Lee Tusman
Lee Tusman creates urban, socially-based art projects as a curator, installation artist and photographer. He is Creative Director of Hidden City Philadelphia and a curatorial member of Little Berlin art space.
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(via HyperAllergic)
Over the weekend, a group of 100 or so activists protesting Tadashi Kawamata and Christophe Scheidegger’s “Favela Café” were teargassed at Art Basel. The café, in attempting to mimic the desperate conditions of Brazil’s tragic slums, meant to bring introspection and perspective to Art Basel’s air of orgiastic excess — a project not unlike building a waterslide on the sun.
Needless to say, it ended poorly, with police forcibly ejecting a protest group opposed to this trivialization of the favelas, a crew variously described as “revelers,” “partying protesters,” and “an artist-activist group.”
Although I’m not keen on wasting paper, I’m going to participate at least a little bit.
~~ In memory of Aaron Swartz ~~
LABOR, UbuWeb and Kenneth Goldsmith invite you to participate in the first-ever attempt to print out the entire internet.
The idea is simple: print out as much as of the web as you want — be it one sheet or a truckload — send it to Mexico…
If you have been reading international news about the protests that started in Istanbul and have spread across Turkey, you may be under the false impression that this is an ideological battle between a secular piece of society and an Islamist Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, sparked by an insignificant event, the occupation of a city park. But the role of space in these outbreaks cannot be underestimated. As part of a project that wouldpedestrianize Taksim, Istanbul’s main square, the adjacent Gezi Park was to be demolished to build an Ottoman-via-Las Vegas Mall. The protest was an effort to save a park by occupying that very park; it was not a symbolic or ideological demonstration like the Occupy Wall Street movements, but a primal struggle between human bodies and bulldozers, that made the political discourse all the more potent.
Taksim is also the first place where protests have historically occurred; the planned pedestrianization of the square would have cut off the avenues where protesters could enter, effectively a vasectomy of its power as a commons. In Erdoğan’s own absurdly ironic words, “We want to stop traffic in Taksim, give the square to the people, pedestrians so that everyone can walk there freely.” This space of dissent, the last vestige of democracy reserved for moments in time when politicians have refused to listen to their populous, was itself under threat.
#OccupyGezi protesters raise a lot more than their goal to place a full-page ad in the Washington Post or NY Times.
h/t @aym
(via Technically Philly)
Crowdfunding isn’t just for money: help build the Hidden City Festival from the ground up by donating your time, chairs, water coolers and more. (Cash is welcome, too, of course.)
The month-long celebration of Philadelphia’s history, public spaces and local art is using the notion of crowdfunding to get people involved.
The festival goes from May 23 – June 30. You can get tickets here.
To be clear, it’s not exactly a novel concept to solicit help from event goers, but there’s something about using the imagery of crowdfunding (that bar that shows how much money has been raised) that makes it easy to understand how much help is needed and how you can contribute. It practically invites you to help out.
Flying Kite media interviewed me about the upcoming Hidden City Festival I curated.
If you’re bragging about Philadelphia and its unique charms, be sure to add the upcoming Hidden City Festival to the list. This is something nowhere else has — it’s ours and it’s amazing.
The first iteration took place in 2009, when founder Thaddeus Squire and his team opened up some of the city’s inaccessible architectural gems to the public. They transformed those abandoned and underused spaces into canvases for art installations and performances. Over 10,000 people showed up to explore the sites, which included the Metropolitan Opera House, the Royal Theater, Shiloh Baptist Church and Disston Saw Works.
Round two for the festival has been years in the making. This time they’re doing things a little differently, focusing more on interactivity and community. The five-week-long extravaganza — kicking off May 23 — will feature nine sites, with opportunities to meet the artists, docent tours, walks, concerts and discussions. A variety of passes (daily, weekend, festival-long) are available; Thursdays are free.Dave Kyu also received an Asian Arts Initiative Social Practice Lab grant (along with the project HOT TEA that I’m doing with 3 collaborators). Check out his project Sky Write as he attempts to create a message to write in the sky above Chinatown North/Callowhill/Eraserhood/The Loft District in Philly.
What message would you write in our neighborhood sky? Here’s your chance to have a say, by being a part of the Write Sky project by Dave Kyu.
Applications due by May 31, via email to davejkyu@gmail.com or via mail to:
WRITE SKY PROJECT
C/O Asian Arts Initiative
1219 Vine Street
Phila, PA 19107(via Asian Arts Initiative)
I’m collaborating with 3 other artists (my partner Kathryn Sclavi, Laura Deutch and Katya Gorker) on a mobile tea cart in the Chinatown North/Callowhill neighborhood of Philadelphia. It’ll serve as a site for art actions, conversations, DJ concerts, field recordings, a bookmobile, and more. Check it out.
We’re rolling out HOT TEA today from 3:30-5! Join us and special guests Ginkgo and Melinda Ocelot! near 11th and Wood, we’ll be roving so if you don’t see us, just trek around there nearby and listen for us. Free delicious tea and free sunshine.
From my punkarcade tumblr I manage with Sarah Brin, I recently wrote about Twine (which lets you make text adventures like Choose Your Own Adventure books) and how easy and compelling they are, and the rise of a huge community of new DIY gamemakers.
What the hell is Twine? You may have seen me mention it in past posts. Twine is easy-to-use software that lets you make choose-your-own-adventure style stories quickly, easily, and able to be uploaded anywhere online. There’s a huge community of users, all kinds of experimental games, and you can sit down and write your first game in a few minutes without any previous experience.
Twine’s become recently popular as it’s been championed (and has a how-to guide) by Anna Anthropy, author of Rise of the videogame zinesters that’s a manifesto and mini-manual for DIY videogame creation. Anna loves that all kinds of people, including and especially those brand new to games and many who have not been part of the videogame industry, are now able to create games from their own perspective. There’s a gallery of Twine games here, created in Twine! Great article on Vice’s Motherboard about Twine here. One of the things I find interesting is that this turns videogames back into the early lineage of Zork and other super-early videogames. And reminds us that games are about making choices, and giving your players choices to make. It’s pretty amazing that in an era of intense graphics capabilities that something as compelling as a great story can be so transformational.
We’ll try to profile some great games here. Send us ones you’ve made in twine, or your favorites.-LT
Coming soon to a mailbox near you!
If you would like to receive the fourth card of this 5-card collectible series join our mailing list, http://www.publicartarchive.org/content/join-our-mailing-list.
I curated Skullphone History Museum at the Riverside Art Museum a few years ago. Still one of my favorite skreet artists. Still think I should get a skullphone tattoo!
(via 10 Years of Wooster:Skullphone | Wooster Collective)
Oh, Skullphone, that’s who puts up those scary posters. Now we know.
The Museum of Everything
Museum of Everything in Paris (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic unless indicated)
PARIS — For a brief time, a former Catholic seminary on Paris’ classy Boulevard Raspail was overtaken with a psychoanalyst’s jubilee of art from self-taught creators who worked in secret or seclusion, in mental asylums or hospitals, or just from their own particular perspective of the world. The Museum of Everything is a traveling exhibition started by British filmmaker James Brett in 2009 that’s been widely successful in its unique curation of overlooked art.
As a native Los Angelino, I consider one of the city’s gems to be the Watts Towers. Completed in 1954 by Italian immigrant Simon Rodia, a construction worker without any art training, he would come home after work and slowly but surely (it took him 33 years) build “17 interconnecting sculptures adorned with intricate mosaics.” He used steel rods and pipes for the main supports and embedded pieces of porcelain, tile, bottles, and sea shells.
According to the LA Times, when the city of Los Angeles finally found Rodia’s masterpiece, the head of the municipal Building and Safety Department wrote this in a memo: “Personally, I think this is the biggest pile of junk outside a junkyard that I have ever seen.”
Quite the contrary, no? The Watts Towers have come to signify something very special to the city and since 1990, were designated as a Los Angeles landmark.
Over the years, tiny cracks and weather conditions have deteriorated the towers. In 2011, the Los Angeles’ Department of Cultural Affairs contracted with LACMA to help with maintenance and restoration.
Read here for more on how the restoration of The Watts Towers is coming along.
- Heidi
I love this project.-LT
Last Thursday, March 7th, we transformed Civic Space into a tattoo shop for one full day. This was the final event in a project we co-hosted with Portland’s Jason Sturgill called Windsor is Forever. In the spirit of Jason’s Portland project Art is Forever, Windsor is Forever became a community-driven art and tattoo project that gave Windsor residents an opportunity to make a permanent mark on themselves. It also gave us an opportunity to discover what Windsor might look like as a set of icons. We found out which objects or symbols were important to Windsor residents, and which could begin to tell a story of what Windsor was and will be. Windsor is Forever allowed us to connect with artists from the area and help create something that would last forever. This project demonstrated that Windsor is very important to many people, and for some, it is an integral part of their identities. Civic Space was transformed from a multi-use studio space to a sterile and appropriately-lit tattoo parlour in a day. This wouldn’t have been possible without the hard work of everyone who played a part in making Windsor is Forever a reality. The commitment from those involved and the participants themselves was incredible.
Saying Goodbye to a Brooklyn DIY Architectural Marvel
The Broken Angel House
Most of the coverage you’ll find about the Broken Angel House, a handmade architectural marvel in Clinton Hill, starts the story in 2006, when there was a small fire that set off all the trouble.The intensified activism of the 1960s fueled by the Vietnam War and struggles over class inequality, women’s rights, and black liberation drove the rapid growth of the underground press. Between 1965 and 1969, the five indie counterculture newspapers scattered across the United States multiplied to over 500 around the country, representing and communicating the voices of feminists, the Black Panther Party, gay activists, psychedelic aficionados, and other social movement groups with their art and design as radical as their messages. Rebel Newsprint: The Underground Press at Interference Archive in Gowanus is digging into this historic period with over 100 newspapers from across the sixties underground.
The exhibition of ephemera is curated by Sean Stewart, the editor of On the Ground: An Illustrated Anecdotal History of the Sixties Underground Press in the U.S. (2011), and was drawn from his own collection, with yellowed and folded issues of newspapers like the bilingual community publication Basta Ya started in San Francisco in 1969, the experimental San Francisco Oraclepublished from 1966 to 1968 out of Haight-Ashbury that reflected the area’s psychedelic scene in trippy rainbow ink and spiritual poetry, and the sexual revolution sourced Screw: The Sex Reviewco-founded by pornographer Al Goldstein. Most of the newspapers are held in plastic and suspended from the walls of the Interference Archive’s small space, a cascade of counterculture messages like “End the War Now,” “Don’t Mourn, Organize,” and “All Power to the People” blaring out from vibrantly hued cover art and rapid fire text.
For the community of Makoko of Lagos, Nigeria, life on the water is nothing new. Prone to flooding, residents have dealt with encroaching waters for generations by building houses on stiltsand using canoes as their main source of transport. Nigerian-born architect Kunle Adeyemi has a vision for the city of 250,000 people that involves constructing a group of floating structures that have better access to sanitation, fresh water, and waste disposal. His first endeavor would be to build a three-story school held afloat by plastic drums.
Mobile Structures!
Smithsonian American Art Museum Acquires the Life’s Work of an Imaginary Soul Singer
Between 1968 and 1977, Mingering Mike released around 50 albums, each with its own hand-drawn album art, and played sold-out shows around the world. Yet if you haven’t heard of the prolific soul and funk singer, it’s because he was entirely fictional, but the art was real and has just been acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
An Appreciation for the Often Hilarious, Usually Horrible, World of Bad Graffiti
Who cares about bad graffiti or street art? The spray paint scrawls of ill-chosen tag names (“Piggy Nasty,” “Pony Tail,” “Tricky Trout, Jr.”), reckless vulgarity (penises and boobs drawn on absolutely everything), and sad drawings that barely shape into the animal, face, or whatever they’re trying to be, who cares about all that? Usually these aerosol-on-concrete creations just fade into our visual background without a second glance, but artist Scott Hocking has recognized them for the masterpieces of mediocrity that they are in a photography book appropriately called Bad Graffiti, released in December 2012 by Black Dog Publishing.
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- RT @HiddenCityPhila: Wow, great review of the Hidden City Festival by @atlasobscura They spent a day visiting every festival site! http://t…Jun 19, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @0PN http://t.co/a4vvrSdosd is my jam today. i hope it's released as a soundbox like the buddha machine.Jun 19, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @SparkerlyMusic @HiddenCityPhila and you'd dig shivtei, kelly natatorium, hawthorne hall. but really you can't go wrong anywhere!
- @SparkerlyMusic @HiddenCityPhila hey steve, i would say go to this concert tonight! http://t.co/tCc7Ma4WXO
- RT @_HelenMF: Things to do in June a. Print out the Internet @internetprintJun 14, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @terrycavanagh i like it!
- i went to the bathroom of a comic book shop tonight and there was a stack of comic books next to the toilet.Jun 14, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @lolaadesioye thanks Lola!
- RT @HiddenCityPhila: HUGE HIDDEN CITY WEEKEND! Including this SAT concert w/ @DataGRDN concert at Historical Society of Frankford! http://t…Jun 13, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Just got my tix! RT @creativetimeNYC 2013 Creative Time Summit tickets are now available! http://t.co/HKQDJNNlVC #CTsummitJun 12, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @ajstream Thank you too! RT @AJStream Many thanks to our community and guests! @lolaadesioye @realitygives @2sman2sman and Fabian Frenzel.
- RT @HiddenCityPhila: Creative Director Lee Tusman will be on Al Jazeera's @AJStream today discussing poverty and tourism at 3:30PM EST http…Jun 11, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @Powserati: This weekend in Philly @DataGRDN & @HiddenCityPhila combine forces to present @muxmool @Jacob2dash2 @spaceshipaloha http://…Jun 11, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @AJStream: At 1930GMT: Do slum/ghetto tours help in understanding #poverty or #racism? Submit a video comment - http://t.co/TxFpbI0gvxJun 11, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- I'll be speaking on Al Jazeera @AJStream today at 3:30PM EST http://t.co/95DisTXx5l
- listening to @rvngintl FRKWYS vol 9. Sun Araw & M. Geddes Gengras meet The Congos to get me through this heat http://t.co/LG37BxqhyKJun 05, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @juliaxgulia: Whoah. White Columns is having a cat themed art show & "Cats-in-Residence" program. Count me in! http://t.co/HBu3TXqeD2 cc…Jun 04, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- Hyphy SkreetJun 04, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- @kingbritt live recording of his @HiddenCityPhila x @DataGRDN set from Fri at Frankford Historical Society! https://t.co/ZS1rl1ZPSxJun 04, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
- RT @samth0r: Photos from Turkey: http://t.co/0PvmDbAMtIJun 04, 13 from web Reply, Retweet, Favorite
