planting the Foraging Circle at the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden

…has continued gradually in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden (commissioned by the Walker Art Center) over this week that started with snow and sleet and is ending with sunny summer weather – and though the wild plants, trees and shrubs (like asparagus, apple, mint, strawberry, rhubarb…) are little and struggling to occupy our mound of fertile soil, I’ve found that a few strategically placed – locally gathered – rocks, logs, branches, and leaves can suddenly evoke a landscape without anything even growing yet.

laying of the Foraging Circle slate pavers

…in the Walker Art Center’s Minneapolis Sculpture Garden (for ‘Fritz Haeg: At Home in the City‘), where we laid the massive local slate pavers, surrounded by seating logs, surrounded by an 8′ radius of mounded fertile soil, ready to be planted with wild native foragables next week.

the last days of Domestic Integrities E02 rug & garden

…here on the Pollinaria farm in Abruzzo, Italy have reached their peak spring moments and final installations as we prepare to leave after a few weeks of living with them. (see lots of new pics posted here)

transplanting to the circle

…all of the wild spontaneous plants we can find growing on the sprawling sloping expanses of the farm that have some domestic use, like borage, mustard, dandelion, chicory, chamomile, mint, cardoon, wild rose, fennel, blackberries, nettles…but our wish list of as yet unfound delicacies includes wild asparagus and native grapes.

Domestic Integrities at the Hammer Museum

…wrapped up it’s eventful four day marathon session at the Hammer Museum this evening, and tomorrow the (ever expanding, now 22′ diameter) rug travels to Human Resources in Chinatown for an intensive 10 days of morning to night Sundown Schoolhouse activities. (see more info and photos here)

Lucky Dragons on the Domestic Integrity rug and making music at MoCAD

…music art collective friends Sara and Luke just happened to show up in town the day of my post-Detroit Art Institute lecture reception at MoCAD last night…so they graciously set up shop and got down to business creating comforting sound landscapes while some crocheted the rug and others enjoyed the local food Jon Brumit was serving up on the other side of the room.

MoCAD and Jon Brumit preparing local produce

…is where I have returned today to set up for an evening event following  my lecture at the Detroit Institute of Art – for which artist Jon Brumit is foraging food, Lucky Dragons is making soundscapes, and I’ll be sitting in a circle on the floor with anyone who wants to join me crocheting the Domestic Integrity rug bound for the new Broad Art Museum, opening November 9th.

the green and white center of the MSU Broad Museum of Art Domestic Integrities rug with it’s the materials for it’s rainbow outer rings waiting in the background

…the colors of the MSU Spartans – is center emerging from the piles of cast off clothes, textiles, and fabrics gathered for the third official Domestic Integrities rug (the European version now installed and gradually growing at Pollinaria in Abruzzo, and the American rug just opened at MoMA) which will be going to the Broad Art Museum for it’s November 9th opening, in advance of which I am holding public rug-making hours in a vacant store front next to campus where it has been a pleasure to get to know some of the students who drop by to help when they have time and today it is up to 9 feet in diameter, of the 20 or 25 foot goal.

Detroit sensibilities: the purple stage on Cass and Visions in a cornfield at MoCAD

…are on display with exuberant engaging street vibes in two current installations indoors and out; one on Cass with the Purple Stage supported by Arts Corps Detroit taking over a vacant lot, and the other a vast interior landscape of pimped out cars and dried corn husks called Visions in a Cornfield (by Destroy All Monsters, Ogun, and Apetechnology) at MoCAD, one of my favorite contemporary museums anywhere, near the historic Cass Corridor, it is housed in a rough industrial space refurbished and cleaned up just enough to present the work – a welcome tonic to the museum monument machine cranking out architectural wonders elsewhere.

Vision in a Cornfield is a large-scale collaboration that unites distinct creative communities in Detroit: the psyche/art rock band Destroy All Monsters, the urban arts group Ogun and the electromechanical art collective Apetechnology. The inspiration for the exhibition is two-fold. It is based on an unexpected encounter shared by Destroy All Monsters’ Mike Kelley and Cary Loren, which took place in a cornfield in Fowlerville, Michigan. It is also a reunion and reimagining of an unsanctioned art project in the streets of Detroit by Ogun, named after the Yoruba orisha of iron, hunting, politics and war.

Domestic Integrity Field A01 installed and ready to open

…and finally we get to see the project fully installed, presented to the public, rug in action, with a few days of crocheting getting it up to about 16′ in diameter, not the 18 or 20 I had hoped – but there is still time for it to grow throughout the show – while it is being animated and populated home and garden offerings by everyone from urban farmers to MoMA staff placed upon the fantastic low pedestals built by Pail Bartow at Mildred’s Lane, a partner in the project who will be presenting a series of activities on the rug called ‘swarmings’ by proprietress J Morgan Puett. (webpage)

IKEA Disobedients at MoMA PS1

…by Andrés Jaque Architects encountered after my conversation with Annie Novak during a break from installing Domestic Integrities at MoMA across the river, was one of the favorite things I have seen in a museum in a while…a complex vertical structure comprised of various IKEA artifacts piled up, occupied and animated by haircuts, cooking, and even sitar-playing.

Domestic Integrities A01 rug and garden at MoMA

…this afternoon coming right from the airport to the museum for a few days of communal rug crocheting to get it up to size for the Monday night opening, meanwhile out in the courtyard, the Domestic Integrity garden that we planted last June has been sprawling out, with an errant squash tendril occasionally grabbing a nearby Bertoia chair.

chalkboard map planning for Detroit Methods

…is the project studio I am starting today at Wayne State, exploring the unique way that Detroit art collectives (including Dflux: Detroit Research Studio, Heidelberg Project, The Hinterlands, Market Studio Kitchen + Detroit Emergent Futures LAB, MBAD Bead Museum, Popps Packing, Power House Productions and Design 99, The Edible Hut, TAP (The Alley Project) Gallery, Yes Farm) are domesticating the city, and institutionalizing the home in a post-industrial and at times post-capitalist urban environment. (webpage)

‘Detroit Methods’ is a studio for exploring the particularly innovative ways in which some contemporary artists are working in Detroit today, while developing student projects with similar strategies and approaches. We are looking at ten local art collectives and artist run initiatives, and their ways of working that extend beyond the conventional private production space of the solitary artist studio and the controlled public presentation space of the commercial gallery and art institution. Instead we see these artists turning into the home, and extending out to the commons, i.e. the street and shared public spaces of the city. The fundamentals of human culture, survival, and pleasure become the source and focus. Eating, gathering, conversing, gardening, cooking, composting, constructing, playing, bathing, cleaning, socializing, and learning often become central to the work. In the process our assumption of a clear division between daily life and elevated art may become blurred.

These approaches to making and experiencing art have been on the rise globally, but in Detroit we see it happening in a unique way at new levels of visibility and activity. The city has become the focus of international attention and an influential center for a particular kind of art making. Young artists establishing themselves in Detroit with conventional backgrounds in painting, sculpture, architecture, design, music, literature, and performance are often confronted with a reality where those conventions no longer make sense. Other ways of working emerge. We will study and apply those strategies, or Detroit Methods, to our work for this studio.

Since all art is about some response to time and place, we pay special attention to what it means to be an artist in the city of Detroit today. Since all art is about communication, we will consider uniquely effective and appropriate ways to present and share our work. Since our work may be ephemeral and temporary in nature, not taking the form of discrete objects, this is especially important. Since all art comes from a community or a culture, we will pay special attention to the community of our class (housed in a communal studio space) and school, the community of local artists, the general community of the city, and your personal communities around you at home.

MSU Broad Museum gallery under construction

…designed by Zaha Hadid will be opening on November 9th, featuring an installation of Domestic Integrities, and today was my first chance to see the gallery interior under construction, whose slick design will provide the perfect foil for the huge hand-crocheted rug of discarded textiles, clothes and linens upon which locals (like students from the university organic farm) will present things they are gathering, harvesting, preserving, and making with what they find around them. (MSU announcement)

Domestic Integrity Field rug-ring bound for MoMA

…which has a 6′ hole in the middle to accommodate the beginning of the rug we made at Mildred’s Lane this summer, is now up to 12′ in diameter back in LA, where local friends have contributed clothes to the crocheting effort – and now it is going in a box headed to MoMA where NYC friends will join us on September 23rd and 24th for some communal crocheting sessions in hopes of getting it up to 18′ for the opening reception on the evening of the 24th. (webpage)

The Writings of Robert Smithson, designed by Sol LeWitt, 1979

…the beautifully designed book edited by Nancy Holt and published six years after his death in 1979 by New York University Press (kindly presented to me last night by my friend who found it at Logos Books & Records, the very awesome Santa Cruz bookstore – with a surprisingly extensive knitting section by the way – after we all had dinner at Cafe Gratitude around the corner and before we went across the street at the old fashioned Del Mar Theater to see the Ai Wei Wei documentary) – and the brilliant super sophisticated 1970′s graphic design job is explained by the fact that it was designed by Sol LeWitt.

Portable Orchard, Newton Harrison and Helen Mayer Harrison, 1972-73

…the trail-blazing artist couple now based in Santa Cruz whose work I have been aware of since college days – their early work taking the form of radical  dirt, farm, and orchard making projects, were inspiring and charming dinner companions tonight at Montalvo (the artist residency where Lorenzo from NERO has joined me for a few weeks to finish our book) recounting fascinating stories of the 1950′s in Florence; the early 1960′s New York Art scene (they were also at the 1974 Beuys’ ‘I love America and America Loves Me‘ performance); Yale days with Nancy Graves, Bob Mangold, Richard Serra, Jennifer Bartlett; and eventually UCSD where they helped establish the art school with a tight knit community of other artists like the Eleanor and David Antin and Allan Kaprow – though now they are preoccupied with super ambitious long term projects dealing with global warming called The Force Majeure, whose effects will outlive them way into the future…and the evening left me with a renewed sense of how long art – and it’s story are – and how short the day to day ups and downs of everything else is…and how helpful it is to stick your head up from the smallness of the moment every once in a while in to the bigger chain of time, backward and forward. (the Harrisons website)

…at the Hammer Museum’s biennial show Made in L.A. is a dramatic L.A. spirited standout that responds nicely to the strange rainbow shaped window she found on the otherwise awkward 2nd floor Lindbrook terrace, now beckoning you over with her installation colors.

Obrist & Baldessari

…packed the LACMA Art Catalogues space and lobby with crowds to hear an engaging interview event marking his new artist book.

Venice Beach Biennial boardwalk, and Katie’s astral instruments

…not to be confused with that other thing going on over there in Italy – casually and graciously infiltrates, while paying homage to, the existing landscape of art, craft, performance and booths along the Venice Beach boardwalk this weekend organized by curator Ali Subotnick as a part of the Hammer Museums’s Los Angeles Biennial exhibition ”Made in L.A.” featuring some favorite friends and local artists like Lisa Anne Auerbach & Robby Herbst, Jedediah Caesar, Eve Fowler, Matthias Merkel Hess, Joel Kyack & Michael Decker, Carter Mull, Renée Petropoulos, Ry Rocklen, Erika Vogt, plus old friend and college classmate Katie Grinnan who presented her ambitious new project Astrology Orchestra featurning handmade instruments based on astrological signs and planets…which we hear will soon be traveling – apropriately enough – to Joshua Tree’s Integretron – whose design is based on ‘the telepathic directions from extraterrestrials….originally designed by (George) Van Tassel as a rejuvenation and time machine…the only all-wood, acoustically perfect sound chamber in the U.S.)