Pre-Production Lunch, Old Navy

Oh the seasonal salad!
Persimmons and pomegranates
really put on a show!

Made this very delicious riff
on Jerk Chicken.
Introducing,
the long anticipated,
spice grinder!

Bees!

I came home today to find this group having a party! WILD!

Getting ready for this!

Having a brief residency and show at Commonwealth and Council. 

Please, 

come on by!

*

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Jen Smith

Link Arms and Listen

November 6 – 20, 2010

Reception: Saturday, November 6, 12 – 5pm

Commonwealth & Council presents Link Arms and Listen, an exhibition by Los Angeles artist Jen Smith. The exhibition title, borrowed from the lyrics of a song by The Golden Bears, sutures dual impulses between Smith’s formal aesthetics and social art practice.


Link Arms and Listen presents three works. The first work, a video called "Oh I Limp Concise Sadism!" (a reformation of “Mission Accomplished”) documents Smith’s pilgrimage to Washington, D.C. during which she dons a white horse’s head made of chicken wire and paper, and drags the severed rear of the horse. She spews yards of celebratory ribbons like blood and guts. Without a viewing hole on the mask to guide her steps, she uses the length of her arms to assess her path, only to fumble and collide with the pillars of the monument. Her blinded movements and lack of coordination suggest the futility of an idealized, mythic nationalism.


During her two-week residency at Commonwealth & Council, Smith constructed the second piece in the show, a banner of satin and linen that reads, "WE MAKE THE RULES.” Conceived as a communal affirmation and a critical provocation of imperial power, the piece links the formal investigations of the video to the social offerings of her home preserves project. 


The third work reminds us that the politics of the social and the economic is always a part of the home. Configured as part artist project and part entrepreneurial exercise, Smith began making home preserves in response to the seasonal abundance of Los Angeles and her own economic necessity. As part of the show Link Arms and Listen, Smith will offer home preserved pickles and preserves and a pickling demonstration on November 6 at 2pm.


Link Arms and Listen is a continuing exploration of utopic/ dystopic tensions within notions of democracy in late capitalism, examining both the mythological and the quotidian.


Jen Smith is an artist and musician. With her post punk band the Quails, she has played music halls, street protests and squats, made posters, zines and anti-war ephemera, and recorded three albums. She received her BA in American Studies from University of Maryland, College Park, and her MFA from University of California, Irvine.


Commonwealth & Council is open Saturdays from 12 to 5PM and by appointment.

She's a Giver!

Massive Prickly Pear Cactus.
the giver of both this lovely
red fruit
and
 the tender paddles of
Nopales.

Jay Stuckey allowed me to scale he and Jennifer's amazing cactus on a rainy day. It was a harrowing feat. Tiny little needles found their way all over me, despite my best efforts. Prickly Pear jam, I suffer just a little bit to make you!

Harvest Moon Pickle Party!

Tender Lovers!
I beseech thee!

Please mark your calendars
for an autumnal pickle!

FRIDAY
OCTOBER 22nd!
6-8pm
At my house!


This month, NEW!:

*Pickled Pumpkin!
*Pickled Asparagus!
*Pears in Vanilla and Pepper Syrup!
*Peach Jam!
*Wild Card: Pickled Young Almonds!

Also, from the larder:

*Spicy Okra!
*Curried Cauliflower!
*Pickled Nopales!
*Dilly Beans!
*Dill Spears!
*Smoky Spears!
*Bread and Butter Pickles!
*Thai Spiced Pickles!
& some other fruity things!

I will make some cider
and hang around,
so happy to send you off into this stormy world
with some pickles to keep you warm!

Please email me for directions:

fullmoonpickles@gmail.com

Pickles at SMITHS in Oakland

My pickles went on their own adventure, joining the fun at the Putting Up Party and Pickle It Workshop at SMITHS in Oakland. It looked like they had a fantastic session. Wished I could have been there in person.

The event was initiated by Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell who do some pretty lovely discursive pickling themselves. Here Ted is interviewed about some of their social practice projects.

Gather Together: T'was a Rainy Day!

Gather Together was a very informal affair due to a persistent drizzle. Any fluxuation in the weather will arrest the best intentions of Angelenos-- this is what I am learning! A hearty international crew convened-- New Zealand and Sweden (and me, trained in the inclement San Francisco!) where a light rain is just that. Native Angeleno Kate Wolf did make it over and brought a lovely book on Scandinavian cooking and told us about Noma.

The internationalists made for an interesting conversation about american politics and witnessing Obama's presidency.

FOOD 1: Gather Together

An essential human experience, how can artists mobilize the democratic possibilities of the discourse around food cultivation and eating? What do we have to share? Participants are asked to bring ideas, inventories of artist projects and community resources, interest and/or something to eat to contribute to this gathering within the temporary autonomous institutional space of the Elysian Park Museum of Art. Join me for lunch from noon to two at Elysian Park, Solano Canyon picnic tables (pastrec center tennis courts).

If you plan to attend please RSVP: fullmoonpickles@gmail.com

See map. Look for the spot marked FOOD 1.

*

Helga Fassonaki asked me if I would like to put together a meal in conjunction with the Elysian Park Museum of Art at LACE. She describes her curatorial intent to me this way:

In this series, I'm inviting artists to prepare food to serve/present at any location in Elysian Park to about 10 to 20 patrons.  Each artist will participate on a separate FOOD event date (I'm aiming to curate five of these).  It would be completely up to the artist to decide how they choose to form/shape this happening, what location (in Elysian Park), and what you want to create/make in terms of food.  I'm not so much interested in Food artists, but rather an artists making food as a catalyst for gatherings, conversation/dialogue, exchanges, and interactions.  The title FOOD is taken from Gordon Matta Clark's restaurant called FOOD and is a direct homage to him. Every Sunday, he would have a different artist be the Chef for his restaurant and sometime bizarre gatherings would result.  His widow, Jane Crawford, recalled such a time when Clark  'cooked a lovely whole sea bass, but it emerged from the kitchen encased in a block of aspic nearly three feet long. He unmolded it, then gave the table a good kick, so that the aspic wobbled wildly and the bass seemed to fishtail upstream.'

What I hope will convene is a discussion about food within contemporary art and it's activist possibilities. With so much interest in local, organic and sustainable food practices, I worry that the theme reiterates a fanciful lifestyle preoccupation. Having only recently shifted my conception about my own pickling as an artist project, and here to fore, been both weary and keenly curious about these types of artist projects, I am hoping to educate myself through this informal gathering.

The invitation was cobbled together very recently so I will be thrilled with whomever arrives to eat and talk about art, food and politics!

I am also very happy to be part of the EPMoA's investigation of the park as an artist space, where "exhibitions are by necessity temporary and lightweight, in a dialogue with the ecology of the park itself, and the incredibly diverse ways in which it is already used." 

Advanced New Genres

The lovely Erika Vogt invited me to be a visiting artist this week for her Advanced New Genres class at UCLA. It was a biographical lecture cum art talk that culminated in an explanation of the discursive field of the pickle.

Advanced New Genre Pickles equals Back to the Future equals Pickles to the People! 

good times.

Antelope Valley Expedition

Today, I trekked out to Little Rock with my friend and birthday twin, Charles Rosenberg (who is actually a twin himself). My mission was to pick the last of the season's peaches. Charles is an artist, certified nutritionist, personal chef, frugal gourmet and probiotic expert. Is there something about being born on April 29th that makes a person prone to making magical concoctions and being compelled to use everything to it's fullest? Well, if Charles and I are any guide, I would say yes! Witches are we! Today he guided me on a fantastic culinary odyssey along Pearblossom Highway.

Our first stop was the Yingst Ranch. This is the last three days of their "U-Pick" season which begins in June. Mrs. Yingst explained that when the peaches are gone, they close-- though they still sell their fruit at the farmers market and are happy to bring you anything you want, if you give them a call. They have a regular stand at the Sunday Hollywood Farmers Market which is where I fell in love with their beautiful pears last year. The Yingsts also grow plums, apples and persimmons. While they are not certified organic, which can be a prohibitively expensive process for small farmers, they use no pesticides.

I picked twenty pounds of peaches and twenty pounds of pears.

Charles in Charge!

Last of the Season

Mrs. Yingst

Our next stop was Charlie Brown Farms: a regular road side culinary attraction with barbeque, funnel cakes, deep fried twinkies, date shakes and other heart stoppers. But within this arsenal of oddities, there are some real gems: local honey, dates and pickles!

Pickles at Charlie Browns

And then, tucked between fruit rolls and an aisle of candies labelled "the Eighties!," we entered a delightful grotto, the modest tasting room of the local Cameo Vineyards. We arrived to find Caroline, the sommelier, in a dour mood. Saddly, the oldest vineyard in the valley is closing. Hit hard by the economy and the failing health of the vintner, Caroline is selling off all the remaining wine and retiring her pours after sixteen years of service. She started us off with generous tastings of the dry reds, about six in total. Then she moved to the sweet wines, pulling a dozen plus bottles from the fridge! It was incredible! We were so seduced by her stories and generosity (and the twenty-five percent discount), we bought a case of the various offerings. Gentle readers, I must confess, I have never done such a thing in all my life!

Caroline, what a dream!

After our bacchanalia, we made our last stop at the Valley Hungarian Sausage and Meat Company where they make a fantastic array of fresh and cured sausages. We ate summer sausage sandwiches and bought a few links of boy scout kielbasi (being a popular recipe for the touring youth) and spicy smoked kielbasi. Charles was delighted to find local pecans for $2.75 a pound, grown in the owners yard.

My bolshevik sister behind the counter at
Valley Hungarian Sausage & Meat Co

Well, there she is! Miss Little Rock 2003
and her prize pig!

A real magical mystery tour, if e'er there were one!

Christina Linden and Amanda Eicher on Radical Citizenship: The Tutorials

Christina's review is here.

And Amanda writes:

*

I've been thinking about the tutorials, too. In the class meeting after coming back from the island, we looked at the dictionary definitions of radical - I think as we were using it on the island, it came into its meaning of revolutionary, and also sometimes intransigent (two synonyms in the thesaurus). However, there's a way in which radical also means the closest to the bone, referring to the deepest, or root, qualities of something. (I credit Jason Bird for bringing this out in discussion.) 

I liked the solitary experience of Julia's tutorial for exactly this reason. Facing the ferry harbor alone or next to another person listening through headphones, we listened to sound recordings of individuals repeating the phrase 'I am a person.' Although the undifferentiated long tracks were ultimately not quite so personalizing to my ears, it did drill down to a point of root citizenship - our humanity with each other - which is so important to realize. However, where Julia's sound piece invited us to plug in and stare out to the sea, I gravitated toward the tutorials in which we were invited to examine the ways we relate to each other and the state as citizens on a root level. Dictionary.com's first definition for radical is as follows: 'of or going to the root or origin; fundamental: a radical difference.' To be together in radical citizenship in this sense would seem to connect us all at a fundamental point of divergence, to call us back to these conflicts and arguments and brilliances and ingenuities which distinguish the parts of the whole. Often these moments were bodily moments of looking at one another, but in certain circumstances, I think this could have been brought about through awareness of site and landscape as well. It probably happened this way in Shanti's walking tutorial.

In taking the immigration test with Huong-An, I found myself meeting someone I could imagine as a friend and colleague, but who was my interrogator for an hour, in a way that really tested me as a person. I was brought back to my lifelong relationship with lying, something that we all, as Americans, have to wrestle with, whether it's the tiny everyday lies of omission which make us a part of an international economy which takes with one hand as it gives with the other, or the lies one necessarily tells to become naturalized as an American through an interview like the one Huong-An administered. When we switched out of the bureaucratic mode, I still felt nettled, and this time it was because our conversation about what we'd like to see as citizens threatened to open up differences between us that we'd most likely smooth over in a different atmosphere (i.e. meeting between classes in the professional halls of a university, rather than at a picnic table on Angel Island). The way we talked felt open, though tinged with the performing we both had done just a little bit earlier. 

Maybe that is a departure point for talking about the tutorials with Lt. Mark Gagan - the conversations Mark and I had with gallery visitors about observation, noticing, and surveillance seemed as much to do with vision and seeing as to do with words and lying - how we deal with and manage the police, and how they manage us; what our eyes do as members of our civic bodies. In each tutorial, Lt. Gagan's straightforwardness seemed to disarm the gallery visitor, and visitors often talked about truths or how manipulation of truth caused distortions in what would be an ideal relationship between the police and the populace. This was not all we talked about, but the conversation (spread across four tutorials) seemed to point toward radical points of divergence between police and populace - places where we could examine the splittings with real curiosity, perspective, and feeling.

A Salty Gathering! A Conceptual Pickle!

Yesterday, in a near dream state, I spent the afternoon in the kitchen of Chez Panisse with some great thinkers, Jerome Waag, Amanda Eicher, Valerie Imus, Rosie Branson Gill (the OPEN curatorial team), Christina Linden (a curator, writer and fast friend from Consider The Gatherer/ Radical Citizenship foraging), and Rebekak Cantor (my dear friend who is versed in permaculture and fermentation). In preparation for OPENwater, our mission was to put up tomatoes and freshly foraged nasturtium capers while Jerome made salt out of sixty gallons of sea water harvested at dawn from the Marin side of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Jerome pours the reduced sea water through
16 layers of cheese cloth, as recommended
by the World Health Organization

Two gallons of salt were harvested.

My time with OPEN continued today when a few spirited picklers gathered at the beautiful tables of 18 Reasons  for a pickling demonstration. OPENwater is being organized around water issues of the San Francisco Bay. Jerome very eloquently explained their project then asked that I make a very simple conceptual pickle with our group: cucumbers from a farm at the top of the San Francisco's water table, near Stockton, in a salty vinegar brine made from the bay water salt, seasoned with nasturtium pods and wild fennel flowers picked at the mouth of the Bay, where the water table releases into the sea.

And that is exactly what we did. This pickle was a delight! The sweetness of the fennel was in perfect counter balance with the tartness of the vinegar. Incredible!

Our own hand model and model forager,
Amanda Eicher picks the pods!

Picklers Pickling!

Conceptual Pickle!

Cucumber with wild fennel flower,
it was dramatically delicious!

More about OPENwater

OPENrestaurant Presents OPENwater

What is the future of water, for us? OPENwater, SFMOMA's latest collaboration with the artists, chefs, and educators who make up OPENrestaurant, takes the form of a pop-up restaurant and art installation in a large warehouse space on the San Francisco waterfront. This immersive dining experience highlights three major areas: oceans and fisheries; water management, both urban and agricultural; and water as a medium. The piece serves as a platform to focus on water as our most fundamental resource and to debate the health of the Bay Area's environment, water table, and water-based politics.

It is being staged at St. George's Distillery (aka Hangar One) in Alameda, from noon - midnight on November 13 and 14 with educational and improvisational events including:

November 13

• Teacher with a Bus: 1 -3 pm for a Marine Biology/Physical Education lesson -- Basics of the Hydrologic Cycle - open to all
• OPENkitchen 3 - 4 pm: Salting Meat and Quick Pickles --- the OPENkitchen opens to visitors for a workshop on salting meats and preparing pickles on the spot at home and in pop-up warehouse kitchens.
• Round Table Discussion -- Cured, Curated: 4 - 6 pm: Food Historian Ken Albala, Jenn from the Exploratorium, Food and Water Watch activists, and SFMOMAConservationists discuss salt curing, caring for artwork, and environmental care and preservation in a round-table discussion before the first seating for OPENwater's three-course dinner.

November 14

• Salmon Run: 2 -4 pm -- Why does the Salmon Run Dinner include no salmon? What are the stakes of the Bay Area (and California's) principal waterways? Why should we care about water conservation, and what are the worldwide implications? Experts including career fishermen, activists, and conservationists discuss the future of California's waterways and how the discussion impacts the wider world.