Gonz

This week was exam week, so that means that the majority of my time was split equally between studying and procrastinating with my roommates on N64 and that this week’s link-o-rama is a bit longer than usual:

• Miss Van did a studio visit for Hi Fructose.
• Roa, Phelgm and Robots have an installation going on outside of London through March 6th.
• Yes for more street art in Zambia and volunteering!
• A perfect example of how street art can brighten up a community (unless there’s backlash for trying to make the site of a car crash look nice, like the backlash when artists painted the separation wall in Palestine).
• Another example.
• Michael De Feo has his first London solo show opening next week.
• MOMO put up a piece in London, but I think thedocumentation is more interesting than the end result.
• Reader has a new zine out. It is devoted to art on postal labels.
• And now even Mr. Brainwash’s street art is getting protected with plexiglass…
• Insurgency Inc is doing some hilarious stuff in LA. These posters relating to Banksy are some of my favorites.
• Also, I’ve been posting a lot of photos on my flickr lately of stickers in Philadelphia.

Photo by RJ Rushmore

Just caught wind of what is turning out to be an incredible project from Imminent Disaster. Check out the Kickstarter, because money talks, but please take the time to support however you can. More from Disaster on the project after the jump.

“Homeland” is a Wet-Plate Collodion photo essay focusing on grassroots efforts to rebuild life after the collapse of the American economy. By documenting communities and individuals in NYC and across the country, this project aims to connect disparate communities and individuals into a national movement with common ideological threads. The range of projects documented will include urban farms, bicycle collectives, off-the grid homes, alternative fuel producers, art and theatre collectives, community dinners, free schools and after-school programs, squats, itinerants, tent cities and other grassroots social practices.

So you might have heard me talking about Wet-Plate photos, or mentioning that I might be leaving town on a cross-country trip at some undetermined date in the future. Both of these things are true and part of one and the same thing, which is a project I have been brewing up since last November. I am finally at a point where I am confident the project is happening. I just bought the car on Monday, a VW Golf Diesel, which gets about 50mpg, that I can run on biodiesel, from a funny man on Staten Island that I’m still dealing with to get the title figured out.

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Sweet Toof and Pins aka Paul Insect

Had a pretty interesting week. Last Friday was the opening of, Sex Drive, the latest show at The Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, where I work part time. It’s a pretty great show, so if you’re in the Philadelphia area, I’d say it’s worth stopping by. But if you’re not, there’s also a lot of online content. But here’s what’s going on the more Vandalog-relevant world this week:

• Kid Acne and Dscreet painted a pretty cool collaboration.
• I just read Kid Acne’s latest zine, which is pretty cool for Kid Acne fans.
• MOMO’s also got a new zine out.
• An impressive Os Gêmeos is going to be for sale at Philips de Pury later this month.
• This looks like a great mural project in Madrid.
• You’ve got to have an appreciation for beautiful handpainted signs like these.
• There’s a trailer out for a film called How To Sell A Banksy. It seems to be about a person or group who are trying to sell a street piece by Banksy that they removed or somehow got their hands on. I’m not sure what to think of the whole thing. On the one hand, it certainly raises some questions about the value of art and what Banksy is (like the guy from Andipa, a dealer in secondhand Banksy artwork, saying that perhaps Banksy’s street pieces are absolutely worthless), but I can’t help but believe that those questions will be obscured in the film by the filmmakers themselves being sucked into the system. They are trying to sell something after all, how could they not become part of this system that the film seem to be critiquing?

Photo by nolionsinengland

Baltimore Open City
An open city is a place where everyone feels welcome, regardless of such things as wealth, race or religion. In every neighborhood of an open city, one feels like he or she belongs. Does Baltimore feel open or does housing discrimination, bad public transportation, and the privatization of public space separate people and create an uneven distribution of opportunity? For the exhibition Baltimore Open City, students of Maryland Institute College of Art’s Exhibition Development Seminar invited scholars, activists, community- based organizations, local artists and visiting artist Damon Rich to create a series of installations, workshops and other public programs that investigate the ways in which Baltimore is and is not an open city. We welcome our neighbors to join us in exploring what an open city might look and feel like.

Call for Entries
At this time, Baltimore Open City would like to invite artists, designers, architects, educators, community groups and all other interested parties to participate in our exhibition. We are looking for people to contribute original and informative works of two- and three- dimensional art and design. The work submitted should be relevant to the idea of the “open” city in general and/or Baltimore specifically. Only finished work will be considered for acceptance.

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From the artist’s website: The Downtown Eastside is the oldest neighbourhood in Vancouver; it is also the most run-down. This historic area is infamous for being plagued by social problems due to poverty. Before falling prey to serious urban decay, it has known brighter days, and was even the city’s business hub until the 1980s. Derelict for over twenty years, in more recent ones, it has started to be sought after again. The Downtown Eastside is undergoing a major mutation —witness the newly renovated buildings and the constructions sites that now dot the area.

The coming of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games is accelerating the Downtown Eastside’s transformation by heightening real estate speculation and gentrification; new condo towers and big box stores are appearing. The revamping of the neighbourhood seems more responsive to the expectations of people who are better-off. Tensions between real estate developers and members of the community are palpable, with fears of a form of implicit “social cleansing”.

It is striking that the history of the Downtown Eastside began in destruction and disappearance. In 1886, soon after the city was incorporated, the Great Vancouver Fire swept down on the neighbourhood and razed almost all of it to the ground. The video installation Fire with Fire recalls this troubled period of Vancouver’s history. It also alludes to the neighbourhood’s present conditions by reminding us that many lives have been consumed there, worn down by years of homelessness, drug use, street prostitution, and violence.

The video can be watched here on Youtube. Thanks Elle on the tip

from LunaPark

Considering a majority of Street Art exists in the shadow of neglect and finds its most receptive canvas on the facades owned by slum lords, I thought it would be pertinent to share this piece in particular. “Shapolsky et al., Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System as of May 1,1971″ was an exhibition of Hans Haacke’s work canceled six weeks prior to its opening by the Guggenheim Museum in New York because it exposed the questionable real estate speculations of a prominent board member Harry Shapolsky. Each property was detailed, photographed and mapped to expose the slum lord activities of this powerful broker. The Whitney literature on the show elaborates:

“Shapolsky et aI., Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971,” is the product of Haacke’s research into the real estate holdings of the Shapolsky family in Manhattan. Harry Shapolsky had attracted Haacke’s attention because he was the landlord who owned more slum properties than any other landowner in New York. Haacke’s research—all culled from public records—reveals how Shapolsky’s business worked, different properties being held under different company names. The series of 142 photographs of the facades of tenement buildings, accompanied by typewritten data sheets, added up to a biting indictment of the monopoly of one family of wealthy proprietors over the slums of a particular area. Due to be displayed in an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York entitled Hans Haacke: Systems, the work was deemed “inappropriate” by the museum’s management, and the Guggenheim decided to close down the exhibition. The curator, who defended the work, was fired. As a result of the ensuing furore, “Shapolsky et al.” became one of the most talked about works of the early 1970s.

Now that the tumblr has developed, I would like to bring attention to the Baltimore Open City Exhibition and blog which I am writing for. As a sort of extension of the parallels series I have been continuing on Vandalog, the BOC site will be regularly updated with projects from the Exhibition along with pertinent essays and past shows that serve as precedence.

A brief explanation of BOC: An open city is a place where everyone feels welcome, regardless of such things as wealth, race, age, or religion. In every neighborhood of an open city, one feels like he or she belongs. In Baltimore, however, issues like housing discrimination, inadequate public transportation, and the privatization of public space have resulted in an exclusionary environment for many people. The restriction of access to the basic things anyone would want, such as a good education, a decent job, stable property values, and cheap, healthy food, are conditions of a closed city.

For the exhibition Baltimore: Open City, students of Maryland Institute College of Art’s Exhibition Development Seminar have invited scholars, activists, community-based organizations, local artists, and visiting artist Damon Rich to investigate the ways in which Baltimore is and is not an open city. Through a series of installations, workshops, and other public programs, we explore the impact of Baltimore’s history on the current politics of the city’s built environment. We welcome our neighbors to join us in exploring what a more open city might look and feel like.

The most recent Rosler essay for E-Flux Journal #21 is a holistic portrait of the development of the modern city from its genesis with the Industrial Revolution to the complicity of the creative class in the process of urban succession. A must read for anyone interested in urban issues and the history of city space.

(yes that is lady pink modeling the t shirt in 1983) Colab, Group Material, the Real Estate Show, If You Lived Here, Martha Rosler, Dia Beacon Soho, ABC No Rio, Loft Living, Lee, Lady Pink, Jenny Holzer.
To get a sense of these correlations between sometimes seemingly disparate conceptual, graffiti and activist works, download this informative essay by Alan Moore with Jim Cornwell Local History: The Art of Battle for Bohemia in New York. In an effort to explore street art in a frame of relational aesthetics, let’s start with these connections, exhibitions and artists