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April 29, 2003
Laughing Squid The San Francisco
Laughing Squid
The San Francisco guerrilla art scene rolled into New York this past week in a school bus loaded with mutant bicycles and trailing three enormous dog heads.
To be precise, the dog heads were side-by-side on a flat-bed trailer, each one a six-foot-tall cartoonish fiberglass bust of a Dachshund wearing a chef’s hat -- the onetime marquis mascots for the now-defunct “Doggie Diner” chain of restaurants in Northern California. The bus, meanwhile, was the traveling home of the SF Cyclecide Bike Rodeo, a San Francisco-based bicycle performance group.
Dogs and bikers had arrived in town for Laughing Squid: NYC, two days of performances bringing together dozens of artists from the Bay Area and New York fringe art scenes. It was a weekend of communal, non-commercial, and participatory art of the sort which has thrived in the Bay Area, but which has not always found a home in New York’s more fragmented and bottom-line-oriented art world.
Still, hundreds of enthusiasts turned out on both days for the events, which were promoted largely by email and word-of-mouth and organized by Laughing Squid, a Bay Area non-profit arts group.
CBGBs
The weekend officially began Saturday evening at CBGB’s Gallery with an all-night variety show featuring acts such as Kitty Kitty Bang Bang, Mr. Lucky, the Nervous Cabaret, Bishop Joey, and the Clown Porn Posse -- all of whom presented something entirely original, if not always easily comprehended.
“It’s great to have venue where people can do this sort of thing,” said Alyssa Abrahamson, a New Yorker who, like many in the audience and onstage, was a veteran of Burning Man, the annual counter-cultural happening in Nevada’s Black Rock desert.
Abrahamson said she had heard of the Laughing Squid event through Nonsense NYC, an email newsletter which promotes “weird events…and senseless culture” in the city, and added “if I didn’t have outlets like this, I wouldn’t feel like a whole person.”
One crowd favorite, was Donald the Nut, self-described as the “main purveyor of AVI,” an “infamous art form of body movement and vocal sound.”
For his act, a somewhat geeky Donald stood rigidly at first and then began a sort of awkward strip tease while making gutteral sounds and falling abruptly and repeatedly to the ground.
“It was totally nonsense,” said Maxwell Ryan a native New Yorker in the audience, “but it was riveting to watch. I don’t know why it was good. Maybe it wasn’t good.”
Some performers seemed not to get the benefit of the doubt, however, and occasional choruses of “You suck!” were heard from an otherwise amused and tolerant audience.
Emily Kischell was a typical member of the audience, many of whom drifted to and from the stage as performers came and went from 8:00 p.m. to well past 3:00 a.m. Sunday morning.
Now a literary agent in New York, Kischell lived in San Francisco for years until she “was laid off from thousands of dot com jobs,” and couldn’t find further work. She spent a year in Portland – which she now describes as a “horribly ill-conceived notion from hell” -- before moving to New York last year.
For Kischell, the weekend’s events meant a reunion with Bay Area friends and a welcome dose of the unrestrained, creative ambiance typical of Burning Man.
Irreverence was omnipresent.
“You see a lot of crazy stuff in New York, but it’s not as silly,” said DJ Wendella, another Bay Area transplant, who sported a bright full-length dress and a stylish pink wig. “New Yorker’s can be uptight, but they’re also very passionate.”
This seemed to fit in with how the clowns saw things.
The Clown Porn Posse ended the evening with a campy and sexually explicit performance led by Ouchie the Clown, who, as his name might suggest, attempted to bridge the worlds of clowning and sado-masochistic fetishism.
Ouchie, who is from Waco, Texas but has been living in San Francisco for 11 years, described New Yorkers as being “simultaneously uptight and jaded,” and clearly hoped that his act would shock, if not awe.
“It’s art for art’s sake,” he said. “which I think is the best kind.”
Glenn Campbell, another of the clown posse and a Los Angeles-based celebrity photographer by day agreed:
“Art needs to be less about money,” he said and talked about taking “31 clowns to the opening of the Warhol exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles” and noting that the group plans to head to Washington, D.C. next week for a “drive by clowning” of the capital.
The Washington trip was the brainstorm of Cameron Assadi, who, pulling up his shirt-sleeve, reveals another point of distinction between many of the San Francisco contingent and their New York counterparts: a pervasive connection to technology.
Circling his bicep are a line of tattooed ones and zeros which spell out the word “change” in binary code. Assadi, who is a database engineer, points to the importance of the Internet as the glue that keeps many of the Bay Area artists together.
“Technology enables the next great leap in culture,” he said.
The Bike Rodeo
The show moved to Brooklyn on Sunday, and, starting with the weather, things seemed to go well all day.
On the ride out of Manhattan with the dog heads in tow, the Cyclecide bus drove past Washington Square Park where, to everyone’s amazement, the Dachshund Friendship Club was holding it’s annual Spring Fiesta, filling the park with hundreds of “wiener dogs.”
Amused New York City police officers looked on as the Cyclecide crew attempted vainly to explain to New York’s Dachshund owners that they had not driven across the country expressly for the Spring Fiesta.
“It was the most serendipitous thing ever,” said Summer Burke, a Cyclecide member who was once the nightlife columnist for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. “But that’s the way things happen when you’re on the bus.”
“Serentypical,” is the word that Linda, another Cyclecide member, used. “Everywhere we go, something good happens.”
The group’s good luck held in Brooklyn, where they were hosted by the Madagascar Institute, a six-year-old “art combine” that stages events in New York and around the country. Despite not having a permit, the Madagascar Institute managed to close off a street in Gowanus for most of the day without ever hearing from the police.
Perhaps the police were happy to see the smiling faces on the enormous bicycle-seat see-saw, or perhaps they simply didn’t know what to make of the half punk, half country western affair.
Almost certainly they didn’t get close enough to see the Homeland Security Bike being attacked, or maybe they were afraid of the Mighty Thor bicycle which presented a rotationg wheel of hammers to anything in its path.
Whatever the case, bands came and went on the main stage providing a soundtrack as the rodeo proceeded from an introductory parade of highly modified bikes, through medieval jousts staged on double-high bicycles, and eventually ended hours later with the the “mosh pit of hell,” in which performers and audience members on bikes circled and collided violently with each other in a nutty survival of the fittest competition.
Justin C. Atwood, commonly known by his assumed name of Jarico Reesce, founded Cyclecide in 1996, and staged the first bike rodeo in 1997. He describes himself as a “mechanic/welder guy,” and says he learned how to build bikes from the Hard Times Bike Club, a Minneapolis group which he says is “the Hells Angels of bike clubs.”
Fresh from a tour of Mexico and a ten day jaunt across the country, Jarico says the group likes building things and does the rodeo events to have fun.
“We make no money on it, I can tell you that, but on a day like today, we make out,” he says as an audience member riding by on a dangerous-looking “grasshopper bike” crashes and tumbles across the pavement.
“That was worth at least five dollars,” he says.
Also milling about in the bicycle rodeo crowd on Sunday was Steven Black, the Head of Acquisitions for the Bancroft Library at the University at California at Berkeley.
Black pondered the confrontation between the San Francisco art underground and New York, and referenced the fate of the Cockettes, a sixties drag queen chorus line about which a documentary film was released last year.
“The Cockettes met with derision when they came to New York. They were amateurish, sure,” he said, “But, you know, it was perfect for the place and time,” and he added “the perception is that New York is…the point of origin of culture. Generally [art] doesn’t matter unless it forces itself on the city.”
But if Black’s comments reflected New York’s dominant role as gatekeeper for the mainstream art world, Jeff Stark of the Madagascar Institue paid tribute to the deep roots of the Bay Area’s independent art community.
“San Francisco has a longstanding tradition of weird art,” said Stark noting prankster groups like the Suicide Club and the Cacophony Society and fringe art world veterans like John Law who had performed the night before at CBGB’s. In comparison, the history of the New York scene “is not a continuum – it’s broken,” he said.
Meanwhile, as the sun set over the Gowanus Canal, kids from the neighborhood had climbed on the bicycle merry-go-round and were peddling themselves around in faster and faster circles.
“We love this neighborhood,” said Stark from under his straw cowboy hat, “and this neighborhood loves us.”
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Posted by oliver at April 29, 2003 03:52 PM