but we are not. Feral in pheromone and intuition, feral in our sweat and fear, feral in tongue and language, feral in cunt and cock. This is the first commandment: to live in fealty to the feral angel.

"I wanted to put my cheeks against a glacier, to drink direct from her springs, to see vistas untamed. It's ferocious, this feeling: vigorous and raw. Wanting to touch life with the quick of the spirit, to feel the wind in my hair, the crusts of mud under my fingernails, the sun on my naked body, ice cracking my lips, tides flooding my body inside and out. Immersion is all.

"I took seven years over this wok, spent all I had, my time, money and energy...[Along the way] I found a paradox of wildness in the glinting softness of its charisma, for what is savage is in the deepest sense gentle and what is wild is kind. In the end -- a strangely sweet result -- I came back to a wild home."

Photos were taken this week during my residency at Caldera in Central Oregon where I am reading this extraordinary book and examining my own wildness against the backdrop of winter and forest, lake and rain.

Excerpts from Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey (New York: Penguin Group: 2006.)

Inside the Map

2010-01-10T15:04:00.004-07:00

I am proud. It's not often that students are asked to dig into an idea as dense and evasive as that of "site-specificity" and then demonstrate some understanding of the notion through real, tangible projects. The UCCS students enrolled in my Special Topics course Curatorial Project: Site-Specificity in Art have done just that.

Throughout the semester we read Miwon Kwan and Lucy Lippard, examined lengthy passages of James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and discussed the legacies of Richard Long, Robert Smithson, Andrea Fraser, N55, Hans Haacke, and many other artists. For their mid-term project, each student presented a site-responsive exhibition (Creative Time's This World & Nearer Ones, Prospect 1 in New Orleans, Andrea Zittel's High Desert Test Site, to provide a few examples).

While much of our time was spent examining the legacy and theories of site-specificity in art, we also engaged in a semester-long exploration of a particular area of the university's campus. UCCS is an unusual place in that it owns 553 acres of extremely desirable land, most of which was gifted to the school or to the state, including the unique and inspiring Heller Ranch. Learn more about the Heller Center for Arts and Humanities here: http://www.uccs.edu/~heller/

Students developed proposals throughout the semester, first working as groups and then individually. The final projects were designed in concert with one another to illustrate a "curated" and complex sense of place. These projects were produced on-site and then documented in a catalog. This production was called Inside the Map.

Below is the curatorial statement I wrote for the catalog, followed by some images of student work. I wish I could upload the catalog in its entirety as it is quite impressive. Working with students has been one of my very favorite experiences. Especially rewarding are the retrospective statements of students who have struggled with difficult content. As one of them said, "I think site-specificity will change the way I look at art, but more importantly LIFE, from now on." Three cheers!

Inside the Map is the culmination of a semester-long exploration of the Heller Center by eight students enrolled in the Special Topics course, Curatorial Project: Site-Specificity in Art. Guided by an in-depth survey of site-specific trends and theories in contemporary art, students designed their own investigations of UCCS’s Heller Center. Their projects were produced in concert with one another, with aims to create a broad yet fluid representation of the property and its complex attributes.

These research-driven projects were produced on the Heller property; they were designed to respond to the place, getting beneath the surface or “inside the map” of formal understandings of the place. The projects are interdisciplinary, involving performance, social engagement, scientific inquiry, and other cutting-edge art practices. This catalog is the only public presentation of the artists’ work.

The power of art is that it offers new ways to see the world. Through site-specific practices, artists illuminate uniqueness and detail, confronting generalizations about people and places and providing opportunities for expanded sensual intellect. Our project, like many site-specific projects before it, removes art from the context of the gallery or museum, activating a new space – the world – for art’s consideration, production, and presentation.

We have come to regard site, not only in physical or spatial terms, but as a particular cultural framework characterized by a complex set of social conditions, historical happenings, geological, economic, and political circumstances that change over time. Each of the student projects in Inside the Map amplify elements of the Heller Center, illustrating that this, like any other place, is a hybrid of memories, fragmented events, and incredible potential. This concept of site as something more than a location signals an important development in defining the role of artists as harbingers of in-depth cultural considerations.

Lucy Lippard has said that “Artists can make the connections visible. They can guide us through sensuous kinesthetic responses to topography, lead us from archeology and land-based social history into alternative relationships to place. They can expose the social agendas that have formed land, bring out the multiple readings of places that mean different things to different people at different times… The dialectic between place and change can provide the kind of no-one’s-land where artists thrive.”[1] For us, the Heller Center is a tremendously rich context in which to develop site-specific projects, testing a variety of concepts and methods while cultivating an inherently progressive sensibility about getting “Inside the Map.”

[1] Lippard, Lucy. Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. New York: The New Press, 1997, p. 19.

Idea Fund for Big Ideas!

2010-01-10T14:57:00.005-07:00

Great news!

PLAND has been awarded a project grant from The Idea Fund!

The Idea Fund is the second re-granting initiative supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, following the lead of San Francisco-based Southern Exposure’s program, Alternative Exposure. The Idea Fund is a Houston-based enterprise supported by Diverseworks, Project Row Houses, and the Aurora Picture Show.

As the Idea Fund’s website boldly states: “The Idea Fund is committed to new, risk-taking forms that help to define new practices in contemporary art.”

Also: “The Idea Fund favors projects that exemplify the unconventional, interventionist, conceptual, entrepreneurial, participatory, or guerrilla artistic practices that occur outside of the traditional frameworks of support.”

With our grant of $3,500 we intend to support a week-long summer work party as well as a visiting resident artist or collective. Here are some excerpts from the awesome grant that Nancy wrote:

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

PLAND focuses on open-ended projects that facilitate collaboration, experimentation, and hyper-local engagement. We do not hold expectations about prescribed outcomes. We privilege process over product. We believe artists can do amazing things when supported and encouraged in new contexts. We believe that no context exists like that of the Taos mesa.

PLAND is initiating project-based residencies to transform our parcel of land into a more inhabitable outpost while challenging artists to create, experiment, and produce their own work within this unique context. Inaugural PLAND residents are encouraged to marry survival-based goals with big ideas, aesethetic decisions, social engagement, and experimental methods.

I would add that:

PLAND finds its inspiration in a legacy of pioneers, entrepenuers, homesteaders, artists, and other counterculturalists who – through both radical and mundane activities – reclaim and reframe a land-based notion of the American Dream.

As we enter into a new year, big ideas promise big action. Stay tuned for more exciting developments with PLAND.

Thank you, Idea Fund, for your support of this exciting project!

Pioneers! O Pioneers!

2009-12-09T23:05:00.004-07:00

PIONEERS! O PIONEERS!

by Walt Whitman, published in Leaves of Grass, 1855

COME, my tan-faced children,

Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,

Have you your pistols? Have you your sharp-edged axes?

Pioneers! O pioneers!

For we cannot tarry here,

We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,

We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you youths, Western youths,

So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,

Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the foremost,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

Have the elder races halted?

Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond the seas?

We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the past we leave behind,

We debouch upon a newer mightier world, varied world,

Fresh and strong the world we seize, world of labor and the march,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

We detachments steady throwing,

Down the edges, through the passes, up the mountains steep,

Conquering, holding, daring, venturing as we go the unknown ways,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

We primeval forests felling,

We the rivers stemming, vexing we and piercing deep the mines within,

We the surface broad surveying, we the virgin soil upheaving,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

Colorado men are we,

From the peaks gigantic, from the great sierras and the high plateaus,

From the mine and from the gully, from the hunting trail we come,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

From Nebraska, from Arkansas,

Central inland race are we, from Missouri, with the continental blood intervein'd,

All the hands of comrades clasping, all the Southern, all the Northern,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

O resistless restless race!

O beloved race in all! O my breast aches with tender love for all!

O I mourn and yet exult, I am rapt with love for all,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

Raise the mighty mother mistress,

Waving high the delicate mistress, over all the starry mistress,

(bend your heads all,)

Raise the fang'd and warlike mistress, stern, impassive, weapon'd mistress,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

See my children, resolute children,

By those swarms upon our rear we must never yield or falter,

Ages back in ghostly millions frowning there behind us urging,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

On and on the compact ranks,

With accessions ever waiting, with the places of the dead quickly fill'd,

Through the battle, through defeat, moving yet and never stopping,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

O to die advancing on!

Are there some of us to droop and die? has the hour come?

Then upon the march we fittest die, soon and sure the gap is fill'd.

Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the pulses of the world,

Falling in they beat for us, with the Western movement beat,

Holding single or together, steady moving to the front, all for us,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

Life's involv'd and varied pageants,

All the forms and shows, all the workmen at their work,

All the seamen and the landsmen, all the masters with their slaves,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

All the hapless silent lovers,

All the prisoners in the prisons, all the righteous and the wicked,

All the joyous, all the sorrowing, all the living, all the dying,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

I too with my soul and body,

We, a curious trio, picking, wandering on our way,

Through these shores amid the shadows, with the apparitions pressing,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

Lo, the darting bowling orb!

Lo, the brother orbs around, all the clustering suns and planets,

All the dazzling days, all the mystic nights with dreams,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

These are of us, they are with us,

All for primal needed work, while the followers there in embryo wait behind,

We to-day's procession heading, we the route for travel clearing,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you daughters of the West!

O you young and elder daughters! O you mothers and you wives!

Never must you be divided, in our ranks you move united,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

Minstrels latent on the prairies!

(Shrouded bards of other lands, you may rest, you have done your work,)

Soon I hear you coming warbling, soon you rise and tramp amid us,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

Not for delectations sweet,

Not the cushion and the slipper, not the peaceful and the studious,

Not the riches safe and palling, not for us the tame enjoyment,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

Do the feasters gluttonous feast?

Do the corpulent sleepers sleep? have they lock'd and bolted doors?

Still be ours the diet hard, and the blanket on the ground,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

Has the night descended?

Was the road of late so toilsome? did we stop discouraged nodding on our way?

Yet a passing hour I yield you in your tracks to pause oblivious,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

Till with sound of trumpet,

Far, far off the daybreak call-hark! how loud and clear I hear it wind,

Swift! to the head of the army!-swift! spring to your places,

Pioneers! O pioneers!

Thanks to Nancy Zastudil for offering this poem as a tribute to and reminder of the pioneering spirit still very much alive and well today.

This Beautiful City

2009-12-06T19:13:00.005-07:00

Tonight I attended what has been called "a site-specific theater production" by the Civilians, a New York-based troupe, about the city where I live. In 2007 the Civilians were invited to Colorado College for a 10-week residency in Colorado Springs, during which they developed a musical based on the city and its legendary evangelical churches. The production was sculpted from hundreds of hours of extensive interviews and provides a complex and thought-provoking mosaic of actual statements from real, local people. Here's how the Civilians website describes the play:

This Beautiful City is a play with music, created from interviews with actual persons, that explores the Evangelical movement and its unofficial U.S. capital. Because of the presence of several national Evangelical headquarters, the influential megachurch New Life (formerly led by Ted Haggard), and numerous and diverse churches, questions surrounding religion and civic concerns are brought to the foreground of everyday life in this city. The Civilians’ project looks at Colorado Springs as a microcosm of issues facing the country as a whole—the shifting line between church and state, changing ideas about the nature of Christianity, and how different beliefs can either coexist or conflict within a community.

This Beautiful City has traveled the country and received rave reviews; the city of Colorado Springs, though, has not fared so well and continues to suffer from the media spectacle surrounding its evangelic Christian population.

I must admit that I was nervous about attending the production, fearing that the worst part of our city had been dressed up and put on national tour by a bunch of outsider critics. For years I've denied being from Colorado Springs because I didn't want to associate myself with the mega-churches, the military, and the right wing politics that have taken hold in this town since the '90s. I wasn't alone with my localized shame in the hometown audience tonight.

The performance featured local personalities and paradoxes and while these could have been presented in a cynical or tongue-in-cheek fashion, but instead were both human and fair without being at all feel-good. As a New Yorker review states, the play is "vivid, agenda-free, and marked by a benevolent irony." After witnessing the musical that proved to be thought-provoking, well-researched, expertly produced, and fully accountable to its audience; I am proud of the Civilians and proud of our city. Appropriately titled "This Beautiful City," the musical unpacks (as much as a two-hour musical can) the divisions, opinions, characters, and history surrounding the evangelical movement, finishing with a song about our beautiful mountain, Pikes Peak, and the quandary of living with extreme difference in an extremely desirable place.

Since 2001, the Civilians have cultivated their craft of "investigative theater" that combines journalism and art. They have made 12 productions that include The Ladies, about "the lives of Eva Perón, Madame Mao, Elena Ceausescu, Imelda Marcos — and those of project author Anne Washburn and director Anne Kauffman — told through gossip, tape recorders, torch songs, spectacle, and grim historical analysis." Canard, Canard Goose is "a story about a Hollywood movie and a lost flock of carelessly imprinted geese resulting in an eclectic show about disorientation, misplaced empathy and coming home." Their current project is an investigation of the Atlantic Yards development in Brooklyn and the Great Immensity, focusing on the environmental crisis and climate change.

Documentary theater is a new concept to me but appears to be a potent form of cultural production, one that is capable of taking on difficult issues in specific places. As This Beautiful City has evidenced, cities are complex, issues are personal, and art -- in both its production and dissemination, and with ample time and curiosity -- can create meaningful dialog about what it means to be human.

Learn more about the Civilians here: http://www.thecivilians.org

Read a rather short-sighted review of This Beautiful City in my hometown newspaper here.

Brilliant, Singing

2009-12-05T16:52:00.006-07:00

Ashleigh Brilliant is a writer and cartoonist, best known for his humorously illustrated, one-line postcards (see above example). I recently discovered Mr. Brilliant while doing research on the Human Be-In held in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park during the Summer of Love. I came across a set of radio pieces highlighting the sounds of Haight-Ashbury circa 1967. Amidst various interviews relating to the definition of "groovy" or the ideology of Free Love, were a few recordings of Ashleigh Brilliant performing live in Golden Gate Park.

His songs struck me as poignant and raw. Set to the tune of well-known songs, he changed the words to reflect the world he witnessed in the Haight-Ashbury during those times. At times these sound like countercultural anthems, at times they are snide criticisms of hippie materialism. From my understanding, he performed these songs regularly and never sang with accompaniment.

Unfortunately, I don't have a sound recording to share with Red Legacy readers. But here are the lyrics set to a tune you'll surely know.

From Haight Ashbury Song Book

"Haight-Ashbury The Beautiful"
(tune: "America the Beautiful")

O beautiful for hairy beard,
For psychedelic smiles,
For lava-lamps and costumes weird
And run-away juveniles.

Haight-Ashbury, Haight-Ashbury,
America unbound!
Within thy good old neighborhood:
The rising underground.

O beautiful for hippie feet
That walk without mishap
Through tourist trash on every street
And piles of canine crap.

Haight-Ashbury, Haight-Ashbury,
Your own conclusion draw--
Collapse entire or die by fire,
But never go bourgeois!

You can order his songbook, published in 1967, for $10 on Ashleigh Brilliant's website. Check it out at: http://www.ashleighbrilliant.com/

The Teacher Was the Sea: Pacific High School

2009-12-03T00:34:00.000-07:00

I am soon to finish my first semester of teaching at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and with this experience comes a heightened concern for making education a provocative investigation that invites a personal sense of agency and curiosity in each student. Likewise, with the initiation of PLAND, which aims to be a process-driven exploration of community and place, I am interested in models of experiential research through real, lived projects. How timely it feels to have encountered Michael S. Kaye’s book, The Teacher Was The Sea, which is a thoughtful retrospective about his involvement with Pacific High School.

Resulting from the brainstorm of several disgruntled parents and teachers who wanted a new educational alternative, Pacific High School started in the fall of 1961 with 11 students, one full-time staff member, and no place to call home. After an extended field trip to the Sierras, Pacific settled into a rented space above a law firm in Palo Alto and offered a schedule of courses that students could elect, but were not required, to attend. The goal was non-hierarchical progressive education in which everyone involved was responsible for his or her individual experience.

Within the following four years, the school moved eight times and struggled to pay bills, maintain enrollment, and practice some collective notion of student-empowered education. Of these early years, Kaye recounts the main struggle as a common but naïve faith that kids will go to classes because they want to, that learning is its own reward. He recalls thinking that “all we have to do is cook up a bunch of interesting relevant classes and that kids, after a period of adjustment will flock to them.” He talks about trying to “beat the sports news” but that “classes are an abstract, unnatural way of passing on information. When kids are not coerced, few of them will go regularly… They are too busy living.”

Faculty struggled to create a curriculum that adhered to a no-rules, no-hierarchy manifesto, often discontinuing classes that students didn’t attend or offering one-off workshops to test their feasibility. Students were invited to join long-term field courses to study ecology in Mexico, to work with legislature in Sacramento, to practice French in Quebec, even to Albania for “eight fun-filled months in the world’s most hated country.” This mosaic of curriculum was punctuated by frequent parties that, in effect, restored good feelings and a sense of shared freedom. Parties, Kaye claims, were “the redemptive saving feature of the school.”

In spring of 1965, as Pacific teetered on the brink of closure, the school was given a 40-acre parcel of land in the Santa Cruz Mountains (in truth, it was a trade: the land was commission for handling the legal work involved with acquiring 440 acres for a local conservation group.) Buildings were moved to the land and others were constructed. To aid in the school’s mere survival, classes were relegated to the morning while afternoons were given over to the building program.

The faculty was made up of a constantly changing cast of characters, voted on and invited by the community at large. Stanford professors taught pro bono courses, Ant Farm and Zomeworks initiated alternative building workshops on the property, musicians from the San Francisco Tape Music Center taught music with synthesizers and hand-made instruments, the radical art collective Videfreex brought cameras and new experience to the students at Pacific. Most people who taught at Pacific were not teachers by trade, but rather they knew how to do things that the community admired and were “hip” enough to the Free School experiment to readily participate.

With hands-on projects and visiting teachers, there was a sense of purpose alongside real, tangible life lessons. While building shelters, gardens, and instruments provided a sense of structure (both literally and metaphorically), a new director of the school introduced a vastly radical approach to the already alternative environment at Pacific that bred anxiety and a pedagogical groundlessness. Peter Marin wanted to create “a feeling to the place: a sense of intensity and space… a ‘guilt-free’ environment, one in which the students might discover or become what they were without having to worry about preconceived ideas of what they had to be.” Under his directorship, students were encouraged to go out and experience the world on their own (even experimentation with drugs and sex), knowing that Pacific was “a place to come back to.”

At one point during this period, the school received a call from a police offer who was holding eight kids he had found on the beach. His conversation with the Director went like this:

“You say they’re on a regular field trip?”

“Yup.”

“What kinda field trip?

“Marine biology and oceanography.”

“How come there was no teacher?”

“The teacher was the sea.”

By summer 1966, Pacific was in such economic turmoil that teachers were not afforded salaries; still many decided to continue teaching, and moved onto the land to live rent- and commute-free. Classrooms became bedrooms, tents sprouted up, teachers lived in their cars and through by becoming a live-in community, Pacific was brought back to life. Soon the faculty decided to stop bus service for students and invited them to live on the land as well. 15 students moved onto the property, each paying $5 a week, sharing cooking duties and other chores. All business was discussed in a constant string of community meetings, during which every student, staff, and faculty member had an equal vote. What to stand for and how to “STOP SUPPORTING PASSIVENESS” were regular items on the agenda.

That summer, Pacific decided to become a “live-in, community-school” but needed boarding facilities to bring in more students. In a spontaneous burst of brainstorming, the group decided to invite Lloyd Kahn, who was associated with the Whole Earth Catalog and was an experienced dome builder, to lead the construction of the experimental school. As the domes went up, more students seemed to materialize. Kaye says, “people were apparently so desperate for alternatives to conventional high schools that they were willing to try a boarding school with only ephemeral boarding facilities.” By the first day of school, 60 students were enrolled. Parents paid up to $3,000 a year in tuition, which included room and board.

Several student groups set about building their own dome homes. It’s hard to comprehend being 16-years old and living full-time in a structure of one’s own design and construction, but given the charge of student responsibility and self-reflection many of these collective experiences were recorded in photographs and journal entries. Kaye’s book includes a semi-daily log from a student group – four boys and one girl – who built a dome 1/3 of a mile from school on a hill they dubbed “Horny Mountain.” The Log is written with adult-like confidence and honest introspection, chronicling the daily “hassles” of chopping firewood, patching a leaky ceiling, smoking pot, wanting girls, wanting privacy, feeling adrift, feeling inspired.

As a community-school, life at Pacific was shaped by a trial-by-fire democratic process. Relationships between the faculty and students were increasingly intimate and rules were never put into writing. Kaye describes Pacific as “made up of people with an aversion to giving and taking orders. If we were not going to give orders, then the only way to ensure that the kids acted responsibly was for them to feel committed to the community. And the only way to ensure this commitment was for the kids to have power.” Getting the kids to take that power, to believe in it and use it to real ends was a different story. Education remained a certain focus, but as the community grew (and met incredible challenges) the politics increasingly took into account the daily function of meals, dishes, sanitation, and relationships. Kaye writes:

“We were all living together. The artificial distinctions that had for so long separated students and staff were blurring. Each morning we staggered into breakfast together. When the sanitation in the kitchen screwed up, we all had the runs together. The older and younger people were becoming friends – lovers. Kids and adults were talking openly about the school, themselves, and each other. I cannot over-emphasize the importance of this. It meant that the kids could be part of the very fiber of the place.”

Kaye’s book was published in 1972 when Pacific High School was at its height. With 80 students and constant calls from prospective staff, he writes about the school as a complicated mix of success and failure. The school was never intended to be a utopia or a model of free education. He says, “Beneath all of its changes and confusions there has always been a bedrock common-sense, a surprisingly consistent principle at work: to restore to the center of experience experience itself.” For Kaye, teaching at Pacific was not necessarily about training young minds, but about testing the limits of freedom, democracy, shelter, adolescence. For better or for worse, it was a shared experience in learning how to live, and also maybe one of living how to learn.

I don’t know what happened to Pacific High School. The book ends; time has passed and little has been written about Pacific High in the past 40 years. There is much that can be said (and much I haven’t shared here) about the legacy of Pacific. Instead, I’ll end with this quote from Oscar Wilde in The Critic as Artist, 1861:

“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.”

*All quotes and photos from Kaye, Michael S., The Teacher Was the Sea. Links Press, 1972.

Gentle Thursday

2009-11-30T18:37:00.002-07:00

Artist unknown. Announcement, The Rag. October 31, 1966. Austin, Texas.

Trans-Love Energies and a Total Assault on Culture

2009-11-08T23:32:00.016-07:00

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?

2009-10-29T14:53:00.003-06:00

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

2009-10-07T00:52:00.008-06:00

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

2009-10-06T23:25:00.007-06:00

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

2009-10-05T22:27:00.000-06:00

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

2009-09-23T13:37:00.000-06:00

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!

2009-09-11T20:28:00.000-06:00

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

2009-09-10T18:40:00.000-06:00

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?

2009-09-08T16:25:00.000-06:00

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

2009-09-06T17:43:00.001-06:00

A Midnight Thing

2009-09-01T00:59:00.000-06:00

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

2009-08-31T21:39:00.000-06:00

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.