Emvergeoning

UPDATE: Check out Ben’s description of the night over at Scattered Work.

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Go check out the road to the parking lots at the ol’ San Antonio International Airport.  San Antonio local, Gary Sweeney has interjected some good humor into a portion of the drive. I managed to catch him there, hard hat and all..

These are just a few of the signs he placed in the drive space, keep an eye out the next time you go for a spin around the SA Airport to catch the rest.

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(words by Hills Snyder, photos by Justin Parr)

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In between running around shooting photos of record stores and weird museums today, I managed to make it by the Alamo and catch Jacob Goudreault (fresh in town from Chicago, IL) doing a performance / painting give-away in front of our favorite old mission.

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Steve Roden posts on a gig canceled, then rescheduled with only the Sun as audience. Be sure to listen to the audio linked at the bottom of his post.

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An old friend sets out to chronicle New York City through its ATMs on a new blog, aptly titled :

UPDATE: ATMNYC’s author writes:

The photos on atmnyc are taken with my iphone and then emailed directly to the tumblr blog. So the pictures are all snapped and posted in almost the same instant. I like to think of it as a sort of updated polaroid style. The limits of the iphone camera, the problems with focus, the tendency to blur and glare, even the dimensions of the photo, actually remind me a lot of the old Polaroid Land Camera.

I do not photograph any indoor atms unless they are visible from the street. I take many of the pictures quickly from my bike. I make little effort at composition— the city takes care of that part itself.

I used to hate the sight of atms, thinking that they were a regrettable intermediary techno clutter, not unlike the cell phone towers tacked onto so many historic Manhattan apartment buildings. On the other hand I find payphones charming, perhaps because they are nearing their obsolescence. Likewise, New York’s rooftop water towers are beautiful appendages, so maybe cellphone towers should be indulged as well.

In any case, I’ve become fond of atms, and have come to see them as helpful little droids, standing on corners blinking their senseless cyclopes eye, waiting patiently to serve the needs of a passing master– for a small fee, of course.  In the meantime they are heaped with every abuse offered by graffiti, violence and the weather.

But despite my growing sentimentality for the things, I still get my cash from the teller at a local branch bank.

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Cruz Ortiz Demonstrates his catapult, part of his new show ‘Puffy Taco Plate Company” at Three Walls Gallery on First Thursday in San Antonio. Don’t you just love cell phone video?

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Jimmy Kuehnle blows back onto the Texas art scene, fresh from his Japanese Fulbright stint, to bring new inflatable sculptures to San Antonio and the borderlands of Laredo. Check out one of his ridiculous performances on Friday, the Fourth of July, at Bluestar.

And don’t forget to mark your calendars to see Jimmy “The Big Ball of Red Delight” Kuehnle next week at the Laredo Center for the Arts.

Welcome back, weirdie!

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It was closing time at my neighborhood bar, the three of us leaning on a concrete table surrounded by cactus, when I heard about the dumpster full of art. A large scale public mural by Anton Vidokle was in the process of being removed by a company which had bought the building. The mural, an application of 100 vinyl decals on metal panels, depicted simplified versions of logos from bankrupt companies. Now the panels were being removed and thrown in a dumpster in the parking lot next to the building.

Installation shot of 100 Bankrupt Corporations (public geometry) by Anton Vidokle (courtesy Artpace)

We finished our beers, jumped in the car, and headed downtown. When we found the dumpster at around one in the morning, we realized immediately that we weren’t the first San Antonio art scenesters to have this idea. While almost all of the panels had been removed from the building, only a dozen or so were left in the dumpster. We jumped in and started throwing our favorites out into the parking lot. After cramming as many as we could into the trunk of the car, we took off, leaving a few for any other art scavengers who might not look down their noses on dumpster diving. After installing a panel with red semi-circular fragments of anonymous logos in my living room, I started noticing the other pieces around San Antonio. Stacked up near studios, hanging on workshop walls, leaning up against houses, they spoke of something just out of reach. Over the course of their lives, from symbols of production and commerce which drowned in a sea of such symbols, to their resurrection as material for an intricate yet minimal public mural, and finally to their cold, arbitrary fragmentation along the lines of a surface grid, they moved from abstraction to abstraction, carrying bits of identity from place to place.

Photos of Vidokle panels in the wild by Justin Parr

For a long time I waited for the few remaining panels along the top and down one side of the building to be removed. Every time I drove down San Pedro I looked to see if a few more of these public geometries had been taken from the face of the building, if perhaps the dumpster might have a few more treasures in it. And for a long time nothing happened. The building remained unchanged. After some months I forgot about the few logos that remained in their public home, and the mostly-deconstructed facade slowly slipped into the background of my focus.

Then one day it was gone. Not the facade, the panels that were always too exentric to remain for long, but the building itself, which had been reduced to a heap of rubble. A slight controversey ensued, but that too will slip from the front of our minds before long. Still, these little pieces of the mural endure, reminders of the simplified, fragmented memories we collect from our meanderings through the city; reminders of the sometimes crude identities we carry with us, and the ways they can be resurrected, transformed, annihilated.

Photo of Jorrie Furniture Building rubble by Justin Parr

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(Found on S. Flores early a.m., photo by Justin Parr)

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public art? aqualung? pigeon coop? design by committee? I’m trying to get a good angle on it, but nobody seems to know ANYTHING about these. Pictured below, I’ve spent the last 2 months asking people “in the know,” if they know of, or have seen these objects, to no avail. Do you know anything about these giant acrylic hollow boxes, sheathed in metal and bathroom tile on the fore-front of our walk through downtown to the Alamodome? I’m not sure of the exact install date, but I have seen them unchanged in their current condition since the 2 weeks preceding the Final Four basketball games that gripped downtown San Antonio for a week. Possibly its unfinished? ..or maybe I just don’t get it.

(more images by clicking below)
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One of my favorite pieces of long-standing illegal graffiti in San Antonio, totally anonymous aside from the image itself, this large painting of a Native American Indian in feather headdress on the Sunshine Laundry building on South Flores has been catching my eye for some time. After asking around, I heard several stories of people who have purportedly met this person, painting the same Indian in other places, (bar bathrooms?) No info as to the artist identity (or given “street” name) has been found. This image is in plain sight of rush hour traffic going by Flores St. on I-35 in San Antonio (near San Pedro exit).

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Invites have been circulating recently for a reception to mark the opening of the new Linda Pace Foundation offices (adjacent to Pace’s Camp Street residence) that have been quietly renovated over the last year or so.  I noticed on my bike ride to the gallery last week that the big blank wall facing S. Flores had been installed with a new text piece.  After some research, I’m concluding it is one of the new pieces of the Pace collection, mentioned in the reception invite as a Daniel Joseph Martinez.  The invite mentions two new acquisitions for the Foundation, no info as to the other has yet surfaced.

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Yesterday the Washington Post published a little reflection by Edward Hirsch on the connection between walking and poetry [hat tip]. He threads his own poetic footsteps with those of Baudelaire, Frost, Blake, and a host of others. The piece has an interesting resonance with a lecture Hirsch gave last year at Trinity University, in which he compares the act of reading to pulling a message from a bottle drifting in the sea. We can see him wandering along the beach, gathering the bottles tossed into the waves by poets on distant shores; and to stretch the metaphor further, uncorking a missive sent through the oceanic postal system of memory by the nascent poet in an 8-year-old Edward Hirsch.

Mostly, though, this discussion of long, poetic walks reminds me of Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch. The opening passage introduces lovers who wander the streets of Paris, dating by chance:

Would I find La Maga? Most of the time it was just a case of my putting in an appearance, going along the Rue de Seine to the arch leading into the Quai de Conti, and I would see her slender form against the olive-ashen light which floats along the river as she crossed back and forth on the Pont des Arts, or leaned over the iron rail looking at the water. It was quite natural for me to climb the steps to the bridge, go into its narrowness and over to where La Maga stood. She would smile and show no surprise, convinced as she was, the same as I, that casual meetings are apt to be just the opposite, and that people who make dates are the same kind who need lines on their writing paper, or who always squeeze up from the bottom on a tube of toothpaste.

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