Third Friday 9/18/09: Great Accommodations with Jamie Burkart and Urban Culture Project’s visual and performing arts studios

It seems that third Fridays is where it is at lately if your looking to be an engaged participant. Whether it is navigating an inflatable river system or giving constructive criticism and suggestions to a local dancer and performer in residency-what art seems to say lately is that you are not just a viewer. You are a vital component, one that is of value (and not in the sense of economics). You are of value because you have something to share, something to contribute as a human being in the world.
Many artists are acknowledging that they can't face this world alone and with good reason. Jamie Burkart is another example of someone who subscribes to this mentality.
This past third Friday was the reception for Great Accommodations with Jamie Burkart: Imagining Lifestyles for Cities on the Water as well as the open studios preview of the Urban Culture Project’s visual and performing arts studios. Although first Friday has contributed much to the arts in Kansas City, it has as of late, felt rather stale and stuck (perhaps the lovely commercialization of such an event has contributed to this? as well as new developments in the West Bottoms. Third Friday, by the way of the Urban Culture Project, provides a very vital platform for what Kansas City needs: dialogue and exchange.
This dialogue is formed via Great Accommodations with Jamie Burkart who through his personal navigation of American rivers is re-envisioning a way of life that is codependent mimicking the notion of symbiotic relationships. Jamie essentially wants you to know that “ There’s a river in this city” and to ponder the implications of developing cities near rivers. He wants to highlight Kansas City’s potentials and does so, I believe, pretty damn successfully. If you ask anyone who knows anything, they will tell you that something is happening here in Kansas City that is rather unique for the Midwest. Jamie might be preaching to the choir however (those that already attend Third Friday might already have a hunch to K.C.’s current status via the art world and beyond). The amazing thing would be to see how Great Accommodations affects the non-gallery frequenter because the show has such wonderful considerations that react against stale artistic frameworks.
What Jamie is offering is not necessarily the 21st century’s answer to Huck Finn as some have labeled him, though I suppose you could look at him in that manner. Great Accommodations is much deeper than being written off as just a man’s journey with his close friends. It is at the core speaking to something many of us, especially generation y are use to: the idea and importance of social networking.
Great Accommodations is sort of the synthesis in a series of engagements that Jamie is the facilitator of, which highlight the use of local rivers as a social networking agent. It comes out of an interest of the river’s capacity to connect people. There is something romantic and noble about these desires, which have been activated by Jamie.
Mr. Burkart alongside of Suzanne Hogan and other multiple collaborators built a bicycle powered paddle wheel raft in typical D.I.Y. fashion which took to the rivers a few years back. After doing so, Jamie and Suzanne Hogan mailed hundreds of letters and placed facebook advertisements to reach people and places located along the Missouri, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Ohio rivers. These letters and advertisements were open invites for individuals to share their experiences and perspectives of life on the river to share alongside of Jamie.
Great Accommodations is Jamie’s humble attempt to communicate the use of rivers as agents for connection. His attempt to communicate this came through using the bicycle powered raft as an artifact of what is possible with a little bit of courage, the complete transformation of the Paragraph and Project space into a massive site specific inflatable river system, and the use of technology/media emphasizing the idea of connection.
It is a hands-on interactive experience immersing the viewer/participant in a physical, behavioral, and visual environment. You are invited to explore the inflatable river system made from plastic tablecloth, blue painters tape, and recycled building materials, all while Jamie acts as a gallery attendant, “active accommodator”, and facilitator of the show. You navigate the space as you confront interactive pieces such as Accommodations for James Johnson which is what appears to be a simple modulation of the viewer’s real-time movements against rippling wavelike artifacts as a metaphor for the dynamics of the river and Moving in Cities on the Water in which by the turning of upside down bicycle wheel, the viewer can scroll through a looping slideshow of 410 photos taken near the Missouri river between Kansas City and Saint Louis, while audio composed by film musician Spencer Owen mimicked the barges of the river.
There are other pieces that emphasize the desire for connectivity on a social level such as Strangers which is a piece that dates back to 2007, in which Jamie bridges the span between two apartments via window to window by the length of wood. He then in a display of his mastery of balance walks across the beam of wood into his neighbor’s house, where is neighbor had been active and isolated upon a computer.
It seems that the only thing that seemed stagnant in the show was the bicycle-powered raft, which hung in one section of the inflatable river system. It would be nice, as a viewer and participant to have some sort of interaction with the bicycle, to actually power the raft, to learn the mechanics of such a device, etc. This is a small issue in comparison to a show that functions in such an open manner.
What is amazing is that an artist is willingly to assume so many roles. Humility has finally entered the art realm! Nothing felt forced or unnatural about the presentation or the manner in which the work was talked about. The space only functions as a living museum because Jaime is doing so. It is the openness of this young artist’s personality that attempts to rid of old dichotomies and opens one up to an offering of trust, one that many of my generation are engaging in. Will this change anything? Only time will tell but it sure is inspiring.
Speaking of breaking down barriers, alongside of the third Friday reception for Jaime Burkart was the open studio preview of the Urban Culture Project’s visual and performing arts studios at the City Center Square (which is located at 12th and Main, 5th floor). The facility provides shared studio/rehearsal space for both visual and performing artists as well as small private studios. The venue includes a large open space (approx 3,000 sq. feet) and the private studios are each approx.150 sq. ft.). This preview was perhaps the most magical part of the night because of how refreshing it was to see these creative beings inhabiting a highly corporate building. The artists which have been selected have transformed the sterile environment of corporate office spaces into something invigorating (or at least it is getting there). The space and the artists are currently residing on a one-year lease, so let’s hope that this space becomes a place of constructive, innovative, and fresh engagements through the arts.

related links:
http://www.charlottestreet.org/

CItygarden St. Louis, Mo.

Labeled as an urban oasis and aspiring to become a “civic jewel”, the Citygarden, which is in the heart of downtown Saint Louis, opened on July 1st 2009. It serves as an urban sculpture garden featuring modern and contemporary sculptures. It is a project funded by The Gateway Foundation (at a price tag of approximately $30 million), to help revive downtown Saint Louis. Though not a relatively new or groundbreaking idea, the garden gives a much-needed boost to the possibilities of public art within The Saint Louis region. What it comes down to is: good design and an attitude towards public education that is accessible.
Saint Louis like many other cities is a city that has been experiencing a rise in those living in lofts and apartments within its urban core. Beyond an investment in living at the core of the city, Saint Louis is also seeing a renewed interest in the downtown area as well as its grand arts district from people traveling from the suburban outposts looking for attractions in the heart of the city. The irony is that the suburbs are exactly what contributed to the economic decline in Saint Louis within the city in the 1950s. Now downtown Saint Louis is trying to revitalize itself by attracting many to return the origins of the city, to the heart of its core from these suburban locales.
Downtown St. Louis is modest in comparison to the downtown of Chicago hailed for its public art (think Millennium Park). Yet for the flack that Downtown St. Louis receives, it has a decent number of historic, family oriented attractions such as the Gateway Arch, The Old Courthouse, The Washington Street Art district and the unique City Museum. The Citygarden is a great addition to these educational and artistic attractions.
Blossoming within the Gateway Mall, an area of downtown that has been ignored for a long time and serves according to locals as a place where “ the homeless sleep”, this sculpture garden is bustling with the energy of the twenty first century. It was not long ago that this area was nothing but an unattractive grass mall full of numerous cracked sidewalks. The buildings towered over this plaza where life seemed to barely converge.
This once unattractive park is now a highly accessible park which is unfenced and offers entrance from all its points. It is just across from what many unfortunately claim as the “unattractive and inaccessible” Richard Serra piece titled Twain (named after Missourian Mark Twain). Yet with a renewed interest in this area of downtown, Serra’s twain appears to receive some of the benefits of having a beautiful park just across the street. The citygarden for many of its visitors that live and work in Saint Louis renews public art and gives it justice, even if none of the pieces are site specific. More importantly, it attempts to educate one on the motives behind making public sculpture and a free public garden by the use of maps which contain a small amount of information on all 23 pieces featured and the use of audio tours via your cellular device (hosted by local celebrities such as Ozzie Smith formerly of The Saint Louis Cardinals and Jenna Fischer of the hit television show The Office). If only the same could be done for Serra, perhaps Twain would have a higher acceptance rating.
There are many features that make the Citygarden a treasured space. One can sense that every part of the three acres of landscape and sculpture was planned with every detail taken into consideration. The use of public space for a garden that features local and regional plants is a popular thing to do in the age where interest in sustainability has grown popular (as it should be). However, we can learn so much about our surroundings, the native area we inhabit and its history through thinking this way. Not to mention, that this is a step in a right direction for Saint Louis. The Citygarden, though packed at lunch hour as business executives, construction workers, and lawyers take a lunch break, serves as a place of relaxation, play, and hopefully inspiration.
What truly makes this sculpture garden enjoyable is the amount of time dedicated to the sustainable features (designed in collaboration with landscape architect Nelson Byrd Woltz) which aides in educating visitors of the beautiful natural elements of the Saint Louis Region. The sustainable features include: green roofs upon the architecture (which helps reduce the “ Urban Heat Island Effect”), rain gardens (six separate ones which covers more than 5,000 sq. ft and helps prevent erosion, water pollution, and flooding), and plants (mostly Missouri natives), which are designed to give a unique experience and a humbling one at that. There is care expressed clearly in the designed of this park. In an age where projects are built without consideration and skyscrapers have become the symbol of status, this is incredibly meaningful to see within an economic decline.
Combined with the plant life, there are also three water fountains in which two of the three (The floodplain Band and The River Terrace Band) are designed to be interactive cooling elements for the public. On any given day you can watch children run through The Floodplain band, which is a paved field of 102 vertical jets that project water up to ten feet in height.
The other fountain is the The Rivers Bluffs Band, which cascades from the café terrace to the floodplain band below as a waterfall constructed from native limestone. It represents the falls and the bluffs of the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. This is all part of an attempt to present three bands that represent the natural history of Saint Louis and its surroundings, through representation of geographic features of the province.
Most of the sculptures themselves are not site specific and were not commissioned for the park with the exception of Big White Gloves, Big Four Wheels by Jim Dine and special casting of bronze by Marisol, which will arrive next year. The collection overall offers a view of modern and contemporary sculpture of European and American artists. None of the sculptures featured are incredibly loud. The intent for the park is to be enjoyed therefore the art is not overly challenging. There are no great demands put upon the viewer where the Serra’s Twain across the street offers a conceptual challenge.
The Gateway Foundation already owned two of the 24 sculptures and the rest were purchased for display. The gardens sports many famous and typical names that one would expect to find in a sculpture garden such as Jim Dine, Niki De Saint Phalle, George Rickey, Mark Di Survero, Tom Otterness, Tony Smith, and Benar Venet. Most of the work verges on the abstract (such as the Benar Venet’s 230.5 Degree Arc x 5 and Mark de Suvero’s Aseope’s Fables) or the metaphorical (such as Donald Baechler’s Scarecrow and Aristide Mailol’s La Rivere). A personal treat was Keith Haring’s Untitled (Ringed Finger), which is situated at the Southern River Terrace Band. It presents the energy of an abstracted body in motion. The simplicity of the piece, made from painted steel, is reminiscent of his work for children’s hospitals and came as a nice surprise and a beautiful welcoming gesture to the western edge of the park.
The cutting edge and contemporary “ works” that the park offers are two LED panels designed and programmed by Julian Opie (titled This is Kiera and Julian Walking and This is Bruce and Sarah Walking) which present the everyman and woman walking in a continuous animation and a 10-foot-long outdoor state of the art LED video wall. The video wall apparently will be utilized for baseball games, movies, commercial films, and art videos. The art videos will be chosen by a team of curators, one each from St. Louis' major museums: Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, and the St. Louis Art Museum.
The crowd favorite and one of the nice surprises was the polish artist Igor Mitoraj’s Eros Bendato (translated: Eros Bound). This is probably the most powerful and awe-inspiring pieces that the garden has to offer. Eros Bendato greets visitors on the southeastern edge of the park, and is meant to be the dismembered head of Eros, The Greek god of love and desire. Bandages wrapped around head bind Eros, suggesting that desires and ideas have been imprisoned. What is powerful is the fact that it presents the idea that civilization is being held together amongst the chaos. For this fact, Eros Bendato is possibly the most thought provoking piece in the entire garden.
The Citygarden is not ground breaking but a nice dose of art and nature in the middle of what use to be desolate urban jungle. It has become the intersection for play and relaxation during the workweek and for visitors to the city. It is no Millennium Park but its purpose should not be competition. It has brought beauty among the concrete and asphalt underneath the skyline of the arch and should become one of the Midwest’s many treasures, while blossoming into a “ civic jewel” for the city of St. Louis.

related links:
http://www.citygardenstl.org

Review: Electromediascope at the Nelson Atkins Museum Of Art. Steina and Woody Vasulka's Participation

Review of Steina and Woody Vasulka’s Participation
http://www.vdb.org/smackn.acgi$tapedetail?PARTICIPAT



Steina and Woody Vasulka are renowned artists that are credited alongside others with the development of what we now today deem new media art. The Vasulka’s founded The Kitchen as a media arts theater in New York and formed an arts collective to reside there in 1971. They have explored the territories of documentaries, modulation through analog and digital signal processing as well as computer programming.
They arrived from Prague in the 1960s to New York where they found themselves in the midst of an explosion of culture through the arts. Steina was previously studying classical violin and Woody was a student in the FAMU film academy. They soon, to their amazement at the exciting times they were living in, began to document using a portapak, the emerging underground theater and music scenes in New York City. The results were compiled into Participation an example and tour de force of this illegitimate culture riding the waves of free love, Pop art, feminist issues and the emergent homosexuality on display within New York and American culture at large.
Steina has stated that she learned the craft of the camera as a documentarian of the counterculture of New York also known as the “ sexual avant garde”. All the elements that make a great documentary are in Participation. The craft is very evident in particular by how we are as the audience led upon this tour de force through the use of the simple process of editing. Steina and Woody make good decisions for the most part particularly when it comes to managing time, inserting either potent clips of famous musicians (Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, and Don Cherry performing in Washington square are standouts) or underground homosexual theatre, where the sheer performance, the spectacle of these performances is enough to take your breath away. They splice this footage in contrast to some of the more illegitimate figures and actions within the underground culture such as burlesque dancers, drag queens, and some of the characters that hung around Andy Warhol’s Factory that add humor to the equation.
The highlight clearly was a piece that could stand out separately from the rest of the footage. It was Steina’s piece where she is lip-syncing to “ let it be” by the Beatles. What was so enthralling about this presentation and simple action has to do with the potency that still resonates with the lyrics “let it be” in relation to the time period that Stenia is lip syncing in. The 1960s and the early 70s was a time of change from the sexual revolution to the Student riots in 1968 that happened all around the world, and Stenia’s piece is a humorous and enticing video to watch. This video presents and sums up the excitement of that era.
The film closes with Don Cherry (who was an innovative Jazz trumpeter and was a pioneer in the Jazz/fusion movement) who seems to bring the film to a close with his performance in Washington Square. Once again, this is a clever editing choice on part of the Vasulkas who presents Don Cherry leaving Washington Square as spectators look upon alluding to the idea that the events, changes, etc. that transpired during the course of that era still live on and are responsible for some of the major developments that we have experienced presently especially through the arts and the world at large.
Participation acts as a sort of time capsule capturing the uniqueness of a certain region going through massive change. How does one react to change historically? Historically we have reacted by utilizing the art of expression. This is what this film presents: the democracy of expression in the United States during the late 1960s and 70s with all its audacity. Participation is an amazing journey with very few mediocre performances.
However, this film was not meant to be viewed within an institutional setting such as the Nelson-Atkins’ Auditorium. When displayed in the early 1970s, it was projected in gritty bars frequented by the people it was depicting. Perhaps by screening this film within an institutionalized setting the experience became a bit "formal" when it was meant to be experienced "informally"? I also can’t help but wonder if the curators have taken into consideration that perhaps the title alludes to something beyond just the artist’s own experience? The importance of being a part of something special is the knowledge that what is so special about it is the fact that you are sharing.How could this film be presented in a manner that promotes a reciprocal exchange that is felt. If anything could be founded within Participation is that those within the film had the driving force of passion for expression.
Most of my critique actually is with the institution itself which in many cases appears to be a very limited sphere. How could this film be displayed in a way that evokes the audience to become participants? How could we view this film in contrast to the era that we are participants within?
This brings us to the problem with many institutionalized programs, which lie in the lack of a critical dialogue as well as the lack of employing the use of experimental educational models. This could be useful especially if the work is a bit dated (which I don’t feel that Participation suffered from).