Joseph del Pesco

The Bitter Valise

2010-04-13T03:17:33+00:00

The Bitter Valise starts with 7 varieties of home-made bitter liquors carried in a walnut traveling case (custom built by Barbara Holmes). The liquors are made through the infusion of dried and fresh herbs. The valise is currently carrying flavors like Celery Lemongrass, Lavender Beet, Shiso, Fennel, Citrus, and Cinnamon Mint. Moving through an informal network of friends, I'll be making weekly visits, by request, to the homes of artists and curators who have received a rejection letter in the last month.

Pickpocket Almanack

2009-10-02T06:26:32+00:00

Autumn 2009 Faculty: Les Blank, Jens Hoffman, Beth Lisick, Rick and Megan Prelinger, Ben Kinmont
Autumn 2010 Faculty: Amy Franceschini, Jerome Waag, Renny Pritikin, Jim Fairchild, Claudia Altman-Siegel

The Pickpocket Almanack is an is an experimental school-without-walls. Each season, a temporary faculty of artists, curators, writers and filmmakers create courses by selecting from public events already scheduled to take place at venues around the Bay Area. Each course takes these pre-existing events (lectures, screenings, workshops, panels) out of context and gives them a new thematic frame. The result is a set of journeys around Bay Area cultural life, some unexpected connections, new discoveries, and a different angle on the Bay Area led by some of its most distinctive cultural figures.

  Discussion will be conducted online throughout the course, and participants and faculty will meet in person at the end of each season. There are no age or experience requirements, and all courses are free and not for credit (tickets may be required for some programs and events). Participants may enroll in a maximum of one course per season; space may be limited for some courses.

http://www.pickpocketalmanack.org

Anecdote Archive

2009-08-04T04:01:18+00:00

The Anecdote Archive involves recording video informally using the Flip camera and uploading to YouTube. Each issue of the Anecdote Archive is a compilation of short narrative accounts by individuals. The project proposes word-of-mouth as an alternative to conventional modes of documentation and distribution (such as exhibition and print magazine). Focusing on performances, situations, actions, exchanges and other ephemeral events, the archive aims to register memorable encounters with art.

“The fact that works of art to a large extent are tales, points to the folkloristic aspect of the artworld. In other words, the art world is a place for transmissions: someone has seen or heard of someone who has done something. The story is told and retold. As in any other oral culture there are misunderstandings, adjunctions, displacements and falsifications. The dependence on ‘what is on every lip’ creates a situation where works that are difficult to talk about run the risk of being neglected and ‘disappearing’. Sometimes an art practice escapes omission through stories about the artist as a person. Whatever one may think of this oral circulation of art — through formal seminars, think tanks, staged conversations, informal discussions, and not least through chatting at bars and cafés — it should be recognized as a place for art distribution equally important as the exhibition space and printed matter.”
—Magnus Bärtås from his essay Talk Talk in Geist

State of the Arts

2008-12-01T14:28:53+00:00

In the conversation: Amy Balkin, Anthony Discenza, Aaron Gach, Eleanor Hanson, Packard Jennings, Helena Keeffe, Mads Lynnerup, Anthony Marcellini, Christian Maychack, Lee Montgomery, Lucas Murgida, Steve Shearer, Chris Sollars, David Stein, Oliver Wise

Facilitated by the Present Group, State of the Arts is a project about the political and economic conditions that affect artists in the San Francisco Bay Area. The project developed from two informal think-tank style conversations with two groups of artists. During a series of follow-up emails, major points were identified and distilled into arguments, demands, and observations. These statements were then translated into a series of 4 letterpress posters. Two of the posters address the situation in the state of California in general, and the other two speak directly to the SF Bay Area. All four posters were delivered to elected officials in the Bay Area.

Black Market Type & Print Shop

2008-06-04T23:21:43+00:00

With posters by: A Constructed World, Brad Adkins, Amy Balkin, Paul Butler, Harrell Fletcher, Amy Franceschini, Jamie Gili, Sam Gould, Marc Horowitz, Marisa Jahn, Steve Lambert, New Beginnings, Giancarlo Norese, and Derek Sullivan

Exploring the use of type in recent art practice, the Black Market Type and Print Shop is a collection of 20 fonts culled from contemporary art publications. These types are a byproduct of art production extracted for a second use, but without modification or addition. All of these fonts have been created without the permission of the artists, and their use is limited to the exhibition. (While the project is called a black market, none of the fonts are available for purchase.)

All of the types are hand-drawn by the artists with only one or two exceptions, and all are readable letterforms except two: the General Idea AIDS logo-type infects the entire typeface, and David Shrigley's "dingbats," a collection of symbols drawn by the artist. A loose selection criteria for this resource was to omit artists employing existing typefaces, or borrowing from other sources. It was also limited to type appearing within a single artwork (or related series) rather than written correspondence or other informal output by the artist.

Utilizing the black market type resource, a group of 14 international artists have been invited to make a text-only poster, to be distributed around Montréal. The resource is also available for gallery visitors to design and print their own posters in the gallery. The project instigates a distribution of the aesthetics of contemporary art into the media stream of lost-dog announcements, rock show flyers, for-sale notices and other street-post ephemera.

On Being An Exhibition

2007-10-15T18:49:33+00:00

Artists: BGL, Conrad Bakker, Beth Campbell, Germaine Koh, Valerie Hegarty, Isola and Norzi, Chadwick Rantanen, Derek Sullivan, Anne Walsh & Chris Kubick, Lee Walton, Laurel Woodcock

The artists and organizers of every gallery exhibition offer a response to the questions "why does the gallery exist?" and "what is an exhibition good for?" Whether intended as a statement of critical self-reflexivity or a response implicit in the continued use of forms that have become the default, all institutional productions operate within an encapsulated history and logic. The hierarchy of an institutional bureaucracy, the raw materials of the physical architecture, and the modes of social exchange occuring within the boundaries of a gallery--and its child the exhibition--accumulate to form a language that is spoken by galleries around the world. While it is unclear how much of an effect a fluency in this language has on the production of artworks for public exhibition, it is apparent that a gallery can inflect the art it presents as much as the art determines the form of presentation in the gallery.

Through years of experimentation, agents of culture have repeatedly tested the conceptual and physical limits of the gallery through exhibition. As a result of this gallery-as-laboratory activity, the language of exhibition has been expanded to the very threshold of its capacity. Yet, despite the excesses of pluralism in art, the gallery and the exhibition have developed a set of stable signifiers: lighting track, white walls, a front desk, a gallery attendant, etc. While these fundamental structures of meaning differ slightly from gallery to gallery (and from gallery to museum to alternative space), they can be said to accumulate as a set of expectations in the viewer/user. Once the particular dialect and idioms are identified in a given environment, this root language can be employed to construct context-contingent meaning and to support or undermine the expectations harbored by the audience.

Artist Michael Asher, who has become well known for employing this kind of context-contingent meaning, uses the term "Situational Aesthetics" to describe "an aesthetic system that juxtaposes predetermined elements occurring within the institutional framework. They are recognizable and identifiable to the public because they are drawn from the institutional context itself." In other words, Asher acknowledges certain elements of the gallery or museum are known quantities despite their background/neutral status. Through combination, relocation, or removal, the value of these elements can change, making us aware of their capacity to hold meaning. Thus, context-contingent meaning arises out of a complex set of relationships between the gallery, its history, and the expectations of the viewer/user.

On Being an Exhibition borrows Michael Asher's thinking as a point of departure toward the development of an exhibition that leverages the pre-conditioning of the viewer, the physical language of the gallery, and the packaging and promotion of its contents. While the exhibition does not seek to locate these practices in relation to a specific genre of art, it proposes a continued support of the infiltration of creative thinking into all corners of the institution and the re-identification of these larger practices as not limited to the strategies of institutional critique and site specificity.

Collective Foundation

2007-04-15T18:26:44+00:00

Project Partners: Scott Oliver (Collective Furniture), Steve Lambert (Coop Bar), and Josh Greene (Service Works)

The Collective Foundation is a research & development organization presented via six experimental programs, mini-exhibitions and partner projects. This permeable organization of over 100 contributors was founded at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in April of 2007. The mission of this organization is to propose and prototype an array of services for artists and arts organizations while investigating new resources and locating practical ways of reducing administration and overhead.

Project Placement

2006-11-30T17:33:54+00:00

Artists: Conrad Bakker, Amy Balkin, Jay Heikes, Marc Horowitz, Packard Jennings, Gianni Motti, Mads Lynnerup, Zoe Sheehan Saldana.

The Embedded Invisible

The hidden-in-plain-view marketing strategy of product placement has recently grown beyond the insertion of commodity objects into film and television. It now appears in a variety of popular media including video games, comics, music and books. This proliferation is occurring alongside a shift in how these products are being embedded. One example involves an evolution from the more typical product-used-as-movie-prop strategy into the full-swallow integration of products or brands into the story line (see "Wilson" the volleyball in the movie "Cast Away"). This insinuation of commercial interests forces writers to alter the narrative, compromising the creative task of cultural production (and not without protest from groups like the Writers Guild of America). In some cases, marketers are actually replacing these content providers.

This super-saturation of commercial content in cultural media has lead to a conflicted constellation of discourse that includes a debate between the people and the advertisers. The arguments on behalf of the people rely on the viewer's (lack of) awareness, or put another way, the product's contextual invisibility. The assumption is that product placement is a hidden exploitation of the viewers attention and expectations of veracity. A consumer protection group called Commercial Alert calls it "...an affront to basic honesty. Product placements are inherently deceptive, because many people do not realize that they are, in fact, advertisements." Attached to this argument is the theory that if the consumer is not aware of the presence of the product, and if it's invisible to them as a viewer, they are in danger of being manipulated. Research has suggested that some advertisers have been successful at connecting products to latent desires (in addition to offering solutions to problems or responding to existing needs). In this sense, product placement is like a veiled seduction.

Another perspective argues that because our environment is already saturated with an accumulation of images and objects that carry intellectual property protection, whether copyright or trademark, it has become increasingly difficult to represent the world around us in a way that speaks honestly about contemporary experience or takes advantage of our shared cultural/visual lexicon without including these products. This argument is most typically used by artists or film makers in opposition to conservative copyright laws which restrict their freedom to include these everyday commercial objects and images in their work. In the case of documentary films, these placements are often accidental - a byproduct of filming in the public sphere for example. As individuals, these omnipresent quotidian product appearances are as invisible to us as singing happy birthday or wearing a brand-name t-shirt.

While one argument may be said to be conservative (preserving ad-free media) and the other liberal (progressive open access), both arguments are opposing corporate hegemony and therefore approximate a shared resistance - yet the specific tension between the two is worth noting. A generalized account of the two points reads: the artists want freedom of usage and re-presentation while the advocacy groups want to filter output in an effort to stop the public from being duped. In other words, the tension exists on a spectrum between anything goes and tightly controlled, and both may be in our best interests.

Rather than a reform of existing laws and practices, which is what these two arguments typically call for, this seemingly irresolvable tension needs another tack to move toward resolution. This redirection would borrow the strategy of its opponent, product placement, and take advantage of the existing streams of media distribution by embedding its own messages. This effectively turns product placement into project placement, creating room for a new context contingent meaning, and embedding ideas instead of commodities. In the context of late-capitalism, this super-saturation of media content will either lead to an overwhelming cacophony and a disruption of the power and efficacy of existing media streams, or begin the process of reclaiming culture from the capitalists.

A brief history:

Product placement has been around in movies for over fifty years, but became common practice for advertisers in the eighties as a result of significant gains by various placements. While not actually a paid placement, one of the most commonly cited catalysts for the growth of the product placement is the presence of Reese's Pieces in the Spielberg film "ET" (1982). The products key role in the movie resulted in a temporary sales increase of 65% for the candy. This spike in the profit charts led to a new era of creative tinkering with product placement and its spread to related media.

Unusual examples of product placement:

IKEA has a arrangement with Hewlett Packard to stock the mock living-room settings in their stores with (real and fake) HP products - essentially situating computer products inside IKEA's commercial mise en scène.

The Google Earth software, which allows users to virtually roam the planet, has led to roof-top advertising as seen from satellite. Somewhere between product placement and road-side billboards, these birds-eye images of the global landscape are slowly being interrupted by painted adverts and crop-circle like messages.

Virtual advertising, which is the superimposition of images onto real spaces in movies and television, is a particularly clandestine variation that came into public awareness as the result of a recent lawsuit over the virtual make-over of a billboard in the first Spiderman movie. Two companies vied for their rights to advertising space - one real, one virtual.

Examples of project placement:

In 1995, American artist Mel Chin initiated a collaboration between 102 artists to form the GALA Committee (GA for Georgia and LA Los Angeles). They persuaded the producers of Melrose Place (Spelling Entertainment Group) to allow them to provide the program with more than 150 props over the course of two seasons. These placed artworks included everything from domestic articles like bedding and furniture to framed artworks.

In 1993, French artist Matthieu Laurette took part in the TV game-show Tournez Manège (The Dating Game) and, while on the set, identified himself as an artist. This was the first of a series of Apparitions/Appearances which might be considered self-placements by the artist. His presence in at least five television programs can be understood as an infiltration-performance series and self-advertisement campaign.

(essay published in NUKE magazine No.4 "INVISIBLE")

Domestic Multiplex: Heroes & Amateurs

2006-11-15T22:55:51+00:00

Artists: Althea Thauberger, Guy Ben Ner, Harrell Fletcher (with Chris Johanson and others), and Kevin Schmidt

The Domestic Multiplex series brings four semi-narrative artist videos to the homes of local residents. Home-screening visits are made by appointment and are accompanied by the program curator. The program was limited to 10 visits.

The word hero appears in Greek mythology denoting a person willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. More generally, a hero is one who displays bravery and strength and, in ancient Greece, was understood as living between the gods and man. The amateur, can either be understood as the opposite of a professional or, looking to the latin root, a "lover of." While the tension inherent in the binary proposed by the title of this program is not initially apparent, if translated into the contemporary vernacular: the fan (amateur) exists in relation to the star (hero). In these four videos, presented in two parts, the difference between hero and amateur is confused and complicated as the two roles are conflated via fictional narrative. More specifically, amateur actors, who are also often the subjects of these videos, take-on the role of heroes in various and unusual ways.

In the program, artist Guy Ben Ner reinvents the famous Melville novel Moby Dick by tracing the storyline in a low-tech and often humorous form in the artist's kitchen in Israel. Taking on the role of Captain Ahab and other characters as a form of play with his young daughter, Ben Ner's video presents a domestic portrait set in contrast to one of the most important literary works of the 19th century. In The Forbidden Zone Harrell Fletcher & Chris Johanson work with David Jarvey, a developmentally disabled adult, who identifies with the character Christopher Pike from an early episode of Star Trek. Jarvey's long standing relationship with Fletcher and Johanson allows for a unique reenactment of the future. Althea Thauberger's video Northern is a single, continuous shot of a clear cut section of forest populated by young tree-planters who mysteriously awaken. The post-apocalyptic, verging on spiritual, undertones of the video are reflected by the extreme attire of the subjects and the mountain landscape. For Long Beach, Led Zep Kevin Schmidt powers up a electric-guitar amplifier via a portable generator and blasts Stairway to Heaven to a backdrop of crashing waves. Long Beach, which is part of the Pacific Rim National Park, was known as a place where "hippies would squat in driftwood shacks."

3 Solo-Artist Projects

2006-04-08T22:38:40+00:00

Claude Closky at the Banff Centre
Bigert & Bergström at the Nelson Gallery, UC Davis
Jennie Smith at the Wattis Institute, CCA

In Journal, 2005 French artist Claude Closky presents a rapid succession of images extracted from the world media. Paired with a catalytic sound clip, each image briefly erupts, marking a moment of global ferment.
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The documentary Last Supper by Swedish collaborative Bigert and Bergström compares the traditional rituals of a prisoner's last rites to its contemporary form in various countries. It also includes several animated segments and sculptural installations made by the artists.
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For her first exhibition on the west coast, Jennie Smith presents three delicate drawings of psycho-architectures.
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(Image from Last Supper by Bigert and Bergström)