SF | THANKSWIGGING

Well... I was scurrying around after having failed once at the Bourbon custard, remaking the custard, and putting together the greenbeans'n'bacon. Jacob found this time to be best for dancing around in the blond wig Sed bought for me based on my description of the perfect coiffure. I saw it on him and I wanted to wear it. So I put it on. It was my Thanksgivin' wig. I went to a gathering of goths and self-proclaimed pagans from Jacob's work at Dark Garden. Usually the fact of my under-cosmetics makes me relatively unconsiderable to this group of people, but me with my wig created a path toward connection with they who are both severely rigid and refreshingly unserious. Lesson learned - absurdity is not only fun, it's constructive.

SF | SURVEILLANCE IN ART

I'm the TA for a class called Guerilla Video. It's great. Chris is our fearless leader and his philosophy is that people should make their work in whatever way that gets it done. If that means through established structures of governmental bureaucracy or frameworks of art/grant organizations, then so be it. And if those don't work for you, he encourages finding an underground or even illegal way to make it happen. I like this because it doesn't diminish or celebrate anything, outside the work itself.

I put together some work for the class by artists who use surveillance as their practice and in their aesthetics. I find this topic interesting because it seems that even if the conversation and politics of privacy/celebrity have become exhausted because of its pervasiveness in the art conversation of photography and video, artists are still obsessed with it. It's maybe no longer an effective aesthetic because the reality of being watched is fully accepted/expected. However, the following artists have the freshest eye to these issues that I've been able to find.

Kohei Yoshiyuki
- Times article with audio slideshow
- Yossi Milo, representing gallery

Yoshiyuki photographed men peeping on couples having sex in parks in Japan in the '70s. The couples, the men, and Yoshiyuki are all engaged in their own stratus of illicitness. If you listen to the commentary here, the language is about 40 years old, but then, so are these pictures, which make me smile a sneaky smile when I see them. You'll read this if you follow the links, but if you're not a link follower, he got these night shots with infrared lights and film - at the time of these photos, this technology was becoming available commercially.




Jill Miller
- "Collectors" project site

Miller's "Collectors" is a bizarre mix of aesthetics and intentions. She was trained by a licensed private investigator, and then proceded to teach several students from SAFI what she had learned. Together, they surveilled San Francisco's top art collectors. With the project website there was a gallery exhibition, to which all of the collectors were invited to its opening, and a tabloid-esque publication for pick up at the show.

The most confusing thing to me about this project is the Miller's sidestep of position in the project description coupled with the crossed-wires of media, cultural, and visual language she uses to represent various (superficial) aspects of the collectors' lives. While, I believe, the tabloid is meant to suggest the collector's elusiveness and intrigue, positioning them as celebrity, the visual language of surveillance, which is very different than that of the paparozzi, creates a feeling that they are engaged in illicit acts.




Trevor Paglen
- Paglen's website

What is most intriguing part about Paglen's work is that I still don't know if his work is based on factual research or an elaborate network of artist-created information and product that he presents as true. Either way, he's committed and raises questions about trust, representation of information, and the global government. One of the manifestations of his work is the surveillance of secret and hidden military landscapes in the US and CIA-directed networks of secret prisons in Afghanistan.

The most intriguing part about Paglen himself is that he calls himself an artist while working out of the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. He not does he lecture extensively in art school and gallery contexts, he has a long list of TV and web news appearances - and he talks about his work in the same way in both forums.

SF | ARTnDRAG

A lot of times my nights start one way and end another. On Friday, I attended a reception at Southern Exposure for all their Alternative Exposure Grant recipients. Having been inducted into Fabricatorz for their Show Some Color event, I went to the reception. It was sort of a mixer but since I'm still a little ways away from the non-grad-school arts community, I didn't really feel like chatting people up. It was enough to see some faces and be able to connect some dots later on. Here's what artists' reception look like, folks, when it's not in a magazine or on t.v. The notes on people are my commies and also part of Show Some Color. And, Fabricatorz' fearless leaders, Lu and Jon, talk about our project.

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The second part of my night was amongst thin, long-legged queens at The Cinch. Raya Light, Miss Trannyshack 2007, was stepping down from her crown. I went to watch and give love to Jacob/Khadijah, performing Radiohead.

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Because it was an un-crowing ceremony, some of the best, or just most hilarious, Queens performed. Below is what the San Francisco drag scene looks like - which is like not what you think of when you think of drag.

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SF | FASHION POLICE

I watched Thirty Frames a Second: The WTO in Seattle in the Guerrilla Video class I TA for. It was not insightful for the most part, except that the police force's riot gear in 2000 was really impressive. It made the officers twice the size of the mostly-young-adult protesters and although it wouldn't be a leap to compare them to Star Wars Stormtroopers, really what they looked like were the police force in Judge Dredd, which ran in theaters five years before the WTO protests. True or not, I had the sense that it wasn't the movie that was pulling from life and more like this riot uniform was designed from a storyboard.

So police fashion. The fashion police. Dressed to look like fear, like protection, like order. What do those things look like? Descriptions on websites that sell gear say that the uniforms are function only - comfort, fit, protection, flexibility, mobility, non-slip material... But, they also look cool, and they know it.
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The future is now: Still from Judge Dredd (1995), which is supposed to be from 2139, or 2000.

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FX1: FlexForce™ - Modular Hard Shell Crowd Control System from Damascus Protective Gear (designed and engineered in California, U.S.A. !)






























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Additional reference for gear: Police One -> products

SF | BULK:AFTER

No wine. Tecate. S'okay.

Bridget was at the fore of our karaoke troupe. Karla and I were support. We did Olivia Newton-John's Physical. Bridget handed the mic over and pulled out her keys halfway through to shotgun a Tecate. Karla and I were one brain, one heart. We did exercises, like bicycle and scissors, on our backs.


Michiko's lost dog, Snowey, was there and did karaoke. I got her autograph. I'm sure Michiko will be happy to have her back, but I think Snowey liked drinking beer and smoking cigarettes.

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And Tony and I drew our video cameras on each other.

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SF | BULK

Bridget just organized a feminist revival show for the Diego Rivera Gallery at school. She sat at the top of a ladder, naked, double fisting beers and drawing a self portrait of her back at the top of the wall. Bridget just called to see if I wanted to go to BULK with her tonight. BULK is a show by Tony Labat. Tony is a well-known artist and shit-stirrer - and by show I mean, he's turned Queens Nails Annex into a bar for six weeks... or something. Whatever the case, I'll drink whatever wine they have there and I'll hope that Tony has good taste.