NORTH OAKLAND TEMPORARY MUSEUM

PAST EXHIBITS 2007

2009-10-01T00:03:00.000-07:00

Clicking on any image below will send you to that month's exhibit. Within each exhibit itself, clicking on an image will open a larger version of that image.

November 2007:
Scott MacLeod Drawings 1960-62
Something Like Paradise

October 2007:
Scott MacLeod Drawings 1960-62
The Existential & The Familial

September 2007:
Fishburn Park
Photos by Jacob Bensen

August 2007:
Jim Leftwich

July 2007:
Ralph David Eaton:
Drawings 1970-1975

June 2007:
Scott MacLeod Collection: Part 5

May 2007:
Jíří Kalousek:
On the Trail of Brotherhood

April 2007:
Marsha Vdovin Photographs

February 2007:
Scott MacLeod Posters 1995-2004

January 2007:
Scott MacLeod Posters 1982-1994

PAST EXHIBITS 2006

2009-10-01T00:02:00.000-07:00

December 2006:
The MacLeod Collection Part 4:
Fearlessness & Camaraderie

November 2006:
Scott MacLeod Drawings 1960-62:
Ships & Boats

October 2006:
Scott MacLeod Drawings 1960-62:
Bulldozers, Tractors & Automobiles

September 2006:
Scott MacLeod Drawings 1960-62:
War: Ambushes, Melées & Disasters

August 2006:
The MacLeod Collection Part 3:
Accidents & Alerts

July 2006:
The MacLeod Collection Part 2:
It's Okay To Smile, We're In America Now

June 2006:
The MacLeod Collection Part 1:
No Comment

2008-04-30T20:01:00.000-07:00

As always, clicking on an image will open a larger version in a new window.

2007-12-01T13:31:00.000-08:00

Scott MacLeod Drawings 1960-1962: Part 9: Something Like Paradise?

Good Morning Birds, 1962

This will be the last North Oakland Temporary Museum exhibit for awhile. These exhibits take more work than you might realize. Curatorial staff (me) is burned out. Everything I originally wanted to show has been shown & can still be seen by scrolling to the bottom of this page & clicking the links to past shows. I'm sure that I'll find other things I want to show, and in fact there are some new things available to me, but I just don't have the time right now. This is, after all, a "Temporary" museum.

I saved this show for last because it is a sweet show & I wanted to leave you all with good feelings. In many ways these drawings represent the world I thought I was going to grow up into, while October's "Existential & Familial" show was more about the world I did grow up into. Without insinuating any regrets, I did want to reverse these last two shows & present the expectations after the realities. I don't think I need to explain myself beyond that.

2007-12-01T12:46:00.000-08:00

sThree Kids Playing, 1961

Every time I look at the v-shaped birds I used to draw, I think of Van Gogh. Here they wheel above children enjoying their halcyon environment & its appurtenances: sunshine & ice cream. Is that a strawberry cone or a bouquet of flowers for the young lady skipping rope? Puberty is along way away, but the earth's fecundity is apparent all around.

Skipping Rope Park, 1961

Back then we didn't know that lost balloons kill aquatic birds. But at least the kids are getting exercise. When I was 6-12 years old, I'd play football, baseball, cowboys & indians and other war games all over the neighborhood until the streetlights came. And we didn't wear bicycle helmets.

Skip, Kite & Birds, 1962

I was never a rope-skipper, wasn't good at it, and can't remember hanging around with any rope-skippers. Looking at the drawings in this post, you'd think I had a thing for rope-skipping girls. Maybe I did, but I don't remember it. I went to Catholic schools, here in Djakarta where these were drawn, and later in Virginia, until 8th grade when I went to public school, so I did imprint on those plaid uniform skirts. In elementary school I had crushes on Bonnie Shipe, Elise Quasebarth & Meridee Orndoff.

2007-12-01T11:48:00.000-08:00

Mom Waves Goodbye, 1962

Mom seems to be waving goodbye to her daughter, who's staying at home alone. There must be something else to this story but I don't know what it is. I could invent interpretations but hey so can you. It's funny how those birds are so innocuous here & so ominous in Van Gogh. Anyway this drawing is one of my more dynamic, design-wise.

Tree, Sun, People & Dog, 1962

There's something I find fascinating about abject drawings of the sun. I bet the sun is the first thing that a human tried to draw, and the first object that a child tries to draw. And for both, possibly the first experience of coming up against the complete impossibility of representing reality. I think everyone comes very quickly to the understanding that the sun is unrepresentable, and that this is a lesson that infiltrates our subconscious completely, informing everything we experience, and yet is pretty quickly consiously forgotten. But I think we all appreciate a drawing of the sun more the cruder it is.

Even without the sun, this would be a pretty interesting & dynamic picture, with all the inter-linked characters (and the off-camera one.)

The Shop, 1962

You can't buy love but you can buy just about everything else. This was 1962 and things were still looking pretty good for Americans.

2007-12-01T10:54:00.000-08:00

Mountain Cabin, 1961

I think that the only mountain cabin I might have seen at this age would have been the one in Sirnagaleh, Indonesia. This drawing was done in 1961 & the earliest I might have been to Sirnagaleh was early autumn of 1961. And Sirnagaleh is not known for redwood trees. Here are two photos of Sirnegaleh that Brian Walsh sent to me. Brian & his family lived very close to me in Djakarta, at more or less the same time. He was a couple years older. We didn't know each other then but connected recently via internet. His family also vacationed in Sirnegaleh but in a different cabin. But pretty close to the cabin I went to. Anyway these photos are from him & were taken in roughly the same era in which I made my drawings:

Sirnegaleh view

Cabin "Carioca D," Sirnegaleh

This drawing of mine seems pretty clearly a picture of a northern climate, so I'm not sure where this imagery comes from. Some movie, I suppose. I don't think I'd seen much television yet. Just some Garfield Goose with Clutch Cargo & Scott McCloud, Space Angel at my grandparents' house in Chicago.

In any case this is an early version of a scene I drew many many times again & which takes up an inordinate amount of space in my imagination: the isolated mountain cabin hideaway. The later drawings on this theme, all of which I am pretty sure have been destroyed, omitted the rollicking adventures of this drawing's native americans & bush pilots. The mountain hideaway of my imagination is just that: a hideaway, a place of retreat & refuge, a safe house. I have a lot to say about this, but here is not the place & now is not the time. (ps. cool sun)

Village Life, 1961

This one has a strangely rectangular formation of v-shaped birds in flight, a mediocre sun & combines elements from Currier & Ives, Norman Rockwell & Dutch landscape painting. There is a lot going on in the drawing but all pretty mundane activities. This reminds me of living in Virginia, specifically of Virgina summers. I am getting sleepy & a little bored just looking at it.

Forest Dinner With Birds, 1962

Looks like mom's back with a gorgeful of worms & grubs. Even the sun is singing with joy.

2007-12-01T09:56:00.000-08:00

Sandcastle & Speedboat, 1960

Superficially inocuous & lazy, this drawing nonetheless makes me think of Meursault on the beach. (Where's the sun?)

Blue Ocean Beach Scene, 1962

This drawing has really grown on me. Its composition is kind of dynamic, it has a Basquiat-like quality. I like the contrasts between the blue, the black & the white. A Chinese junk, a battleship, fishermen, coconut trees & a netless beach volleyball game: what's not to like?

2007-12-01T09:44:00.000-08:00

Dark Red Butterfly, 1962

Tropical Fruit, 1962

Regina Pacis, the Catholic elementary school I went to Djakarta, gave us religious workbooks. This drawing of typical Indonesian fruits is similar to this page from one of those workbooks:

Bears With Umbrellas, 1962

This picture of two bears in the rain makes me happy. Seems like a nice picture to leave you with.

2007-10-01T23:42:00.000-07:00

Scott MacLeod Drawings 1960-1962:
Part 8: The Existential & The Familial

Line of Cars 1962

Just a blue car driving through a red-car state. A heavily-polluting blue car at that. The red cars seem to be running clean. And is that Al Gore’s large-carbon-footprint house spewing out the spiralling cloud of wood-smoke? Isn’t that Michael Moore skulking behind the tree? I know it looks like I was a Republican when I drew this, but I swear I wasn’t.

I’d been a Democrat since age of 4, since 1960 when I walked into the den in Caracas where my Dad was watching the Nixon-Kennedy debate on television. He said Nixon would win & I told him it was obvious that the Kennedy guy would win - he just looked better. My dad laughed at me & bet me $10.

I was a decent gambler when I was young. My mom is claustrophobic so when we traveled to Dad’s embassy postings in Caracas, Djakarta & Paris, we had to take ships because Mom won’t get into an airplane. (Or elevator or subway.) Most ships in those days were primarily means of getting from one place to another, especially the freighters on which we often traveled. Even on passenger liners, there wasn’t the kind of total entertainment focus that there is now. We were quite content to sit in deck chairs and stare at the ocean in between chapters of whatever books we were reading. At night, though, the ocean is dark & casts its deep shadow deep into human souls: out come the distilled spirits, the dance bands, the talent contests and - the horse race films.

It was typical then for filmed horse races to be collected from tracks all over the country, cut apart & re-edited willy-nilly into a collection of a dozen races that no one could possibly remember ie gain a betting advantage. The films would be shown in the ballroom of the ship, win, place & show bets were taken in between races, gains paid out just like at Charlestown or Pimlico. These films featured the traditional parade to the starting block, so I would have a chance to look each horse over to gain some sense of its mettle. I would bet on any grey horse that showed up on the projection screen. That was one of the few true & useful things my dad ever taught me. Bet the grey horse. And the grey horse always does win. Lacking a grey horse, I would bet on a horse that showed spirit, a horse whose look I liked. Or that had a name that resonated in my relatively hollow 6-year-old brain. I’d have to place my bets through my dad. I always made $2 bets & I always walked away with at least $16 profit by the end of the night. And of course I won that $10 bet backing that Kennedy horse whose look I liked in 1960.

That was the beginning of an interesting decade, the Sixties. Godard made Weekend in 1967. Apparently you can watch the whole film for free on You Tube, or via http://www.subcin.com/godard.html - kind of a pointless way to watch it in my opinion - or - on second thought - maybe not. In any case, what I really wanted to mention here is that it’s pretty obvious to me that Godard got the idea for Weekend’s traffic jam from my drawing above.

2007-10-01T21:46:00.000-07:00

Canoes & Lightning, 1961

This is fairly schizoid drawing. It disturbs me. The sun is shining pretty clearly above the random but quite powerful thunderclouds. Lightning strikes the water very close to smiling, seemingly unconcerned fishermen. The fish are drawn as both victims & predators. Numerous small islands feature both palm & evergreen trees: is this Maine or the tropics? Are these people vacationing in their cabins on the shores of a northern lake? Or are they shipwrecked on an atoll in the South Pacific, struggling grimly to survive? Are those fighters planes destroying or UFO’s? Or robotic bug-zappers frying malarial mosquitos with electrical discharges. Speaking of electrical discharges, the word “taser” has been popping up a lot lately. Have you seen the YouTube clip of Andrew Meyer being tasered at a John Kerry Q&A? It’s pretty frightening & disheartening & not an easy thing to watch. It disturbs me.

Biplane & Kraken, 1960

Is it a biplane or a plane with a domed cockpit, like a Mitsubishi A6M Zero-Sen or a P-38 Lightning? I think the former, if only because the drawing below clearly shows a biplane. But what is rising out of or falling into the ocean below the airplane? I used to draw a lot of Viking dragon ships, at least I did a couple years later. The movie Vikings (w/Kirk Douglas) came out in 1958, so maybe I’d seen it. But I think I’d’ve at least tried to draw the shields & mast. You never know; at this age sometimes I’d have to try drawing something several times - or more precisely I would have several mis-starts - the scale of something would be so totally off that I’d just flip the page of my drawing pad. This could be a sinking viking ship that wasn’t worth finishing. I used to prefer to think of it as a Kraken, but now that I’ve written out the viking ship theory, I think I like it better, I like it being a failed & incomplete viking ship. That’s the way it often is with stories; true or not, once you’ve made them up they kind of stick with you. In any case, even though it’s now a viking ship, I’m still going to call it a Kraken in the title. It’s my picture, my memory, my story & my blog, so I can pretty much do what I want with them.

Biplane Over Rowboat, 1960

This looks like a biplane flying above a guy in a rowboat. The guy in the boat doesn’t have a pole so maybe he’s not fishing. He’s facing backwards so maybe he’s having engine trouble. But there’s no engine. Maybe it broke free of its mount & sank to the muddy bottom of the lake. Maybe the guys in the biplane have been searching for the guy in the rowboat & have found him. So why isn’t the guy in the boat looking up, smiling, relieved? Maybe he’s noticed that the biplane doesn’t seem to have any engine either, so he’s lowered his head back down to stare at the surface of the lake despondently. The absence of any engines in this drawing raises some questions. How does everything move forward? How do things stay aloft? How do we all stay afloat?

2007-10-01T19:47:00.000-07:00

Crashed Airplane, 1960

Well, the answer seems to be that we don’t all always stay afloat, or aloft. Here flight such-and-such of such-and-such airline (I believe that the dead passengers & crew are primarily Scandinavian) has crash-landed on an iceberg that recently calved from Arctic sea ice. Some few may have survived the initial landing trauma but they are surely dead by now - some 47 years later. Soon their ice floe, their floating tomb, will melt along with all the other sea ice on our planet and their aeroplane will sink to the bottom of the frigid deep.

Landing On Water, 1960

Another plane down. Maybe this one flew over Antarctica in October when the hole in the ozone layer is largest. Excess UV(b) radiation may have fried the controls, scrambled the wiring, impaired the pilots’ abilities; for whatever reason this plane also fell from the sky, this time into water, lessening the impact & allowing a handful of coach-class passengers to escape into a life raft just as the aeroplane begins to sink beneath the waves. A seaplane searches overhead fruitlessly. Or is that plane also diving out of control?

The Trouble I Had, 1960

A man in a beanie or watch cap is walking. Whether this Beckettian character is happy or sad, at ease or troubled, driven or contemplative, is unknown & unknowable. I think that these attributes might all be one in the same, or arbitrary & inconsequential scratches on a wide featureless continuum. I also think that this little man has callouses & is the better for that. I used this as the cover image for a book of the same name (ie The Trouble I Had), a compiliation of several text-image chapbooks I’d self-produced in the 1980s. The compilation was published by anabasis/xtant in 2004.

2007-10-01T18:48:00.000-07:00

Splashing in Kiddie Pool, 1960

Here’s another drawing that may have been abandoned by a young artist who saw no future in continuing on with it, no eventual reward worth putting in any more work. I think this is a kid splashing in a kiddie pool. I had a kiddie pool in the back yard in Virginia & one in the front yard in Venezuela. I think those were good times - in the kiddie pool at least. I like being in water. I am more relaxed & happy when I’m in water.

Three Men & Water Buckets, 1960
This predates the “Gatorade shower” it resembles by a couple of decades. This may just be a childs’s impression of a random collaborative human engineering solution in the third world.

Angry at Snowman, 1960

The image provides no real evidence validating my use of the work “Anger” in the title I’ve given it. I’ve given it that title nonetheless, for reasons which will remain private.

2007-10-01T17:50:00.000-07:00

Family With Playpen, 1961

Everybody seems to be smiling here & why not? Isn’t that what family is all about? Good times & smiles? Loneliness abated or at least deferred or camouflaged? Helping each other stay afloat?

Christmas & Racecar # 4, 1960

Smiles all around at Christmas time too. Especially when you get the Matchbox racecar you wanted.

Christmas Tree, 1962

Fishburn Park: Photographs by JACOB BENSEN

2007-09-01T09:47:00.000-07:00

Photo 58

Jacob Bensen took these photographs of Roanoke, Virginia's Fishburn Park in 2oo6 when he was about 5 years old. Fishburn Park is a large park with a creek, woods, trails. Jacob used his grandmother Sue Leftwich's digital camera, which is a few years old & has been dropped a couple times. This camera has been known to add a pink wash to images every once in awhile, but it has never before produced melting faces, thick pink icing & melting cars.

Is this Fishburn Park or MacArthur Park or the X-Files or 1973 Colorado on acid? Anyway I think these are beautiful & wish Jacob the best in whatever sort of life he decides to lead.

Photo 35

Photo 36

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Photo 37

Photo 38

Photo 39

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Photo 40

Photo 41

Photo 42

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Photo 45

Photo 46

Photo 47

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Photo 50

Photo 51

Photo 54

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Photo 55

Photo 56

Photo 57

Photo 58 Self-Portrait

JIM LEFTWICH

2007-08-01T23:00:00.000-07:00

Agent World 1

This month's exhibition is relatively small & straight-forward. Jim Leftwich has been a friend & collaborator for a couple decades now. He's a writer, a visual artist & cultural critic in the most profound sense. His work is prodigious, frightening, disturbing and often (as in the work of similar masters of incision, elision & appropriation Joyce & Beckett) funny.

There are several examples of his work posted within the various past Temporary Museum exhibits referencing my own art collection. The works here are just a few examples from some almost off-handed series; mere spin-offs or tangents, sparks & shavings from the forgings of more-tempered projects.

My ephemeral & barely-loved little museum here seemed like a good place to air these images out.

More of Jim's work, including collaborations & online curatorial projects, can be got at through these links below & through other links on some of my other blog pages.

http://jimleftwich.livejournal.com/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/textimagepoetry/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/textimagepoetry/sets/

(several pages here:) http://wikitextsimagespoems.pbwiki.com/

(w/jukka-pekka kervinen)
http://circulations.pbwiki.com/
http://www.collaborativeprocesses.info/
http://videopoems.blogspot.com/

Agent World 2

Agent World 3

Agent World 4

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BioAbstraction 1

BioAbstraction 2

BioAbstraction 3

BioAbstraction 4

2007-08-01T19:17:00.000-07:00

Poland

Europe 1

Europe 2

Europe 3
Europe 4

RALPH EATON: Drawings 1970-1975

2007-07-01T23:00:00.000-07:00

Fuzz Man in the Fuzz Car

My friend Ralph Eaton’s response to this museum’s previous exhibits of my childhood drawings was to send me a cd with dozens & dozens of images of drawings he did from 1970-1975 (some with his friend Benji Brown). Unlike my drawings, which were done when I was 4-6 years old, these are the work of adolescents, and clearly show some of the specific cultural & environmental influences impacting teenage identity-formation during that time period in the USA.

2007-07-01T22:00:00.000-07:00

Fuzz Man in the Fuzz Car aka the Fuzz Chariot

This sequence of Fuzz Man / Buttside / Buttside Gang drawings is influenced by television’s Ironside, reworking paraplegic detective Raymond Burr’s mobile technology-assisted crime-fighting mission into an equally-mobile but somewhat more transgressive mission to spread mayhem & fart-gas.

Fuzz Car Deluxe

Buttside’s Gang

Fuzz Man’s “Buttside’s Gang,” as culturally diverse as Ironside’s staff, also includes Bonnie & Clyde, popular 1967 cinematic icons who reference mobility, class, justice, gender & anarchy, & draw parallels between the Great Depression & the repressive cultural forms of the mid-60s.

2007-07-01T21:03:00.000-07:00

As increasingly powerful sectors of the received environment, television, cinema & print publications in the early 70s provide much of the inspiration for these drawings, as I’ll continue to point out below. But while TV was becoming a window onto a wider world, for an adolescent living at home the view from the living room window, out the front of the house, onto the street & across it to the neighbors’ houses, was an equally intense sector of the received environment.

Rusty’s House & Family 1

Adolescence is a period of accelerated development of identity, a process which involves, at least in part, the perception, analysis & articulation of differences between self & other. For a teenager, everything tends to be a little faster & crasser & hyper-exaggerated. Hormonal influences & the swift pace of changing power relations between self & parents / physical environment / social environment lead to exaggeration (which is really a means of simplification) as a technique for adept identity-triangulation & boundary-testing. Television and, specifically, MAD Magazine, used similar techniques of exaggeration and so were entirely in synch with teenage perceptual tropes, though probably for different reasons.

Ralph & Benji drew this same subject (Ralph’s neighbor Rusty’s family) over & over; these are just a few of these drawings. The characteristics & proclivities of Rusty’s family are subjected to increasing exaggeration.

Rusty’s House & Family 2

Paterfamilias Rusty is portrayed as a slob & glutton, obsessed only with food & apparently oblivious to all the chaos around him. Signifiers of his obsession include turkey-leg-filled thought-bubbles & hand-carried watermelons; over the course of these drawings, a small dedicated food-deposit drawer on the side of his house becomes a special roll-up door and eventually morphs into a barred & gated underground drive-in tunnel guarded by soldiers (see below).

Rusty’s House & Family 3

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Other members of the family are also depicted almost solely by one defining characteristic. Sonia has a big mouth out of which spews an obscene vocabulary. Ricky is a “slob jr.” in training to become his dad. Jeffrey is both fool & sadist, usually depicted in the act of inflicting violence upon members of his own family. Timmy is the perennial victim (much like South Park’s Kenny): whipped, shot, hanged etc.

Rusty’s House & Family 4

Rusty’s House & Family 5

That Rusty & family are Jewish is referred to by the sporadic appearance of a Star of David mounted on their house. This signifier seems to mark their “otherness” without any direct connection to their depicted personalities or familial dynamic. What interesting to me about its appearance in these drawings is what it suggests about what white male teenagers in southwestern Virginia in the early 70s might have understood about “otherness” - ie that these people were “other” - without having any real idea of what that meant, specifically.

Rusty’s House & Family 6

This drawing above is actually by Benji Brown.

2007-07-01T19:17:00.000-07:00

Armed Biker

The narrative of adolescent development in the 20th century is inextricably intertwined with the concept of “Coolness” & its interrogatory & confrontational relationship to established cultural mores. For many teenagers growing up in the relatively static culture of southwestern Virginia in the late 60s, television & cinema & Mad Magazine provided models of Coolness, usually depicted as exaggerations & simplifications of codes of dress & behavior, that would allow avenues of escape from the horrifying probability of growing up to become one’s parents etc.

Depictions of outlaw bikers, pirates & Robin-Hood-like gangsters suggested romantic possibilities for lives to be led outside the constraints of existing local cultures. For testosterone-charged teenage males, it was natural to privilege “toughness” as a primary component of Coolness. I like the drawing below for its melding of pirate tropes with urban Black 60’s funk fashion.

Pirate Funk Gang

Television was actively bringing images of urban Black culture into homes far away from any actual contact with that culture. The politicized & interrelated discourses of civil rights activism, urban violence, race relations, popular music & fashion, all squeezed through a highly constrained but not-yet-overdetermined media (TV) into the chaotic brains of teens produced drawings like the one below, which depicts Black males looting, playing pool & barbequeing.

Look What I Got

As interesting an insight as this is into how Blacks were being portrayed & perceived by TV & its audience, I am more intrigued by the fact that these characters are dressed to the nines in styles that seem to come straight from Carnaby Street to the streets of “the ghetto,” and that a tremendous amount of work has been put into the depiction of the fashion details. The mis-en-scène here seems in part to be an excuse for showcasing the patterns, colors & cut of the clothes. And I am especially bemused by the fact that the television being looted is a console-type television. This is very much a drawing of a particular moment in cultural history.

Running Hippies

It’s not too far from the scene of urban looting to this scene of white hippies running.

2007-07-01T18:01:00.000-07:00

Woodstock 1

Woodstock - or more specifically, the Woodstock depicted in the style of Mad Magazine’s heavily-populated, double-page spreads - became a strong inspiration for Ralph & Benji. The Mad style, in combination with limited drawing skills, creates tableaus reminiscent of medieval painting prior to the development of “perspective.”

In this first drawing we still see carry-overs from the “Rusty’s House” drawings, with many of the characters depicted in such a way as to suggest that they are meant to represent real people that the artist knows. And the scene includes a UFO, a grave, a submarine; the music festival doesn’t quite encompass all the action.

Music 1

Music 1 & Music 2 here (all titles are the curator’s not the artists’) don’t specifically depict Woodstock but I believe they derive from the form of the artists’ Woodstock drawings. In the first, in contrast to Woodstock 1, the characters have largely become anonymous male musicians & bikini-clad female dancers. The only recognizable character is the fictional Charlie Brown, obviously feeling very much out of place in this increasing tribal & sexualized gathering.

Music 2

2007-07-01T17:00:00.000-07:00

Woodstock 2

The population at Woodstock has grown considerably, but the individuality of the characters is enhanced. A dirigible above the stage makes Mad Magazine’s influence explicit.

Woodstock 3

Woodstock is now filled to bursting; characters’ bodies extend beyond the crowded frame, which is now filled with characters from other popular-culture sources: Dagwood, Beetle Bailey, Smokey the Bear. Snoopy seems to take it all in stride. Can’t we all just get along?

2007-07-01T16:00:00.000-07:00

City Plan 1

I love maps & was immediately drawn to these examples of purposely-dysfunctional city-planning. Every effort has been made to make the worst possible urban-planning decisions. In City Plan 3, the most dystopic of all, the atomic-bomb testing plant is right next to the gas station; the old-folks home is completely cut off by a freeway interchange; the Quaker church is next to the dragstrip. To get to “colored town” one has to walk by the KKK center. One scenario that seems unfortunately prescient is the short & direct path leading from school to reform school & then to prison.

City Plan 2

City Plan 3

Psychedelic Patterns

Finally we bring this exhibit to a close with this drawing by 17-year-old Ralph, a drawing that seems to me to compress all the Woodstock & city-plan drawings that came before it through a filter whose x-axis is almost certainly LSD & whose y-axis might be Picasso.

See more of Ralph Eaton's drawings in The North Oakland Temporary Museum Annex: http://smnotma.blogspot.com/

SCOTT MACLEOD COLLECTION - PART 5

2007-06-01T23:00:00.001-07:00

I traded Lisa Mendelson, the curator of Soap Gallery, a couple of my Targets for a couple of her embroidered doilies. I liked the "cocksucker" one the best of the ones she had in stock & I got the bright idea to commission some new ones from her. The three below are the ones I had her make & which I just picked up from her. The top two are Czech & the bottom one is Serbo-Croatian. "Blbec" is not too nasty but the other two are pretty nasty.

2007-06-01T21:00:00.000-07:00

Li Jiun-Yang

Jiun-Yang's a Taiwanese puppeteer & visual artist I met while he was a resident artist at the Headlands Center. He made fantastic small sculptural installations using materials from the surrounding woods & marshes: eucalyptus leaves, branches, nuts, acorns, etc. He's a very sweet man & we hit it off right away. When he left, he gave me several sculptural groupings, very ornate & fragile constructions that I installed in the backyard & that have mostly been destroyed over the years by rain & sun. This demon painted on a pine cone is in pretty good shape, though the rest of the piece (about a dozen thin reeds projecting out in a 360º halo with small acorn-like nuts on the end of each reed, each nut with a unique face painted on it) is now pretty much kaput.

Michelle Rollman

Exterior & interior of a small Rabbit Theater.

2007-06-01T20:00:00.000-07:00

Sue Leftwich

Some dryer lint with asemic figures. Painstakingly crafted by Sue after many years of living with the master of asemia.

Gianni Bedolo

I met Gianni at Emilio Morandi's Perfomedia Festival in Ponte Nossa, Italy in 1990. Gianni & his pal Giorgio Bulzi helped me with a performance. At the time the two of them were at that time working as a artistic collaborative under the name Darkene, which was the brand name of an Italian version of the narcotic Flunitrazepam, a drug that Kurt Cobain od'd on (along with champagne) a few weeks before his death.

Gianni & Giorgio were a mischievous pair doing pretty irrereverent work, so I was slightly surprised to see the direction Gianni's work has gone in. There's a lot more of his work at www.bedolo.com. This image above is of his 1996 painting "Spring Collection." Or rather it is a scan of a color-xerox of that painting. The color xerox is in my collection, the painting is not.

Peter Ganick

The prodigious writer began painting in (I think) the mid-90's & sent me this one on paper which I hated for about two weeks but hung on my kitchen wall anyway, then suddenly one day I looked at it and and I really really liked it & have liked it ever since.

2007-06-01T19:17:00.000-07:00

Jakub Kalousek

Here are six images by Jakub. I actually only own the top one, a postcard he sent me, but I like his work, want to share it with others & consider anything he does to be part of my "collection." His father Jiri Kalousek was featured in last month's Temporary Museum exhibit.

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Linda Wilson just gave me these two sumptuous gorgeous photos (above) that she shot in Ireland. And this one below is by Thomas Lowe Taylor aka Anabasis:

See also here and also (with Jim Leftwich) here:

2007-06-01T16:00:00.000-07:00

Quido Sen

My good friend Quido makes interactive sound sculptures, often quite large & I assume pretty expensive, so the only thing I really own of his is this sketch he sent me, which I like just for itself.

Radana Parmová

Another dear friend, in Ostrava, Czech Republic, has made a number of paintings on paper depicting herself, me, her children & various angels as we all try to help each other emotionally survive difficult times. This one above is one of my favorites.

František Skála

This is an image I scanned from Fama & Fortuna Bulletin 1993/15 which reproduces the lavishly-illustrated journal that Franta made as he walked from Prague to Venice as his contribution to the 1993 Biennale. Franta's work is simply the best - defying categorization & appealing to the most profound human instincts & aspirations.

Jíří Kalousek: On the Trail of Brotherhood

2007-05-01T23:00:00.000-07:00

This month's exhibit features images scanned from a travel journal made by my friend Jakub Kalousek's father Jíří (George) in 1953. These watercolours depict scenes from a hike/walk taken by Jíří, his wife Milena & their friend Ludya through then-exotic forests & villages of far-eastern Czechoslovakia and Hungary. I think these images are charming because even from this temporal distance they offer immediacy rather than nostalgia.

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IN TRACKS OF BROTHERHOOD

they went, drew pictures, in sweltering heat they suffered, sung,
and romped, with Talafus victorious,
and not even a triple-evil wolf were they afraid of,
they hated Mary, and yet commiserated with her,
got drenched, got lost, risked lives, but on they went
Milena - George - Luda

BONUS PHOTOS

2007-05-01T14:30:00.000-07:00

These two watercolours are not from the sketchbook described above, but I want to include them here. This first is from a children's history book:

This watercolour is probably from the artist's trip to Cuba in the early 1960's.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY

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Jíří Kalousek (1925-1985)

Born on the 7th February, 1925 in Nový Bydžov. The first-born child, he had two younger sisters, Věra and Blanka. His father, Antonín, was in charge of a train crew and painted in his spare time. He took his family on regular train trips to visit Czechoslovak castles and ruins. The Kalouseks lived in Hradec Kràlové, in eastern Bohemia.

1936-1944: Studied at the classical grammar school in Hradec Kràlové. Took an interest in astronomy. Visited the Hradec observatory. From his third form. he attended drawing classes directed by Prof. Říha. Was an assistant in the studio of the sculptor Josef Škoda. Captained the S.K. Olympia Hradec Kràlové basketball league team. Was well-known for his tricky style of play, making unexpected breaks with the ball.

1945-1950: Studied at the Prague College of Applied Arts under Prof. František Muzika and Prof. Antonín Pelc. Took an active part in student activities of all kinds. Together with Milan Grygar. he organised the 'Prague Autumn Spring', a kind of musical happening on the steps of the Rudolfinum building. the National Museum and in Prague streets. Those who were interested by Kalousek's activities included the director Alfred Radok, especially in connection with the pre-première of the opera 'Mother' by Karel Hàba at the Estates Theatre. (The students' performance did not, in the end, take place).

1947-1948: Study trips to Bulgaria and France. His pen-and-ink drawings and watercolours were shown in 1948 at the exhibition staged by the Association of East Bohemian Artists at the Town Museum in Hradec Kràlové.

1951-1955: A member of the art editors' board of the magazine 'Československý voják' (Czechoslovak Soldier).

1953-1969: Created satirical work, drawn humour and caricatures. Collaborated with magazines, in particular 'Dikobraz' (Porcupine) and 'Mladý svět’ (Youth World).

1954: Married Milena Lamarová. His son Jakub is born in 1958.

1958-1969: First book illustrations for the State Children's Book Publishers. A co-founder and active member of the Polylegran group. (The group's founding members included A. Born, O. Jelínek. M. Jiránek. V. Jirásek. M. Lid'ák, J. Malásek, K. Nepraš, F. Skála, B. Štěpán and M. Žemlička. The first exhibition by Polylegran at the ÚLUV Gallery in Prague in 1960, opened by M. Horníček, represented a key event in Czech humour and satire. The same was true for the group's subsequent exhibitions, especially the third, held at the Czechoslovak Writers' Gallery, 'which was opened with a striptease.

1958-1986: Continued illustration work for the publishers Albatros, Čs. Spisovatel, Mladé léta, Mladá fronta, Státní pedagogické nakladatelství, Kruh. Melantrich and Artia, and also for the children's magazines 'Mateřídouška' (Thyme), 'Sluníčko' (Little Sun), 'Sedmička pionýrů' (The Pioneers' Seven) and 'Ohníček' (Little Fire), He developed a humorous stylisation, particularly in the 19705. which evolved into aioose and sensitively poetic drawing style in the 1980s.

1959-1965: Journeys to Greece, Egypt. Cuba and Great Britain, which influenced a shift in his painting of the 1960s and '70s from lyrical-humanist stylisation to work on the volume- and composition-related questions of landscape painting. His daughter Lucie is born in 1965.

1964-1978: Took great interest in philology. Discovered the 'cluster' method of teaching English. Learned Spanish and also tried learning Japanese. Wrote poetry and translated the poems of Christian Morgenstern into English. Collected dictionaries and old postcards. Staged the 'happening' exhibition 'Postcards in the Forest' in May 1978. Intense correspondence with his friends. Wrote about himself that he was 'a maniacal lover of words' and wished people a 'Happy New Car.'

1965-1983: Worked systematically on an illustrated geographical dictionary entitled 'With the Artist Around the World', which contained more than 1,400 colour drawings (first published by Albatros in 1984). This led him to a more thorough study of his favourite geography and to the strong cultivation of delicate, small-scale expression in drawing, mostly with watercolour.

1965-1985: Created animated films. and collaborated with Czechoslovak Television. Made a total of 15 films, of which 5 won prizes and commendations. Continued in book illustration and collaboration with magazines for children. Often travelled to meetings. in which he took an active participation.

1965-1985: Worked intensely; focused increasingly on painting, mainly at his summer studio in Kohoutov near the Krkonoše Mountains. There, he staged ir September 1982 a 'happening' exhibition of paintings in the landscape accompanied by photographs by Jíří Jahoda. In his narrative themes he dealt with immediate philosophical and ethical issues. In terms of painting technique. he cultivated a subtle, economical style of expression. Developed the work 'Correspondence Ar't. Continued to pursue lively correspondence with friends.

1985: Last trip abroad, to the USA, which inspired one finished and one unfinished painting as well as numerous sketches and notes.

MARSHA VDOVIN: PHOTOGRAPHS

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As always, clicking on an image will open a larger version in a new window.

cartop2

Marsha Vdovin writes: "I am a child of modernism. I embrace the clean lines, the simplicity and the minimalism. I bask in abstraction and clarity of form. I salute Neutra and Schindler, Eames, Malevich, Rodchenko, Delaunay, Rothko, Stella and Punk Rock, Punk Rock, Punk Rock.

My photography is about my lifelong obsession with abstract painting. It is about line, color, texture, form and composition. I began to paint my own paintings in order to photograph them and the paintings sometimes end up having a life of their own. There is so much available material in my immediate life. Texture has been a huge interest for me as graphical elements – where lines intersect – and color of course becomes a major player. I have resisted extensive photoshop manipulation and what you see is what I see in the viewfinder."

What I like about Marsha's photographs is their immanence, their insistence that the entire universe is contained in every minute partial view. A single view of raindrops on an automobile becomes for me an afternoon spent in a movie theater watching a film adaptation of a novel by, possibly, James M. Cain. And my experience of the photo also encompasses the reading of that novel, and my post-movie dinner, seated alone in a booth in a 24-hour diner where main street crosses the old highway. These photos tap deep into my filmic imagination without being, themselves, particularly filmic.

When I was a small child & had superb eyesight, my imagination was continuously sparked by all the details & textures of my surroundings: shadows, lint, plaster, pebbles, all the myriad patterns & random arrangements of the walls, floors, rooms, conveyances, environments around me. Taller now, more jaded, distracted, and with much poorer eyesight, I sometimes feel as though I am moving like a zombie through a world that no longer speaks to me.

Many of Marsha's photos once again bring me close enough to surfaces so that I suffer (enjoy) a synesthesia that ignites a proliferation of referential sensations & filmic memories. What I like about those that do not bring me close to a distinct surface is that they refuse to resolve into any surface at all, but do so suggestively, and shimmer with mysterious lights like Boulevard Saint-Michel in the rain after seeing Fellini Roma.

redlight

redrug2

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bluebronze

grate

green.0

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green

greenbrown

morecorners.0

yellowcorner

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sidewalk4

england

cement3

sidewalk3

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floor2

floor15.o

orange

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mumbai

colors2

lemons.4

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paintingclear

paint12306

painting 13

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orangeblue

orangeblue3

paintingorangeblue

Scott MacLeod Posters 1995-2000

2007-03-01T20:37:00.000-08:00

This month's exhibit concludes the show of posters that I produced for my own performances & readings. Clicking on an image will open an enlarged version in a new window.

Two distinct types of posters are represented here. Many of you will have attended the events or performances that some of these posters advertise. I also produced several posters that didn't advertise anything but were themselves complete works. I posted or mailed hundreds of copies of these over the years. I still have far too many copies of the "Mayakovsky-MacLeod" poster pictured above.

The performance titles below event posters will usually be links to documentation of those performances. Click these & other links for more info & images.

2007-03-01T19:41:00.000-08:00

An Atmosphere But For An Instant, Southern Exposure, 1/25/95

Two posters for a performance that I did inside my gallery-sized installation Even If Such An Object Outside Us Were Unimportant. This performance was in some ways the last of the Brief Amaze performances that I had made in Europe in 1990.

Paintings & Small Objects, Sneak Gallery, 3/29/95

I started smearing paint around on plywood & found canvases in 1993. I'd work on writing projects in my office at the front of my large flat in Dogpatch & when I got tired or blocked, I'd walk to my tiny back-porch studio to flail my arms around & get high on spray paint & varnish, which would give me ideas & I'd go back & do more writing.

Eventually the house filled up with paintings & I started wondering what to do with them, so when Cid Pearlman & David King moved out of the storefront studio below my house, I convinced the owner to let me have it for three days gratis. I hung everything up & had a one-night only exhibit. I offered to give away all the paintings for free, first-come first-served.

Patti Davidson & Tommy Hicks were the first ones there & made a beeline for a painting called Lombards 1. They have discerning eyes; almost everyone who attended asked me if that one was available. Patti & Tommy have since put together maybe the largest collection of my work. Anyway that night I gave away almost 40 paintings.

2007-03-01T18:44:00.000-08:00

Very few redeeming qualities to this poster. But I think everyone should be able to toot their own horn at least once. And who's to say it's still not possible?

One of my favorites. Someday I'll get around to offering this slogan on coffee mugs on Cafe Press. The image is from Thread, a performance I did at Shedhalle in Zürich with Yvonne Austen.

Shrewd Little Angels, Collision, 8/24/95

Shortly after my friend Nina Iskrenko died I began having dreams that she was lost & desperate in a kind of fog or ether. One morning after the third or fourth of these dreams I started making paintings of angels to guide her. I made nearly sixty angel paintings in a couple of weeks & the dreams stopped. I figured Nina didn't need them anymore so I should try to give them to people who did.

I convinced the nice young people at Collision Gallery to show these paintings. The interior of Collision reminded me of a forest cabin in Wisconsin, so instead of an opening reception I had a slumber party. About 15 people "slept" over with me till the next morning.

Anne Frank In Jerusalem, 111 Minna, 8/7/95

At Galerie Theuretzbacher in Vienna, Mark Hudson, one of my collaborators in the Feed-Back-And-Forth project, slid his tongue down the length of one of the corners of the room. Actually, a couple of other artists had held him up in the air & rubbed him like a pencil on the wall. About halfway down, his tongue became so abraded that it started leaving a trail of blood on the wall. It was great & I wanted to do that too somehow. So here at this reading I had my chance. I would read a section from my novel Anne Frank In Jerusalem & then turn & lick the wall behind me for awhile. I'd rubbed my tongue with sandpaper beforehand so that I'd be sure to start bleeding in good time. I did manage to leave a bloody smudge on the wall but it was very much inferior to Mark's action.

The images used on the poster are from a performance I did with Yvonne Austen at Galerie Theuretzbacher the same day Mark's tongue bled.

2007-03-01T17:47:00.000-08:00

Just a simple collage flyer designed to be posted in public. A poem, an image of Josef Beuys, xeroxed fake flowers. There was no particular intention here, just a quickly-made thing that immediately charmed me & still does.

Sometimes one word can do so much. When newspapers serve up fat ones like this little series of images of Sen. Robert Packwood, I find it difficult not to take swings at them. I sometimes suspect, and hope, that I am responding to intentional decisions made by subversive newspaper editors. Carla Harryman liked this one & I appreciated the fact that she told me so.

2007-03-01T16:49:00.000-08:00

One of a series of flyers I made using sloppy two-color registration to make the visual properties more complex and the text a little more ambiguous. I found the real motives of Czech soldiers serving as peacekeepers in Bosnia to be a pertinent shading of the professed USA & NATO agenda, and in keeping with my cynical perceptions of the cultural transitions occurring in Eastern Europe after 1989.

I can’t remember what book I appropriated this text from. It's a good book; this selection pretty much sums up the writer’s basic thesis & I wanted help disseminate his attempt to deflate the romance of historical architecture & re-inscribe that architecture from a perpective focused on the human cost of colonial practice. Here I used sloppy registration to make the text harder to read, mirroring the difficulties of re-reading common assumptions. The image is of a Kipper Kids performance.

A slightly cautionary celebration of beer. Text is caption of a photo of stone carvings found in Sakkara, photo is Ladislav Baxa hoisting a pint of Radegast.

2007-03-01T15:51:00.000-08:00

During the week or so after any given performance, a couple people would invariably come up to me, apologize for missing it & very enthusiastically state their intention to come to the next one. Always lacking for an audience for my work, I decided to stir the pot a little by abusing this tendency for people to be more enthusiastic when they missed something than when they didn’t.

I sent the Appointment poster out the afternoon before the performance, guaranteeing that no one would get it in time to attend & thus stoking their interest. I went to the designated place at the designated time & made a performance for no audience. When people came up to me expressing their regret for not making it, I told them the performance had been “great.”

I then sent out the Disappointment poster in plenty of time for people to be able to attend this sequel performance two weeks later. About 12-15 people came to the deserted corner by the train tracks at 10:30pm. I stayed home, in bed, reading a book. My spy, Michelle Rollman, reported that Jean-Louis Pearson, the director of Show-N-Tell Gallery, ran around the entire neighborhood, peering into dumpsters & muttering “I know he’s here somewhere.” After 30 or 40 minutes, Aaron Noble said “I don’t think he’s coming.” To which Nelson replied “Ohhhh. I’ve been to performances like this before.”

It seemed too bothersome to try to collect the 150 or so paintings of mine which were in private collections, find a place to exhibit them etc., but I wanted to have the feeling that all those collectors were taking a few minutes at an appointed time to reacquaint themselves with the paintings they owned. I guess I needed some affirmation. I have no idea if anyone actually did as requested. I am a sucker for shelving. I love having lots of it & I enjoy building it. So this photo of Conlon Noncarrow in his studio was like hardcore shelf-porn to me.

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These are the two sides of a poster I sent to all my friends in England inviting them to a reading & performance I made at Ingrid Swenson’s art space Production in London. A photo of a Russian legislator barricaded inside Moscow’s parliament building in 1993 on one side, Sirhan Sirhan on the reverse.

I was driving my mom around on a tour of Frank Lloyd Wright houses. On the grounds of the Wright house at Kentuck Knob, Lord Palumbo has a sculpture park which includes a section of the Berlin Wall and this Andy Goldsworthy piece. I’m a fan Goldsworthy’s work & couldn’t resist taking one small stone from the wall & replacing it with similar stone that I found on the ground a few feet away. In our bed & breakfast the next morning in Columbus, Ohio, Mom & I watched Princess Diana’s funeral on television. Lord Palumbo was interviewed for awhile on that broadcast. Never having heard of Lord Palumbo before, I thought this was an interesting enough coincidence to commemorate by issuing this poster.

2007-03-01T13:55:00.000-08:00

This image of me doing a private performance at Shedhalle in Zurich was one of several images that I used on small cards announcing my 15-hour A Violin In This Dark Shed performance at the SF Art Institute.

Another series of newspaper photos that I just couldn’t let slip by unremarked upon. And, having been something of a horn-dog in my younger days, I felt I should implicate myself as well.

I guess I must have been having some issues relative to the horn-dog thing. None of the statements in this flyer were entirely untrue.

2007-03-01T11:57:00.000-08:00

Another spontaneous newspaper detournement.

Just a straightforward announcement for a reading.

The version of this puerile diversion that I sent out highlighted several quotes from the article, including: “There aren’t too many places where this kind of organ can go,” and “…the organ is just too huge.”

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For this flyer announcing an event at The Make Out Room, I collaged a photo of Virginia Dare with a photo of my father & his buddy on board ship during their Coast Guard service. Here's also a link to the Wannabe Texans - Brad & Mary were in the Wannabes before they started Virgina Dare.

An atypically sloppy attempt to conflate the Tienanmen Square massacre with gentrification in SF’s Mission district.

Scott MacLeod Posters 1982-1994

2007-01-01T23:53:00.000-08:00

A little change of pace for February's exhibit.

Here below are most of the posters that I produced for my own performances & readings from 1982 through 1994. Click on each image to enlarge it.

There are about ten that I don't have copies of. Many of you have seen these before & have seen or even been in the performances these posters advertise. Technically I wasn't in the Zoviet Youth performance that the first two posters refer to; I just made them posters in order to kiss ass & try to get them to let me join. The performance titles below the posters will usually be links to documentation of those performances.

Zoviet Youth, Sound of Music, 10/30/82

Zoviet Youth, Ink Gallery, 12/1 & 9/82

Zoviet Youth "Tour" poster, December 1982

Zoviet Youth, Union Depot SFSU, 12/15/82

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The Drunken Jungle
The Semantics, Eye Gallery, SF 6.10.84

In The Liberated Zone & She Was A Really Big Woman
Tango Planet, Intersection for the Arts, SF 3/22-23/86

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A reading, Sixteenth Note, SF 5/29/86 (I think it was 1986 but I'm not sure)

Living in Los Angeles in the torpid & miserable summer of 1986, I tried unsuccesfully to find community amongst various gaggles of bad young poets.

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Two text-based performances in 1988.

I think this reading was to support the publication of - well - hmm - I didn't publish anything in 1988 - maybe this was for abendland which e.g. published in 1986; if that's the case, this poster is out of chronological order, sorry. I think this image was used as the title page for the excerpts (from Road Kill) published in Blind Date No. 6 in 1989 in conjunction with the Visual Voices performance series curated by Kevin Radley at Southern Exposure, where we did this performance.

Margaret & I performed this piece five times: at Artists Television Access, at The Lab, at the Academy of Art College, at Southern Exposure & at a Poetry Center reading at the SF Arts Commission Gallery.

2007-01-01T22:00:00.000-08:00

As 1994 began I wanted to address aproblem that had been vexing me for some time: that my creative persona suffered from dissociative identity disorder. My creative practice consistently encompassed many media & genres & styles and to me these were all intricately related, like a long conversation with a close friend over a span of years, a conversation taking place through short flippant postcards, long heartfelt letters, anguished phone conversations, decadent physical contact in grade B resort towns in Tyrol, brutally insensitive emails, flu-riddled visits to each others' homes, etc - the stuff of friendship: schizophrenic, illogical - and inseperable - all of a piece; to see just one episode or epistle - one genre or exhibition - would give, in all likelihood, a false image of what the overall relationship/practice was.

While my effort & attention & output had been fairly consistent over the past twelve years, I remained at best an experimentalist, trying on new hats & tricks & tropes & media in my attempts to see how things would bend, how ideas would play out, how close my perceptions & articulations related to others' perceptions. I wasn't one to master a gimmick or style & keep plugging away at it, which was or seemed to be how a career was made in San Francisco. Once you could be counted on to be dependable, a reasonable known quantity, legible if you will, then reviewers could review you, curators curate you & audiences schedule you into their lives. I jumped around too much for anyone to get a handle on what I was doing, so I never got reviews and never built an audience very far beyond my circle of acquaintances & the built-in audiences of venues or publication I appeared in.

This meant that I'd never developed any even semi-sustainable "career" in the arts. I was still surviving, as I always had, by doing skilled or semi-skilled labor: housepainting, construction etc, full-time jobs that took lots of time & energy away from creative work. By 1994 I was working in a medical-records warehouse, a job that began a segue into various sorts of facilities & project management jobs.

Beyond this practical problem there was a conceptual one - or maybe it was an ego problem. I had started getting depressed because someone would come see a play of mine & have no idea or clue as to where this play had come from or how it fit into a long & varied exploration of the themes it articulated. This audient would only know what they had seen that night & would think of me only as a playwright. I wanted to be "conversing" with people in several "dialects" simultaneously: through paintings, writings, performance art, etc & I felt like there were only - maybe - a dozen people who both knew the range of my work and were interested. And those dozen weren't necessarily the people I really wanted to be talking to.

That sounds crass I suppose. What I mean is that they were basically close friends of mine, I love them still & their support has been & is invaluable, but just because someone's your friend doesn't make them your best "reader". Only about half of that dozen were people I could talk to & learn from - we were collaborators I guess even if we never did any work together - though with some I did.

Anyway I was getting really fed up with the restrictions imposed when applying for things like residencies. There's lots of competition, so the committees that evaluate applications have to sift through lots of samples, so there's not much time, so presentations have to be concise, samples focused, and despite all the rhetoric about multi-disciplinary work, you are basically forced to apply as something specific: as a writer or as a visual artist for instance. You can't apply as both even though you work in both media simultaneously and each informs the other. I grew to hate having to present myself as 1/4 of who I felt I was.

One of the few places that made any accomodation for my predicament was Headlands Center for the Arts, though while yes I could apply as a writer and as a visual artist and as a performance artist and as an art critic, I still had to make entirely seperate applications that would be judged by essentially seperate committees. I made a habit of applying in several disciplines, never to any avail until one year I actually got called for an interview with the committee - as an art critic - which was basically absurd - and I didn't get that residency either.

Anyway, I didn't mean this to be a rant about how these institutions work but rather to be an explanation about why I started making these combination posters, like the DISCIPLINE one above. I wanted people to think of my work in a larger sense, so that they might say to themselves, well, we don't know if we'll get a sculpture or a performance or a novel but we don't care, let's give him this residency, commission or gig anyway because we know & admire the broader scope of his thinking etc etc.

Pathetic & naive yes I know but anyway for a few months in 1994 I was pretty busy in different media & wanted people to know that, hence my posters took this form. The photo of the one above is me gagging myself at a collaborative performance project in Zürich in 1991, the one directly below is from a performance I made in Karl-Marx-Stadt, East Germany in 1990, and the text is my version of The Three John's equally facetious "...still the youngest and best-looking band in Leeds."

In some cases I also still made single-event specific posters, such as this one for a performance called Lullabye at The Back Room.

2007-01-01T21:34:00.000-08:00

The above image is of me performing privately for the other artists collaborating in the Feed Back & Forth project in Zürich. Attempting to, I should say. The large group (12 of us from 5 or 6 countries) was having a very difficult time resolving some deep differences. Things were near the breaking point & we made these private performances for each other in an attempt to heal & bond. The attempt didn't work, not really, but nonetheless was a much-needed interlude of reality. And by & large these individual pieces were much better than the collaborative ones. What I'm doing above is to force my body into a square area of floor space that is cordoned off by strong rope (or elastic rope or something) - to penetrate that area far enough so as to be able to reach some golden potatos & kick them out of that area.

Yeah - well - fine - you try to explain the performances that you do & see if they sound any less stupid, okay?

This image above is of the evil performance rebel secessionists (me, Yvonne Austen, Fritz Vogel & Mark Hudson) waiting for the tear gas cloud to reach our performance site, a small traffic island on a riverside street in Zürich. There was an anti-automobile riot that evening - it is a long & pretty good story that I will write down elsewhere. I am the figure with my right arm raised to my head, standing out against the white cloud. Yvonne is departing the scene with her 8-month-old baby Ebba.

Up Late With Bill & Hillary was Lise Swenson's & my sequel to "The Washington HillBillaries: The A Teams" performance at The Lab. If you click on the image you should be able to read the text on it, which explains the premise. This was typical of the work that Lise & I made together: create some sort of semi-ridiculous scenario framework & invite people to more or less autonomously create characters & perform inside it, in front of an audience. The fourth walls of these things were always very porous.

Scott MacLeod Collection 4: Fearlessness & Camaraderie

2006-12-01T10:00:00.000-08:00

Chantal DeFelice

This is my latest acquisition. I sort of had to have it as soon as I saw it on the wall at auto3321 gallery in Oakland. It just made me so happy. It reminded me of 1983-84, hanging out at the 17th & Mission flat with Lisa Kim, Andrea Menefee, Mary O'Neal & Trish Pashby, a great group of women who had tremendous camaraderie & fearlessness at that time. I was about 28 & they were all about 23. Back then the music was Pop-O-Pies, Au Pairs, Flipper, Delta 5, Theater of Hate, Faith No More, Slits, Marine Girls, Young Marble Giants, The Cure, stuff like that. There are few things more invigorating than hanging out with young, brave, intelligent women. It was a very fun time & this drawing brought it all back to me in an instant. Plus it was cheap enough I could actually afford it.

2006-12-01T09:00:00.000-08:00

Mads Lynnerup. Everyone was supposed to take a pair of cardboard flipflops in their size from Mads' show at SF Art Commission, so I did. They are more comfortable than you would think. But I wouldn't wear them in the rain.

I bought this photo of a beachside Santa at one of the annual art auctions at 21 Grand. I'm sorry I can't remember the name of the artist. If anyone knows who made this, let me know & I'll add the proper credit here. I like this photo for many reasons, but I bought it with the clear intention of sending it to my friends in the secret society of B.K.S. It is currently hanging on the wall of Franta Skala's studio in Prague.

I'm including a couple of t-shirt designs in this exhibition. I basically haven't worn t-shirts with images or text on them for ten years or so, with very few exceptions. But it's hard to go through life without collecting a few t-shirts with designs on them. This one here is one of the very few I would consider wearing in public - unfortunately I'd have to lose 25 pounds & shrink two sizes in order to wear it with any dignity - odd as that word may sound in this context.

Let me see if I can remember the story that Franta Skala told me about this shirt. At some point B.K.S. was "challenged" or "insulted" somehow by another group of male Czech artists - younger men, reckless men, just callow upstarts really. There was a great temptation to simply ignore them, but the young bucks continued to bray from time to time & it became clear that continued silence on B.K.S.'s part might lead some to think they were weak.

I don't remember the important details about the significance of the imagery, the metaphoric cloud surrounding this situation. All I remember is that B.K.S. produced only a very few of these t-shirts & either wore them themselves to some public event, or presented them as presents to their younger rivals. Another stunning triumph for B.K.S. They gave me one because I am cooler than ice.

If Franta will remind me of the correct story, I'll revise it here.

2006-12-01T08:46:00.000-08:00

Michael Manning. This is a t-shirt that I did wear many times. It too is a bit snug & I hadn't worn it for several years until I last wore it at the opening of Visual Aid At 16 show at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in April 2005. That was one hot opening. Hey Willpower played & weren't they great!? They made me feel like it was the late 70s again, or the late 80s or at least the mid 90s, when I bought this t-shirt off the wall at Eichelberger's. I am sorely tempted to sell or give this t-shirt to anyone who wants it enough to tell me why they have to have it.

Raegan Kelly. Even though she'd broken up with me a couple of weeks before I was leaving on a four-month performance art tour of (mostly) Eastern Europe in summer of 1990, Raegan made me this painting to wear on the back of my leather jacket. It's on chamois or ultrasuede, something like that. Here's a closeup:

Here below it is hanging by the front gate of Auschwitz, and below that I am wearing it while standing inside the ruins of the Berlin Wall:

In Moscow, a couple of guys in leather jackets asked me if I was a Hell's Angel. Of course I told them I was. This photo is by Franz John.

2006-12-01T08:00:00.001-08:00

Franta Skala.

Franta Skala. During the course of two seperate residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, just north of San Francisco, Franta made dozens & dozens of heads carved from sea-kelp. Pursuant to my support of his kelpicidal actions during the "Massacre at Montara Beach," Franta gave me a head of my own. It's gotten a little moldy.

Franta Skala. I first met Franta & B.K.S. in 1992 when I was a member of Parallel, a group of U.S. & Czech artists & administrators who'd gotten together to produce cultural exchanges between the two countries. In 1991 we'd brought about 25 U.S. artists to Czechoslovakia & the following year we brought I think it was 22 Czech artists to San Francisco, Santa Barbara, Tijuana, Arcata & other places.

One of the Czech groups was B.K.S. The advance word on them was that they were "dark" and "apocalyptic" so I was expecting, I don't know, GWAR or something. I was busy ferrying people from the airport & didn't get a chance to meet them there. I'd planned on housing two of the B.K.S. artists but they had insisted that they all must remain together 100% of the time, so someone had brought them all to my house.

When I finally made it home around midnight, I was surprised to hear an odd & mysterious sound coming from the brightly-lit kitchen at the end of the long hallway. I entered the kitchen and found four gentlemen sitting stiffly in black three-piece suits...whittling! Expecting Ozzy Osbourne, I got -what?- Amish dudes? The kitchen floor was covered in wood shavings, the table was covered with tiny intricate sculptures of cottages, femurs & graveyards. These dudes could whittle.

Anyway it's too long a story to tell here. They weren't Amish, they were . . . B.K.S. At some point, they gave me this very suggestive "rum bottle" nutcracker that Franta had carved. It's a good nutcracker & it's fun to hold.

Unknown maker. I found this painted wooden goose somewhere in some trash or some abandoned house. I like ducks & geese & I like this little guy.

Unknown maker. My parents hand-carried several sculptures back to the U.S. from Haiti when we were passing through in 1960. This was one of them. I can't remember how it came to be in my possession. All the rest are still at mom's house.

2006-12-01T07:00:00.000-08:00

Jakub Kalousek.

Jakub Kalousek.

Jakub Kalousek.

2006-12-01T06:00:00.000-08:00

John Chiara. John lives at Developing Environments, where I lived from about 2000-2003. John was a big fan of my varnish paintings & ended up buying several of them over the years. I could only afford one of his giant photos, this one of a fish. We finally realized that he was trying to make photos that looked like my paintings, and I was trying to make paintings like his photos - so we finally collaborated a little.

Unknown maker. When my grandmother, Margarethe Eitel Stapels, married for the second time, to Aloysius J. (Al) Petry, someone made these two 15" high doll likenesses of them in their wedding finery. I guess they must have commissioned these to be made. The clothing etc is pretty accurate in its way. They're a little freaky, which is why I like them.

2006-12-01T05:00:00.000-08:00

Zdenek Hula. Zdenek's a sculptor & printmaker friend of mine who also runs Galerie H in Kostelec nad Cernymi Lesy, CZ.

Thomas Lowe Taylor (Anabasis). Tom's a poet, photographer & visionary living north of Portland Oregon.

Unknown maker. Just a typically bad "impressionist" painting of a French or Italian street scene that I found in the trash, but I have a fair share of respect for people who can paint like this (I probably can't do as well) and the painting does brighten up the backyard patio, so I think it has as much right as anything else to be here in the Museum.

Megan Wilson. Megan painted & freely distributed hundreds of similar signs, each one unique, for her Home project. I got one because I had recently been evicted & so was sort of a victim of gentrification. Actually I have two: one large red one is lost somewhere in my studio; this one is mounted prominently on the outside of the studio, which feels a little like home because I built it myself.

Scott MacLeod Drawings 1960-1962: Part 3: Ships & Boats

2006-11-01T19:00:00.000-08:00

USA Ship, 1962

I'd intended to post a different show this month but that project turned out to be more complicated & time-consuming than I thought it would. Time & energy are in short supply this month, as my current employment strategy has insidiously mutated from a sporadic, bureaucratic type of thing I could do in my pajamas (if I wore any) to a nearly full-time, dust-covered, sweat-streaked physically demanding killer of 50-year-olds. So I've taken the easier route & come up with another exhibit of my drawings from 1960-62.

It's not surprising that ships show up a lot in my drawings; we traveled by ship whenever we moved to a new assignment. My mom is claustrophobic & won't get into a subway, an elevator or an airplane. Car or train tunnels make her nervous unless she can see the light at the other end.

Orange Ship, 1962

Luckily in the 50s & 60s we could avail ourselves of what were still commercially viable & not-that-expensive passenger freighter & ocean liner travel industries. My friend Martin Cox has created probably the best online resource providing a glimpse into that world: Maritime Matters.

My father worked as a radio engineer for the U.S. Embassy and we accompanied him to postings in Caracas, Venzuela; Djakarta, Indonesia; and, later, Paris France. By the time these drawings had been made, I'd sailed on the SS Santa Rosa from New York to La Guaira, Venezuela, back to NYC via Aruba, Kingston & Port-au-Prince on the SS Santa Paula, from LA to Japan via Hawaii on the SS President Cleveland, from Japan to Indonesia via the Phillipines & Thailand on the freighter SS President Grant.

Minature golf on the SS Santa Rosa, 1957

Vendors, Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 1960

Me keeping watch on deck of freighter SS President Grant, 1961

In 1961 we sailed from Indonesia to Singapore & back on the SS President Harrison, and did the same again in 1962. On that 1962 trip we then took the M/V Frankfurt to Singapore, Bataan, Corregidor, & Hong Kong, the M/V Hamburg back from Hong Kong to Singapore, & the Norwegian freighter Turandot, with 12 passenger cabins, from Singapore back to Indonesia.

In 1963 we left Indonesia for good, boarding the M/S Frankfurt on May 10th bound for Singapore, then Penang, Malaysia, where we took on a large load of Banka tin ingots. From Penang, we headed west across the Indian Ocean, where we were caught in a monsoon that put the ship at risk.

I vividly remember trying to sip warm Canada Dry Ginger Ale from a can in an effort to quell the prodigious vomiting brought on by the lurching of the ship between huge swells. We would slide sideways up a wave till one side of the ship was suspended in air at the crest, then slide nauseatingly down into the following trough. Later the captain told us that without the weight of the tin ingots in the hold, the ship would have likely capsized. This drawing, done three years earlier, seems prescient:

Ocean Liner On Big Wave, 1960

2006-11-01T18:00:00.000-08:00

Sphinx, Great Pyramid, Ray-Bans, 1963

Passing through the storm, we continued on our way to Suez, where we debarked and made our way by land towards Cairo for a couple days of sightseeing. Our ship made its slow way through the locks of the Suez Canal and we re-boarded her at Port Said, on the Mediterranean coast. We sailed to Naples, left the M/V Frankfurt, spent a couple months driving around Europe, then returned to Naples and boarded a ship (I can't remember which just now) for New York City.

Sipping Coca-Cola by Lago di Como, 1963

I was barely seven years old & had traveled around the world solely by surface transportation. In fact I'd logged enough sea miles to have gone around another half turn as well. I've always been very grateful for this experience of having seen, up close, nearly every mile traveled, and credit it as one of the most profoundly influential of my life.

And in fact it was aboard ship that I made my performance debut, backed by a big band, singing what song I will certainly never recall:

Singing on ship, (1961?)

2006-11-01T17:00:00.000-08:00

Anyway, enough autobioblather - here's some more types of boats:

A paddle-wheeler about to run over several men in a canoe, 1960

Some sort of odd houseboat? 1960

About as square a yacht as you can imagine. Some flag-waving & some mysterious activities & appurtenances. 1960

2006-11-01T16:11:00.000-08:00

Fishing Fleet, 1961

In Indonesia we had use of a sailboat, Ichiban, Japanese for "Number One," and its skipper Eddie. We'd sail out and around, nothing too adventuresome though on one trip we got caught in the edge of a storm and things got pretty dicey. Mostly it was calm sailing over coral reefs. If we went swimming we'd have to wear sneakers or the coral would've shredded our feet. This drawing above also pictures two junks, which I'd seen plenty of by then, and a canoe, which I'd probably only seen in movies.

Raft Rescue, 1960

Here two people on a large square-rigged sailing vessel are probably rescuing two people on a raft. If they'd been pirates putting two people on a raft, I'd definitely have drawn a skull & crossbones flag.

Two Aft, 1960

This miiiight be a covered lifeboat; I'd seen lots of them in real life & in the movies.

Piranesi Ship, 1960

The stacked ziggurat shape is typical of how I drew large ships, but this double-stack is over the top even for me; maybe Piranesi drew this one.

And here I'll leave you with a cheery drawing/collage from those bucolic days of May '62: sun, sea, snorkeling, fishing, seagulls overhead & even sensible UV-blocking headgear.

Sailboat Party, 1962

Scott MacLeod Drawings 1960-1962: Part 2: Bulldozers & Tractors

2006-10-01T11:56:00.000-07:00

We lived in Caracas, Venezuela from 1958 through 1960. Our first home in Caracas was an apartment building near a construction site. I'd stand on the balcony in my bathrobe, holding my stuffed chimpanzee, Kokomo Joe, and watch the giant yellow backhoes, bulldozers, cranes and other "trattors" for hours. At least once I got a chance to ride a few. Most days I'd have to be satisfied with drawing them. Here are some drawings of bulldozers, cranes, tractors, cars & less determinate vehicles, along with a few photos of me either riding or drawing.

Huge Tractor, 1960

Since this October exhibit is kind of small, I've also posted a related exhibit in the North Oakland Temporary Museum ANNEX that details a "performance" I made while/of working as Project Manager for an engineering company retrofitting a 120' CorTen steel pedestrian bridge & installing over a creek in San Jose CA in 2005-6.

2006-10-01T10:56:00.000-07:00

Bulldozer 1, 1960

Bulldozer 2, 1960

Bulldozer driver, 1960

I think I drew trailer hitches on the bulldozers because my Matchbox bulldozers & cars had little yellow trailer hitches.

2006-10-01T09:43:00.000-07:00

Firemen Ladder Truck Rescue, 1960

Firemen Ladder Truck & House, 1960

Like other kids I went through a fire-truck phase. The picture directly above is a little mysterious; at first I thought it was a cage on a truck parked near a rocket lifting off from a small house. But I think the dude's hat gives it away; it is likely a fireman with a poorly drawn ladder truck, and the rocket must be a chimney that is on fire at its base, or some such scenario.

The photo below looks like a tourist bus (with large windows) parked near the bottom of a gondola ride of some sort.

Firemen Ladder Truck & House, 1960

2006-10-01T08:45:00.000-07:00

Racecar Number 4, 1960

Strange Long Low Vehicle, 1960

Two People on Scooter, 1960

2006-10-01T07:46:00.000-07:00

Tractor & Truck, 1960

Crane & Forklift, 1960

Crane Lifting Car, 1960

2006-10-01T06:47:00.000-07:00

Runaway Tractor, 1960

SM & Tractor, Caracas Venezuela 1960

Don't forget to take a look at the related exhibit in the Museum Annex

Scott MacLeod Drawings 1960-1962: Part 1: War

2006-09-01T23:39:00.000-07:00

Flag Soldiers, 1962

Having exhausted most of the readily-bloggable artworks-by-others in my collection, I'm embarking on a change of direction for the Temporary Museum. This month's exhibition is the first of several which will drawings I made in 1960, 1961 & 1962.

In late summer of 1961, I had just turned five and was attending kindergarten of Regina Pacis Elementary School, a British Catholic school in Djakarta, Indonesia. The multi-racial nuns wore white habits and spoke with English accents.The classrooms were for the most part open to the large dusty central yard where recess was held. It was my second month in Indonesia and my first day in school. I was wearing a diaper because of some stomach infection or temporary food allergy.

The class was asked to draw a picture. Anything we wanted. I bent tight over my desk and drew a multi-tiered battleship, bristling with cannon, firing wildly at huge v-wing planes that dove and strafed and bombed in return. I'd just seen The Sinking of the Bismark on board ship on the way to Indonesia. The entire was page was filled with war machines, explosions and the broken lines of tracer bullets, all in green crayon. Similar in style to "Red Invades Black" and "Black Parachute Battle" below, but more manic.

Finally the teacher called time and asked if anyone would hold up their picture for as all to see. A girl with blond curls, three rows forward and three rows to my left held her drawing proudly above her head. I stared at it with slowly mounted dread, though dread to me usually feels more like a falling. A crisp, sparse rectangle house, with a neat triangle roof, done in purple crayon, perfectly squared and centered on the page. One rectangle for a chimney, a single line wiggling out as smoke. A simple door in the exact center, a simple window on either side, exactly symmetrical. A small tidy bush under each window. That was it.

A rushing sound was filling my head, from the inside, so I could barely hear the teacher and the other students ooh and aah over this girl's picture of a neat well-kept house. I bent my head and stared in horror at my own violent cataclysmic catastrophic crayonic excess, at the flying shards of metal and the stench of death that I - I! - had made. I knew at that instant that I was in some sort of deep trouble for which there was likely no solution and from which there was certainly no escape.

I'd originally planned to exhibit these drawings chrononologically, but after some thought I decided it would likely bve more interesting to group them thematically. So in honor of that first memorable drawing, and in sad resonance with the world's continuing cycles of violence, this first exhibition will be of drawings of war & violence as transcribed from Hollywood films, comic books and otherwise imagined by a 4, 5 & 6 year old.

Red Invades Black, 1962

Plane & Helicopter Battle, 1960

Black parachute battle, 1961

2006-09-01T23:02:00.000-07:00

Tank Explosion, 1960

Amphibious Invasion, 1960

Combat! Tent, 1960

As I posted this I realize it is mis-named. I thought the cross-hatching on the helmet meant that this was Vic Morrow as Sgt. Chip Saunders in TV's Combat!, but the animals & other details don't jibe; the whole thing looks like an Arabian scene to me now, some sort of Orientalist fantasy where turbans and keffiyehs share the same tent. God knows. So it looks like this isn't even about war. Well, we all make mistakes; some of us just don't bother to hide them. Anyway, a little research points out that Combat! didn't start airing until 1962 (I saw it beginning in 1963 when we moved back to the USA from Indonesia). And blow me down with a feather but did you realize that Jennifer Jason Leigh is Vic Morrow's daughter?

Battle At Mushroom House, 1960

Again, who the hell knows? This could be a science-fiction type thing, as I drew a lot of landing craft like the one here. But it could as easily be a nuclear explosion, a giant glazed donut. Who knows what lurks in the mind of a four year old?

2006-09-01T22:30:00.000-07:00

Archer & Sword Melee, 1960

Swords & Spears Melee, 1960

Four Gladiators, 1960

Some small-group battles. Is that a dartboard unwinding in the upper image?

2006-09-01T22:00:00.000-07:00

Tree Ambush Indian, 1960

Sword, Spear & Tent, 1960

These stark two-person fights remind me the bleak, frightening yet comedic scene in Pasolini's Oedipus Rex where Oedipus comes upon his (unbeknownst to him) father Laius's wagon. Laius's guards chase Oedipus down a rocky dirt road for what seems like an hour, running on in sandals, carrying heavy slabs of metal (swords etc) under a hot sun. Finally Oedipus turns and kills one or two of the guards and then chases the last guard back down that same dirt road for what again seems like an hour, till he at last catches and kills him near the wagon where Laius still sits, waiting dully for what will soon be his own death. I probably saw that scene when I was in high school and have never been able to forget its resolute demystification of ancient warfare, whose filmic tropes I had enthusiastically absorbed as a younger child.

2006-09-01T21:42:00.000-07:00

Conquistador & Aztec Fight, 1960

Gunfight Near Tombstone, 1960

Chefs Fight In Canoes, 1960

Men In Hats In Canoes, 1960

Sometimes the subjects are recognizable. Others admit room for conjecture. The bright lights of the past burn ever dimmer through the scratched and dented telescope of memory. Who are these enigmatic men in boats, who smile and paddle? The last image isn't overtly warlike but I think these Tahitians, these Iron Chefs, are out for blood sport.

2006-09-01T21:00:00.000-07:00

Knights On Dinosaurs, 1960

Melee With Monster, 1960

Toys In Urban Disaster, 1960

Strange Tower Assault, 1960

Are they horses or dinosaurs in the first of these four images? Mountain lion, monster or feral sagauro in the next? And what are the last two scenarios? Their scale leads me to think these are depictions of toys not humans. I collected plastic toy soldiers avidly from a young age and for a decade or more the floor of whatever bedroom I had was usually covered with some epic battle in progress: the Alamo, Shiloh, Chancellorsville, the Teutenberg Forest, the Pelennor Fields. Did I draw myself in this last picture?

2006-09-01T20:20:00.000-07:00

I drew battles on paper pads for decades. Different perspectives, different styles, mostly black & white, mostly stick figures. Drawings in color, or featuring full-figured figures, as these below, were rare.

Robin Hood & Red Birds, 1962

Zorro & Volcano, 1961

Kittens & Cavalry, 1962

From 1960 through about 1972 I drew at least three or four thousand pages of battles, islands, explorers, flying saucers, scenes from daily life and scenes from Jules Verne, H.G. Welles and John Ford. From Hollywood and TV and the backyard. For some really odd reason I threw them all away sometime in the 1980's. As far as I know the drawings, all from 1960-62, that I will post as exhibits here on and off over the next several months are the only ones that still exist.

Scott MacLeod Collection: Part 3

2006-08-01T23:45:00.000-07:00

I've taken a few people's advice & decided to include works by photographers, which I'd avoided previously because of some reservations I had re: image quality.

Martin Cox

Anne Hamersky

Debra St. John

Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret

I just bought the Dagnan-Bouveret reproduction at a garage sale for $10 and gave it to Jakub Kalousek because it reminds me of him. See this article for an idea of what I mean. But I like this image so much (possibly because it reminds me of Jakub) I wanted to post it here also, as if I still owned it.

2006-08-01T22:26:00.000-07:00

Jiří Kalousek (1925 - 1986)

Sem Zpracek & Jakub Kalousek

Jakub Kalousek

artist unknown

2006-08-01T21:15:00.000-07:00

Artist unknown

Phoebe Gloeckner

Mia Lor Houlberg

Jim Leftwich polaroid of Ralph Eaton sculpture

2006-08-01T20:21:00.000-07:00

Jim Leftwich

Matt Volla

Mia Lor Houlberg

I didn't want to wreck the very professional shadow-box framing job, so I tried to photograph it as is, but the results aren't too great. Sorry Mia. Let me know if this is too pathetic to leave up.

2006-08-01T18:25:00.000-07:00

Julie Murray

This is a little hard to make out. It's a long false eyelash - I guess you trim off what you need each time.

Jim Leftwich

Jim Leftwich

2006-08-01T16:39:00.000-07:00

Jakub Kalousek

I'm cheating here, I don't really own this one, I just like it a lot & wanted to pretend I owned it. I stole the picture from Jakub's blog, which I think is okay since I showed him how to set the blog up.

Leona Christie

Josef Aukee

Matthew Barney

This is a small clump of petroleum jelly from Drawing Restraint at SFMOMA, filched for me by Fina Gloeckner, using the toe of her flip-flop. I smeared it onto a piece of card stock so it would scan better.

Andy Goldsworthy

This is a rock from Goldsworthy's Room at Kentuck Knob Sculpture Park in Chalk Hill, Pennsylvania. On September 5, 1997, I took this rock and replaced it with another, similar rock that I'd found on the ground in the vicinity.

IT'S OKAY TO SMILE, WE ARE IN AMERICA NOW: The Scott MacLeod Collection Part Two: July 2006

2006-07-01T19:16:00.000-07:00

Marker on foamcore, 11"h x 31"w

On and off for the last ten years, I've been buying cardboard signs from men and women who use them to solicit money on sidewalks, median strips and other public places. I usually offer $20, a new black magic marker and a blank piece of cardboard, and am almost never refused. Folk art is often just the result of imagination overcoming difficulties imposed by poverty or repression. For me these signs are important more for political reasons than for aesthetic ones, but I am conscious of how aesthetics inform, deform and transform the political. These signs' utility overcomes, I think, any misplaced poignancy. I can only rarely afford to buy these signs, and am not in much of a position to exhibit them, beyond the confines of this digital frame. If anyone an put me in touch with someone who could better care for and utilize these fragile signs, I'd be appreciative.

2006-07-01T19:01:00.000-07:00

Pencil & marker on cardboard; 9"h x 13"w; by "Red"
Bought in Atlanta in 1993 from Red, who was 43 years old, birthday in April, he used to drive an 18-wheeler.

Tempera? on cardboard; 19"h x 28"w

Crayon on cardboard; 14"h x 22"w