Today we continue our week-long series, Summer of Utopia, through the work of artists Rosa Casado and Mike Brookes. Spanish performance artist, Rosa Casado and British visual artist, Mike Brookes initiated a long-term collaboration in 2000 focusing on performative engagements in social spaces,  informed by seminal works addressing utopian ideals of social equality,  self-organization and ecological sustainability.

Paradise 2 - the incessant sound of a falling tree; Photo by Rafael Gavalle; Courtesy of Rosa Casado

In Paradise 2 – the incessant sound of a falling tree, Casado recites a text based on Jorge Furtado’s Ilha das Flores, a film examining humanity within capitalism. Reflecting on her ability to holiday in Mali having “profited” from work, Casado deftly draws diagrams of her voyage on the ground. Her gestures are interspersed with deliberate consuming of chocolate trees from a chocolate island, each eaten tree activating a sound that creates a loop. She narrates and draws out the voyage taken by Ibrahima Boyé, from Senegal where he was unable to make “sufficient profit” and travels to Spain for work. Though alike in intellect and core physical characteristics, Casado’s journey is one of a tourist, while Boyé’s is that of an immigrant. In an era where consumption and profits form progress, a sense heightened by the rhythmical percussion sound increasing in beats as the trees are eaten by the end of the 40-minute performance, how do we consider our desires and value of human dignity?

Some Things Happen All At Once; Photo by Mike Brookes; Courtesy of Rosa Casado

Similarly, Some things happen all at once comprises an installation typifying a community within a 45 minute durational set, represented through 150 ice trees, 60 ice houses and an ice church on the ground. A reading drawing on writings of architect, Buckminster Fuller and scientist, Philip Ball, muses on the extraordinary ways earth maintains the balance of energy exchange and humankind’s capacities to develop survival strategies. As the audience’s heat hastens the ice melting, attempts are made to sustain the village through a bicycle powering a cooling system. The balance between hot and cold senses, and solid and liquid visual properties display the inter-dependence of humans and nature. Against the possible fate of the earth as a heat reservoir, the interventions to foster sustainability provoke thought on the realities of human presence, action, and negligence.

One thing leads to another; Photo by Mike Brookes; Courtesy of Rosa Casado

Human interventions as a critical part of systems takes precedence in One thing leads to another, a durational piece involving the movement of 50 small toys forwards. Visitors become agents of change, articulating the game’s rules and deciding how the game progresses. This action varied across contexts. In June 2008 in Polverigi, it was developed through the streets of the town. In October 2009 in Singapore, participants developed a game which expounded personal meanings of progress in workshops, culminating in a public presentation where visitors played the games, opening discourse and making visible assumptions of social rules and progress.

Casado and Brookes do not pronounce an all-encompassing utopian vision and acknowledge decay and destruction as inevitable scientific processes. Yet, a palpable utopian quality at the core of their works rests in the belief in the human conscience which, when activated, enables meaningful action.

Casado trained in ballet, studied physics at the University of Madrid and theatre at Istituto d’Arte Scenica. Brookes is a Creative Wales Award Recipient 2007 and a Creative Research Fellow at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Paradise 2 will be presented on 26 September 2010 at Teatre Municipal de l’Escorxador, Lleida, Spain. A new work, Just a little bit of history repeating exploring how a place acquires meaning through time will feature at the b-side multimedia arts festival, Weymouth and Portland, Dorset, UK which runs from 17 to 26 September 2010 and at Festival BAD in Bilbao, Spain in October 2010.

Today, DailyServing continues our 7-day summer series, Summer of Utopia, where we investigate seven different artists who either employ or interrupt ideas of utopia. Full disclosure: Ted Purves was the first person I met at the California College of the Arts and—despite the fact that I don’t work in relational aesthetics—one of the reasons I decided to apply to their graduate program.  He is the editor of the seminal book What We Want Is Free and founder of the country’s first MFA in Social Practice. Last week he took some time to discuss utopia, democracy, morality, and the success of the projects he creates with his partner Susanne Cockrell.

Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell, Temescal Amity Works (July 2004-January 2007).

Bean Gilsdorf: I listened to your interview at Bad At Sports and you said, “I’m not a utopian in any way” and that intrigued me.  Tell me how you’re not a utopian, working in social practice.

Ted Purves: Let’s think about what the utopian project is: generally, to design a coherent social system that satisfies all basic needs.  Thomas More created this very intense class structure, and utopia saw to the needs of the upper and middle classes.  It’s really horrifying, utopia, because it’s the idea of agreement about what a perfect society is.  We don’t live in times of agreement or tribal identity or singular religious identity. We live in a situation of disagreement and negotiation.  I’m much more interested in the notion of democracy rather than the notion of utopia, because it allows for the possibility of negotiation and change and alteration.  Democracy is about the peaceful negotiation of disagreement.

BG: Has that come up in your work, like the Temescal Amity Works, that feeling of negotiating disagreement?  Where has that come in for you guys?

TP: I wouldn’t say that we’ve actively looked at disagreement in our projects.  We’ve been working from another starting point: the position of economies in people’s lives and how exchange functions.  Even though we tend to think of ourselves as living in this highly capitalist market economy, we actually live within several different economic systems all at the same time.  Getting paid and going shopping is participating in a larger capital economy, but giving a friend a lift to the store is a different, casual kind of economy.  Not all of our relationships are of cliency and payment.  We are interested in the way people are negotiating between competing or overlapping economies within their own lives, and creating a way to see that there are different ways to view your own personal economy.  For instance, the projects about sharing fruit were about getting people to think about latent caloric energy that’s growing in the neighborhood, free of charge, at the same time that people are going out to stores to maintain their bodily lives.  It’s getting people to see that we’re living in one system where we’re working to get money to buy calories when, yet, there’s another production of calories that’s going on…

BG: …aside from that, parallel with that…

Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell, Temescal Amity Works (July 2004-January 2007).

TP: …yeah, right under our noses, that’s not being used.  And how do you create a project that illuminates this other kind of economy?  One project I admire is The Blue House project.  It’s a really interesting counter-utopian project because it’s about creating a space for unplanning, a space for ongoing negotiation and debate in a highly planned suburb—even though the idea of that suburb wasn’t necessarily to be a utopia.  I think there is a utopian interest in most kinds of civic planning because they are based on the idea that there is a perfect fix or a mostly-perfect decision to make about how you apportion resources, how you set up where people are going to live, what people need, and what’s going to make them happy.

BG: There seems to be a kind of benevolence that underlies a lot of these projects, and I wonder if you guys think about that explicitly in your work.  Does morality enter into this at all?

TP: I don’t know if morality does because from our “negotiation-and-disagreement” mindset, morality is another sort of thing that is always going to be disparate among people, so it’s always going to be a negotiated space.  We’re interested in working with the public and in public spaces to learn what people think and how people perceive public space around them.  We start a lot of these because we don’t know everything about a situation and we’re curious about it, and we are interested in creating opportunities for research and dialogue with people.

BG: So you start with a question?

TP: Exactly. Temescal Amity Works started with questions: What is the history of the neighborhood that so many fruit trees were planted here?  How do we negotiate the idea of the developed economy of the neighborhood?  And that’s given way to a larger set of questions that we’re thinking about: how does the social imagination continue to drive people’s decisions, beliefs, lifestyle choices?  What kinds of social imaginaries regarding the rural inhabit the minds of people in cities?

Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell, Lemon Everlasting Backyard Battery, San Jose Institute for Contemporary Art (2008).

BG: When do you feel a project is successful?  What makes you go home and high-five each other at the end of the day?

TP: I feel like a project is successful if we have had substantive encounters with people, if we have created spaces where a kind of exchange—whether it’s family history, or talking about why something should or shouldn’t be in an art museum, or sometimes it’s just swapping recipes—some form of animated or engaged dialogue comes out, or some sort of story emerges.  It means we learn something, a story can be brought forward from that, that’s when things are successful.  Another high-five moment comes when there is something compelling to look at.  A lot of times when you see a social practice show, it’s either a room full of crap to read, or it looks like a place where they had a party and you didn’t get to go.  I’ve been to a lot of those, and they’re not satisfying!  You either wish they had just printed a book you could take home and read in your own chair—because it’s not very comfortable to sit in a museum—or you wish that you’d been at the party.  When we did Lemon Everlasting Backyard Battery we had hundreds of jars of lemons on this table, and it was beautiful.

BG: It sounds like bringing aesthetics back into it is important.

TP: Yes, certainly when there’s a material expectation for it to be art.  [Lemon Everlasting] was great for us, because it got to be beautiful-looking, but it also got to do something; two things were happening in the same space.  It occupied the institution and it challenged the institution in ways that were playful, functional and aesthetically critical.  Aesthetics are important.  Obviously some artists don’t think this way.  They can just go in and do straight up exercises, and by the rules of the game that’s art too, but for us there’s got to be something else, a twist, a different way of seeing.  We’re working in public space, so we need to challenge public expectations, a kind of weirdness, wrongness, whatever that might be.

BG: Do you think of projects as iterative?  Would you want to restage that project, or do something similar someplace else?  Or have the questions been answered and now you can move on to other questions that have been formed by the outcome?

TP: That’s a great question.  I think it depends from project to project.  I would definitely say that you never answer all the questions.  The new thing we’ve been working on is this ongoing newspaper project, The Meadow Network.  We structured it in a specific way because a thing like Temescal Amity Works was such a Herculean effort that you don’t want to do it again!  We created TMN so that there was an option to have a repeatable form that could grow on itself, so that we wouldn’t have to reinvent an entire project every single time…  That only half answers the question: I think it is good to have some projects or programs that are sort of open-ended but able to be temporarily concluded, because some questions don’t go away.

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast
A weekly column by Catherine Wagley

"Breakfast at Tiffany's," film still, 1961.

At the start of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Truman Capote’s charming novella about a troubled socialite looking for “what’s hers” and attracted to everything that’s not, the unnamed narrator receives a message from a bartender named Joe Bell. He meets Bell, an old friend, and the two clandestinely talk about Holly, the socialite who has long since disappeared (as the novella progresses, we find out why). Both men are still quietly preoccupied with her.

“If she was in the city, I’d have seen her,” says Bell. “You take a man that likes to walk. . . and all the years he’s got his eye out for one person and nobody’s ever her, don’t it stand to reason she’s not there? I see pieces of her all the time, a flat little bottom, any skinny girl that walks fast and straight–” Then Bell becomes uncomfortable. “You think I’m round the bend?”

“It’s just that I didn’t know you’d been in love with her,” the narrator replies. “Not like that.”

“You can love someone without it being like that,” Bell says. “You can keep them a stranger, a stranger who’s a friend.”

Francesco Vezzoli, "A Love Trilogy: Self-Portrait with Marisa Berenson as Edith Piaf", film still, 1999.

Strangers are friends in Francesco Vezzoli’s A Love Trilogy: Self-Portrait with Marisa Berenson as Edith Piaf, a short, wistful film that had been on view at MoCA’s Geffen Contemporary until July 12.  In it, the actual Marisa Berenson wears Valentino gowns, lip-syncs to the absent Edith Piaf and floats across the screen like a well-manicured ghost. “The result is a bit like catching a whiff of perfume lingering in an empty elevator,” wrote Richard Flood in a 2000 issue of ArtForum

At one point, Berenson whisks down a red-carpeted aisle in a chapel filled with rows of empty white chairs. Vezzoli patiently waits for her at the altar, wearing a tuxedo that, while certainly not cheap, appears unpretentious next to Berenson’s couture gown. Berenson closes in on him, though doesn’t get close enough to touch him, before spinning around and whisking out. And the whole time, Vezzoli looks boyishly content–when he made the film, he was only 28 years old, practically still a boy; Berenson was 52. Later, Berenson throws herself against a black casket. “When Marisa Berenson entered a room, people would clap: she was so beautiful it was unbearable,” Vezzoli told Massimilliano Gioni in 2001.

In A Love Trilogy, everyone dabbles with what doesn’t belong to them. Berenson, a diva, inhabits the life of Piaf, an earlier diva whom Berenson never met but admires enough to embody. Vezzoli, a diva devotee, shares screen space with Berenson, an idol of his but someone whose life he likely never would have entered if not under the guise of this film about Piaf. These triangulating circumstances keep the characters–and Piaf counts as a character–in Trilogy at arm’s length; their mutual admiration is the film’s narrative glue, but they have to remain strangers because of the gaps between their situations.

Divya Victor, "Hellocasts", FERAL-CAT ATTACK performance still, 2010. Courtesy Les Figues Press.

I saw Vezzoli’s film on a Sunday afternoon, before boarding the Red Line and riding to Hollywood for Not Content 2, one of a series of performances at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). LACE’s back gallery was set up as a haphazard auditorium and vodka-spiked lemonade sat on a table next to a boxed blue cake and a carton of water. Most importantly, a big Hello Kitty icon had been inscribed into the far wall and filled with text. During the second third of the performance, I found out why. Poet Divya Victor’s Hellocasts uses the multi-part poem Holocaust by Charles Reznikoff–which talks about S.S. officers throwing stones at groups of Jews, shooting bodies twice to be sure of death, and forcing orchestras of Jewish musicians to play as others died–as a starting point. The word Holocaust sounds like Hellocasts, which sounds like Hello Cats, which, of course, recalls Hello Kitty, a symbol Victor associates with silence (“Hello Kitty, the cat, has no mouth. Hello Kitty, the brand, always speaks for itself; is always spoken for by its consumer; is a felicific felicitation of affirmed desires,” she writes).

Victor’s voice read Holocaust by Reznikoff as seven performers transcribed what she said into Hello Kitty outlines on the wall, often on top of the big, already present kitty. These performers occasionally pulled audience members up and gave them their own Hello Kitty to write in, which resulted in a crowded and quickly filling wall. Victor kept reminding everyone present that the words she read were not Reznikoff’s when they became hers, and that they were not hers when they became the transcriber’s, and that they were not the transcriber’s when they became the audience’s. In other words, the Holocaust/Hellocasts belonged to none of us and all of us. No one seemed to want full ownership, either. Those of us who wrote seemed more than willing to be friendly, silently participating, jotting what we heard into the body of a kitschy kitty cat but keeping the distance of strangers between ourselves and our situation.

Resistance, 2006; Courtesy the artist; Courtesy gb agency, Paris; Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; Johnen Galerie, Berlin

The work of Slovakian artist Roman Ondák has been referred to as “intervention,” a label which makes reference to the way a piece confronts the viewer with an unexpected experience. Ondák, who is currently participating in the Berlin Biennale through August 8, 2010, creates work that is at once mischievous, hilarious and stone serious. He deals with social issues of both the grand and trivial scales and swaddles participants—whether knowingly or not—inside the folds of each performance. In the manner of a social scientist, he is wont to stage “temporary situations and imaginative sitespecific constructions that predict various communication patterns in behavior and in the perception of things.” (source) In his 2009 presentation of Measuring the Universe (2007) at Museum of Modern Art in New York, Ondák urged museum visitors to mark their height and first name on a white wall—the same way a child might over the years in a hallway at home—until the thousands of black ink markings became as visually dense as they were socially significant.

In Loop, his installation for the Slovakian Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale, he brought the lush grounds of the Giardini Publici into the interior pavilion, causing guests to take pause before realizing that the artist’s installation was in fact the well-ordered plant-life which surrounded them. His 2006 video Resistance, originally staged during an opening at Viennese Museum of Modern Art, plays with ideas of social status by following the feet of a group of guests with untied shoelaces. As reported by Kontakt, the Art Collection of Erste Group (whose artists were being presented in the exhibition during which Resistance was staged), “Fellow visitors were puzzled by this intervention, since there was no direct clue as to why certain people were posing this way. Thus Ondák queries the bondage, not necessarily visible, of certain peer groups, in this case through the need of people working in the field of art to proclaim otherness as a means counterbalancing social standardization.” (source)

Loop, 2009; Courtesy the artist; Courtesy gb agency, Paris; Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; Johnen Galerie, Berlin

Roman Ondák was born in 1966 in Zilina, Slovakia and now lives in Bratislava. He was recently included in I’m Not Here. An Exhibition Without Francis Alÿs at De Appel, Amsterdam—a “solo exhibition that takes the form of a group exhibition in which works by the contributing artists evoke the atmosphere of the work of an absent Francis Alÿs.” He has been included in numerous solo presentations internationally, including at MoMA, New York; Tate Modern, London; 2009 Venice Biennale; and 2008 Shanghai Biennale.

I've Been Shot, installation view, courtesy XPACE Cultural Centre

In the 1988 action film, Die Hard, John McClane (played by Bruce Willis) hustles around a Los Angeles skyscraper—sweat-soaked and shirtless—in an effort to save his wife and other hostages from a ruthless terrorist group. At various points throughout the film, McClane (an NYPD officer) survives a partial jump from an exploding building and smashes through a plate glass window. Basically, he is injured to the extent that he arguably would not be able to still perform such heroics as he does (saving everyone in the end) if this were real life. But this is not real life, it’s Hollywood. And so the hero always perseveres.

The themes of personal danger, machismo and pain have been explored by artists in the past, namely Southern California performance artist Chris Burden. Burden is perhaps best known for his 1971 piece, Shoot, in which he had a friend shoot him in the left arm from a distance of about fifteen feet. Shoot, and the many other performances by Burden throughout that era (during which he crawled over broken glass, spent weeks on a high-up gallery platform with almost no food and no human interaction, and was nailed through the hands to a Volkswagen) prompted serious discussion around the subjects of fear, war (Vietnam), consumerism and the role of art in society. While there is no shortage of people who considered Burden insane at the time, many continue to consider his work monumental. (Incidentally, if you’re interested in reading more about Burden’s work, I recommend this particularly well-rounded New Yorker essay by Peter Schjeldahl.) What if, however, an artist were to take a more humorous–and admittedly less painful—approach to the same overall theme? Enter Toronto-based artist, Robert Lendrum.

I've Been Shot, installation view, courtesy XPACE Cultural Centre

Lendrum’s I’ve Been Shot consists of a looping video in which a man grasps his bloody chest and crawls in pain toward a red phone to call help after having been shot. Just as he reaches his goal and goes to lift the phone, the video loops back to the beginning where he enters the frame, grasps his chest, exclaims that he’s been shot, and drags his body toward the phone. And it goes on and on. In his statement about the piece, the artist says, “This humorous re-articulation of the Sisyphean myth…satirizes machismo in both the art world and Hollywood films.” I’ve Been Shot does well to continue the dialog that Burden once started, and at the same time consider the extremism of Burden’s approach, but it can easily be argued that the younger artist’s work is just as reactionary and extreme (albeit in a different way) than that of his predecessor.

Robert Lendrum is currently included in the group exhibition, THIS IS UNCOMFORTABLE, at Gallery TPW in Toronto, Ontario. He earned his BFA in Visual Arts and English at University of Western Ontario; his MA in Media Studies at Concordia University, Montreal; and his MFA in Documentary Media at Ryerson University, Toronto. He has been included in solo and group exhibitions all over Canada and in the U.S., including at: Xpace Cultural Centre, Toronto, ON; University of Colorado New Visual Arts Complex, Boulder, CO; and Spark Contemporary Art Space, Syracuse, NY.

Nostalgia is a word that means “a wistful desire to return” or “a sentimental yearning,” but from these cloying definitions one would never guess that the word originally meant “homesickness”. At its heart, Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance at the Guggenheim Museum in New York is nostalgic, but it is also complex and engaging without a hint of the saccharine. Nostalgia as homesickness is the distant light that guides this excellent melancholic exhibition.

Sarah Charlesworth, "Herald Tribune, 1977" (1977). Twenty-six chromogenic prints, 59.7 x 41.9 cm each, edition 2/3.

Despite its subtitle, Haunted includes work in a wide variety of media, including painting and sculpture. Helpfully, the works are organized into thematic sections that guide the viewer through the winding gallery: Appropriation and the Archive; Documentation and Reiteration; Landscape, Architecture, and the Passage of Time; and Trauma and the Uncanny. These divisions assist the viewer in comprehending the modes in which current artists have reckoned with history and their art-historical antecedents. Insightful wall text accompanies the beginning of each new section.

Idris Khan, "Homage to Bernd Becher" (2007). Bromide print, 49.8 x 39.7 cm, edition 1/6.

Walking up the curving ramp, the viewer encounters Appropriation and the Archive first. This is the perfect introduction to the show for both uninitiated and seasoned viewers, featuring imagery “borrowed” from print media, movies, and other images taken from the public domain. The textbook-classics are here: Andy Warhol, Sherry Levine, Richard Prince, Sarah Charlesworth. For the experienced, it’s like greeting old friends; for the newcomer, it’s a well-rounded primer. Though it may be familiar, Charlesworth’s Herald Tribune, November 1977 (1977) is particularly gratifying to see in person. Idris Khan’s Homage to Bernd Becher (2007) is a diminutive powerhouse of layered emotive lines that conjure up the industrial structures documented by photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. The work in this section stands as a persuasive critique of the myth of artistic originality.

Spencer Finch, "42 Minutes (after Kawabata) (2005). Seven chromogenic prints, 15.2 x 15.2 cm each.

Continuing up and around, the Documentation and Reiteration portion displays the photographic evidence of performance work, citing notables such as Marina Abramovic, Tacita Dean, and Ana Mendieta. Though most of the works in this section stand on their own, they function primarily as reminiscent testimonials to events in the past. The performances that provide the basis for this section provoked conversations among fellow viewers: one well-dressed woman recounted her experience of seeing an Abramovic performance to her companion; an elderly couple argued about the processes likely used to make Markus Hansen’s Curtain (2004).  Landscape, Architecture, and the Passage of Time is modest, with many of the works being smaller than their counterparts in other sections of the exhibition; but it also contained some of the most evocative work. Spencer Finch’s 42 Minutes (after Kawabata) (2005) is a series of seven photographs that transform a snowy landscape into a picture of an interior door via a reflection on glass. The subtle shift from landscape to door, inside to outside, means that one image manifests itself in another, and no image in the series truly exists without its counterparts. This is a literal haunting, and it is eloquent.

Nate Lowman, "Loser" (2009). Alkyd on canvas, 101.6 x 76.2 cm.

Organized around a theory that originated with psychologist Sigmund Freud, Trauma and the Uncanny contains intriguing and provocative work, some by lesser-known artists. Nate Lowman breathes new life into the raster-dot image first promoted by pop artists like Sigmar Polke, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein. The Last Supper (2009) and Loser (2009) are compositions that manage to be smart, funny, and heart-rending all at once. Gillian Wearing’s Self-Portrait at Three Years Old (2004) provides a double-take experience: the artist took a sweet childhood portrait and cut out/replaced her three-year-old eyes with her own adult eyes. The new portrait could function as a mask, hiding the adult self behind a guise of innocence; or show the outward form of a child who understands more than she lets on. The effect is disturbing.

Gillian Wearing, "Self-Portrait at Three Years Old", (2004). Chromogenic print, 182 x 122 cm.

There is no doubt that the work in the exhibition is superlative, and the thematic arrangement makes it easy for the casual art viewer to understand the context—without seeming too obvious for the more sophisticated habitué. This is museum curation at its best: stimulating but accessible, informative without condescension. The nostalgia in evidence brings to mind a quote from the late cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard: “Simulation is master, and nostalgia, the phantasmal parodic rehabilitation of all lost referentials, alone remains.” The nostalgia demonstrated by the artists is wistful but not sentimental; and the history they mine tells us as much about the present as it does about our past.

Marc Horowitz, a self-described “maximalist,” has permeated American culture with his socially-oriented projects and playful enterprises. His work includes video, drawing, cultural experiments, and the dynamic use of networks like twitter and youtube. In 2004, while working as a photo assistant for Crate & Barrel, Horowitz wrote “Dinner w/ Marc 510-872-7326″ on a dry erase board that was included in their fall catalog. He received over 30,000 requests for dinner dates, and began driving around the country to dine with people. The National Dinner Tour garnered attention from numerous press outlets; Horowitz appeared on The Today Show and was named one of People Magazine’s 50 Hottest Bachelors in June 2005.

In 2009, Horowitz embarked on The Marc Horowitz Signature Series, for which he signed his name on a map of the United States and drove that route, stopping at 19 towns along the way. He documented these adventures in short webisodes. In Nampa, Idaho, Horowitz established the first Anonymous Semi-Nudist Colony (complete with complimentary jean shorts and ski masks). In Battle Mountain, Nevada, he pitched an idea to local politicians that involved changing the name of the town to something less pugnacious, suggesting the gentler alternative “Tender Pie Hill.” Other notable projects include Google Maps Road Trip and Talkshow 247.

In December 2009, Horowitz participated in a panel discussion as part of Art Basel Miami Beach’s Video Art Program, “Video Art and Mainstream Distribution,” curated by New York’s Creative Time. Short films from The Marc Horowitz Signature Series were shown prior to the discussion. DailyServing’s Rebekah Drysdale was able to ask him a few questions about his past projects and future pursuits during an interview conducted over Skype in December.

Rebekah Drysdale:  At your discussion in Miami, you mentioned you studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute after leaving the business world. Do you think the tools you are using now, such as YouTube and Google maps, are the new media for this generation of artists?

Marc Horowitz: I think so. Painting and drawing will never die, obviously, but with the advent of the internet and the accessibility of video and broadcasting, I think that there is going to be such an insurgence of artists using these media.

RD: Your work engages the public, but seems very personal as well. What is the most influential encounter you have had in the making of your films?

MH: Omigod, there are so many of them!

RD: Can you pick one or two?

MH: The most memorable project is probably one you have never seen before. It was one I did while at the Art Institute, called Free Ideas. I went down to the corner of Market and Powell streets in San Francisco, where they turn the cable car. There are all kinds of tourists and homeless people there, the Seven Galaxies guy, preaching about the end of the world, religious people, preaching about God, and then there was me. I had two blank white sandwich boards that I made. I was handing out blank sheets of paper saying “free ideas.” People were confused. Most of the business people didn’t want to deal with me. One guy came up to me and said I was doing God’s work, for whatever reason. Several tourists thought that I was always there and wanted to have their pictures taken with me. Homeless people wanted me to write letters to their family members, so we would, and when we were done, they wouldn’t have their address. Kids wanted to have paper airplane throwing contests. I honestly think that project was what got me started in most everything I’m doing now.

RD: How did Free Ideas influence your later works?

MH: It was just taking such a simple idea as a blank sheet of paper and putting yourself out there in the world with that one element and then seeing what happens. I think that notion informed a lot of my projects after that. The Dinner Tour is the simple idea of dinner, at its least common denominator. Driving your signature across the United States is just a signature, something we use everyday. The Google Maps Road Trip was me and my friend wanting to take a simple road trip together, but not having the time or money, so we had to do it virtually.

RD: Tell me more about the experience and execution of the Google Maps Road Trip.

MH: The Google Maps Road Trip was a fascinating way of seeing America. It was also a really great way to get to know Peter (Baldes). In 2003, he e-mailed me saying I should have a blog. I had no idea who he was and why he was contacting me. Nevertheless, I immediately called him up because he put his phone number in the e-mail. We talked for a bit and he seemed nice enough, so we loosely kept in touch. I didn’t actually meet Peter in person until last year at a friend’s wedding. So all in all, we had only spent about twelve hours together in-real-life before we executed GMRT, and then we shared 40+ hours together “driving” across the country virtually. For me, it was like the Dinner Tour, except I got to know a single person, Peter, much more in depth.

The technical aspects of the project get a little complicated, but basically we left my house in LA and began driving together to Pete’s place in Richmond exclusively on Google Maps. For nine straight days, we “virtually drove” across the country by zooming in all the way on Google Maps and continuously pressing the Google Maps arrow keys eastward. We broadcast the entire experience live on googlemapsroadtrip.com. This meant that folks were able to not only see and hear us as we traveled, but also join us in a real-time chat room. Just think of it as an invitation for someone to hop in the backseat and ride along with us for part of the adventure.

RD: It sounds like your interaction with Peter during the Google Maps Road Trip was similar to what travel buddies may experience on a real cross country road trip. Do you think virtual travel will become more popular?

MH: Google Maps Road Trip is very lo-fi and basic. I would love to see it be implemented in schools. You could have an American fourth grade class travel around Europe, and (time zones permitting) they could travel with European students. They could go back and forth and talk about the things that are local to them. With the accessibility of Flickr photos, YouTube, and Panoramio (Google’s photo program), you can see all kinds of stuff you wouldn’t otherwise see. You can even bring up peoples’ live broadcasts while you are traveling. So, yeah I definitely think it is the start of something.

RD: In terms of your creative process, it seems that projects like The National Dinner Tour or the Marc Horowitz Signature Series would require much more planning than something live like the virtual road trip. Do you prefer to work with a plan or broadcast live?

MH: The Dinner Tour involved a serious amount of logistical planning more than anything else. Getting places on time, setting up dinner dates, etc. And I had no help. It was just a one man army. But that was a not-for-broadcast type of project. It was more experiential. Then I did the Signature Series, which was highly planned. A lot of it was written. We had to have all of the props, the locations secured, etc. It was a different way of working for me, but I really enjoyed it. Through all of the planning, there was still a lot of room for chance because we were doing the project in public, and in that way it felt very improvisational, like my previous works.

After that, I did Talkshow 247, where I broadcast myself live for three months, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week on talkshow247.com. This project about destroyed me. There was always a live audience chatting away, commenting on my every action. It made me feel like I constantly had to be entertaining an audience that wasn’t even physically there. I really just wanted to live my life, but it became addictive to look at the chat and see what the audience was saying, and then do things to make my life more exciting. I didn’t really like that. So, to answer the question, I would much rather do some more planned out projects in the future, like the Signature Series. That is the direction I want to head with these projects.

RD: What type of work do you show in galleries?

MH:  I had some shows in Europe that were mostly drawings and sculptures because it is really hard to sell video art. It’s almost impossible. At some point, you have to make a product if you want to make a living as an artist, which is weird, you know? I did a show in Italy, called More Better. In it, I had made a drawing on how to make a helicopter out of a disassembled brick house and GMC truck. Really futile stuff, like a remote control bearskin rug. I made a suit of armor out of kids’ shin guards that is designed for people with a fear of sharp objects who are on a budget. Also included was The Tragedy Car Series, drawings of cars dedicated to terrible moments in history. For example, The Titanic Car.  The drawings are interesting to me because I can really go way far out there, without actually having to execute these proposals. For a show I had at Nuke Gallery in Paris, I did a series called At Least You Don’t Have it This Bad. One of the drawings is a guy with circular saws for hands, and he’s trying to eat chicken McNuggets. That stuff is more fantasy-based. It’s really one big joke, they’re one liners. I like that.

RD: What are you working on now?

MH: I’m about to launch a new project called The Advice of Strangers. I’ve been working on it for about a year, but haven’t told anyone about it yet. Basically folks will be able to vote online on all my life decisions, small to large. Should I comfort the girl across from me who is crying? Do I tell my mom she should work out? Should I eat the noodle that fell on the floor that my roommate jokingly offered me? Should I start looking for a new place to live cause my landlord is an asshole? Do I move in with my girlfriend? Each decision will have a time constraint depending on the magnitude of the choice. And when the poll closes, I’ll post photo and/or video documentation of what happened as a result of the poll so people can see how their vote has effected my life.

The website for the project is www.theadviceofstrangers.com. If you are interested in participating, please check the site for the launch date.

RD: Your work certainly has a refreshingly witty appeal. Is there one last thing you would like DailyServing readers to know about you or your practice?

MH: A big component of my work is my blog, www.ineedtostopsoon.com. I am always posting fresh stuff there. Another thing that I am really into is Twitter. I’m so addicted to it. I’m using it as sort of a diary! You can follow me at www.twitter.com/marchorowitz.