The Okay Mountain Mural
Austin Ventures, Austin
By appointment... maybe

By Dan Boehl

Okay Mountain, Austin Ventures Mural, 2008.

The idea for the Okay Mountain (OK) mural on the 22nd floor offices of Austin Ventures (AV), the downtown investment capital firm, came from Julie Thornton, art collector, supporter of local arts organizations and wife of AV partner John Thornton. Broken up by workspaces and file cabinets, doorways, windows and functionless alcoves, there is a lot of wall space, but not enough room to hang any art. Home to the functionaries, the accountants, the IT staff, the associates, and the assistants, the 22nd floor is mostly dark, half empty, lined with cubicles, lain with oatmeal colored carpet. Wishing to dispel the blandness of the place, Julie Thornton approached artist and curator Dave Bryant to come up with a solution. Bryant suggested that Okay Mountain do a series of murals based on the game of life with an entrepreneur as the game player.

Taken all together, the finished mural panels are amazing. Bright splashes of colored game board snake the walls, growing into lively narrative panels. The life stages of a new company—Idea, Invention, Capital, Production, Market and Profit—structure the mural. Comical, fun, vibrant, with a healthy mix of doleful prognostication, they brighten the AV offices while delivering their stunning cautionary tale.

The first panel introduces the entrepreneur, Oliver, as he sits in a dirt patch, light bulb floating over his head. In the next panel, white boxes sprout like potatoes from the ground while farm animals look on. Oliver holds a pitchfork, looking earnest, under a smiling sun. As with each of the panels, the colorful backgrounds and ancillary elements move the narrative, but it is Oliver, the creation of OK partner Ryan Hennessee, who brings emotion into the composition. Black and white, slightly pudgy, styled but unaware of his appearance, Oliver inhabits the role of the everyman entrepreneur. Throughout the cartoonish panels, Oliver’s monochrome expressions keep him human while his tale unfolds in vibrant palettes. In the end, Oliver sits on a chaise lounge, like Kane at Xanadu, flanked by the accoutrements of fast won wealth: cavernous mansion, yellow Lamborghini, neo-Classical sculpture, exotic pets, and sycophantic servants. A martini glass in his hand, a wry smile crosses Oliver’s face. He doesn’t seem to care how vapid his life appears. Anyway, he doesn’t have to care. He’s rich.

The audience is undoubtedly the employees of AV, the very agents of capitalism that the mural warns against, who spent one third of their day surrounded by the mural's message, while they pursue financial gain. Rather than focusing on the inequities inherent in wealth creation, the mural highlights the lonely distance monetary gain fosters in its pursuers. The mural strikes a nice balance of indictment and levity, though, never becoming self-righteous or preachy. An agent of satire, Oliver functions like Homer in a Simpsons episode. The viewer identifies with Oliver's humanity in the earlier panels, but seeing him lounge in a coin filled bathtub clutching an uncorked bottle of Champagne in a later panel, the viewer realizes Oliver is taking things too far. Drowning in his own wealth, Oliver soaks alone. It’s is a mistake the viewer is less likely to make.

In all, the mural is adept at creating a work of art that spoofs the organization that commissioned it, but OK did have some back and forth with AV over some elements. AV voiced concern about a number of the mural’s elements, and Okay Mountain toned them down. In the Capital panel, Oliver presents his box product to the group of investors. The design called for stiff backed suits, which came across like gangsters in Hogan's Alley, the classic Nintendo game. AV pointed out their relaxed dress code. They weren't gangsters, but partners in the entrepreneurial process. After completing the other panels, the OK partners returned to the suits and replaced them with cash bestowing fairy tale heroes: Robin Hood, the Easter Bunny, grandmom and her apple pie, William Randolph Hearst in profile with a question mark for an eye. It comes across as the least satisfying composition, but it is hardly a compromise. Instead of being depicted as men of import and influence, the beneficent investors are spooks, figments of childish imagination.

During the time the OK partners spent at AV, AV staff marveled at the OK creative energy, asking them to explain the symbolism lurking behind every figure and image. At one point, Carlos Rosales-Silva explained to two women that the animals represented farm animals. That’s all. As something foreign to them, the process of painting fascinated the AV staff. At another point, Tim Brown oversaw an IT administrator as he meticulously applied paint to a boot. Afraid to “fuck it up,” by the time the IT guy was finished he was drenched in sweat.

In the most complex and visual compelling panel, a graying cityscape covers an entire wall. Pedestrians head downtown or stumble like zombies in the crumbling intercity. Oliver gazes from the opposite wall, perched like Bruce Wayne on the top of a building, gripping his product, flanked by his only company, the pigeons. These panels constitute the climax of the cautionary tale. Success is empty without someone to share it with. Standing between the panels, turning north, a window looks out at Austin below. From here, the viewer gets the sense of inhabiting a space somewhere between product and entrepreneur, a space between wealth and loneliness.

There is a missing seventh panel that OK didn’t paint. Oliver, soft and bleary with decadence, was to be surrounded by a mound of moneybags. If the seventh panel ever does get painted, I think I’d like to see the other side of the story. In this one, Oliver eschews vanity and excess, finds love, raises a family, supports the workers’ union, collects art, creates a foundation and donates boxes to Africa’s poor.

The mural series isn’t the story of a lonely entrepreneurial pioneer. It is the story of how Okay Mountain and Austin Ventures came together to create an ambitious work of inspiration. Both parties benefit. AV as collector and investor houses a large-scale work from a stable of talented artists with solid careers. OK completed an ambitious project that would have been impossible without AV’s financial resources. In the process OK developed a powerful collaborative language of narrative, planning and execution. In November, OK will spend a week creating a mural at the Urban Culture Project Space in Kansas City, an impossible feat if not couched in their AV experience. In the end, like Oliver, everyone profits. Except maybe you. Unless someone throws an unveiling, you’ll have to pitch a company to Austin Ventures to see it.

Dan Boehl lives in Austin, Texas, where he is working on a post-petroleum children's novel.

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The Activist Impulse
Women and Their Work, Austin
Through November 15, 2008

By Claire Ruud

Judi Werthein, Brinco (Jump), 2005, Installation view. Courtesy the artist.

The Activist Impulse brings together five works by five socially engaged artists—Andrea Geyer, Emily Jacir, Kristin Lucas, Valerie Tevere & Angel Nevarez and Judi Werthein. Each of the five works operates both within the public sphere and the art world. In fact, the existence of each of these works within the gallery walls depends on the representation, through text, photographs, videos and other ephemera, of the functions of each project outside those walls, within political territories, government bureaucracy and the channels of mass media. Documentation through text and video notoriously provoke viewer fatigue, but curator Regine Basha’s seamless installation ameliorates any such tendency. The works are few and amply spaced, and a broad corridor built along the north wall of the gallery simultaneously guides the viewer into the space and divides the sizable room into manageable chunks. Moreover, Basha does some heavy lifting with this exhibition, which commemorates the 30th anniversary of Women and Their Work. In the catalogue, she suggests that the show is a “nod” towards the “activist impulse” of the nonprofit’s founders. In fact, The Activist Impulse makes an argument about the legacy of that impulse today: the continued relevance of that impulse is not only in the commitment to women artists, but moreover in its commitment to politically active art practices.

Jacir’s well-known Where We Come From (2003) opens the exhibition, installed in a long, wide corridor around the corner from the gallery’s main entrance. The series of thirty sets of images and texts unassumingly documents Jacir’s actions as she carried out the requests of Palestinians in territory they were forbidden to enter—requests such as “play soccer with a boy in Haifa” and “hug my mother and kiss her.” I first saw Jacir’s series in the 2004 Whitney Biennial, where only a few of the thirty sets of photographs and texts were exhibited. There I, like many others, was captivated by the intimate experience of reconstructing Jacir’s both tender and politically charged actions. At Women and Their Work, the effect is different; Basha has installed all of the images and texts, creating a cumulative impact that rises to a crescendo (or perhaps a decrescendo) at the end of the corridor, where hang two texts representing unaccomplished requests: a family home not found, oranges from a family grove not harvested. These lonesome texts poignantly illustrate the limits of Jacir’s intervention within a system much larger than herself.

To the left of these two forlorn texts, the gallery opens up into a larger space containing the four other pieces that complete the exhibition. The initial promenade through Where We Come From thus inflects the rest of the work. Opposite the entryway, three televisions play videos of bands performing We Need a Theory to Continue, a protest song by collaborative team Tevere & Nevarez. The setting for these performances is particularly striking: the Austin City Hall Pavilion Stage. In the state capitol of Texas, Tevere and Nevarez have chosen a site of city rather than state government. Their choice invokes a particular local audience—the liberal few clustered within a conservative state. Their lyrics express both the hope and discouragement of a blue dot awash in a red sea.

Werthein’s Brinco (Jump) (2005), installed beside We Need a Theory to Continue, also has particular relevance here, in a state with one of the largest populations of undocumented workers and a city which has declared itself a “safety zone” where all people are treated equally regardless of immigration status. For Brinco, commissioned for InSite 2005, Werthein designed a pair of sneakers for Mexicans crossing the border into the US, complete with a map on the insole, a flashlight, a compass, a pocket for money and an image Toribio Romo, patron saint of migrants. In Tijuana, Werthein handed out about 500 pairs of these shoes to people planning to cross the border and another 500 pairs were sold at boutiques in San Diego. At Women and Their Work, the shoes are installed on a pedestal, behind which two screens play recordings of news coverage of the project. Brinco pairs beautifully with Jacir’s Where We Come From, both drawing attention to the effects of political borders on physical bodies.

Geyer’s The Queen of the Artists’ Studios: Audrey Munson is the only work that suffers from its installation. The photographic series representing the piece at Women and Their Work fails to communicate the narrative behind Geyer’s project or her social engagement with a community. In The Queen, Geyer researched 19th century artists’ model and muse Audrey Munson, creating an archive of newspaper clippings, images and testimonials and, from these, she put together a book and the series of photographs. These photographs, which superimpose images from the suffrage movement over images of the statues for which Munson posed, are difficult to decipher, though somewhat bewitching. The archive, which is pivotal to the project, was sorely missed; just a few newspaper clippings could have guided the viewer through the work.

The Activist Impulse closes with Refresh (2007), a piece in which Lucas petitioned the Superior Court of California to change her name—to change it from Kristin Sue Lucas to Kristin Sue Lucas. Understandably confused, the judge hesitated, but ultimately granted her request. This piece most poignantly embodies the type of activism represented throughout The Activist Impulse: these artists choose social action on a small scale to reveal the effects of large-scale politics on individual bodies. Through their conviction that the personal is political and their intentional presence in the public sphere, these artists extend the legacy of Feminism.

The gallery’s support for women artists has been unflagging over the past thirty years and remains relevant and necessary. However, through The Activist Impulse, Basha challenges Women and Their Work to think beyond exhibiting women artists and to support socially engaged artistic practices. A timely challenge, as we hold our breath in anticipation of what our country will become on November 4.

Claire Ruud is Editor of ...might be good.

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Andy Coolquitt: iight
Lisa Cooley, New York
Through November 16, 2008

By Arnaud Gerspacher

Andy Coolquitt, iight, 2008, metal, epoxy, lightbulbs, wire, 49 x 18 x 5 inches. Courtesy the artist and Lisa Cooley Fine Art.

Immediately entering Andy Coolquitt’s intimate solo show at Lisa Cooley, the gallery goer comes face-to-face with a thin assemblage of suspended metal rods in the shape of a wide-angled upside down “V” with fat light-bulbs emanating a soft glow out each end. The metal rods, which taper gradually, are alternatively painted red, off-white and blue, making the work, hold on to me (2008), seem a distant metallic and electric cousin to a Broodthaers (elbow) bone. Whether or not this work, along with the rest of the show, is as political is a question worth pondering.

Not in question is the beautiful and delicate tension Coolquitt’s various light-bulb structures evoke. Of the 15 works on display, 7 are variations of the one described above. The crucial difference is their positioning in the gallery. Unlike the suspended hold on to me, the rest are propped up throughout the space. The resulting contact between the light bulbs, the wall—and in some cases the floor or the ceiling—is truly affective. In wink wink (2008), two metal rods with light-bulbs at each end casually lean against the wall and stand on the floor. There is nothing casual, however, about the resulting tension: the weight of one end presses down on its light source, as if its bulb might burst at any moment, while the opposite end counteracts this tension in a flush, buoyant relationship with the wall.

In the middle of the gallery, a single metal rod, 1 thru 10 (2008), curves slightly as it rises from the floor to make light-bulb contact with the ceiling. Off to the side and leaning against the wall is the work from which the show draws its title, iight (2008), a “U” shaped variant of hold on to me. On the other side, 21st century agressive carpet growth (2008), is a single rod draped by an oppressively dingy carpet with light-bulbs bracing both ends. In each case, there is a play of contact between the work and the physical space, a play that makes the viewer wonder whether the illuminative energy comes from inside the work, or is somehow magically activated by the contact itself: in short, a play between materiality and poetry.

All the works are bricolages of mundane found objects, but not all are plug-in-able. Coolquitt includes rods with irreverently sculpted middle fingers at each end, a stout block of wood masked by a paper bag, and a liquid-filled malt liqueur bottle with a chain of drinking straws jutting out the mouth and rising up in the air, just to name a few. Balancing out the show, these objects seem to be props in a ritual long-since forgotten, or private meanings long-since inaccessible. Or, more simply, they are objects normally relegated to dumpsters and basements now salvaged and given renewed meaning. In a time of heightening eco-politics, this logic of recycling should seem timely. And if this review began with a begged political question, the answer might come in the form of this litter(al) return of repressed objects, and in the form of light-bulb sculptures that seem to sustain themselves through connections and currents of energy endlessly looping from one end to the other. Coolquitt’s work may very well be at once a material display and poetic polemic for clean, renewable energies, with, quite naturally, no drilling involved.

Arnaud Gerspacher is pursuing his Ph.D. in Art History at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York.

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NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith
P.S.1, New York
Through January 26, 2009

By Nicole J. Caruth

Amalia Mesa-Bains, The Curandera’s Botanica, 2008, Dimensions variable, Mixed media. Collection of Richard L. Bains. Photo: Matthew Septimus. Courtesy P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.

NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith is unusually calculated. Like a good Sunday morning sermon, I’m convinced that all is as it should be. But my conviction is based on aesthetic alone, impression more than understanding, sentiment above fact. The exhibition's lack of didactic material (a rarity in an exhibition so steeped in history) cultivates an experience that is not of knowing but feeling. What is there to gain from an exhibition about spiritual practice, particularly concerned with cultural tradition, that doesn’t set out to contextualize but simply offers an encounter?

Curated by Franklin Sirmans of both P.S.1 and the Menil Collection, NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith explores multiple meanings and manifestations of spirituality in contemporary art through nearly 50 works of sculpture, photography, assemblage, video, performance and other media. Sirmans draws on the work of distinguished poet Ishmael Reed who adopted the 19th-century term “HooDoo” to explore the idea of spiritual practice in contemporary literature and art outside of easily definable faiths, creeds and rituals. In this cross-generational gathering of artists from both American continents, approaches to spirituality diverge and intersect, sharing a penchant for the decorative and the use of found and utilitarian objects.

Installed in the broken spaces of P.S.1’s second floor, the various rooms, nooks and crannies of the Center are both its strength and weakness. At times, it’s tricky to hold viewer attention and pull a narrative through the twists and turns of public school hallways, restrooms and staircases, though it works well for this show. Creamy white galleries and curved passageways read as chapels and spaces for meditation; video rooms speak to the semi-private, dark retreat of confessionals.

Upon entering the main gallery, the eyes are drawn through an archway to Michael Tracy’s Cruz de la Paz Sagrada (Cross of the Sacred Peace) (1980) as if to silently announce that this is a space of worship. (That is, if you recognize a cross as more than geometry.) Layers of tin and brass milagros nailed to its surface evoke both nkisi figures and Crucifixion. Not surprisingly, spikes, thorns, and pins pierce objects throughout the exhibition in works by such artists as Kcho, Robert Gober, Pepon Osario and Jose Bedia. An emphasis on the symbolism of shapes, such as circles—an ancient sign of unity, wholeness and infinity—is apparent in the union of James Lee Byars’ The Halo (1985), a gilded brass ring over 7 feet in diameter; David Hammons’s Untitled (1989), a circular sculpture of green-tinted and transparent wine bottles; and George Smith’s Spiral to the Next World (1990), a funnel-shaped black steel sculpture.

Rites of passage are portrayed in three short videos by Regina José-Galindó. The same petite woman submits to the jolt of a stun-gun in 150,000 Voltios (150,000 Volts) (2007); endures the forceful spray of a water hose while standing naked in the open air in Limpieza Social (Social Cleansing) (2006); and in Confesión (Confession) (2007) is repeatedly held underwater. Sequentially, these videos make me laugh, wriggle in my seat and hold my breath. When I begin to inhale, wafts of sage and pine pass me, which I presume to come from The Curandera’s Botanica (2008), a full-room installation by Amalia Mesa-Bains. Botanicals, a prayer book, and tools of modern medicine comprise this unsettling piece. The central surgical/lab table serves to cast a lifeless chill across the entire installation. Created as a way to get closure on a troubling period in the artist’s life (including a severe car accident, family illness, and the death of her parents), the piece is symbolic of the wobbly line between healing and loss.

Bedia’s installation Las Cosas que me Arrastran (The Things That Drag Me Along) (1996/2008) is the high point of NeoHooDoo. Piles of loose cigarettes, bottles of alcohol and other paraphernalia, some adorned with Vévé, are toted by toy trucks resembling military vehicles and wooden boats. From here, thick iron chains rise up to pierce a painting of a double-headed figure just where vintage photographs of African and Native Americans are adhered. Untitled (Go-Go Dancing Platform) (1991) by Felix–Gonzalez Torres, a shimmery box lined with small light bulbs, comes to life in this Youtube video, but seems incongruously secular in sight of Bedia (a priest of Palo Monte)—a reminder that religion is fundamentally a matter of interpretation. More subtle forms of spirituality appear in photographs by Adrian Piper (known for living out Kantian and yogic doctrine in her work), Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons and Rebecca Belmore. The sensuality of Belmore’s light box image Fringe (2008), shows the backside of a woman resting on her side. A familiar composition in the history of art, here, beauty is disrupted by a sewn gash across the subject’s bare back, and then reinserted in a cascade of red beads run along the threads of her stitches. It appears that healing will eventually come, but not without the experience leaving its mark.

Pepon Osario skillfully deconstructs and melds snow cone cart and altar with Lonely Soul (2008), a shrine to the Virgin of Montserrat in Puerto Rico. This small wood-paneled house with wheelchair wheels mounted on both sides sits at eye level. Precariously supported by several wooden crutches, the piece suggests the very fragility of faith.

“Neo-HooDoo believes that every man is an artist and every artist a priest,” wrote Ishmael Reed in his 1972 collection of poetry, Conjure; this sentiment is effortless and eloquent (like the exhibition) and precisely the root of my dilemma. Having lost my faith in exhibitions to teach me anything new about looking, I anticipated a manuscript as opposed to a happening. At points, I desired instruction on how to look and dig deeper, but found that I was fully open to create a narrative for spirituality with only objects and pictures to guide me. Funny, how that seems like a novel concept.

Nicole J. Caruth is a freelance writer and curator based in Brooklyn. A regular blogger for Art21, her writing has been published by the Studio Museum in Harlem, Taipei Fine Arts Museum and Gastronomica. Her personal blog, Contemporary Confections, merges two of her greatest loves: art and sweet foodstuffs.

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MTAA's Our Political Work
http://www.mteww.com
2007-2008

By Cody Trepte

MTAA, Still from Our Political Work, (2007-2008), Dual channel digital video with software, Commissioned by LX 2.0 Project, Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporânea. Courtesy the artists.

With the end of President George W. Bush’s second term and the next election rapidly approaching, a pervasive feeling of anxiety is palpable. MTAA’s Our Political Work (2007-2008) gives form to this collective angst as a guttural performance of endurance.

MTAA (M.River & T.Whid Art Associates) is the Brooklyn based collaborative art duo of Michael Sarff and Tim Whidden. Our Political Work is the latest in a series of computer-generated self-portraits. It is a web-based video diptych driven by a database of 141 video clips. Custom software randomly combines these short clips of the artists filmed against a silver backdrop into an endless video stream – clips of M.River on the left side and T.Whid on the right. Both artists are performing similar actions of screaming and laughing. At times, the howls begin to harmonize, punctuated with laughs and the occasional “Fuck.” At other moments, both M.River and T.Whid stare at the camera in synch as if waiting for something to happen. Then again, due to the random nature of the piece, the chorus of screaming and laughing resumes and the infinite loop of outbursts continues.

Our Political Work exists in a space outside of language where communication approaches a pre-linguistic state. The variety of screams is impressive: anger, growling, howling, laughing, sobbing, expletive, horror, and shock make the work feel like an assignment from an acting class. After watching for a while, the video becomes comical – the screams seem more exaggerated and the laughs more contrived. MTAA’s satirical use of screaming links this work to the performances of Mieskuoro Huutajat, the Finnish screaming choir known for their renditions of popular songs by a group of 30 shouting men. In their performance of The Star Spangled Banner, Mieskuoro Huutajat literally screams in a four-part chorus the melody of the classic American song. Like MTAA’s work, language begins to fail but the potential for emotional and political communication perseveres.

While Our Political Work has the appearance of the familiar two channel video installation, it is far more complex. Driven by custom software, each viewer sees a unique combination of small performances of hysteria. This work exists in a space between the server and the computer. MTAA’s Simple Net Art Diagram (1997) provides context; in that piece, a lightning icon with the words “The art happens here” appears on a line connecting two computers. As in much of their work, the Internet is used not only as a system for distribution, but also as a material. The computer code, fiber optic cable, your computer and mine all become the substance of their work.

During a time in which political discourse occurs online as often as it does through the television or print media, web-based art has become an increasingly effective means of reflection. Our Political Work shares virtual space with political blogs, Youtube’s debate coverage and Myspace’s staged political dialogs as well as the websites of news networks such as CNN and MSNBC which provide a continuous stream of up to the minute poll results, viewer feedback and video clips from the campaign trail. The Internet has become a platform for endless meta-information and constant feedback. It is precisely this space in which a viewer is perpetually inundated with information that allows such a reductive political commentary to resonate.

MTAA performs a political action that is succinct and subversive. Our Political Work is a protest of (simulated) endurance: infinite, random, and digital. It is the inverse of political satire, pointing out that it is reality that is the joke.

Filmed against a silver backdrop, the artists suggest that there is in fact a silver lining to the current political atmosphere. The November 4th election is rapidly approaching and people will soon have the opportunity to register their opinions. With the recent global economic collapse, impending energy crisis, healthcare, women’s and same sex couple’s rights all hanging in the balance, Our Political Work is not only a reaction to the current political climate but is also a well-timed call to arms.

With so much at stake, one is left wondering if we all screamed loud enough, would the message be heard?

Cody Trepte is an artist living in Los Angeles. He is currently working on his MFA at California Institute of the Arts.

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Knifeandfork: The Wrench
http://knifeandfork.org/
2008

By Lee Webster

Knifeandfork, The Wrench, 2008, Rhizome commission. © Knifeandfork. Courtesy the artists.

Joe (the Plumber) Wurzelbacher’s story has been aired, dissected, and already forgotten in most American living rooms. In our search for an Everyman, Joe the Plumber fit the bill, at least for a while. Still, Joe exists as a rhetorical device, a human face to politicians’ populist appeals this season and the personification of Senator John McCain’s “fundamentals of the economy” – i.e. the American work force. For a couple weeks what was most interesting in this unfolding drama was Joe’s story, its truths and fictions, how it was represented and how it broke down under scrutiny. Most interestingly, Joe’s story was never a straight narrative; politicians, the media, and the man himself batted it about, spinning it this way and that to fit the various agendas of the day and the person.

Like Joe the Plumber, Tino Faussone, the main character in The Wrench (still in beta), the latest project from Knifeandfork collaborators Brian House and Sue Huang, personifies the working Everyman. Knifeandfork has adapted Primo Levi’s 1978 novel, The Monkey’s Wrench, and its protagonist, Tino, into a work of interactive fiction: a weeklong exchange via text message between a contemporary Tino and you. The Tino of the novel is a loquacious, straight-talking Italian rigger whose work is his life’s passion. His expertise at the finer points of fixing factory towers at 65 stories up and fastening oil derricks to ocean platforms takes him to jobs the world over. The novel is essentially a collection of Tino’s impossible tales from his life as a rigger, structured by the ongoing conversation between Tino and a writer he meets on the job. In The Wrench you become Tino’s sounding board. Anytime of day or night, for better or worse, you are Tino’s friend and confidant. He pushes the boundaries of relational art and your patience as a participant.

After you initiate the conversation Tino keeps it up, checking in on your day and work, sharing bits of personal philosophy and occasionally asking for your help or advice. The artificially intelligent Tino engages you in conversations based on ideas and incidents in the novel, while pulling from RSS news feeds for convincing contemporary material. Thanks to the text messaging’s accepted nonobservance of rules of grammar, Tino’s computer generated responses are mostly convincing as typical text messages.

Knifeandfork have adopted SMS (Short Messaging Service), the most widely used text-messaging platform, to create software that facilitates the delivery of an interactive narrative. In an accompanying essay on the project’s website, Brian House cites the genre of interactive fiction, embodied most fully in the computer-based adventure fiction game Zork of 1978, as one of the influential models for the non-linear narrative structure of The Wrench. In Zork, a player moves throughout the space and encounters obstacles according to either/or decisions made along the way. Similarly, Tino at points during The Wrench will ask for direction:

Tino: Point is, i'm lost. Not worried though, these things work out. But I need your help. Do I follow the group of people or go where they aren't?
Tino: These guys are going too slow. so now is it stop at the tourist office or follow the rat down the side street?
Me: Go it alone…
Tino: Going with the tourist. Ok but Im not the asking for directions type. Should I go walk by the Office Depot or past the XXX adult video store?

Occasionally Tino’s questions seem loaded with possibility, as if your answer might determine the trajectory of a whole day’s conversation. I wonder now, if I’d advised Tino to take his date to the movies and instead of to the shore at sundown, would he have been prompted to calculate which New Jersey chemical factory emits the right combination of vapors to produce my very own dream sunset: aquamarine and orange, with red accents.

Tino: K. Some wine, lil'cheese and vulcanized nylon vapor and you got a dream picnic. Head to the Dupont Factory in Pompton Lakes, NJ. in the spring. Pretty.

Tino is a character who would have known the original use of SMS, invented more than two decades ago as a communication tool for technicians on the job. Today, as billions of 160 character conversations are exchanged each year, text messaging holds a different place in our lives; it has become a ubiquitous social medium. At one point during The Wrench Tino refers to Eliza, the girl who “got (him) started with this texting stuff.” It’s a playful reference to the 1960’s computer program ELIZA, the first of Tino’s kind; ELIZA inserted text input from users into preprogrammed phrases to create the illusion of human conversation. ELIZA’s conversational ability was limited to mock psychotherapeutic responses, taking a user’s statement and rephrasing it as a question. It’s rumored that on occasion ELIZA’s responses could be so convincing as to bring users to a point of psychological breakthrough. ELIZA laid the groundwork for computer generated chat programs, and revealed our impulse to anthropomorphize just about any linguistic voice, to use it even as an outlet for our more private emotions. The Wrench plays on our willingness to suspend disbelief because of our desire to engage. As long as the illusion remains convincing, we are happy to let the project insinuate a presence in our lives.

Tino’s messages alternate between the colloquial and the poetic, engaging us more with their imagery and ideas, less with the story they tell. He only ruminates on the nature of labor and product, never criticizing.

Tino: Hey Lee whats up. I can't get out of bed this morning: PAIN. That rigging job in India is catching up to me with a vengeance.
Tino: Built a massive building for tiny parts. Semi-conductor facility There's a certain satisfaction in that. What do you do for work anyway?

Tino finds wonder in the world around him and in his work, and implores you to do the same.

Tino: Guy called di staso says that if youre an expert you can see your work in any object. Look at that box of paper, am I right?

Since 2004, Knifeandfork’s work together has made use of mobile devices, artificial intelligence and text to explore the nature of narrative, truth and fiction. In a piece at Kulturhuset in Stockholm in 2004, viewers who checked out handheld computers were cast in the role of detective as they watched a murder mystery unfold in chapters triggered by hotspots around the venue. In Berlin in 2005 they designed a text message-based project utilizing the Ringbahn. The Ringbahn’s route, which rounds the city’s perimeter, sparked a circular narrative about the symbolic significance of the train route in a once divided city. The Wrench continues this experimentation with narrative structure by employing elements of interactive fiction, expanding to include the viewer as a player in the performance of the narrative. The experience of The Wrench is as much in the moment and context in which the viewer receives Tino’s messages as it is in what those messages say.

Although Tino talks around work, usually with bullish optimism, you can never quite ascertain any fundamental meaning to the talk. Tino works in a line of highly skilled manual labor—a type of work that is both romanticized as an American tradition and disappearing in a new economy. Just ask Joe the Plumber, whose launch into the limelight highlights the multiple narratives that exist in the story of labor and the U.S. economy. With all this talk floating around in our heads, it’s a shame The Wrench doesn’t use Tino to delve further into the conflicting narratives of a changing economy and every working person’s place within it.

Lee Webster is an artist living and working in Austin, TX.

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I am here because of Ashley: Obama and Piper on the Rhetoric of Race
The U.S. Presidential Election 2008
1988/2008

By Audrey Chan

Adrian Piper, Cornered, 1988, Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Bernice and Kenneth Newberger Fund. © 1988 Adrian Piper. On view at MCA Chicago in the exhibition USA Today (November 8, 2008 - March 15, 2009).

I’m black. Now, let’s deal with the social fact and the fact of my stating it together.
–Adrian Piper, Cornered (1988)

I wrote this essay partly because of a nagging resistance to the idea of Barack Obama as a messiah. I would like the banners of “Hope” and “Change” to be put away soon. They make me nervous. They are too full of potential and of dreams deferred. It makes the moment too fragile. The most important thing that we can ask from a leader is accountability. By focusing primarily on rhetoric, the effective and persuasive use of language and the art of influencing an audience, in the case of Obama and Adrian Piper, my hope is that lessons can be drawn from both of their rhetorical approaches to the subject of race, a subject that is bound to take on new dimensions in the very near future. It will be a struggle that is characterized by a conflict of a generous hope and faith in humanity on the one hand and on the other a deep irony that may be more accurate in describing the situation on the ground.

The 2008 election season is roiling to an explosive finish. Senator Barack Obama, young, gifted, and black, is forecasted to win decisively. We don’t yet know if his campaign will fall victim to the Bradley Effect or rampant voter fraud; we don’t yet know how we will speak about race post-11/4. The language that we currently use to talk about race and racism descends from a history of pain. The verbal trauma of this history is manifested in a rich vocabulary of oppression, slavery, and victimization. Barack Obama presents a new situation that begs the question: what will happen to the conventional power dynamics of racial discourse when the Other assumes the mantle of “Leader of the Free World”?

The current fraught discourse of race in this presidential election produces a timely context to investigate two rhetorical examinations of race in America: artist Adrian Piper’s video installation Cornered (1988) and Senator Barack Obama’s speech “A More Perfect Union” (2008). A span of twenty years separates these two performative events, a period which has seen the rise and the so-called end of the Culture Wars. Although the heated conversation around race and difference abated to a degree in the last decade (the fervor of which was transferred to the terrorism paradigm), the linguistic legacy of political correctness continues to inflect our policy, language and social behavior. The term originated to describe attempt to develop linguistic standards that would ameliorate offensive and prejudicial speech. However, rather than eliminate the vocabulary and behavior associated with sexism and racism, the self-policing nature of political correctness has sublimated these impulses into an increasingly elaborate vocabulary of coded winks and nods. Racism was thus pushed out of “polite society” into the private sphere, where it is not subject to rebuke.

In Piper’s Cornered and Obama’s “A More Perfect Union,” race is performed as pedagogy in an attempt to coax the subjects of race and racism back into the open. (Not surprisingly, both Piper and Obama come from academic teaching backgrounds as professors in philosophy and law, respectively.) Employing the strategy of rhetorical modeling in their made-for-television monologues, Obama and Piper seek to persuade an anonymous viewer to engage in a nuanced conversation about race. Obama seeks the attention of the skeptical voter, while Piper targets a skeptical art viewer. To address these invisible personified generalizations, Obama and Piper adopt the role of the empathetic authority figure. It is a role deliberately familiar and conventional; it is the trusted voice of television broadcast news. The visual cues of their televised images also conform to a predictable standard of polite appearance. Obama stands in a well-cut suit and blue tie at a lectern flanked by American flags, speaking at the hallowed site of the nation’s founding in Philadelphia. Piper wears a blue sweater with a strand of pearls. She is seated at a table with her arms politely crossed. Her long black hair is combed neatly off her face.

“Passing for white” is a key formulation in the construct of race that Piper presents in Cornered. Her monologue opens:

I’m black. Now, let’s deal with the social fact and the fact of my stating it together. Maybe you don’t see why we have to deal with it together. Maybe you think this is just my problem and that I should deal with it by myself. But it’s not just my problem. It’s our problem. … It’s our problem because your hostile reaction to my identifying myself as black virtually destroys our chances for a relationship of mutual trust and good will.

In her opening statement, Piper establishes her provocative relationship with the viewer. By suggesting that you, the viewer, are racist and are uncomfortable with talking about race with a black person, Piper sets up her radical proposal that statistically speaking, the majority of white Americans are in fact black. Piper mines the inconsistencies and double standards implicit in the “one-drop rule” of racial classification in America, which erases distinctions of origin and cultural difference among American black identities. She reverses the equation by suggesting that since she, as a light-skinned black person, could pass for white, white people could consider themselves to be the lightest of light-skinned blacks. Thus, what begins as an accusation of racism moves into a kind of appeal to solidarity, but also an initiation and invitation to participate in “the struggle”, re-characterizing racial suffering as a badge of honor, particularly for those suffering from white guilt. As would any sophisticated self-help guru after a thorough diagnosis, Piper presents a delimited set of personal choices to the viewer in moving forward. For example, one could continue to enjoy (with guilty conscience) the privileges of whiteness or one could decamp from the white elite and positively identify with their black identity to reap the institutional benefits of affirmative action.

For Piper, it’s not a matter of whether or not she has good faith or bad faith in the American people. She shares in common with Obama his emphasis on race as a mutual, shared problem. In Cornered, she is constructing the means by which one can excavate the deep hypocrisy written in our psyche and “the entrenched conventions of racial classification in this country.” The work is designed to offend and alienate the viewer, not as an end in and of itself, but rather to generate a self-awareness that is produced during the process of watching Piper and being subject to her rounds of questioning, or perhaps later, after walking away from the piece. Piper acknowledges this process within the text of her video, blithely suggesting, “you must be feeling pretty antagonized and turned off by what I’m saying.” It is undoubtedly manipulative but bold-facedly so. Piper’s deadpan delivery of the 20-minute uncut monologue is now practically inseparable from our understanding of the work even though she originally intended her role to be performed by “a white, Diane Sawyer newscaster-type actress.” Piper’s mode of address can be put into context by her own observation,

I personally have the deep-seated, optimistic sense of entitlement of an upper-middle-class het WASP male…I always have, and there’s nothing I can do about it…to have that sense on this particular planet is to have no bounded sense of self at all, since all of one’s subjective tastes, prejudices, and impulses are equated with objective truth.

It can be argued that it is both Piper and Obama’s ability to channel this sense of entitlement without capitulating themselves to the role of victim that provides the subversive edge to their respective monologues.

On March 18, 2008, Barack Obama delivered the speech “A More Perfect Union”, known more colloquially as “Barack Obama’s Speech on Race”, at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The occasion for the speech was controversy surrounding Obama’s relationship with his former pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright of the Trinity United Church of Christ located on the South Side of Chicago. By responding to the Wright controversy with an expansive speech on the state of race relations in the United States, Obama was able to reframe the conversation on race on his own terms rather than engage it on the level of sensationalism.

Obama opens “A More Perfect Union” by establishing historical context—the failure of the Founding Fathers to abolish slavery in the primary documents that form the basis of American government and society. The Founding Fathers would leave the question of slavery, the American original sin, to be resolved by future generations. The inconsistency between the fact of bondage and the ideal of equal citizenship under the law would be worked out through a twisted future that would include civil war, lynching, segregation, protest, legislation, assimilation, and systemic neglect. These historical allusions form a backdrop for Obama’s campaign, part of whose stated goal is to continue the unfinished project to bring more integrity to the opening words of the Constitution, “We the people, in order to form a more perfect union…” By reframing the flaws in America’s origins as an opportunity for collective self-improvement, Obama offers the “glass half full” version of Reverend Wright’s “anti-American” characterization of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence as blatant lies.

In his speech, Obama paints an evocative portrait of a nation bathed in resentment. Blacks resent whites for generations of institutionalized racism. Whites resent blacks for the institutional privilege of affirmative action. He catalogues the resentments and misunderstandings, taking a moment to empathize with each wronged party. He even cites criticism of his own candidacy as “somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap.” But the message that he returns to again and again is that Americans are not maximizing their inherent potential for unity and good. Obama’s hopeful humanist message is based in a continual process of affirmation as opposed to Piper’s strategy of provocation and self-criticism. The advantage to Obama’s strategy is that his integrity remains intact through the constant buffering of hard evidence with the invocation of the exceptional, in the form of anecdotes from his successful campaign. Piper, on the other hand, offers herself up as a scapegoat, relentlessly pursuing the notion that people need to be pushed far out of their comfort zone if they are to make radical change in their psychic orientation.

Obama’s speech was the contemporary equivalent of the passive resistance and non-cooperation favored by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s camp in the Civil Rights Movement descended from the teachings of Jesus Christ and Mahatma Gandhi. In “A More Perfect Union,” Obama’s rhetoric was rooted in a radical passivity (or cynically, a glorified version of damage control) that has allowed him to skillfully navigate the landmines of dirty politics and race-baiting. It is impossible to talk about Barack Obama without comparing him to leaders who were crucified and shot down—not to mention the many stylistic comparisons of Obama to JFK—for their exceptional ability to build public coalitions around ideals of equality and justice. Currently, it is Obama’s rhetoric more than his actions that link him with the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. An Obama presidency would be an opportunity to demonstrate that the goals of equality can be pursued without bloodshed. It is an example that we desperately need.

Welcome to the struggle.

Audrey Chan is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles and France. Her projects can be viewed online at audreychan.net.

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Drawing on the Wrong Side of The Brain
The U.S. Presidential Election 2008
October 13, 2008

By Hills Snyder

Hills Snyder, Bugs or Elmer, 1993, Graphite on paper. Courtesy the artist.

“In my father’s house there are many mansions.”
— John 14:2

I take that to mean that within the human heart and mind there are vast spaces. That experience is a keyhole we can look through, into a larger room.

That’s what I think, but in the meantime Oliver Stone’s W. opens this week, and since ...might be good has invited me to write something for their political issue, I’m re-viewing a set of movies I screened for the UTSA Graduate Painting class I taught in the wake of the 2003 Bush/Cheney invasion of Iraq. A Village Is Missing Its Idiot Film Festival, that’s what I called it, though I’ve never known the origin of that phrase which most often begins with Somewhere In Texas…

And now I see that Alaska has been added to the topography of idiocy, which you may option to display on your bumper if you can still afford to drive.

Advance word has it that in W., the scene in which Bush flies over Baghdad on a magic carpet has been deleted. “It was wacky stuff that at the end of the day took us out of the movie,” said Stone. So I guess we’ll just have to hold out for that to appear on YouTube or perhaps among the extras on the DVD, which should be available before November 4 (weather permitting—I hear it might rain).

Speaking of which, and The Dude’s rug notwithstanding, I’m pretty sure there is a Looney Tunes cartoon featuring Bugs Bunny on such a carpet. I just thought I’d mention that—I like to bring up Bugs Bunny when I write or converse.

Now friends, I have inside information that there was plenty of weed blowing around during the making of W., so maybe some after-the-fact discretion fed into Stone’s decision to edit some stuff. That’s fine, he’s pretty creative anyway—I like to recall the horse whinny sound bite in U Turn when the grease monkey played by Billy Bob Thornton takes a crow bar to the hood of Sean Penn’s classic ’64-and-a-half Mustang.

Anyway, Karl Rove has already said he won’t see the movie and claims that Stone has a brain “with only a functioning left side.”

I guess Karl didn’t take the drawing class.

So…what are those movies you showed your grad students?...you might ask.
OK, here they are. I highly recommend this series and suggest you watch them in this order and in close succession: Don’t Look Back (1967, D.A. Pennebaker) / Bob Roberts (1992, Tim Robbins) / A Face In The Crowd (1957, Elia Kazan) / The King of Comedy (1982, Martin Scorsese) / Being There (1979, Hal Ashby).

Oddly enough, I saw A Face In The Crowd on television the same week that Being There appeared in the theatre. Perhaps that was the germination of the idea to somehow put these films together. Andy Griffith’s guitar playing drifter in A Face In The Crowd is a charismatic, but amoral, personality who seems indifferent to circumstance yet seizes on every opportunity to gain any kind of advantage. Lonesome Rhodes, as he comes to be called, is the opposite side of the coin to Being There’s Chance the Gardener, a simpleton assumed by Peter Sellers in one of his best performances. Chance knows only gardening. The rest of his behavior is mostly limited to miming things he sees on TV, which he watches incessantly. He accidentally gains the ears of power in the wake of his guileless demeanor and tendency to say “yes” or “I see” in answer to just about any question. The polite goodwill of the upper crust world he lands in propels him into a position of inadvertent influence: his gardening talk delights the president, who takes it as a metaphor for the health of the nation. Both films are incisive assessments of TV culture. Being There lampoons it, while A Face In The Crowd is a critique of that medium as a tool of political influence.

Three years after Being There, The King of Comedy would give us Rupert Pupkin, surely one of De Niro’s best pre-mannerist psychopaths. This film is the companion to Scorsese’s 70s film Taxi Driver in its deep look into the ways that fame and notoriety play darkly in the national imagination. A decade later, Bob Roberts (featuring an early appearance by Jack Black) came out two months before the 1992 presidential election. This film retrofits the cornered-by-his-own-celebrity, mid-60s Dylan in Don’t Look Back, replacing one Bob with another, and the anti-Woody is there too—conservative huckster Roberts sings, “this land is my land, this land is my land.”

Lonesome Rhodes, Rupert Pupkin, Chance, Bob Roberts—each character figures into the Palinesque aw-shucks-fascista persona that these films create when watched in sequence—a persona that was just waiting for George W. Bush to come along like some spaced out Johnny Appleseed and add his two cents to the mix.

And now I’d like to sing a song. It’s titled Guts. I wrote it in 2005.

an eagle scout always ready for the chore
he was raised up believing that some things really are worth fighting for
he had his heart on his sleeve when he signed up for the war
but his brains were on his helmet when they brought him to our door

the mosh at the end of School of Rock always made him cry
he cried all the way through that movie he never did know why
he had his heart on his sleeve when he signed up maybe to die
but his brains were on his helmet the day they brought him by

intestinal fortitude
ear wax and elbow grease
the backbone to do it
the stomach to take it
and the spleen to dish it out
he was a real boy scout

and he was always ready for the chore
he was raised up believing that some things really are worth fighting for
he had his heart on his sleeve when he signed up for the war
but his brains were on his helmet when they brought him to our door

This was written with empathy and respect for soldiers and their families. Its humor is no darker than what is offered in Johnny Got His Gun.

So, as long as we’ve ventured out onto this particular patch of the shining sea, the choppy part, I’d like to mention that John Defore’s review of Religulous nails it perfectly, “…condemning the whole of religion for [the freak-show corners of faith] is like damning romantic love because it sometimes makes an astronaut drive cross-country wearing diapers.”

Bravo, though I do wonder how that woman is doing.

Regardless of what you believe or don’t believe (and believe me—I don’t care either way), Religulous has some extremely funny moments and I’d like to go on record with this: if you can’t find the humor in religion, any religion, or if you can’t laugh at your own beliefs or look at them from the odd angle, then you are hiding from something. So please tear down those walls. I’d like to invite you for a swim. Or at least for a walk in the rain.

Just one more thing: that Holy Land theme park. Just flat out arrogant. Or silly. Or a really revolting combination of the two. There is something about the spectacle and its tators that reminds me of the head crusher from The Kids In The Hall (no offense guys). It’s like there is an inappropriately casual presumption of power or control, as if some wonder of nature needed to be backlit. This nonchalance even seems to carry over to the spectators who exude a you-go-girl enthusiasm toward the crucified actor and apparently think nothing of buying junk from vendors dressed in bible clothes. The whole notion is just so miserably reductionist. As we’ve seen over and over in these polarized times, in the fundamentalist house there are many closets. Small ones.

“However, I digress”—that’s the phrase that’s supposed to come up about now, but really, I don’t. Crowds and the ways they gather around iconic figures are central here. It’s how we humans do it. Let’s just make sure the right one gets in this time. You may think it’s a done deal. And I get that. It looks that way. But don’t forget, Bush did get elected in 2004. But a victory for McCain/Palin would be even more of a disappointment, more of a reflection of how deeply ignorant this country has become. But that’s not going to happen. Because we have had enough.

So vote. No one is asking you to walk on water. Nor is there any need for a magic carpet. Just vote. But do bring your umbrella.

Hills Snyder lives in San Antonio. More of his writing can be found at www.hillssnyder.com.