Author: Joshua Kochis

Every year, the Penny Stamps School of Art and Design has a juried exhibition of artwork created by its loyal undergraduate students. The stakes are high; two participants whose work is deemed “best in show” are awarded a whopping $2,000 prize each, with several honorable mentions bringing in $100 as well. The jury usually consists of University affiliates, this year being made up of three alumni of the Stamps School (before it was the Stamps School). The decisions of said jury are always much debated for weeks after the cuts are made.

This year, the exhibition consists of many design projects, from toothpaste lids that hold your brush in place to vegetable peelers that fit on your thumb, a few tables, prints, and various other media. The winning projects were Hillary Butterworth’s mesmerizing drawing machine that changes what forms it creates based on how close people are standing to it, and a presentation of video and collage made with a jaw-operated pinhole camera by Nick Williams. Of course they deserve the award, and had it been up to me, I would have chosen the same two projects.

In addition to the juried show, however, something a little different took place. The students who didn’t make the cut put together their own exhibition, affectionately titled “The Shit Show”. It was installed in the street gallery outside Slusser, right next to the work that was deemed higher quality by the panel of alumni. On the night of both openings, December 2nd, there were also installations put up in the senior studios, videos in a room played on a large digital projector, and performances to augment the work in the street gallery.

Upon entering the building, one first encounters the unjuried work leading up to the large open room scattered with objects and images. The general consensus was that if nobody had expressed there were two distinct exhibitions going on, they would have thought it all the same show, judging by the quality of work. The biggest difference, it was said, was that the work in the Shit Show actually had something that the juried work lacked in some cases: character. While not every piece in the street gallery is a masterpiece, there is a definite diversity of media, content, and form that’s exciting in comparison to the cleanly finished pieces all spaced out along the walls and floor of the Slusser Gallery. I even heard one or two brave souls venture to posit that the Shit Show was maybe even better than the Salon – I mean the Stamps show.

While I think it’s good to give students an opportunity to show their work in a professional setting, and a little friendly competition to be healthy, it seems like the pressure exerted on students to make what the University defines as “exceptional” work can be overwhelming, and leads to tension between friends and fellow artists who may or may not have gotten in. It is especially difficult to walk through the Slusser gallery with the idea that every piece inside was specifically and individually decided to be “better” than yours, despite what people have said or your own judgments about the work. When it comes down to it, the process of comparing two completely different projects about different things made with different materials is ultimately completely subjective. It’s probably helpful in the long run to get used to being denied access to exhibitions, as keeping our expectations in check results in happier surprises when things do work out. All in all, every artist has to learn to deal with rejection – but is their undergraduate University the right place for this kind of put-down? Ask around and your answers would likely be split by the line drawn between those artists who were good (or lucky) enough to make it into the show this year.

Both the Juried Exhibition and the Shit Show will be displayed for the next week or so: come on up to North Campus and decide for yourself which show is “better” – or appreciate them both for what they are, without marginalizing one collection of work in favor of the other. After all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, is it not?

After a short hiatus from this here blog scene (for which I apologize, I’d retreated into the depths of my mind for the month due to anxieties and lack of sleep) I return to transpose the latest happening put forth by the Tenet Collective which has accumulated a momentum and reputation and a solid base of groovy dudes and gals and everything in between, who are down with what the group can do and has done so far this year.

It was the core group of aforementioned hooligans that kept things together this time around, as the temperature drop into degrees reminiscent of the dreaded polar vortex must have (understandably) anchored other attendees to the warmth of their homes and couches. The third progressive revolution began again at the Fuck Boys’ Lair, with vijjy screenings showing a variety of bohemian types: there was one perplexed custodian with an iPhone taped to his welder’s mask, recording himself sweeping up the remnants of a gingerbread house, his real-time vision impaired by the mask so that he ended up taking much longer than necessary to clean up those crumbs, a metaphor for vision if I ever saw one; there was a girl who painted convulsively, sporadically, rolling and throwing reds and blacks onto canvas repetitively, the video a layering of this process so that at certain points there were two or three of her painting and overlapping and swaying into one another – the composition and process having to do with psychological tendencies and actions that come up without us knowing, things bubbling to surface subconsciously, her acknowledging this loss of control over own body, coming to terms with control; lastly a lone naked spiky haired lanky fella with only his boots and gloves and a pair of glasses on, dropping a monologue about a trip home to his parents’ house in a dream while the vid cut between him speaking and boxing with a big red balloon, where after confessing his broken heart due to a love affair gone sour the dad, in perfect form, went into how there’s a lot of heartbreak in this world and a lotta sad people out there with cracks in their sad hearts, but also how there is also a lot of joy and love and sunshine around if you look for it right, and maybe that’s what life’s about – and the naked man in the boots and glasses having it out with the balloon that just might have been his own cracked heart, telling his tale and rubbing his face and growling out his syllables in such a way that the whole story was genuine and honest and not played out or cliche or washed up, and I shed more than one tear at this point here and a wave of emotion swept through the room.

There was a small procession over to a house on N. Division where the living room had been transformed into a cuddle fort with blankets draping from the ceiling in the fashion of a billowy circus tent, there were pillows and blankets all around layered on the walls and floor and in the entrance hung one particular old holy worn out blanket from someone’s childhood years, whose sentimental qualities emanated from its softly ragged folds and provided an entrance to this parallel dimension with glowy lights and sounds seeping in from the corners, and the room was full of good vibes and people sharing stories and touching each other in friendly affection, and there was no judgment there, only the kind words and feels remained. And downstairs the music played, Yada Yada stringin along smooth melodic jams, a comfortable kind of funk that made me think of nights on the beach or out in some greenfield at dusk, and the crowd swayed and dipped in agreement of the jive they laid down – and when the sounds of Yada faded into the voices of the crowd more bands took that corner stage which sat in front of a Thomas the Train tapestry, and into the night the music went and the ups and downs of the party people on the stairs mirrored the noises down there, all becoming the Night, all parts of the Time.

And I suppose the moral of the story here is that you don’t need two hundred people chanting and stomping down the street to have an effect, that sometimes a low-key interaction leads to more intimate relationships and connections with old friends and new friends alike, that despite what the commercials and television faces say maybe less can be more, and maybe building up our expectations about how big or how many something is only ends up ruining the outcome, that maybe we can be content just going with the flow, and quietly shake things up in our own kinda way.

Well hey they done it again –

on Saturday the 25th day of October the movers and groovers of this so-called Tenet Collective went and struck these Kerrytown Streets once more, Mr. Leg Champii and all the various Special Knees once again beginning at the Mail Box early with a low key acoustic jam session on the floor and drawings on walls, all kinds of landscapes, the clock stretches and the word spreads and the crowd gathers, everybody warmin up and the Zines and the CDs laced with incandescent sounds all dished out, the house hums and you can see it in the air all quivering anticipation in the dim intensifying Night –

and off they went, destination Ingalls Mall, the band and dancing hoop of flame leading crowd to fountain where there was a hush into quiet, a gloomfaced seer sat waiting, severe and still and here he told the fortunes of him and her and them from cards, a sphere glowed whitely on the end of his holy Deck, there were whispers and everybody craned on their toes and leaned in –

and onwards back to them Fuk Boys’ Lair, there was a lost drummer and fellow wanderers standing there to bring em in for the screening of a short film by Champii Himself, a cinematic story affectionately titled A Womb to call Womb; downstairs the music plays softly and the screenfolk murmurs and discusses sweet mysteries in low tones, showed it twice for all to see, the crowd shifting in the LCD lowsun panorama basement and bubbling upwards to surfaces of cool dank hardwind and the moon’s echo in the cloudy vast –

and here the final stop, the crowd all boomerangs back to the Box, the Knees tapping on drums and stuff, whisper taps and flicks of little beats, the whole thing a whisper party (in attempt to avoid or at least delay the appearance of cops), the main room now dim and tense, a massochistic ritual about to go down where one man stands all blankfaced and glassy empty eyes, another man takes his staple gun and chunks and chunks away at Man One’s stomach, kichak kichack kichak is how it went and both of their faces remained a shroudy blank and it was raw and brutal even and the congregation flinched and most kept watching all cringing –

and here is where the night was meant to end by fading into whispers as it began but this is not that story, instead the corner lamps are out and all that’s left is Technicolor watersurface ripples and golden neon sound, the night erupting into kicks and celebrations of successful journeys, halloos and smoke, smashing of small porch things, the crowd believing the performance carries on – THIS being the electric thread began last time, last month, last year, keeps going, everybody keeps humming and the vibes are back like they were never gone, everybody diggin it all and wanting to be involved and wanting to see things happen, all riding this wave of creative happenings and makin it happen together, makin things happen –

so til next time keep the heads up and the eyes open and the ears at the ready and when you see us marching by just hitch a ride – One and All

Last week’s visitor at the Penny W. Stamps Speaker Series was an artist named Fred Tomaselli. His work includes installations with fans and paper cups in grids, lines and designs made from rows of pills, compositions of leaves and pictures of birds cut out of field guides, all exploding in vast splaying patterns and colors, encased in resin, painted over, more resin – this year having published a book of gouache and collage paintings over scanned printouts of the front pages of the New York Times, aptly and simply titled The Times, which will be conveniently available for viewing at the University of Michigan Museum of art through January 25 - the visual disruptions responding to headlines, reflecting the news and happenings of Today.

What I really enjoyed about Tomaselli’s presentation of his work and ideas was the tone he went about explaining it all, chronologically, walking us through the development of form, content, and concept, all with the same casual lightheartedness that comes from (what I see as) a deep and profound sense of purpose, being completely at peace with his existence as a craftsman, a maker of images, an alchemist of visual data – the work existing as both a personal, compulsive, ritualistic act of synthesis, as well as a relevant collection of powerful imagery that wanders amidst topics of political and environmental and spiritual significance – stuff like the use and legality of pharmaceuticals and psychedelics, arranging these materials into lattices referencing folk art and the Eastern approach making images – he also likes birds, watching them and identifying them, and fly fishing, happily referring to himself as an “angler”, a cutter of lines through the air with rod, a reader of the particular river and ecosystem in which he casts his thoughts. His tedious process stems from experiences working at blue collar jobs, determined not to let the hours and days of working laborious jobs be a “complete waste of time”.

The rest I’d like to leave up to the work itself:

This weekend I attended Dlectricity – a sprawling festival exhibition of Art and Light installed within Midtown Detroit, along Woodward Ave. starting at Kirby and stretching down past the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (affectionately known as MOCAD), the purpose being an interaction between old spaces and new media of expression, developing a sense of community, literally allowing the crowds of wide-eyed onlookers to see these public structures in a new light. Some things I saw:

Beginning at Detroit Artist’s Market where Endi Poskovic (Internationally acclaimed and prolific artist/teacher at A&D) has curated a show called Landscape and Abstraction, bringing together six Michigan printmakers whose work wanders between fields of relief, collage, reduction woodcut, hanging installation, and even prints with city lights punched out of the paper, leaving it full of holes and shadows – here also is projection on screen by another A&D teacher Heidi Kumao, shadows and video shot onto stack of books, small silhouette climbing spines like ladder rungs, well done –

on to MOCAD where two projections outside talked across from each other: a girl slowly beatboxing really barely making any noise and opposite her a dancer man in a sweat suit pop locking and turning to her occasional rat-tats and fwooms – farther behind in shack-like side building more projection on garage door, through door are shadows interacting with footage of guests donning paper and rubber masks and walking through this hall of shining mysteries, us watching from outside, adjacent to this real time journeying are shots of disco retro dancer couples, strange contrast, ritualistic but jiving, the dancers all smiles, us moving on –

big steel MOCAD doors, wander inside, pass gift shop, ponder art – I saw paintings of lacquer and varnish, garish portraits with worms of paint squirted from tube over bodies, farther in was a room of rooms, pairs of artists filling small spaces, like IP studios, I saw videos, tables of books with hanging headphones that don’t work, moldmaker casting things he likes, wants to try, saw buddhas and large quarters and rock mobiles, collections of plants, a room of hayfloor and wooden puppet at table of horrors, a room of college essays and notebook sketches and writing stapled behind plexiglass all four walls and floor – in the next room a performance, two girls on stage, purposely caked makeup, dumb wigs, blacked-out teeth, cartoons, sing karaoke ballad about freedom of self, hop around stage, having fun up there, us deciding it was about performance culture and our expectations of performers and the realities we don’t see and don’t want to – onward, pop-up shop of forgery containers in corner gallery, soup cans and boxes of crayons and spam, cigarette cartons, candy packaging, all plastic and empty with little lamps inside, free, on necklace or fishing pole stick dangle, bouncing light –

there was a bike parade in the street, wheels and wheels spinning by all a-glow, whistles and hoots and hollers from riders, music blares, mingles, moving, us following flow of bikes up Woodward  – stopping next at a big open field on Warren, perspective box confusing, supposed to distort scale, make small and tall people look same size, can’t see while inside walking through, unsure, design tent of wares, projection on wall on back of porto-potties (a woman in a blindfold sitting on a whoopee cushion over and over again, on three screens, somehow each clip a little different, done multiple times) – onward again, a glowing inflated set of four fingers gyrating in the sky, reminding of rocketship alien arms, scheming above bystanders, lighting up and spreading, buzzing, down the street hugeing projecting on façade of DIA, madness, landscapes and faces with trees and scales growing, a cube with cameras, projecting immediate audience onto various backgrounds (traffic, fields of color, crowds of people), a cathedral with echoey glowing windows, ineffective from up close, craning neck to see nothing faint glimmer of orange light above – us reaching Woodward and Kirby, turning, walking block to see Osman Khan (yet another A&D Prof) installation, a house shape in LED tubes, fluorescent, a diagonal bulb in middle occasionally blinking while house frame dims –

in addition to all this ART I saw faces, all the faces gaping and looking around, searching for meaning in awe of illuminations, seas of crowds flowing over street corners, intersections, tides of feet and eyes, heads turning in Look – and the space really was transformed, not even so much by the light itself but what the light causes which is community, everybody here for the same thing, all the souls searching for one thing or another, the real deal being something there worth searching for, this the effect of light, to make us see what we hadn’t before – and you can be sure I’ll be back next year.

so guys

this is coming a little late, but something happened in Ann Arbor a few weeks ago and now I’m feeling the need to write about it as others have written about it and should be – a progressive youthful creative act operating under the cover of a party that will go down in the journals of its leaders and participants and maybe will be rediscovered later and discussed in the Michigan Theatre at a lecture series, or maybe will just be remembered and talked about by the two hundred strong involved, which would be equally as beautiful if not more, actually probably better that way, but anyway something happened.

some context:

the artist/writer/musician/creative group of students formerly and currently known as the TeneT Collective began as and continues to be an underground zine of various media including but not limited to stories and poems and drawings and photos, the group a real raw bunch of subterraneans hangin out on porches all wide-eyed and excited, all headwise, cool, having read and known and talked about good books, all out to make things happen and make people think and feel and think maybe they should go out and express themselves too because dang it sure does look like those folks are havin a good time – and this group of doers and movers and makers got together and decided to step outside the zine for the time being to make something happen that hadn’t happened before, that wasn’t happening yet but should have been the whole time and this is how all great ideas begin –

and on the 6th of September the Happening occurred in Ann Arbor, beginning in Kerrytown (the IT house) and there were drawings all around and paper on the walls and paintings in doorways on hinges, vibes all over the place, everybody gathered and drew together, doodled as One and broke the ice and got their feet wet before being led away by Leg Champii and the Special Knees, the marchingband TeneT sector shepherding the crowd to new digs via the accordion, guitars, drums and other noisemakers; there was a woody nymph in a pale dress twirling a hoop on fire, spinning and dancing and leaving glowing tracers in the night, her and the band leading the way, a skip in their step and on the parade went down State street toward the Fuc* Boys Lair and here it reeked of Art too – there were paintings and performings and the release of a skate video set inside the Stamps studios titled BUT IS IT ART and everyone decided that it was, and on it went, this a brief stop of the Night, and further downtown Champii and the Knees marched, stopping cars in the streets, taking up whole blocks of sidewalk, onward to an underground empty parking lot where the acoustics were choice, the walls sang back, all were good and confused, the band doubled around and up and out the garage as quickly as they’d come and off we were again, making a sort of loop, only a hop and skip from the Origin, ending now at a Lamp house partay – there were lights all over, everything aglow, the lawn full of chairs and couches even all bespecked in glinty light, people teeming in rapture, the air quivering, excited, sharp, there were flashes of light and giant sparklers lit off, waved around, the fiery hoop and fairy hooper returned, swirled and dipped and hung in the air, a lad jumped through cleanly and nimble to cheers, the night went on – and then the cops came, it was only a matter of time, the crowd dispersed, webbing off into the shadowy dark to reconvene in factions, fading into Gloom and tingles, knowing they had just witnessed a Thing, one that doesn’t happen every day, having felt something new –

and to me this feels important – young people takin peers by the hands and the ears and jazzin everybody up, gettin everybody goin, feelin good, feelin light, feelin fine, feelin like dancin in streets and singin loud and lockin arms and huggin and laughin and talkin and makin MOVES, makin vibes, makin life do what they want it to and think it should, makin life, talkin about Life and Now –

so I say: watch out Annie, there’s change in the wind and more on the way –