HomeSweet?

Photographic Documentation of the 7-hour duration performance installation as part of the HomeSweet? Exhibition in The Loom {art mini-mall} Bushwick Brooklyn. Part of the BETA Spaces festival organized by Arts in Bushwick as part of the Better Than Jam Co-Op shop and Nalani Latish Williams. My thanks to the photographers Danielle Remo & NLW.

the history of cardboard

Corrugated Papermaking - Cardboard

In 1856, Englishmen, Healey and Allen, received a patent for the first corrugated or pleated paper. The paper was used to line men's tall hats.

American, Robert Gair promptly invented the corrugated cardboard box in 1870. These were pre-cut flat pieces manufactured in bulk that opened up and folded into boxes.

On December 20, 1871, Albert Jones of New York NY, patented a stronger corrugated paper (cardboard) used as a shipping material for bottles and glass lanterns.

Boxes = Wor{l}d{s}{?}

The box is a world.
When someone inserts their head into the box they are accepting, if only for a few minutes, the unknown parameters of a miniature, alternate world. This mundane item, the cardboard box, reframes a face-to-face encounter in a way that rewards their risk and encourages intimacy.
After I welcome someone to the box and ask a few questions, which are never the same set twice, my guest in the box becomes a collaborator, helping determine the direction of our temporary reality.
In our shared dark space, where faces are barely visible at this time of day—it’s evening outside the library—one young lady tells me of her recent divorce and leads me through a meditative breathing exercise. Another extracts her head after 15 minutes discussing storytelling, and exhorts the handful of spectators to give the box a try.

Extracted from Brian Rush - Box

Next Sunday, as part of Arts in Bushwick Festival, I will perform at BETA Spaces 2010 group exhibition "HomeSweet?"

I applied for the group exhibition via the 'Artists Seeking Artists' opportunities, and emailed the curator with some initial ideas for a performance proposal. I wasn't expecting anything at first, still wary of the New York reception of performance art in this current age.
My first responses back from the curator/organizer didn't appear to be going anywhere;
they wanted to know more, in precise detail it seems, of what I was proposing/planning to do when I performed and how it related to my previous body of work.
I had to explain that I am now attempting to create a 'new' body of work which 'in-itself', questions the nature and status of the 'new'.
Wasn't hopeful of being accepted, no expectations raised- recalling conversations as to the decline of Performance Art in NYC during the past decade due to financial unsustainability in current resessive economic context causing more and more artists to leave performance behind as a medium in favour of more commercial purchasble media and forms...
Then yesterday, whilst waking up with the rest of the packed house sitting at the Breakfast table drinking Chen Jin's green tea, recieved email confirmation:

From:	NLW Arts (nlw.arts@gmail.com)
Sent:	03 November 2010 00:43:10
To:	xiipal lapiix (xiipal@live.com)

Hi,

Home Sweet is being exhibited at 1095 Flushing Ave. at a retail store,Better than Jam.

There is a space behind the store, where you you can do your Durational & Interactive Performance.

Excellent! Short sudden shot of panic of now having to deal with another art 'world' and community whom I have no connection to prompts me sharply to go and befriend them at their place, very close to Grace Space I then discover.
My persistance in submitting the applications was encourages by my CEP supervisors insitance that I attempt to contextualize and seek exterior opportunities from beyond the wing of Grace Space.
...Even If the proposals and submitions we're rejected, have the texts and responses to include in an appendix of attempted projects in context, plus feedback on how to improve my applications for the future...

For Person Remunerated for a Period of 360 Consecutive Hours, originally made at P.S.1 in New York in 2000, Sierra built a brick wall in the gallery space and paid a low-income worker his usual wage to live behind the wall for 360 hours, receiving food and drink through a narrow opening at the base of the wall. Other works have included instructions for minimum wage workers to push enormous cement blocks around a gallery, to sit in a cardboard box throughout an entire working day, to hold up a wall leaning at 60 degrees, to have their backs tattooed or sprayed with polyurethane, etc. Employing temporary laborers – often immigrants not legally allowed to work – determines Sierra's work as performative, with his ‘'actors' being by necessity and by definition provisional. By making clear indictments of global economic imbalances and abuses, Sierra, as a member of a privileged social class of intellectuals or 'cultural workers,' cannot possibly be part of his own works.
Extracted from http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/blogon/view_essay.php/154/the_legacy_of_performance_art

Bed Bugs love NYC

A recent survey of pest control companies found bedbugs are now prominently invading commercial businesses -- such as offices, clothing stores and hotels -- rather than private residences.

PIX 11 News first reported in May that New York City was quickly climbing to the top of the list of having the biggest bed bug problem in the country.

Extracted from: http://www.wpix.com/news/local/wpix-bed-bugs-on-the-rise,0,2726280.story

Signs everywhere I walk claiming to be a 100% effective guratantee bug extermination. Whole blocks and high-risers fumigated over night.

Are these creatures the New, New York immigrants?
Compare the linguistic hostility toards them with those mexicans crossing the border every minute.
Mass migration = mass movement = mass infestation = No Control, No Order.

New Rule: Every item of clothing I buy- the minute I'm home, thrown in the washer then the dryer. Twice over. Taking no chances with these blood-thirsty critters.

And now they could be my next inspiration for a performative Halloween costume.
Some of you blogstalkers may recall my performative outfits to the Freshers Ball Alice-InWonderland theme - when I was the Knave of Tarts, with a box-heart which you could open for candy and sweet? And a plate to play Tart Roulette- which one's filled with salt? Or maybe you remember the Glitter Ball, when I came as a cough sweet? All wrapped up in bubble wrap and white iridescent glitter; pop a bubble and recieve a sweet?
These costumes harken back to my younger adolescence when I'd go to clubs with friends dressed up to the 9s, they too, and we'd end up meeting everyone in the club and have our picture taken. Oh the club kid lifestyle, how I miss sometimes.
I've even been to a Bjork concert in Wolverhampton dressed as a present you could open (back when purple and yellow was just coming back as a clash-fash.)

Having missed my opportunity to perform guerilla at the Columbus Day Parade, this is my next chance before thanksgiving. And, perhaps, once more commenting on the current domestic American border and immigration policy with México and Mexicanos, I'm considering going as a Quasi-Mexican Bed Bug (or at least, a mattress, complete with sheets, pillow and blanket... perhaps, and this is the next level, use an actual old mattress, most probably infested with our fateful neighborhood friends ... but maybe I'll just stick to cardboard replicas again...).
The performance out of the costume would be to give away useful and not so useful advise on the control and extermination of bedbugs, but also highlighting the parable of the 'unwelcomed foreign alien' in our spaces of familiarity and control.
As per usual, (bed) bug sweets will be thrown around and handed out to all and sundry as a way of enticing and making [temporary] friends for the evening.
What more can I do..?
Post your ideas to PO Box 722 SUCKY SUCKY

[OutOfContext] "Heat-Smoke 'em out"

"What we're about to show you is brand new... her up-scale Northen Kentucky apartment hasn't been taken over by aliens [note: possible E.T. cultural reference? or perhaps more general cinematic infiltration of the 'site' of new alien technology/futuristic/biohazard apparatus- once again, a rmeinder of the implicated point sof reference hyperreal Hollywood has had on the American journalistic writing and average American psyche).
...she's been invaded by something far worse."
"Hoping to catch them, before they caught her... so humiliating, you don't want to tell anybody...

With the video above, note not only the moment when he announces that he and his family managed to get rid of the bed bugs, right before scratching his arm, hear that nice rasp, but that it appears that advertising companies now are giving some nice fat wads to customers willing to promote their products online via the 'home-baked' and 'neighbourly' medium of the self-uploaded Youtube video. Clever, very clever. McLuhan was right all along- only now the Corporations have cottoned on.

Is it me, or is there a fine line in the irony of the very heat they thrive to, is the very heat that kills them?