Emvergeoning

This is a little reminder of some of the art events on this busy weekend.

• Mel Bochner is showing recent work at Lawrence Markey gallery on Friday night, 5-7 pm.
• For those of you who dig theory, the Land Heritage Institute is hosting an art-sci symposium, “The Nature of Place,” full of important thinkers, from Lucy Lippard, Sandy Stone, and Joan Jonas to Anjali Gupta (editor / director of Art Lies) and Leslie Raymond (head of the New Media Program at UTSA and one half of Potter-Belmar Labs). This is on Saturday & Sunday. It’s free, but you have to register.
• For some more family-oriented fun on Saturday, check out the Blue Star Contemporary Art Center’s Family Day, with free workshops, demonstrations, food, drink, and live music. There’s even a bike rodeo and free silk screening if you bring your bike & t-shirts!
• Saturday night the Martinez Street Women’s Center is having a fundraiser at Artpace called the Bling-Bling Fling. Should be a blast. Tickets are $25.
• The street art festival Clogged Caps is going on all day Saturday, with top-notch aerosol artists & DJs.

Don’t miss any of this stuff! Seriously!

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“ and Skye Cosby will be destroying a historic piano upon which music legends such as Sam Cooke have played. The piano was a gift from the late artist Reverend Seymour Perkins’ family to commemorate his artistic career and legacy. Perkins and Castellanos collaborated extensively for the last 2 years of Perkins’ life. Afterwards, Castellanos will build a wall sculpture out of the piano pieces…” -Raul’s MySpace

“My performance partner suffered a heat stroke last week cancelling our performance but we are now able to guarantee that on Tuesday the 28th, at 7:45 PM, at 602 Nevada (and Hackberry) at Reverend Seymour Perkins’ famous cement slab/sculpture garden, I, Raul Castellanos, will be breaking a piano given to me by the Perkins family to honor the late controversial and legendary artist from the Eastside. My assistant is Skye who is also Perkins’ only authorized biographer. I collaborated on many projects with Perkins for a bit more than 2 years and was truly honored to do so.” -Raul’s MySpace

It’s hard to believe, but this event was actually as good as it sounded. Raul once had an art studio next to mine and he was always pretty intense- destroying perfectly good instruments to create paintings and sculptures that helped him represent his deafness to the world. Destroying this antique, though, seemed particularly irreverent as well as the fact that, this time, his chaotic artistic performance was taking place in the middle of one of San Antonio’s poorer black neighborhoods. For the most part, passing cars would just honk curiously at the gathering crowd. There were moments, though, when this art crowd might have felt they were on the wrong side of Sunset Station. One passing neighbor yelled at a nervous spectator and told him to put the piano back together. Overall, though, I felt a real sense of community built between artists, San Antonians, and the recently bereaved. It has often been said that in art- in order to create, you must destroy. What better place, then, than at the Reverend’s Revival Center which once strived to rebuild the tattered remains of strung-out lives.

UPDATE: A video of the event was just uploaded to .

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I’ve been digging around a bit for details about tommorrow’s Artist Foundation fundraiser, the ArtBall (aka aLadaDadaGala). I managed to get ahold of a list of artists in the auction, although I don’t know how complete it is:

Anne Wallace, Ansen Seale, Ben Mata, Bettie Ward, Charlie Morris, Chris Sauter, Cruz Ortiz, Diana Kersey, Ed Saavedra, Enrique Martinez, Franco Mondini-Ruiz, Gary Sweeney, Hills Snyder, Jeremiah Teutsch, Jerry Cabrera, Jessica Halonen, Jim Keller, Joey Fauerso, John Mata, Kelly O’Connor, Ken Little, Kristy Perez, Leigh Anne Lester, Loretta Rey, Louis Vega Trevino, Mark Hogensen, Marlys Dietrick, McKay Otto, Michele Monseau, Peter Zubiate, Richie Budd, Susan Budge, Susan Strauss, Thomas Cummins, Trish Simonite, Dan Borris, Scott Lifshutz

I’ve also heard that there will be a reading from a Dada play (Pere Ubu Ubu Roi??), and a performance by the Saint Lorraine Dance Company.

Two artists in the auction have posted images of their ArtBall pieces on Facebook: Michele Monseau and our own Justin Parr. I also hear that a bicycle custom-painted by Alex Rubio, and a library of signed books by San Antonio authors will be auctioned. I’ll update this post as I hear more…

UPDATE: Here’s Hills Snyder’s contribution to the auction:

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When I was working on my first art review back in 2006, I saw a version of Edgar Arceneaux’s video “Old Man Hill” at the Artpace potluck that launched his residency there. The residency project (which later wound up in the Whitney Biennial) wasn’t as impressive as this simple homage to a man he never met: his father’s father. Arceneaux spelled out the only thing he ever knew about this man — that he was called “Old Man Hill” — in silver balloons, which hovered over the war-torn hills of Sarajevo. One by one the balloons released and twisted toward the sky. The cameras followed the balloons wistfully, clinging to these insubstantial forms seeking oblivion. Occasionally the cameras cut to people going about their lives in the city below, people looking away from these hills with their burned out buildings and piles of rubble.

Linda Pace, who had not yet embarked on her battle with cancer, purchased this piece for her collection. Other than that potluck, the video had never been shown publicly; but before she died, Linda asked that it be screened at a special time, with the artist present. The Linda Pace Foundation arranged to screen the final version of this video for Linda’s birthday, last Thursday. Arceneaux was flown in to stage a performance along with the screening. The site selected for the project was the Mission Drive-In, a once-popular drive-in theater now dilapidated, graffiti-strewn, and slated for destruction. (It will be replaced with a new public library).

The evening of the event was overcast, windy, threatening rain. We got there early, and wandered around the old drive-in, its pavement giving way to grass, but its screens still fully intact. One by one, silver balloons were filled up and placed in front of the main screen, spelling out words that were unfamiliar to us, apparently a translation of “Old Man Hill” into Serbian Bosnian.

The translation of words hinted at another translation: the bombed-out hills of Sarajevo where snipers once found cover were translated into a theater in San Antonio, equally desolate, undergoing a wholly other kind of violence. This isn’t to equate the devestation of war to the disappearance of a drive-in, but to translate loss between cultures. Nearby the old theater, the Mission San Jose holds memories of a violence closer to that of Sarajevo: genocide, slavery, subjugation. But to most of us living in San Antonio today, the loss of place is felt more fully than the tragic, large-scale loss of life experienced by those who lived in Sarajevo in the 1990s or San Antonio in the 1700s. The slow erosion of the identities of our cities happens to be the kind of loss we are stuggling with now, the loss that we still don’t quite know how to grapple with.

Eventually, as it grew dark, Arceneaux introduced the video, speaking of his search to learn something of his grandfather, a man neither he nor his father ever knew. This was a search to connect his identity to something larger, something more historically rooted. He spoke of his brief relationship with Linda Pace, who worked to create places in San Antonio that connect to what came before them: an old car dealership downtown becomes an artist residency space. This is the act of translating place — it doesn’t make sense to have car dealerships downtown anymore, but these spaces can be translated into something that is meaningful today, that turns loss and emptiness into another kind of value.

The video started, and as we watched Old Man Hill float away into the hills of Sarajevo, we also watched indecipherable words from another place float away into the San Antonio night, sometimes brushing slightly against the aging screen. And even as they disappeared from view, these words became embued with meaning. This was the final screening at the Mission Drive-In.

(Photos by Justin Parr, courtesy Linda Pace Foundation)

UPDATE: I’m honored to have Devin King respond to this in the second post on his new blog, Dancing Young Men From High Windows. Hopefully I’ll have time to respond to his post soon, but in the meantime I’ll point yall that way for an interesting reaction.

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Performed by Los Dorados del Norte.  Music & lyrics by… ?

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