URBAN FORAGING

Oh, one of my favorite things to do is to follow an idea or query into the far reaches of cyber space! Tonight, as I was scouring the world wide web for suggestions about infusing carob pods in vodka, I came across this lovely message board discussion on chowhound. I love the community conversation, recollection and adventure sharing of people finding, eating and improvising with local free food.

Edible! Nettles!

Gordon Matta-Clark and FOOD

**From the beginning, the idea was to establish not only a kind of perpetual dinner party but also a food-based philanthropy that would employ and support struggling artists, the whole endeavor conceived by Matta-Clark as a living, breathing, steaming, pot-clanging artwork.**

**Mitchell Davis, a vice president of the James Beard Foundation and an adjunct professor in New York University’s food studies program, said that while restaurants like Food bubbled up from the counterculture, their influence eventually changed mainstream culture. “These people were not on the path to being chefs or restaurateurs or professional food people,” he said. “They were like: ‘Hey, we like to cook. We can do this. Why not?’ And in doing it they ended up knocking down all these barriers of wealth and class and status in the restaurant world.”**

**Excerpts from When Meals Played the Muse by Randy Kennedy**

This is an oft cited influence for many of us artists who cook. And I have to say, I REALLY LOVE THIS PROJECT! At the same time, I want to recognize the other humans who, according to this article, were really the start-up capital and lumbering labor of FOOD, most notably Caroline Goodden. I have been thinking lately about these utopian projects fueled both literally and figuratively by the spirit of community. So often, a star is produced in order to describe and historicize the project. I have been witnessing this in contemporary projects. This production of a "star" is not something from which I am immune, obvious from this post's title. But it bares reflection, and that is why I note it here. It is a topic to which I intend to return.

Geoff Tuck is a kind man!

And a man about town! He really keeps up with all the interesting things happening in Los Angeles. And that is why I am honored that he talks about Link Arms and Listen here.

Serving, Cooking, Giving It Away!

Serving, Cooking, Giving It Away: Food, Art, and the Places In Between | by Twilight Greenaway | Art Practical

I am still processing my experiences of OPENwater, and I hope to post more about that in the not too distant future. But in the mean time, this is a very good article about some of the intersections of food and socially based art practices in the Bay Area. The entire 2.5 issue of Art Practical is devoted to food, so check out the whole thing!

Inside OPENwater,
a two day symposium and pop-up
restaurant in a former naval hanger in Alameda, California

To the woods! Sandor Katz in the New Yorker

A podcast with Burkhard Bilger: newyorker.com

This is a a whimsical investigation of the fermentation movement, narrativized through a culinary road trip Bilger takes with Sandor Katz, regarded as the guru of the fermentation movement. Katz' first book "Wild Fermentation" is an important tome of fermentation with recipes that vary from kraut to pickles to sourdough to mead.

Wild Fermentation is also a loving social history of Katz' life in a rural Tennessee radical faerie community. "Nature's Spoils," in the New Yorker November 22nd issue, captures some of that sentiment when Bilger describes a meal with "freegans" and "opportunivores." Having lived in a community of similar activists in the Bay Area for a decade, I find this account to be charming in it's ethnographers account and remove. As a spirited tinkerer and a person content to live with less, and lately as I toil towards an uncomfortable professionalism, this account reminds me of other possibilities.

Pilot NY

Lavender Semi?! Yes, my friends, yes!

Bandana Patterned Napkins?! Again! Yes!

And finally, chaffing dishes and pickles?!
Together, at last?! YES!
YES! A million times!
YES!!!

Selections

The Wound and the Voice
series
2008

The Wound and the Voice
series
2008

The Wound and the Voice
series
2008

The Wound and the Voice
series
2008

The Wound and the Voice
series
2008

Duty Calls, series
2008

Duty Calls, series
2008

Duty Calls, series
2008

Duty Calls, series
2008

Making the Body and the Archive:
Our Painful Inheritance and How We Learned to Live With It
installation view
2009

Mission Accomplished I, II, & III
2009

In the Bush administration’s war on terror, feminist concerns of sexual self-determination and labor equity were co-opted as tactics of military interrogations. Despite this performance of sexual power, women remained objects in a violent, neo-imperialist tableau. This vignette is a particularly American portrait of sexuality, racism and dominance, one not easily exorcised. This body of work investigates the ways in which heroic mythologies of the nation state inflect libidinal impulses. Using strategies of performance, camouflage, and craft, the work draws from the political social archive. It asks what is the visceral legacy of those libidinal impulses? And how do these desires animate the body?

I grew up in Washington, DC where monuments are a very mundane part of the cityscape. Horses are often in these early memorials to war, a romantic vision of industry and imperialism."Oh I Limp Concise Sadism!" (a reformation of “Mission Accomplished”) documents a return pilgrimage to my hometown. I don a white horse’s head made of chicken wire and paper, and drag the severed rear of the horse. I spew yards of celebratory ribbons like blood and guts. Without a viewing hole on the mask to guide my steps, I use the length of my arms to assess my path, only to fumble and collide with the pillars of the monument. My blinded movements and lack of coordination suggest the futility of an idealized, mythic nationalism.

We Make the Rules

Show at Commonwealth & Council through Saturday, October 20th.

Duty Calls
series
2008

Here Always Elsewhere
2010

Installation view

Installation View

In other news, I offer this-- deep from the archives of Mike Appelstein, sent to me via Calvin Johnson, a document from 1993, songs I made with Rastro! and other gems.

Wow! Thanks to the mighty archivists of this world! 

Huffington Post Write Up!

Heather Taylor interviewed me for Chef Speak for Huffington Post. Fantastic!

Snake Eats It's Own Tale! Sic!

Geoff Tuck gives a shout out to this blog, and to my show with Kaucylia Brooke.