I haven't touched this thing in a while. So what's up? Lets see. The president is still an idiot, but I won't bore y'all with my political ramblings. I'm almost done with my MA. After this semester I just have to complete my thesis. Our dog is fine. She's generally happy as a clam. We've created a few more nicknames for her. We call her:

boogie
pookie
silly
lover girl
ms. eva
honey pie
sweetie pie
etc, ad nauseum

We've seen Devotchka a few times lately. Who's Devotchka? They are this amazing band from Denver that I can only classify as "neo-gypsy". Check out:

www.devotchka.net

They play sad sweet music. It feels like someone stabbed you in the heart, but in a really nice and gentle way.

Also, an art show I'm involved with opens this Friday. Here's the info:

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Shopdropping: Experiments in the Aisle


Pond: 324 14th St b/w Mission St & Valencia
(www.mucketymuck.org)

March 11-April 10, 2005

Opening Reception: Fri Mar 11th, 2005, 7-10 pm
Art by:
Michael Campbell & Coby Ellison | Marc Horowitz | Shannon Spanhake |
Ven Voisey | The Art Dept at the Boys & Girls Club of San Francisco |
Steve Lambert | Conrad Bakker | Amy Franceschini | Center for Tactical
Magic | Eva Strohmeier | Packard Jennings

Labels by:
Chris Cobb | Eric Zassenhaus | Emily Abendroth | Amar Ravva | Terri
Cohn | Biz Stone | Jason Sanders | Stacy Doris | Jo Cook | Hilde
Jaegtnes | Summi Kaipa | Amanda Davidson | Jaime Cortez | Griffin
McPartland | Ann Frost | Lisa Boyer | Melanie Ashworth | Lauren
Shufran | Claire Kiefer | Eireene Nealand | Diana Aehegma | Hilary
Kaplan | Tanesia Hale-Jones | Darren Riesz | Marc Nevin | Kathryn Webb
| Brandon Broun

Zine Library: Shoplifting Special: From How-To Primers to Critiques
curated by zine archivist Smurph

Special Event: Digestion: Changing the Nature of Nature
Sat Mar 26, 6-9 pm
a buffet of edible visualizations of supermarket excesses
catered by Shannon Spanhake, Roberto Freddi, Jason Moore, Camilo
Ontiveros, Steve Rioux

Gallery Hours: March 11-April 10: Sat & Sun, 3-8 pm and by appointment

Shopdropping is an exhibition that both catalogues and instigates the
insertion of art into public places of commerce (specifically,
conglomerate retail stores). The artwork--ranging from social
sculptures to gentle gestures of gift-leaving—is presented in the
exhibition in the form of multiples/duplicates or audio/photo/video
documentation. Using beauty, humor, and intimate address to invite
shoppers’ self-reflection and second glance, the works eschew a
reductivist commodity critique in favor of complex strategies that
detourne situations, present alternatives to normative systems of
exchange, and graft together alternate economic regimes.

One tactic characterizing interventionist art is a reliance on the
artwork’s (re)assimilation into the language and space of hegemonic
symbolic systems. Packard Jenning’s Il Duce Action Figure involves
both the insertion of a hand-made Benito Mussolini doll into Wal-Mart
and documentation of the ensuing comical conundrums (a spycam video of
confused workers assigning a value to the item, the manual entry of
‘Mussolini’ onto the receipt, etc.).

An alternate strategy employed by interventionist art is the
insertion of a ‘mute’ or ’impotent’ commodity—a commodity whose
non-functionality rejects or halts the flow of
signification/consumption. For instance, Steve Lambert’s
ultra-genericized cereal boxes employ the language of advertising to
create a meta-commodity. Devoid of purpose or motive, Lambert’s art
works like an insect’s abandoned carapace, pointing out the absence of
what was.

In Lost in the Supermarket, a collaborative led by Marijke
Jorritsma, involving instructors (Marisa Aragona, Melissa Orzolek,
Tara Foley) and youths from the Boys & Girls Club of San Francisco,
hand-crafted ceramic commodities (lotion, dishwashing soap, spice
bottles, soup cans) were reverse-shoplifted into a local grocery
conglomerate—a process that offers a delightfully humorous narrative
of the encounter between shoppers/workers with these ‘inadequate’ or
‘fallible’ products made by kids. But perhaps more importantly, the
process proved wildly startling for youths, ranging in age from 7 to
14, who were fascinated by the prospect that “you could really do such
a thing” (i.e., that you could put something ‘not real’ onto the shelf
with other ‘real’ products). For youths, then, to realize their
agency within the economy, by extension comes the demystification of
commodity logic.

Many interventionist artworks situate themselves not as ‘disruptive’
(a term which, for some, can connote a privileged position at the
expense of the unwitting shopper) but as gestures of ‘gift-giving.’
For Shopdropping, various text-based artists and writers were asked to
create labels or tags that were later pinned to garments in a local
upscale department store. Asked to incorporate elements of
site-specificity and intimately address the shopper, the tags are
intended to function as stowaway gifts. Commenting on the
characteristic of the gift to connect with its receiver, the
anthropologist Lewis Hyde writes, “It is the cardinal difference
between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a
feeling-bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves
no necessary connection…a gift makes the connection" [1]. The
shopdropped tags, then, can be considered a process of bestowal that
symbolically imports the logic of gift exchange into the realm of
commodity exchange.

Ultimately, Shopdropping expands the discourse and field of
interventionist art, asking us to consider its nuanced range of
representational strategy, intention, context, and references.

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Anyway, that's it for now.