Every thing is Pol itical

Andrea Bowers / Daniel Joseph Martinez FOCA 2 everything is political Between a Rock and a Hard Place: From Radical Art to Radical Optimism Lucía Sanromán 4 everything is political If a rock is thrown into a pond and no one observes its shockwaves, does it still make

an impact? This play on the Platonic metaphor comes to mind when considering Andrea Bowers and Daniel Joseph Martinez’s exhibition for the Fellows of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Martinez has used a similar image to describe the conceptual underpinnings of their shared exhibition: His sculpture of a taxidermied hare, eviscerated and stuffed with dynamite sticks, hangs from the ceiling of the Fellows’ Chinatown gallery like a thrown rock caught suspended in mid-air in the moment just before it hits its target. Encircling the corpse is a grouping of 8 plastic tables lined with 15 metal chairs—this is the furniture that typically populates the space, which also functions as the office for the

6 everything is political organization and frequently hosts board meetings, juries, and panels. Andrea Bowers, whose laborious, handcrafted work often appropriates domestic or functional objects, has applied the name of a late contemporary artist to the back of each folding chair; under each seat she has pasted the artist’s obituary—an honor …art objects roll that lists a crucial group of activist artists who have influenced her practice. Interlaced with the space’s utilitarian furnishings, the intervention created by these works discloses the function of the room and stages a generative opposition not just to the space, but between the works themselves: Martinez’ dead hare is a can be the bomb, a projectile, an incendiary device meant to provoke a chain reaction that begins at the heart of the gallery/board room. Bowers’ textual piece does not contain the force of an explosion but instead expands and tempers its ripple effect with the intimate mindfulness of her memorial. vessels and The contrasting artworks, dense with odd associations and meanings, intensify the viewer’s awareness of the institutional framework within which this exhibition takes place: each of the artists is a recipient of a 2010 FOCAFellowship, which includes a grant, the exhibition, and this catalog. Paradoxically, the end result is less an institutional critique—of the part played by a non-profit such as FOCA signifiers when it comes to modes of exhibition, support, and patronage in contemporary art—and more a calling into question of the possibility for contemporary art practice to effect change while remaining embedded, above all else, in a widespread system of production and distribution committed to commodity culture and the of valuation and consumption of art objects.

Andrea Bowers and Daniel Joseph Martinez are political artists. Their practices are fundamentally different, yet they share an insistent belief in art as a detonator of various forms of agency, social engagement, and political action. Although their awareness, related artworks for this exhibition allude to the historical avant-garde and its pedagogical transmission, as well as to the generative and destructive capacities inherent in making, these works also ask vital new questions: Is it still possible to speak of radical art practice today? Does the figure of the political artist continue to have relevance after an era in which many of the doomsday scenarios described ideas, and by postmodernism have not only come about, but even worse, superseded the diagnosis? What is art good for, anyway, if it does not engender change?

The word “radical” derives from the notion of a root or origin; the term “radical practice” is closely associated with Herbert Marcuse’s writings on Marxist even love. 8 everything is political revolutionary politics, ethics, and art. Marcuse’s work analyzes art in the context of the forces of domination and resistance that governed late industrial society. Under his formulation, art generates the possibility of liberation and the What is art transformation of a new subjectivity, disenfranchised from alienation and repression, through play, the eroticized self, and aesthetics. In his last major work, The Aesthetic Dimension: Toward a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics, Marcuse goes one step further, positing art—whether object-based or ephemeral—as independent good for, from social reality, affording art a privileged position in the structuring of a transcendent utopian order. Today, “radical art practice” continues to connote resistance to commodification and often explicitly sets conceptual or time-based performance and dialogical art forms in direct opposition to those founded on the aesthetics of the object. This Manichean formulation of action and discourse versus anyway, art object is a response to the seemingly untroubled manner in which physical objects are absorbed into the art market. Yet late capitalism co-opts not only that which it can consume: As post-structuralism has theorized, capitalism does not stop at the physical world, but colonizes all aspects of the self—our bodies, our if it desires, and our imaginations—demarcating as surely as a barrier the limits of autonomy. The prim separation between matter and ideas that lies at the heart of the object versus action argument, although appropriate given the overriding influence of the art market, does not by itself ensure that the deleterious effects of a stultifying society will be contained. As we all know, anything can be traded— does particularly time, which is the foundation of the labor economy. Marcuse’s concept leaves itself open to argument. Art theorists who privilege social exchange and dialogue over the primacy of the formal aesthetic experience see Marcuse’s late theories as a recasting of Platonic ideas. Yet a return to the not origins of the idea of a radical practice provides useful guideposts with which to understand Bowers and Martinez’s intervention into FOCA’s space and their commitment to multi-layered art practices that critique, reclaim, and reformulate the current prevalent discourse. engender Caught between a rock and a hard place, contemporary art criticism has essentialized the critique of the object into dualistic polemical categories: formalist practice on one end of the spectrum, and socially engaged public practice on the other. Political art may address a multiplicity of formal and aesthetic approaches ranging between change? these poles, yet it continues to be haunted by the representational styles and 10 everything is political political agendas of fascism. Often easily dismissed as pamphleteering and poet Hakim Bey as “poetic terrorism,” a term that the artist borrows to describe subordinated to ideology—not seen as properly effective as art because of its his own practice. For Bey, liberation and transcendence are also the point: “Art ties to social agendas—political art is, on the other hand, frequently viewed as can have the power of a terrorist act, its magical potency—but toward life instead ineffective and capricious—too caught up in the symbolic realm to cause real of death. I mean that a really effective poiesis should act powerfully on emotion social change in the world. These, by now, old arguments, which came of age in and perception, causing an aesthetic shock as powerful as terror but aimed at the 1980s and 1990s, nevertheless still permeate the discussion structuring an catharsis or even satori, the aha! moment, the breakthrough into transcendence. essentially tautological line of reasoning that, under the guise of art theory and Liberation from the image proceeds through the image.”2 criticism, seems to leave no escape other than a fatalistic acceptance of the status In Redemption of the Flesh: It’s just a little headache, it’s just a little bruise; the quo. The Marcusean definition of radical practice, however, allows us to move politics of the future as urgent as the blue sky (2008), a sculptural work that is beyond these arguments; artists engaging in “radical practice” ought to be prepared related to the FOCA piece, a taxidermied hare is grafted with an animatronics to question the very parameters of the term. reproduction of the artist’s own arm onto an automatic painting machine. The Martinez declined to engage in an email conversation with other prominent artists cyborgean creature shoots fake blood onto a white gallery wall like a relentless, on the subject of political art, organized by Art in America in 2008. Instead, he mechanized Pollock for the new millennium. The reading of the sculpture, however, contributed a statement that denied the validity of the binary terms used to cannot be linear: it is about Abex aesthetics and the mechanized self; it is about categorize political art practice—profit versus non-profit, object versus non-object. the fear of the sublime and the beauty of deterministic logic; it is about shock and These exist, he wrote, “in a state of permanent ambiguity that reflects a condition despair; it is about war and sacrifice; it is also about anger. Redemption of the Flesh of the culture’s inability to render a purpose beyond the accumulation of wealth does not presuppose a difference between that which is political (that which and fame, and the complete instrumentalization of art and artists.”1 Martinez’s belongs to the realm of society and its collective structuring of community) and critique, directed at artists first, and collectors and art institutions next, goes a that which is aesthetic (the body of accepted knowledge that defines and describes step further to reject a progressive, ameliorative, and ultimately utilitarian analysis what comes before the senses). The work seeks to intervene into the political of the purpose of art in society. He argues in favor of the repositioning of art as a structure of the commons in the same manner that it enters into a conversation field of knowledge and experience that is charged with the possibility of generating with art and its history, both recent and distant. It wants, simply, to shatter both uncompromising freedom from the current constraints of the dominant cultural, and take them over. economic, and political systems. “Nothing is neutral” for Andrea Bowers. This phrase, which served as the title for Oblique, contrary, unyielding, and even potentially frightening, Martinez’s multi- her exhibition at REDCAT in 2006, expresses her committed denial of the faceted work is confrontational, to say the least. A first encounter provokes a kind difference between art and politics. Bowers’ long-term involvement with research of collapse—opening up a pause, or a gap, in the normal semantic structures by and her appropriation of the history and strategies of political activism have which we commonly make sense of the visible world. Once shocked into a vacuum provided not just a rich source of subject matter for her work, but have also of meaning, the space is flooded—overtaken—by shifting references, associations, shaped the core ethical and aesthetic ideas and methods that inform her practice. memories, and allusions that rapidly supersede one another and force the viewer Through research and investigation Bowers has imbued her practice with a to search for the tranquility of a single stable meaning, an elusive goal that reveals sophisticated understanding of the tensions between activism and the isolated and the strange epistemological stratagems of the age of digital reproduction. The privileged position afforded to artists who, like herself, “make objects” that are hijacking of normative meaning caused by Martinez’s work has been described by bought and collected. From 2002 to 2004, Bowers was involved in Vieja Gloria,

1 Eleanor Heartney, “Talking Politics 2008: Six Artists Who Have Taken On Controversial Public Issues in Their Work 2 Hakim Bey, “Divining Violence,” Daniel Joseph Martinez, Michael Brenson et al., (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2009): 75. Assess the Current Status of Political Art,” Art in America 96, no. 6 (June/July 2008): 167. 12 everything is political a project that documented the actions of an environmental group working to protect a 400-year-old oak tree in suburban Los Angeles. It was through this experience that she gained insight into two key principles at the core of activism. It wants, She explained to Eungie Joo in an interview: “There were two positions constantly presented to me, which the activists saw as crucial to their work and which had a major effect on my artistic practice. First, regardless of whether they were successful in their actions, the activists felt it was essential that they bear witness to the events. To bear witness is not only to observe, but also to provide proof simply, and testify. The second principle was that dissent is patriotic and essential to maintaining democracy.”3

Bowers has intertwined the categories of activist and artist, consciously integrating languages, discourses, areas of influence, and economic structures. Key to this to conceptual graft is the self-definition of her artistic production as “work” rather than as self-sufficient intellectual creation. Julia Bryan-Wilson’s research into the redefinition of art as labor by an influential group of American artists and art critics of the 1960s and 1970s that includes Hans Haacke and Lucy Lippard shatter significantly addresses the legacy of artist activists who have made transformative changes in response to the untenable political measures of the Vietnam War.4 Their efforts make possible Bowers’ critical understanding of the use of her own labor—the exchange of her time, her physical and mental energy, and her attention and focus—as the stage within which sustained periods of testimonial and both witnessing are given form. This legacy also includes and involves feminism, another key influence, which situated gendered labor and craft as legitimate and undifferentiated artistic and political fields. No Olvidado (Not Forgotten) (2010) is an extreme example of Bowers’ operative and exchange between creativity, labor, and testimony. The piece is 10 feet tall, nearly 100 feet wide, and composed of 20 graphite-on-paper drawings of a chain-link fence landscape, on the surface of which Bowers has drawn the names of over 4,000 illegal aliens who died crossing the border between Mexico and the United States. In his article “The Archive and Testimony,” Giorgio Agamben develops an take them

3 Andrea Bowers and Eungie Joo in Conversation, “DIY School,” Nothing is Neutral: Andrea Bowers, Connie Butler et al., (Los Angeles: California Institute of the Arts and REDCAT, 2006), 50. 4 Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical practice in the Vietnam Era, (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2009). over. 14 everything is political account of testimony as bearing witness to that for which one cannot bear witness. Testimony embodies the unspeakable, bringing it forth from the impossibility of speech into language.5 By laboring over drawing the names of the disappeared “dissent on sheets of paper for weeks and months, Bowers, and the artists who assisted her in the work, embody not just the pathos of the plight of the illegal—the evident tragedy lived by “the forgotten” whose thousands of unmarked graves dot the Mexico/US border—but also Bowers’ art labor brings each forgotten person back is into account and into memory. Words and their erasure, the acts of copying and rewriting, are methods by which Bowers memorializes and constructs alternative archives to mainstream history. Her piece for the FOCA exhibition continues this approach. By tenderly inscribing into common folding chairs—functional objects of the everyday—the names of activist artists who have been instrumental in patriotic constructing a terrain for the radical practice that has given shape to what can be said and made, Bowers memorializes the ways in which these artists have contributed to an expansion of the limits of the thinkable.

It is easy to feel despair. But by accepting that there may be no alternative and whatsoever to the operative mainstream that conditions our daily lives and aspirations, one capitulates to its rationale. The dominance of the logic of the market in the contemporary art world is one example; the market effectively erases or neutralizes alternatives that do not ratify its own systematic self- essential valuation and marketing. Bowers and Martinez’s collaborative exhibition does not present an argument for the naïve “overturning” of any kind of dominant system. The exhibition goes one better: Rather than telling us what it means, it shows us. Their project reflects on the possibility that art objects can be the vessels and signifiers of awareness, ideas, even love, and reminds us of the significance to of a radical practice that takes seriously a need to question, to critique, to prod, and to break with the social structures that limit our sense of self and the space and the stake of our collective politics, our ability to imagine other futures. And in this lies their radical optimism.

maintaining About the author: Lucía Sanromán is Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

5 Giorgio Agamben, “The Archive and Testimony,” Charles Merewether ed., The Archive, (London and Boston: democracy.” Whitechapel and MIT Press, 2006), 39. 16 everything is political 18 everything is political 20 everything is political 22 everything is political 24 everything is political 26 everything is political 28 everything is political 30 everything is political 32 everything is political 34 everything is political 36 everything is political 38 everything is political Theresa Hak Kyung Cha 1951-1982

Dead words. Dead tongue. From disuse. Buried in Time’s memory. I FIRST MET DAVID ASKEVOLD at CalArts, in the mid-1970s, when I entered the school’s “The Dream of the Audience: Unemployed. Unspoken. History. Past. Let the one who is diseuse, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982)” one who is mother who waits nine days and nine nights be found. graduate fine art “post studio” program. Many of my instructors were Conceptual artists working 2002-12-06 until 2003-03-02 Restore memory. Let the one who is diseuse, one who is daughter Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington restore spring with her each appearance from beneath the earth. Seattle, WA, USA United States of America The ink spills thickest before it runs dry before it stops writing at all. with performance, image/text pairings, and video. Of this group, it was Askevold who appealed to — Dictee in me most directly. His work struck me as the strangest, the densest, and the scariest of the lot. She lived only three decades, but pioneering Korean artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha left a substantial and diverse body of work. Although Cha is best Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, the third of five children, was born on March 4, known for the book Dictée, which combines family history, autobiography, 1951 in Pusan, Korea, outside of Seoul. Because of the chaos of the Korean Narrativity, in his works, was stretched—present enough to allow me access, but oblique to the poetry, and images, she worked in a wide variety of mediums. For the first War, Cha’s family moved many times during the 1950s. After hostilities time ever, in this touring exhibition, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s exquisite ceased, the family moved back to Seoul where Cha attended Ewha point of leaving me disoriented. The photo/text series “The Ambit: Nine Clauses and Their Allo- artworks are exhibited together. University Elementary School and Toksoo Elementary School. Cha’s conceptually rich work explores themes born of personal experience— In 1962, the Cha family moved to Hawaii and, two years later, to Northern cations,” 1975, was one of the first pieces by Askevold that I saw. It consists of nine four-part color language, memory, displacement and alienation. The Henry Art Gallery California. Theresa and Elizabeth, her older sister, went to the Convent of presents the wide-ranging production of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in the North the Sacred Heart School, an all-girls, Catholic school. Cha studied briefly photo panels “illustrating” a text; the closest description that I can come up with is to call it a Galleries from December 6, 2002 through March 2, 2003. at the University of San Francisco before transferring to the University of memoryCalifornia, Berkeley. She obtained her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s extremely varied work, ranging from performance comparative literature under Bernard Augst and a Master of Fine Arts kind of psychotic legalese. The text is descriptive: It states rules, sets conditions, but you don’t art, works in film and video, ceramics, textiles, works on paper, and artist’s degree, studying with the performance artist, Jim Melchert. Cha spent books, to stamp and mail art is distinguished by its richness of cultural 1976 in Paris doing postgraduate work in film-making and theory with know of, or for, what. The photos are equally opaque, consisting of murky depictions of light and references and use of multiple languages. A retrospective exhibition, The Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour and Thierry Kuntzel. She then returned Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982) introduces to the Bay Area and continued the films and performances she had begun viewers to the full range of Cha’s artistic production, which in many cases to gain recognition for as a graduate student. shadow, material textures, and glistening watery reflections. There is a continuity of language and combines aspects of different media, creating hybrid art forms that blur the lines between such conventionally distinct divisions as book and poem, Cha’s output was varied, consisting of films and mixed-media performance image usage that provides formal closure, but the sense, finally, is one more of mood than of nar- drawing and sculpture, sculpture and poem, or word and image. The exhibition pieces in addition to her written works. The primary theme of her artistic is accompanied by the first fully-illustrated monograph devoted to Cha’s output was the dislocation — cultural, geographic and social — embodied inrative meaning. The combined effect of the image and text is akin to that of reading an overly ofwork. by immigration. She used slow fadeouts, repetition and subtle shifts of words through the use of closely allied meanings and cognates to reveal a “The main body of my work is with language,” Cha wrote,” before it is born on sense of displacement and fragmentation which she likened to memory complex contract while enveloped in a twilight fog after coming down from a heavy dose of cough the tip of the tongue.” Although many of her contemporaries in New York and the experience of the immigrant. and Europe based their Conceptual artwork on linguistic structure, Cha’s Cha’s best-known work, Dictee, is the story of several women: the Korean syrup. Oddly enough, I found this experience extremely pleasurable. language draws on other, more personal sources. For many Koreans, the issue of language is emotional, since under the long Japanese occupation revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Hyung Soon Huo (Cha’s mother, (1909-1945) they were not permitted to speak their native tongue. Cha who was born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles), Demeter Conceptual art could be loosely defined as a movement that attempted to point out, and literally takes apart language in her work, finding new meanings in her de- and Persephone, and Cha herself. The element that unites these women’s constructions and inventing new words. In her video Mouth to Mouth (1975), lives is suffering and the transcendence of suffering. The book, divided play with, the pictorial tropes of the presentation of “knowledge.” This often took the form of she stresses the very fundamentals of the Korean language as she silently into nine parts structured around the Greek muses, mixes writing styles memory Theresamouths the eight vowel graphemes. Eventually, “snow”—or static—nearly (journal entries, allegorical stories, dreams), voices and kinds of information parodied re-creations of page layouts in academic textbooks: bland documentary photographs obliterates the image, suggesting, as Whitney Museum of American Art as a metaphor of dislocation, loss and memory’s fragmentation. Cha’s Curator Lawrence Rinder observes, “a loss of language over time.” language becomes increasingly poetic after the story begins to expand into a “detailed abstract expression of the experience of exile, infused accompanied by redundant footnotes; absurd charts, graphs, maps, and diagrams. Askevold’s work Cha moved with her family from Korea to San Francisco in 1964. She received with intense emotion” (Wolf 13). from the University of California, Berkeley, a B.A. in comparative literature Dictee is an autobiography that transcends the self. Throughout the work, hardly ever addressed this arena of thought. Instead, he was drawn to the world of arcane (1973) and an M.F.A. in art practice (1978). She spent 1976 in Paris doing postgraduate work in filmmaking and theory with the renowned theorists Cha makes the reader aware of the process of writing. Therefore, the Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour and Thierry Kuntzel. During the last two reader struggles with the writer through pages of a rough draft, a hand- knowledge­—the hard-to-pinpoint logic of rambling unselfconscious bar conversation, the free- years of her life she lived in New York, where she created her final and best- written letter, exercises in French grammar, photographs and diagrams. known work, the book Dictée. An altogether original conception and This struggle allows the reader to experience Cha’s life and the lives of floating mind in zone-out daydream mode. He favored the poetics of the pseudosciences, such as remarkable in its scope for a young artist, Dictée combines family history, those she chronicles. There “is a sense of triumph in living through these of Hak struggles and of something deeper, more mythical, giving meaning to autobiography, stories of female martyrdom, poetry and images and touches pop psychology and the occult. Askevold’s version of “stream of consciousness” was, obviously, a on all the major themes of her work: memory, displacement, alienation, and these lives” (Wolf 13). Cha was murdered at the age of 31 by a stranger in the corporeal experience of language. New York City on November 5, 1982, just seven days after the publication of Dictee. structured fabrication, seemingly “analytic” but more than willing to revel in an almost Romantic Cha was killed in 1982. In her short life and career, she made an important contribution to late twentieth-century American art, and the influences of her Voices from the Gaps, zone. I have at times thought of David’s work as being a kind of structuralist take on Kenneth pioneering work in film and video, performance, mail art and artist books University of Minnesota continues to grow. Coming of age in the San Francisco Bay Area as an artist in http://voices.cla.umn.edu/artistpages/ chaTheresa.php Anger’s psychosexual film rituals­—definitely an unlikely, contradictory project. Can delirium, the 1970s, Cha was at the center of a series of influential artistic movements, including conceptual art, performance art and video. Her art stands out, even among the work of her most accomplished and celebrated of her contemporaries, Daviwhile being experienced, be analyzed?d Wouldn’t doing so disrupt delirium’s seductive, mysterious Kfor its formalyung inventiveness, theoretical rigor, and poetic depth. Organized by the Berkeley Art Museum, The Dream of the Audience: Theresa qualities? Well, Askevold seemed to have his cake and eat it, too. He was a disorientation scien- Hak Kyung Cha (1951-1982) has traveled from California to New York, Illinois and Seattle, and will conclude its tour June, 2004 in Seoul, Korea. The tist. exhibition, in keeping with the commitment of Henry Art Gallery to explore new ways of presenting art, also features an extensive on-line presence and a David Askevold and I were friends. We worked on projects together; we bounced ideas off computer terminal positioned near a case displaying pages from the artist’s book that will allow visitors to navigate the same work page by page on each other; we shot shit; and we liked to have some drinks. I had great respect for him as an art- screen. An important extension of the exhibition at the Henry is the presentation of Cha’s classic installation of film and video, Exilée, a poetic Askevold Chafusion of media exploring the roots of exile through memory and language, ist and as a person. He was a true poet. David made my life better, and I will miss him dearly. both personal and universal. The staging of Exilée at Richard Hugo House, on Capitol Hill, is specially constructed for this presentation, based on Cha’s — MIKE KELLEY original design. AbsoluteArts.com from Artforum, Summer 2008

401940-2008 1951-1982 everything is political Kate Ericson, 39, Installation Artist

New York Times, November 1, 1995 Adrian Searle writes: and their financiers, he Gnomic, bald, funny and reserved a special place, Kate Witte Ericson, an artist who collaborated with her husband, wise, Leon Golub was an in a lengthy series of Mel Ziegler, on indoor and outdoor installation works noted for indefatigable presence in the coruscating portraits. His New York art world. In paintings seemed to skin their beauty, complexity and social awareness, died on Sunday at interviews, he and his wife these guys alive, but had her home in Milanville, Pa. She was 39 and also had a home in were a wonderful double act, a tactile quality of awful, Manhattan. a reminder of an America sinewy delicacy. with a conscience. His was a fierce and wry vision of the In the late 1980s, Golub The cause was brain cancer, her husband said. world. It was also - in the once sold a group of his best sense - a terrible vision. death squad paintings to inMs. Ericson was born in Manhattan in 1955. She earned a bachelor inHis paintings told as much. Charles Saatchi. When I of fine arts degree from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1978 and a There was something interviewed the artist at primordial about Golub’s art. the ICA, he said he hoped master’s from the California Institute of the Arts in 1982. She and It has Etruscan painting in it, Lucas Cranach, the paintings might get under the collector’s skin, or Mr. Ziegler met as undergraduates and began working together in Francisco de Goya, newspaper and TV newsreel at least “fuck him up”. Saatchi went on to dispose of 1978, developing a style that featured provocative accumulations images, details drawn from pornography and gun these paintings, which are among Golub’s finest. The magazines. There was also tenderness in his paintings. group of works he showed at Documenta in Germany, memoryof materials and ideas, many of them involved with architecture, memoryAn early sphinx, painted in Italy in the 1950s, still has in 2002, were wild paintings of old age, and came as a American history and the economy. fallen leaves from a Roman winter stuck in the enamel shock to younger generations of artists unfamiliar with paint. He went on to paint images from a world which his work. One of their first solo shows, at the Los Angeles Institute of was both nearer and further from home: peasants and soldiers in Vietnam, mercenaries in El Salvador and At home, he and Nancy spent the days after 9/11 Contemporary Art in 1986, consisted of a display of all the wood Nicaragua, Americans in grubby suits stuffing a body besieged by phone calls from around the world. Leon necessary to raise a house, with each piece carved with a phrase or into the trunk of a car. He painted street corners from was greatly loved, even as he railed at the world’s of ofwhence no one might return. injustice, his bad back and feet, the bastards who run adage about house or home. At the end of the exhibition, the wood the country. Whenever I visited, the food came on was sold and used in the construction of a house. He painted both the torturers and the tortured. Golub paper plates from the deli downstairs (it saved time); once told me he saw little difference between the tours of the studios were obligatory, as was scurrilous Ms. Ericson and Mr. Ziegler exhibited their work in many shows in oppressors and the oppressed: they were all, equally, gossip, libellous conversation, a modicum of shouting. victims. He painted how coercion worked. Certain The best part of him never grew old. Leon was an the United States and abroad, including the 1989 Whitney Biennial. images might now remind us of the trophy unforgettable man, a great mentor, a big-hearted kateTheir most recent New York exhibition was in 1993 at the Michael Leonphotographs which have come out of Abu Ghraib jail. painter of unforgiving images, whose worth has yet to Golub knew that some things never change, that be fully acknowledged. Klein Gallery in SoHo. suffering is perpetual. But for those who ordered “the wet work”, the generals and dictators, the politicians The Guardian, Friday 13 August 2004 In addition to her husband, Ms. Ericson is survived by her parents, H. A. and Alma Ericson, of Norwalk, Conn., and a brother, Scott, ericsonof Arlington, Tex. Golub

421955-1995 1922-2004 everything is political You Can Take It With You (The public life of Felix Gonzalez-Torres) by Carl George

December 1 marks the 10th anniversary of Day Without Art, an event that commemorates the life and work of hundreds of artists killed by AIDS. Among these was New York-based artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose public billboards, candy spill sculptures and take-home multiple prints forged a charged connection between public dissemination and private ownership, popular discourse and rarified art theory, between the daily lives of gay Americans and the right-wing maelstrom sweeping the country in the epidemic’s early years.

The last time I saw my friends Felix and his lover, Ross Laycock, together, was as a huge pile of candy on a museum floor in New York City. The total weight of the thousands of shimmering, silver, foil-wrapped candies was equal to that of the two men combined. Visitors to this installation that Felix created for the Whitney Museum’s 1991 Biennial Exhibition, were invited to take pieces of the candy, and as they did, the pile slowly dwindled — a metaphor for the gradual dissipation of two lives. “I wanted to make an artwork that could disappear,” Felix said in 1995, a year before his death. Much of his artwork addressed this simple idea – the stacked multiple prints that museum-goers carried away, the text-based “portraits” made up of in concurrent names and dates, and of course, the candy spills. Felix called these “informational fragments,” “private revelations in a public context.”

The first time I saw Ross and Felix together was at a cocktail party in Manhattan in 1983. The two had met a week before and were already deeply in love. It was obvious that Ross, an inseparable friend of mine since our teenage years in Canada, had finally found a man of substance. Ross and Felix’s intense relationship played itself out within the context of Reagan America, a time of great difficulty for many people, in particular gay men and lesbians. It was also, for some of us, a time of great creativity and profound personal change, of vibrant activism centered on a seemingly uncontrollable epidemic. Of his art, Felix defiantly stated, “This memorywork is about my rejection of the imposed and established order.” in I remember marching with Ross and Felix in the 1989 New York Gay Pride parade — Ross by then thin and fatigued, Felix screaming at the Christian Coalition counter-demonstrators and me running to find bottled water for Ross’s medication. As the marchers spilled onto Christopher Street, near the Stonewall Bar where riots 20 years earlier had signaled the launch of the gay rights movement, we passed under a massive billboard that Felix had installed as a commemoration to the event. The billboard placed our lives squarely in a long history of struggle against misunderstanding and aggression.

Ross died a year and a half later. He asked to be cremated and to have his ashes separated into 100 sealed of plastic bags. That way Felix could leave bits of Ross, his “only audience,” his “public of one,” wherever he memory traveled. Felix scattered traces of Ross throughout his artwork in the ensuing years before Felix, too, succumbed to a barrage of AIDS-related illnesses in 1996. Ross appears as one of a pair of synchronized wall clocks “Perfect Lovers” whose batteries will expire at different times; as a single light bulb on a cord titled “March 5,” Ross’s birthday; as a billboard photograph of a clean white bed with two pillows bearing the impressions of lovers’ heads.

Felix stated that “each of us perceives things according to who and how we are at particular junctures, whose terms are always shifting.” In Felix’s work, his personal history is inextricably linked to the history that all of us share in the gay community. His artwork represents stolen lives, lost friends, and a cruelly felixuncaring national political leadership. It also conjures up memories of two robust and beautiful young of lovers, walking together in the snow on a cold Canadian winter day or fighting over sections of the gonzalez-Sunday New York Times and laughing hysterically ­ always laughing. Donald torres Judd

441957-1996 1928-1994 everything is political As you know by now, Sol LeWitt just died yesterday. Sol was a personal friend who is singularly responsible for my career. I knew he had been sick for a long time, and for the last year I had not been able to talk to him directly, because his cancer got worse. But I sent him email messages reminding him how important he was to me. I taught a class here at CalArts titled “Sol LeWitt” last year. A friend told me this morning that he died and I was crushed. inIn 1976 he introduced my work to both John Weber and in Leo Castelli who both wound up representing me. And he had assisted me so many times financially when I was going through rough moments (and there were many) either by buy- memorying work or just sending me money no strings attached. He memory also made his loft in New York available to me anytime I needed to use it. Sol was the most generous person I know. ofHis passing leaves an enormous hole for me personally and of I dare say to the world of contemporary art. solThanks for reading my small tribute. ana lewittCharles Gaines, via email, April 9, 2007 mendieta

461928-2007 1948-1985everything is political A Celebration of Life and Art and one in fine art, taught and influenced many fellow artists among them David Hammons and John Outterbridge. Together with Purifoy these artists took art into Noah Purifoy, internationally renowned assemblage sculptor, died on March 5 in the streets and to community people. an accident at his home in Joshua Tree, age 86. Noah Purifoy said he would like to be remembered as an artist who made art for the sake of change and strove to In 1976, then Governor Jerry Brown appointed Purifoy as a founding Member of understand art and its role in the world. He always said: “I hope my work the California Arts Council (CAC) where he served for eleven years. There he provides inspiration for a person to do today what they couldn’t do yesterday, no helped design, administer and fund Artists in the Schools, Artists in Communities matter what it is. That’s art. That’s the fundamental creative process and it’s and Artists in Social Institutions. The CAC was the first to adopt these innovative something that changes people and empowers them.” Artists and friends in programs. They continue to serve as a role model for the rest of the country and Joshua Tree are planning a memorial event at Noah’s art site in March. The remain funded today. In 1987, Purifoy resigned from the Council and resumed foundation will announce its plans at a later date. For further information and making art, moving from the dense urban Los Angeles scene to the spacious rural details, contact the foundation office at (213) 382-7516. The Noah Purifoy community of Joshua Tree, California at the invitation of artist Debbie Brewer. Foundation, www.noahpurifoy.com, established in 1998 to preserve Purifoy’s He went there primarily because he wanted to do an earth piece and could not outdoor desert art museum in Joshua Tree, will continue to move forward and find adequate space in Los Angeles. It took him ten years to save enough money ensure his legacy as an artist and creative genius. to do the earth piece. In the interim he started working on smaller pieces of outdoor sculpture. “The desert,” Purifoy said, “permits you to build with the Noah Purifoy was born in Snow Hill Alabama on August 17, 1917. His parents breadth and the width and the depth of the piece.” With the desert as his studio, encouraged him to pursue an education and he graduated from High School in its big skies and flat empty spaces, Joshua Tree gave Purifoy the creative freedom 1935 and continued his studies at Alabama State Teachers College in Montgom- to expand his repertoire by developing flexible, see-through forms along with ery where he majored in history and social studies and earned a B.S. degree in sturdy architectural structures. Social Work in 1939. Due to the social and political realities of the times, he never got an opportunity to teach history or social studies but instead taught A Retrospective entitled Noah Purifoy: Outside and in the Open traveled wood shop at a High School in Tuscaloosa from 1939-42. At the advent of the nationally and was a critical and public success in 1997. Richard Candida Smith, Second World War, he enlisted in the Navy and served in the South Pacific as a intellectual historian in American Studies, in the retrospective catalog essay Seebee until 1946. Upon his honorable discharge from the armed forces he noted: “Purifoy has spent a lifetime trying to make us ponder how we respond by promptly enrolled at Atlanta University and in 1948, received a M.S.W. in Social pushing us to rethink the nature of the objects that surround us. He issues a Work. For the next few years Mr. Purifoy worked as a Social Worker, first in spiritual challenge. He asks us to let go of our certainty that the world is primarily Cleveland at the Cuyahooga County Child Welfare Board, and then he moved to a place where we do things to achieve goals and get ahead.” In a review in Art in Los Angeles and landed a position at the Los Angeles County Hospital. Almost America, art critic Joe Lewis concluded: “Trying to balance community activism immediately,in Noah became frustrated and disillusioned with the nature of Social and art production is an arduous task. There are few success stories and even in Work and abruptly quit his job and enrolled at the Chinouard School of Art. His fewer guiding lights. African-American or not, now Purifoy’s time has come.” serious focus on art making began in 1951 and by 1954, when he received a B.A. in art, he had begun to formulate his ideas about the relationship of art to self, Purifoy’s work is represented in the collections of the Corcoran in Washington; community, society, and culture. Oakland Museum, California; Illinois Bell Telephone Company, Chicago; and the Whitney Museum, New York as well as in numerous private collections and Purifoy co-founded and directed the Watts Towers Art Center in the 1960s. The universities in the United States, Europe and Africa. Noah received awards and fires of the Watts rebellion in August 1965 dramatically forged a new direction recognition from among others: The Andy Warhol Foundation; The Flintridge and heightened awareness. Purifoy along with artist/musician Judson Powell Foundation, Visual Artist Award, Pasadena , California 1997-1998. Catalog; the ventured into the riot-torn streets of Watts and collected charred wood and melted Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 1997; the neonmemory signs. Purifoy then recruited six other professional artists, consciously Lannan Foundation, Getty Trust Fund for Visual Arts, California Community memory including whites, and created sixty-six separate works of art. The exhibition Foundation to support the California African American Museum Foundation entitled “Sixty-six Signs of Neon” was both an ambassador for community arts sponsored Noah Purifoy Touring Retrospective, Outside and in the Open, and an eyewitness to an inflamed community’s anger. It traveled to nine universi- 1997-1998. Catalog; Florsheim Art Fund, Florida, 1996; Gottlieb Foundation, ties in California from 1966-1968. When the tour ended, Purifoy tried to find a New York, 1995; and the Pollack Krasner Foundation, New York, 1993 permanent home for the works without success. A majority of the works returned to the junk heap with the exception of Purifoy’s “Sir Watts,” a piece that became Noah Purifoy is survived by four sisters, Mrs. Ophelia Jeffries, Mrs. Mary Lewis, emblematic of the Watts community rising from the ashes to redefine itself and its Mrs. Lucille McDaniel, and Ms. Esther Purifoy, all of Cleveland Ohio. aspirations. In the catalog for “Sixty-six Signs of Neon, “ Purifoy shared his philosophy of art: “We wish to establish that there must be more to art than the The Noah Purifoy Foundation preserves and maintains Purifoy’s site for public creative act, more than the sensation of beauty, ugliness, color, form, light, sound, appreciation and participation. The foundation mission also seeks to promote darkness,of intrigue, wonderment, uncanniness, bitter, sweet, black, white, life and public recognition and appreciation of the values Noah Purifoy’s work has of death. There must be therein a ME and a You, who is affected permanently. Art of embodied over four decades as an artist and educator. Your tax-deductible itself is of little value if in its relatedness it does not effect change…a change in contributions are welcome. the behavior of human beings… through communication…and communication is not possible without the establishment of equality among individuals, one to one.”N During this period, Purifoy,oah who held two academic degrees in social work arlene Purifoy raven A BOOK FLOWN BOOK FLOWN A A These fragmentations only mean that These fragmentations only mean that I am fragmented; I am fragmented; that as I symbolize what you say and agree that as I symbolize what you say and agree can I then leave you can I then leave you to set these lines in order, to set these lines in order, assemble them into a book assemble them into a book and, by the first strong winds, and, by the first strong winds, permit its leaves to be torn from cover. permit its leaves to be torn from cover. Let them fly high Let them fly high and, like leaves light and, like leaves light into the lap of Universe; into the lap of Universe; separate of and by themselves separate of and by themselves within, without, complete, yet incomplete. within, without, complete, yet incomplete. Noah Purifoy Noah Purifoy “66 Signs of Neon” “66 Signs of Neon” Angeles, 1966 Angeles, 1966 Los Los

481917-2004 1944-2006everything is political Gran Fury talks to Douglas Crimp, ArtForum, April, 2003 having real resources and opportunities and a platform from MN: The director of the Biennale tried to dismiss the controversy which to speak. This brought about a crisis of conscience in by saying, “Oh, the penis. That’s just kitsch.” In the meantime DOUGLAS CRIMP: One of your members, Mark Simpson, is no discussing how to articulate the group because the stakes had Cicciolina was back there being fucked by Jeff Koons. longer with us. Perhaps we can officially dedicate our remarks here Nancy Spero's death means been raised. to his memory. When did Mark die? TK: It was funny, we made Jeff Koons look just decorative and DC: What was your first high-stakes opportunity? irrelevant next to something authentic that rippled through the art TOM KALIN: Mark died of AIDS on November 10, 1996. world–a situation that then got quickly reversed, sadly. LM: It was Kissing Doesn’t Kill, which was part of a public-art the art world loses its conscience DC: Okay, let’s begin with a work that seems appropriately sad. Ten project called “Art Against AIDS On the Road” [1989]. Within a DC: Here’s perhaps the inevitable question: After achieving such years ago a few of you in Gran Fury made a poster with four year or so, our poster was on buses and subway platforms in San success, why did you stop? A vital, energetic artist who could be funny as well as macabre, questions, the last of which was, “When was the last time you cried?” Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Washington, DC. Up until Was that the final work done under the auspices of the group? JL: We stopped because there were questions that we wanted to then, we were still having a dialogue with the whole membership address that we couldn’t find a means to address. Toward the end Nancy Spero never lost her curiosity in the world LORING McALP1N: Well, after that we did the flyer Good Luck… of ACT UP. When we presented this project, suddenly there were we talked about doing something about the fact that after nearly Miss You for “Temporarily Possessed” at the New Museum. That three hundred people commenting on it; we just realized that ten years of AIDS awareness the infection rates for gay men were was meant as our farewell. we couldn’t work with that much feedback. still going up. We found that our way of working was inadequate DC: That was 1995. You did the four questions in 93. Do you MN: We decided we wanted to function independently, but we to the situation, and we couldn’t change our way of working. Nancy Spero’s death on Sunday took a great artistic conscience from the world. The last time I visited her in remember the other three questions? asked ACT UP for a percentage of the profits from sales of T-shirts MN: We tried to invent new strategies. We tried to collaborate with with our images printed on them. Of course this didn’t include AVRAM FINKELSTEIN: “Do you resent people with AIDS? Do you the Guerrilla Girls and with PONY [Prostitutes of New York], but the LaGuardia Place studio she shared with her partner Leon Golub – Leon died in 2004 – she looked frail the SILENCE = DEATH T-shirts, since that wasn’t a Gran Fury trust HIV-negatives? Have you given up hope for a cure?” The those collaborations didn’t prove to be successful. design, but it included Read My Lips, which sold a lot. They agreed, conversation leading to that work was largely driven by Mark but we didn’t get the money from them on a regular basis. RV: I left the collective a while before it disbanded. One reason was Simpson. We were grappling with a problem we had at that later but indomitable, though surrounded by a galaxy of medications, and getting about only with extreme that I was working in communities of color, and I remember a stage– trying to put very complex things into a very concise text. TK: Well, there was a little bad blood. discussion about the bus-shelter poster we did that showed white This work was a response to our frustration at being unable to ROBERT VAZQUEZ: I remember that well, because I was at-large women. I argued that if you use white women, only white women difficulty. Cursed with arthritis, over the years she had developed strategies to make her art, getting studio articulate the complexity of the issues. We decided to just go bare representative from the floor of ACT UP, and I would hear will pay attention to it. But we went with the picture of the white bones and say how we felt, which had never been our primary focus. discussions about Gran Fury: “Every other committee of ACT UP women, and I thought, “I need to move on now,” because my politics TK: I remember that Mark always had a yellow legal pad in his is open; why is it that with Gran Fury we don’t know who they are had changed. assistants to cut and stamp out the stencils she made, printing them on paper, on walls, and even as a house on which he wrote all sorts of things. And those questions and their membership is closed?” It was counter-intuitive for the MN: It’s interesting that you mention that project, Robert, because were among the things he wrote. They were about feeling alienated ACT UP membership to have a closed group. if somebody asked me what was the final project Gran Fury did, maypole of severed heads. This last was one of the most memorable works at the 2007 Venice Biennale, as someone living with AIDS and about feeling less well physically. DC: In other words, Gran Fury began as an ad hoc committee of I would have said Women Don’t Get AIDS. They Just Die From It [1992], That, and the fact that the visibility of the crisis and the AIDS ACT UP members, then broke away from the larger organization, which was the last snappy one-liner we came up with. And as activist demonstrations had faded away. just as, later, members of the ACT UP Treatment and Data disappointed as we were by that project, the fact is that the issue we greeting viewers as they entered the Italian pavilion where the keynote show was held. Spero said the work, AF: Up to this point, the only emotion we had directly articulated Committee split off from the larger group to form TAG, the were trying to address–the failure of the CDC’s AIDS definition to was anger. But it’s funny that you should even mention this work, Treatment Action Group, and the PWA Housing Committee include the diseases women were getting–changed after we did that Maypole/Take No Prisoners, was “all about victimage”, though its grotesque aspect was leavened by her wit. Douglas, because, unlike a lot of the other things we did, there was evolved into Housing Works. My memory is that other artists and poster; the definition of AIDS expanded to include many more no response at all to that piece. graphic designers in ACT UP became resentful of the status Gran illnesses specific to women. I’m not saying we can take credit for Fury had attained in the art world. And in the end it is certainly the change, but our poster was part of the activist work that LM: Well, we were addressing a different audience. It was really unjust that ACT UP’S graphic style is very often credited to Gran pressured the CDC to change the definition. directed toward our own community. We were trying to acknowledge Fury alone, when in fact many others who were never members something but not judge it, to ask, “What’s happening now? Where TK: Our disbanding also corresponds to the growing efficacy of of Gran Fury contributed to the invention of that style. Often in art this sort of talk is mere platitude, but Spero’s work was determined and unerring. During the did our anger go? What are we going to do?” groups like TAG and the introduction of protease inhibitors. The MN: Just as a footnote to what you’re saying, Douglas, one of the horrible irony is that literally the day Mark Simpson died, I came TK: In my memory, you all went out with buckets of wheat paste, things that really made a big difference in the legitimization of home after taking care of his body and there was the New York Times 1960s she focused on the Vietnam War: helicopters whined overhead, bombers emptied their loads on an just like we did in 1988 with AIDS: 1 in 61, the first work we did with Gran Fury is the article that you published in the AIDS issue of Magazine with Andrew Sullivan’s cover story about the end of AIDS. the name Gran Fury. October [Winter 1987]. You made the argument for why what we Mark had tried protease inhibitors, but he had a staph infection, undefeated populace. She developed a cast of characters and a repertoire of images which she repeated DC:in How did Gran Fury come into being as a collective? were doing was legitimate in the context of art. and they didn’t work. And now supposedly people don’t die of AIDS in anymore, so Mark’s death sadly came at the moment of the final MICHAEL NESLINE: It happened by degrees. Bill Olander, the TK: Our work is also indebted to the appropriation work of the dosing of that earlier chapter in AIDS treatment. curator at the New Museum, came to an ACT UP meeting with a early ’80s that you wrote about. But it’s true, the October article and recombined in different ways every time they were shown. These included burlesque troupes of ancient proposal that ACT UP use the museum s window on Broadway for eventually led to things like the Venice Biennale, to a kind of MM: The attitude toward AIDS changed when it went from being a a visual demonstration. At the end of the meeting, everyone who institutional exposure that probably wouldn’t have happened crisis situation to a chronic, manageable disease. was interested met in the back corner of the Lesbian and Gay otherwise. We went from T-shirts and posters to billboards and dildo dancers, pagan and Neolithic goddesses, Amazon warriors and phalanxes of female, spear-wielding DC: I think you’re making a leap that is historically inaccurate. At Community Center. international exhibitions. the time that you did the final poster with the four questions, things DC: The result was Let the Record Show…. This was 1987. How did MM: The aftermath of that has been really weird. I’m still active were not getting better. It would be two long years before the hunters; even Superwoman was in there somewhere. Her figures danced and raved around the walls of such a complex work get formulated by such a large group? in the art world. I teach in the United States and Europe, and I’m introduction of protease inhibitors, and not only had things become constantly asked how we put together our art collective. It always extremely complex, but many of us were feeling terrible despair. TK: I remember there was a kind of bullet-style accumulation of galleries and museums worldwide, swarming in a cacophonous, mischievous, floor-to-ceiling choreography. blows my mind, because we came together with such a sense of The enthusiasm with which we had approached what we were doing political points compiled from clippings people brought in from the urgency, with goals that had nothing to do with wanting to make in the early years of ACT UP couldn’t be sustained, because death New York Times. The main idea came from demos where we yelled art or to change the way people look at art. was taking too great a toll. Also, we had brought about a lot of “shame” at public figures who were doing nothing about AIDS. So change up to a certain point, but then stasis set in. we decided we’d single out public figures who had made outrageous DC: Probably very few people understand what it is to make art statementsmemory about AIDS, show a photograph of each of them, and collaboratively within the compass of an activist movement. MN: If you remember what the initial goals of ACT UP were–to memory There was a memorable series devoted to Antonin Artaud, which included the phrase: “Artaud I couldn't cast their words in concrete. And then these AIDS criminals They seem to believe that Gran Fury was a group of artists who publicize the crisis, to get drugs into bodies, and to end the AIDS somehow got connected to the Nuremberg trials. It probably went contributed to AIDS activism or to ACT UP, but in fact it’s the crisis–we accomplished two of the three. The third still remains back to the SILENCE = DEATH poster with the pink triangle. other way around. All of us were members of ACT UP, and that’s to be achieved. have borne to know you alive your despair”. Her art could also be riotously funny and sexy as well as why we were able to accomplish what we did. More importantly, AF: This is the way ACT UP functioned on every level. People would JL: I also want to make it clear that the dissolution of Gran Fury it’s why we did what we did in the first place. bring news items to the meetings. They would throw out snippets wasn’t quick, and it wasn’t happy in any way. Our decision to stop macabre, and she made many works which dealt with female jouissance and eroticism, pleasure and pain. from articles, and whatever resonated became the issue we’d LM: We began at an unusual historical moment. AIDS was turning didn’t come as a relief. It was the result of frustration with our organize around. It was an organic process, and Gran Fury worked into a huge catastrophe, and there was no adequate public inability to find a means to continue working. that way for a long time. response. So there was a space for some kind of voice to raise Spero was a spearhead of feminist art in the 1960s, calling for greater recognition of women artists and LM: I think what we accomplished was to drive a wedge into public questions. None of us had any doubts that we had to be there. DONALD MOFFETT: The form developed in the same collaborative discourse and open a space where AIDS could be talked about in all way. The issues unfolded, and the form followed. AF: But as soon as we realized we had a voice, we started to mock its dimensions. By the time we stopped, that was happening. Maybe women in the New York art world. A recent show, Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution, which I saw in ourselves. Every so often we would be cackling, “Oh, that’s so our function was just to initiate that discussion–to expect us to last MARLENE McCARTY: Absolutely. Someone would say, “I know how Gran Fury.” until the discussion is over is absurd. to make a photo mural.” Somebody else would say, “I have access to New York a couple of years ago, revisited those turbulent times, and Spero's place in them. It should have anof LED.” LM: We simply realized the extent to which we were using DC: On top of all the other horrifying events of the present–includ- of institutional power. ing the Bush administration’s rush to war–AIDS here and now is TK: I remember volunteering to make the photo mural of the still a crisis. And nobody talks about it. Nuremberg trials because I knew how to make murals by ironing TK: I don’t think we were being ironic. It was just a question of come to Europe. paper to canvas with glue. I remember Don Ruddy at another meeting the tensions that arose from having a larger platform and still MN: That’s not entirely true. Just this week the newspapers cutting rubber letters with an X-Acto blade to cast the sentences in trying to speak effectively about urgent concerns. reported that the rate of new infections among young African- concrete. The process was additive, like a collage. It just turned out American males in the United States has inched up by a percentage DM: What goes unsaid is that the institutional support was to have a coherent appearance, which made it seem much more point. The information is there, and that’s a huge difference from instrumental for us, because from the very beginning, we decided planned than it really was. the time that ACT UP started. we weren’t going to say, “We can’t do this because there’s no Spero was a vital, energetic artist. She never lost her curiosity in the world, nor her sense of anger at its MN: Well, Mark Simpson actually knew what was going on. He money.” We started out really small with things that we could AF: But the urgency is not there. described to me what the window was going to look like before it afford on our own, and then the money started coming in for real, DM: What I hear now is a rhetorical neglect coming out of the White injustices, and she found a way of making work which combined the graphic with installation, relevance and existed. and it facilitated a continuation of our work, so this can’t just be House that is very similar to where we were fifteen years ago. a discussion about the ironies of what we were doing. MM: Each time we gathered to work on the window, a different DC: And many of the things that we accomplished as activists we timelessness. She and Golub were partners for over half a century. I knew them since my first visits to New constellation of people showed up. It wasn’t until later that we TK: I only meant to address this bigger point. The collective would now have to fight for all over again. For example, ADAP [AIDS decided to form a collective. proceeded from activist concerns, and the fact that we were in mark Drug Assistance Program] funding is being cut all over the country. Nancy sync with the art world and able to use those resources was LM: When we were disassembling the window, there was a And when was the last time any of you saw prevention information York in the late 1970s, and they were a unique and unguardedly generous double act. I owe something of great. But at a certain point, we began to have the opportunity discussion about what to do next. in, say, a gay bar? to address issues further away from what we knew best. For TK: We had a meeting and said, “Let’s continue this.” The poster instance, in Montreal, with the piece for the opening of the new RV: With the introduction of protease inhibitors we didn’t see my formation to this couple, who I once described as the conscience of the art world. And so they were. AIDS: building for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Je me souviens people die as quickly. But in fact people of color are dying just as 1 in 61 came out of that meeting. It was then that we took the name [Never forget, 1992], I remember discussions about what it meant quickly as before. With the introduction of protease inhibitors the Gran Fury, which was the Plymouth model of choice for the New to make a piece in French talking about French-Canadian identity. focus of people doing AIDS policy work shifted to AIDS in Africa, York Police Department. But that group was still larger than the and with their attention elsewhere, horrible policies like mandatory LM: We also had a long discussion about whether we should be in one around this table: It included Don Ruddy, who later died of name reporting began to happen here. the Venice Biennale at all. We had wanted to hang banners in the Adrian Searle, guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 October 2009 15.24 BST AIDS; Anthony Viti was involved in that discussion, I’m sure Todd street, remember? And they said, “No, you can’t do that.” And DC: To return to the question of irony, today Gran Fury is Haynes was involved, Mark Harrington. there was a moment when we wondered whether it was enough remembered less among activists than within the art world. It’s not LM: Steve Barker. The group was variable up until after we made for us to just be inside an art institution, but we decided it was a for nothing that this is an interview for Artforum and not for a the posters for “Nine Days of Protest” that included Read My Lips public enough venue to merit doing it. magazine about queer politics. I guess we probably have to admit [1988]. that the resting place of Gran Fury is the museum. simpsonAF: It was also an opportunity to talk about condom use in the Spero DC: How did a shifting group of people become a collective with a belly of the beast, to confront the Catholic Church on its home MM: But in fact the final resting place is not the museum, it’s the fixed membership? territory. Public Library. JOHN LINDELL: Since initially the meetings were open, anybody MM: I want to go to bat for Venice. We cannot forget how much DC: I meant the museum metaphorically. But yes, let’s be clear that could come, but it became frustrating. press came out of that piece, which was far more public than the Gran Fury Collection is in the public domain and available in a billboard would have been. That work got AIDS on the cover the Manuscripts and Archives Division of the New York Public MM: You couldn’t move forward; you always had to backtrack and of Express. Library. regroup. RV: But we’re being disingenuous when we say that we planned to DM: That legacy is an educational resource for another generation. JL: There was a debate about whether we should be open or closed, send a huge photograph of an erection to Venice, intended as a After all, we didn’t come our of nowhere. We dragged the history and we finally decided closed. provocation to the Pope, and worried that no one would notice. of this kind of art into the ’80s and the early ’90s. And it will be TK: We went from being wheat-pasting hooligans to suddenly We knew very well what we were doing. reinvented again. 50 -1996 1926-2009everything is political Review/Art; Bob Thompson’s Figures and Abstractions, Religion and Myth By ROBERTA SMITH Marcia Tucker, Her first job was as a secretary in the department of prints New York Times, February 2, 1990 a forceful curator who responded and drawings at the Museum of Modern Art; she soon quit The painter Bob Thompson died in 1966 at the age of 28, having spent less than a decade getting all he to being fired from the Whitney because she was asked to sharpen too many pencils. She could out of the New York art scene and the great museums of Italy and France, and putting it to Museum of American Art by went on to earn a master’s degree in art history from the immediate use. It’s hard to say if he reached absolute maturity as an artist; the exhibition of his work founding the New Museum of Institute of Fine Arts at New York University and worked as from the early 1960’s at the Vanderwoude Tananbaum Gallery is often uneven. Still, his art brims Contemporary Art, died on an editorial associate at Art News magazine. Tuesday at her home in Santa with talent, fearlessness and the refusal to close off any options. She also supported herself by cataloging private collections, Barbara, Calif. She was 66. including those of Alfred H. Barr Jr., the first director of the Ms. Tucker learned several years Museum of Modern Art, and the independently wealthy The more than 20 canvases and gouache studies here show that Thompson was equally at home with ago that she had cancer, but a spokeswoman for the New painter William N. Copley. She was especially close with Mr. the past and the present, equally at ease with abstraction and representation, with Christianity and Museum did not specify the cause of death. Barr and his wife, Margaret Scolari Barr. mythology. He borrowed freely from Gauguin and Goya, Piero and Masaccio, Ensor and Munch to tell In establishing the New Museum in 1977 when she was 37, Ms. Tucker acquired her surname Tucker in an early marriage. tales of sin and salvation, of love and violence. Monsters, winged creatures and masked faces abound Ms. Tucker continued the proactive impulses of an older Survivors include her current husband, Dean McNeil; their in his art, yet he strove to be unquestionably contemporary, an ambition he shared with other generation of women who helped create the foremost daughter, Ruby; and her brother, Warren Silverman. modern art museums in New York: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller figurative artists like Alex Katz, David Park, Lester Johnson and Red Grooms. In 1969 Ms. Tucker became a curator of painting and of the Museum of Modern Art, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney sculpture at the Whitney. She almost immediately helped and Juliana Force of the Whitney and Hilla Rebay of the A black man in a largely white art world, Thompson gave his figures a rainbow of skin tones. point the museum in a new direction with “Anti-Illusion: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Procedures/Materials,” the first large show of Process Art, or Sometimes the artist seems to be simply applying the bright pastels of early Renaissance painting But Ms. Tucker, who was born in Brooklyn, came of age in the Post-Minimalism, in an American museum, organized with indirectly to his figures, not unlike a latter-day large-scale Fauve. Sometimes he seems to be wrestling, in1960’s and was a product of her time. She said that her James Monte, another Whitney curator. allegorically, with the demons of race and bias that afflicted his own time and country. This is perhaps motto in founding the museum was, “Act first, think later — Her subsequent shows included surveys of the painters James clearest in the rougher, less resolved paintings from 1960 – “The Assistance of Women,” “Bacchanal” that way you have something to think about.” Rosenquist, Joan Mitchell and Al Held, and the Post- and “The Entombment”– in which the figures come in a range of hues that is intensely decorative yet Her encounters with feminism in college became the basis of Minimalists Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman and Richard a political activism that permeated much of what she did. Tuttle. The harsh reviews of the ephemeral, hard-to-find feels true to life. But it was balanced by an omnivorous passion for art. In the artworks in the Tuttle show eventually led to her dismissal in early 1970’s she belonged to the Redstockings, a feminist 1977. As he progressed, Thompson’s compositions began to lock together in a blunt, uncomplicated way, memory memorygroup. In the 1980’s it was often rumored that she belonged That same year, after assembling a board of trustees that like the pieces of an old-fashioned wood puzzle that have been cut and painted by hand. Trees, figures to the gorilla-masked Guerrilla Girls, feminist watchdogs of included the philanthropist Vera List, she opened the New and fields are given the same weight in this visual scheme; top is equal to bottom. Certain works, like the art world. Later she helped form an a cappella singing Museum on Fifth Avenue at 14th Street, on the ground floor group called the Art Mob (singing alto) and also sometimes “Fallout Shelter” or the comical “Perseus and Andromeda,” almost ask to be looked at upside down, of a building owned by what is now the New School. performed as a stand-up comedian. making one understand what Thompson learned from the all-over fields of Jackson Pollock, Willem At the New Museum she emphasized inclusive group shows In a sense she made the New Museum, which she ran for 22 de Kooning and perhaps most importantly Clyfford Still. with provocative titles like “ ‘Bad’ Painting” and “Bad Girls,” years as director, in her own image: a somewhat chaotic, insisted that the museum guards be knowledgeable about idealistic place where the nature of art was always in the art on view and planned to de-accession the collection ofSometimes his images are so abstract and so colorful that it takes time to realize that a very specific ofquestion, exhibitions were a form of consciousness raising every decade to keep the museum young. She served as series story is being told, then a minute more to see that color is doing much of the telling. and mistakes were inevitable. editor of “Documentary Sources in Contemporary Art,” five She also wanted the museum to welcome art that was anthologies of theory and criticism. excluded elsewhere because it was difficult, out of fashion, In the reprise of Titian’s “Noli Me Tangere” that Thompson painted in 1961, the figure of Christ is Her most notorious show, “Have You Attacked America unsalable or made by artists who were not white or male or bright red. The red ignites a flat landscape that marches skyward in bands of brown, green, yellow Today?,” caused garbage cans to be thrown through the straight. and deep blue, and connects the figure to the orange tomb in the distance, from which He has just plate-glass window of the museum, which had by then The daughter of a trial lawyer, Ms. Tucker was born Marcia moved to Broadway in SoHo. (The museum is constructing bobrisen. But the color also sets off a string of associations that gives the scene a non-Western intensity, marciaSilverman and grew up in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and then a new $35 million building on the Lower East Side, which is and more than a hint of a modern consciousness. New Jersey in a household that took politics and culture expected to open late next year. Until then it is sharing seriously. Drawn to art from an early age, she studied theater gallery space with the Chelsea Art Museum.) The red pushes Christ’s holy radiance toward the heat of radiation or intense sunburn, adding an and art at Connecticut College, where she earned a Bachelor John Walsh, then director of the J. Paul Getty Museum in of Arts in 1961 and spent her junior year at the École du almost humorous twist to His admonition “Noli Me Tangere”’ (“Don’t Touch Me”) – to the kneeling Malibu, Calif., described Ms. Tucker in especially apt terms in Louvre in Paris. Mary Magdalene. The red also evokes more sensuous deities, like the bright blue body of the god a 1993 article in The New York Times: “There’s always been Shiva in Indian miniatures. And of course, red is the color of the devil and of the forces of evil that a social conscience in Marcia that’s impatient and results in thompson tuckera kind of alertness you can just read across her forehead like a Christ overcame and that He invited his followers to overcome. Finally, in contrast to the pink skin of Jenny Holzer sign.” the Magdalene, red makes Christ’s race ambiguous. These several possible reading may make Christ more human to some eyes and more transcendent to others, but mainly they speak for Bob Thompson’s understanding of the power of color and its ability to transform old into new.

521937-1966 1940-2006everything is political 54 everything is political I was born into the small university community of Wilmington College in 1965, a school founded by My name is Daniel Joseph Martinez. Quakers in Wilmington, Ohio. I grew up the daughter of a high school shop teacher in a community of • mainly farmers and assembly workers in auto factories. From the time I was a small child early morning coffee conversations took place at our 1970’s orange Formica bar about unions, family, politics and fishing. I was born in Los Angeles in 1957. I lived in government housing and was abducted For most of the year this part of the country was covered in a perpetual cloudbank and we lived for the by aliens when I was ten. I was cloned and put back in place of myself, except it was not me. summer months. On June 22, 1969, an oil slick in the Cuyahoga River caught on fire in Cleveland, OH not far from my home. I grew up in a town a mile square on the shores of Lake Erie called Huron, OH. As a child I was talking to myself and asked myself why I make art. during the summer months my mother would check the water quality reports in the paper every morning Then I realized I am not myself, and we were angry with you and us. to see if it was safe to swim. My grandfather, my mother’s father, was a farmer in central Ohio. He placed his faith in the modern technological advancements of pesticides and fertilizers. My mother remembers We all thought we could get away with everything. No one got away with anything. trying to keep me away from the DDT in my grandfather’s barn. In 1972 DDT was banned in the United We do not build, we destroy, and we do not proclaim a new truth, we abolish an old lie. Have you ever noticed that political language is designed to make lies sound like States. On May 4, 1970 the Kent State shootings occurred at “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_ truth and to make murder seem respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity University”Kent State University in “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent,_Ohio”Kent, Ohio, and involved to pure wind? members of the National Guard shooting college students protesting Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. The guardsmen fired 67 rounds over a period of 13 seconds, killing four students and wounding nine others. • Amongst my friends the memories of this event led to my generation’s aversion to politics and fear of a We must not remain on these shores. We must go, now! political voice. In 1983 I graduated from high school. Instilled with a deep commitment to family and community I decided to forgo college and continue to live at home. My mother had other plans and I found myself, kicking and screaming, in art school at Bowling Green State University somewhere near Toledo, —d. j. martinez OH. When I was 18 I had my first opportunity to vote for president and began my political life with a Los Angeles, September 6, 2010 • Labor Day horrific act. My family, staunch Republicans, voted against their own self-interests so I followed in their footsteps and voted for Ronald Regan. My mother called me in the winter term of 1984 to announce at the age of 39 she was leaving my father and moving to California. Within a few years she was a vegetarian and dedicated Democrat. In my junior year of college I moved into my own apartment and discovered I did not know how to boil an egg. I frantically called my mother and she informed me that my lack of domestic skills was by design because she would not have her daughter taking care of men, as was the tradition of previous generations of women in my family. In the fall of 1985 I became a feminist. In 1987 I packed up my station wagon and moved to NYC but only made it as far as Hoboken, NJ. I joined WAC, the Woman’s Action Coalition and saw as many art shows as humanly possible. In 1988 I began working as a receptionist at Jamie Wolff Gallery on West Broadway. There I met collaborative artists, Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler. They introduced me to the work of their teacher, Michael Asher. In 1990 I applied to graduate schools and was accepted by Calarts. I was immersed into a pedagogy that demanded independent thinking. I joined a girl band called “Speaker Death”, learned the definition of hegemony and became a different person. In 2002 my mother was diagnosed with glioblastoma, stage 4 brain cancer with a life expectancy of a year and ½. Simultaneously John Quigley, the environmental activist, climbed into a 400-year-old oak tree in Santa Clarita, CA, and didn’t leave for 4 months as an act of civil disobedience to prevent destruction of the tree from suburban sprawl. These two simultaneous events granted me agency and courage to make artwork about ideas that were meaningful to me. In 2003 I made my first overtly political work, a video about Quigley’s tree-sit. Seven years later I’m still making artwork about activists and my mother is still a vegetarian feminist fighting for public art and progressive politics.

—Andrea Bowers

56 artist statements 58 everything is political 60 everything is political artist biographies

Andrea Bowers received her MFA from CalArts and currently lives, Daniel Joseph Martinez has exhibited in the United States and works and teaches in Los Angeles, CA. In June 2010 she had a solo show internationally since 1978. Since 1996, his work has been the subject titled The Political Landscape, at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles of three solo museum exhibitions and catalogues: The Things You See Projects. Other recent solo shows include Mercy Mercy Me at Andrew When You Don’t Have a Grenade! (Smart Art Press, Santa Monica Kreps Gallery, New York that traveled to the MCA Sydney in August 1996); Coyote, I Like Mexico and Mexico Likes Me, Or Simply Another 2010, Your Donations Do Our Work, a two-person show with Suzanne Dead Mexican (Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico, 2001); and The Lacy at UCR Sweeney Riverside, CA and An Eloquent Woman at Galerie Fully Enlightened Earth Radiates Disaster Triumphant: Daniel Joseph Praz-Delavallade in Paris. Martinez: United States Pavilion, 10th International Cairo Biennale 2006 (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 2006) in addition to the 1993 Recent group shows include Love In a Cemetery co-curated with Robert and 2008 Whitney Museum of American Art biennial exhibitions. Sain, and a collaboration with Otis Public Practice students at 18th He is represented by the Simon Preston Gallery, New York. Upcoming Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, Progress, Whitney Museum of Art, exhibitions include: The Quebec Biennial; a solo exhibition at the Simon New York, Index: Conceptualism in California from the Permanent Preston Gallery, New York; how many billboards are there, MAK Center, Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Memory Is Los Angles; Territories, Left Of Center, Luckman Galleries, Cal State Your Image Of Perfection, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Los Angeles; Art of War, CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Cervantes Currents: Recent Acquisitions at the Hirshhorn, Washington D.C. Institute in Spain for Arco, The Artists Museum, MOCA Los Angeles, Her work will be included in several group exhibitions in the fall of FOCA artist Fellowship and Exhibition 2010, Portugal commissioned 2010 including The Last Newspaper at the New Museum, NY, and project and curated, Capitalism in question (because it is), Pitzer Art The Seventh House at Project Row Houses, Houston. She was also Gallery, Claremont, CA. Martinez has also recently been honored with included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and the 2008 California the publication of a monograph by German publisher Hatje Cantz EVERYTHING IS POLITICAL © 2010 Biennial and has exhibited at Secession in Vienna, REDCAT, Los Angeles (Daniel Joseph Martinez: A Life of Disobedience, 2009) with essays PAGES 2, 5, 21-37, 62: all work courtesy Daniel Joseph Martinez and the Simon Preston Gallery, New York and Artpace, San Antonio. Bowers is a 2008 United States Artists by eight critical thinkers, including Arthur C. Danto, David Levi Strauss PAGES 2, 20-25, 28-32: photographs Daniel Joseph Martinez Broad Fellow and 2009 Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grant and Hakim Bey. Martinez has been teaching since 1990 at the PAGES 26-29: images from Buda’s Wagon, Mike Davis, courtesy recipient. She teaches at Otis College in the Public Practice Program University of California, Irvine and is currently a Professor of Theory, Mike Davis and at Claremont Graduate School. Practice and Mediation of Contemporary Art in the Graduate Studies PAGES 3, 20, 40-55, 57,60, 62 : all work courtesy Andrea Bowers Program and New Genres Department. PAG 62: collage Andrea Bowers and Daniel Joseph Martinez Since 2003 Bowers’ work has focused primarily on direct action and PAGES 3, 5, 38-39, 54-55, 59- 60: photographs Jessica non-violent civil disobedience enacted through the lives of mainly Over the thirty years of his practice, Martinez has engaged in an Fleischmann women. She presents the stories of activists to express her belief that investigation of social, political and cultural mores through his artworks, essay © 2010 Lucía Sanromán dissent is essential to maintaining a democratic process, as well as to which have been characterized as “nonlinear multidimensional graphic design: Jessica Fleischmann / still room illustrate the importance of a political strategy that stands in opposition propositions.” He uses a complex artistic vocabulary, which includes copyediting: Stephanie Fleischmann / Hudson WordShop to violence and war. Her work explores the intersections between art text, sculpture, installation, painting, video and photography, and Printed in Tujunga, CA, September 2010 in an edition of 1,000 and archival processes, and between aesthetics and political protest. he seeks to address history and today’s geopolitical realities to expose She believes cultural production can be an integral part of political their complicated dynamics and to destabilize and reorder them in action and can help serve as a voice in counter-hegemonic practices. ways that can be alternately (or simultaneously) disturbing, poetic, She investigates the role of art in documentation, in-depth storytelling, humorous or revelatory. and the reconsideration of historical recording. Many of her projects contextualize historical events in our contemporary situation and underscore their poignancy on our current state of affairs.

Acknowledgments Andrea Bowers and Daniel Joseph Martinez would like to thank FOCA for the support of artists through their fellowship program. The fellowship, exhibition, and catalog show FOCA’s commitment to contemporary art. We would like to thank Lucía Sanromán for her insightful and provocative essay. It supports and interrogates the role of art and its place in the twenty-first century. We would also like to thank Jessica Fleischmann for her dedication to this project and for her beautiful design. Daniel Joseph Martinez is grateful to Mike Davis for his generosity in allowing him to use quotes and images from his book Buda’s Wagon.

62 artist biographies The Fellows of Contemporary Art is a non-profit independent and membership based art organization that supports contemporary art in California in three primary ways, Curators Exhibition Award, FOCAFellowship, and Curators’ Laboratory Series.

Founded in 1975, FOCA is a direct outgrowth of a support group for the Pasadena Art Museum. Today our 236 members come from all parts of California and other States and the membership dues provide the support for FOCA’s mission.

This exhibition, Everything is Political, represents new work created by Andrea Bowers and Daniel Joseph Martinez who are the 2010 FOCAFellowship recipients. In 2005 an award for artists, the FOCAFellowships, was inaugurated. These awards are biennial, unrestricted grants of $10,000 each to artists in recognition of their current and significant contribution to California art both through their work and also their supportive actions within the community. Available through nomination only, FOCAFellowships are designed to further encourage and support California artists with a post-graduate exhibition history of 10 – 25 years. A five-member panel of distinguished curators: Janet Bishop, Hugh Davies, Anne Ellegood, Christine Kim and Catherine Taft nominated ten artists each who were then invited to apply for the award. Final selection for 2010 was determined by a jury of three arts professionals: Jens Hoffmann (Director of the Wattis Institute), Jan Tumlir (writer, editor, curator and critic) and James Welling (artist/photographer and UCLA professor). Previous FOCAFellowship winners are: Vincent Fecteau, Evan Holloway, Monica Majoli in 2006 and Dorit Cypis, Martin Kersels and Julio Cesar Morales in 2008.

FOCA’s Curator Exhibition Award, which underwrites costs of exhibitions and catalogues, has funded thirty-eight projects in thirty-five years. Our 2009 exhibition, Superficiality and Superexcrescence held at the Otis Ben Maltz Gallery was created by curators Christopher Bedford, Kristina Newhouse and Jennifer Wulffson. This cycle’s FOCA Curator Award winner is Sarah Bancroft. Her exhibition, Two Schools of Cool, will open in the fall of 2011 at the Orange County Museum of Art.

The Curator’s Laboratory series held at our headquarters in Chinatown is the most recent addition to FOCA’s support of contemporary art. Two dimensions of our mission are fulfilled by the Curator’s Laboratory: reaching out to young curators whose exhibitions are then documented on our website: www.focala.org. Over time these curatorial projects and the associated web support will generate a valuable archive resource for artists, curators, students and the public.

FOCAFellowship Events

FOCAFellowship Exhibition Conversation at MOCA

Andrea Bowers / Daniel Joseph Martinez A conversation between the FOCAFellowship Fellows of Contemporary Art winners and Bennett Simpson, Associate Curator 970 South Broadway, Suite 208 at the Museum of Contemporary Art

Los Angeles, CA 90012 Museum of Contemporary Art 213.808.1008 Ahmanson Auditorium www.focala.org 250 S. Grand Avenue October 17 to December 17, 2010 Los Angeles, CA 90012 213.626.6222 Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Friday, 11 AM – 5 PM Admission is free Sunday, November 6

3:30 PM Opening Reception October 17 This event is free and open to the public. 4:30 PM

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