When my son was fifteen months old, I bought him his first box of crayons. I was leaving the Galleria after a business lunch, and I bought them with the typically bizarre mixture of best intentions and overwhelming guilt that seems to come with being a parent.

On the one hand: What was I doing at the Galleria when I could be at home with the baby?

On the other hand: I had read on the Internet that some other mother of a fifteen-month-old was already archiving her child’s drawings. Why wasn’t I archiving my kid’s drawings? How could it be that my darling didn’t even have any drawings to archive? Bad mother!

On the third hand: Didn’t I want to be modeling good, strong, working-woman behavior for my little boy? And if I didn’t, what was the alternative? Modeling living-under-a-bridge behavior?

On the hundredth hand: Does buying crayons for a fifteen-month-old put undue pressure on a kid, like buying an SAT prep book for an eight-year-old? Once I was in the store and surveyed the options, I had new doubts: maybe fifteen-month-olds should work, not in crayons, but with collage! Perhaps the two of us should be exploring Jean Arp’s ideas of automatic composition and the organic beauty of chance? Don’t Arp’s collages kind of look like they were done by toddlers anyway? Or, wait: Is it wrong to buy scissors for a fifteen-month-old?

Bloody hell.

It was out of just those thousand-arms of doubt and hope that Creative Kidstuff netted eight bucks for soy-crayons and paper. I would say the hardest thing about raising creative kids is that you don’t do it in a vacuum: the world intrudes.

Read the rest at mnartists.org.

Pictured: Collage with Squares Arranged According to the Laws of Chance by Jean (Hans) Arp. 1916-17. Torn-and-pasted paper on blue-gray paper © 2007 Artists Rights Society, New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Image appears courtesy MoMA online collection.

A karaoke hut on a frozen lake is not necessarily the first thing that comes to mind when you are looking to interview a family about the Walker. But as luck would have it, this is where I first met the Zoll family. This past winter a group of friends and I participated in the Art Shanty Projects, in which artists build structures inspired by the tradition of ice fishing during Minnesota winters. On one of my many trips to sing karaoke at the Norae Shanty, I was blown away by a father/son duo who sang “Fulsom Prison” by Johnny Cash. Sitting out in the cold listening to Cash come back to life I thought to myself: This family rocks, I want to know them. At the time I was absorbed by having to follow their performance up with my own rendition of “Ice, Ice Baby.” Luckily for me I ran into the Zoll family in the Walker galleries at a recent Free First Saturday and was able to have a more in-depth conversation with Forrest (age 10) and Ingrid (age 7) about art and growing up with a dad who lulls you to sleep with Johnny Cash tunes.

Megan Leafblad: If you could only use one word to describe Raushchenberg’s Trophy II (for Teeny and Marcel Duchamp) what word would you pick?

Forrest Zoll: Creative!

Ingrid Zoll: Funny.

ML: Why did you pick that word?

FZ: It is really creative that he put in objects.

IZ: I think it is funny because I don’t know why people would put things like glasses and spoons and clothes in art, and it seems very strange to me.

ML: What is the funniest piece you have seen on view at the Walker?

FZ: The Dolphin [Oracle II]. It says funny stuff and I’ve talked to it before.

IZ: I can’t decide between the everyday object and the Dolphin. It’s so hard to choose.

ML: What is your favorite experience coming to the Walker?

FZ: I like walking through the sculpture garden when the weather is warm.

IZ: I like seeing the cherry.

ML: What is your favorite piece of artwork in the collection?

FZ: Well, right now I just found the Flags one. It’s pretty cool, and I think that might be my favorite.

IZ: My favorite piece so far today is the Dolphin.

ML: What did you and the Dolphin talk about?

IZ: I asked if we were friends, and then she said, “ Are we friends? Am I a friend?” Then I let someone else talk and that person said, “ Yes, you are.”

ML: Do you make art?

FZ: Yeah, I make art. Right now I am doing a video project on this street artist called 27, who does a lot of street art. And I’ve interviewed a person who owns a warehouse that got graffitied.

ML: How did you find out about this artist?

FZ: Well, I first saw one of his artworks and I loved it. So I searched online and found out more about him. His street art is around town, and one I liked said 27 on it, and I found some more of his art that said 27 on it. He has some stuff in an art store that I like; it’s called Robot Love. He has a poster there and he doesn’t let anybody know his name, not even the people in the store. So, I wrote a letter to him and asked if they could send it for me and it said, “ Can I interview you? I think you are one of my favorite street artists.”

ML: What do you think makes art good art or bad art? Why were you attracted to 27’s work?

FZ: Most other graffiti artists tag their names, and he made pictures. I had an idea of how I wanted to draw, and he was basically doing that. I think anything can be good art, if you really look at it.

A co-founder of SoleSides, the record label (now Quannum Projects) that launched the careers of DJ Shadow, Blackalicious, and others), Chang is heading to the Twin Cities for a free panel discussion on “hip-hop aesthetics” Thursday night, June 14. He’ll be joined by graphic artist/designer Cey Adams, Roger Cummings of Juxtaposition Arts, and filmmaker Rachel Ramist. But before packing his bags, he took time for an email volley on topics big and small, from hip-hop’s social potential to the Walker performing arts project his book inspired to his son’s Halloween costume.

In Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, you wrote about the cultural, econonic, and political conditions in the Bronx in the late 60s that gave rise to hip-hop culture (you called it the “politics of abandonment”). Here in Minneapolis, like elsewhere, we’re seeing record-breaking home foreclosures, inner-city school closings, and a spike in violent crime in our urban neighborhoods. How is today like that seminal period in the Bronx? Is there a creative counterpoint to all this bad news?

Well, I would never want to suggest that we need to have social upheaval in order to create beautiful art. In fact, often societal turmoil does not lend itself to progressive work, but to xenophobic, constricted cultural production. What I can say is that it’s deeply human of us to want to make beauty and truth in the face of despair. Hip-hop, in its most vital forms, lives close to these stories, and can tell them more truthfully than most of what we are confronted with in this ether of globalized, corporatized images and narratives.

In an an interview about Total Chaos, you said, “Name your genre, and I can probably tell you how hip-hop has changed it.” Ok: Crocheting. Kidding. But what about, say, mainstream media? Or country music? Is there a far-flung genre you can name that I’d be surprised has changed because of hip hop?

Mainstream media–er, Don Imus? OK, very bad example. Country music–Big & Rich?! How about modern dance? I’m still surprised at how choreographers like Rennie Harris have transformed the ways in which elite dance critics now discuss Black social dance.

You’ve been praised for highlighting the non-celebrities of hip-hop, local organizers who are pushing for small-scale change in their own neighborhoods. Can you name one in the Twin Cities?

How can I stop at just one? I think the work of folks at Intermedia Arts and Juxtaposition Arts is amazing–they actually are creating global models. And although I haven’t been to the B-Girl-Be events, believe me I’m feeling the repercussions of their work everywhere I go on tour and the topic of gender and hip-hop cultural production comes up. I think the B-Girl-Be folks are creating a wave of inspiration all around the world, not just among girls and women, who finally get to be centered in the discussions and the cultural production, but among boys and men who now have a space to really express more of themselves.

What do you do when you’re not engrossed in all things hip-hop?

I love the Oakland A’s. I respect the Minnesota Twins. I very much enjoy seeing the Yankees and the Red Sox lose to the Twins or the A’s.

What was your favorite Halloween costume as a kid?

I wasn’t very good at dressing up, although if I did now I might dig a pirate costume. Last year both my sons dressed up as Frank Thomas.

What contemporary artists do you currently follow? What about non-rock/hip hop music?

I really dig Mark Bradford’s work. Just got to see a show with him, Robin Rhode, and William Cordova at the Nasher and it was great. Musically, I’m omnivorous, so I’m always munching on other stuff as much as I am hip-hop or rock. Right now, I’m digging lots of dubstep, the new Spanish Harlem Orchestra and Chuck Brown albums, a new reggae album by Natural Black, and this old school house track by Joe Smooth called Promised Land.

What’s on your bedside table right now?

Theme, Dwell, ColorLines, and the New York Times Magazines, Brian Coleman’s ridiculously great Check The Technique, Tezuka’s Buddha series, Morrie Turner’s Wee Pals paperbacks (Kid Power! and Rainbow Power!)

Next April, we’re bringing Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s The Breaks to the Walker. It’s inspired, in part, by your work. What’s your involvement been and how does it feel to have your social history and cultural theory brought to life by dancers and artists?

Bamuthi and I are good friends, which to me is a major bonus, because I think he is one of the most exciting people working in theatre right now. In fact, I have told him this, a lot of what Bamuthi does with the word in his pieces–the density and depth, the multiple levels of references, the sheer joy of saying and hearing it all tumble out–gave me the courage to cut loose on my writing in Can’t Stop Won’t Stop. It’s a loop of inspiration! While we have had lots of conversations about the piece, and I’ve seen portions of it so far, I really can’t claim to have any hand in his brilliance. The Breaks is going to amaze people.

And: can you dance?

Yes, but as my wife and kids often remind me, not well! Stick to the writing, they say, so I will!

Photo by Rachel Perry for Red Bull Music Academy

Someone pointed out to me that the Bean’s new language explosion of what I consider to be very odd words – pinecone, keyhole, grate – is not so odd at all. All those things can be found at his level, which is, roughly, the bottom two feet of the world. And so it was that we spent yesterday exploring Sarah Sze’s “ Grow or Die,” a 2002 installation in the Conservatory of the Walker Art Center’s Sculpture Garden.

The installation is underground, three separate installations made of Styrofoam, nets, thread, glass beakers, lights, fans, and countless tiny, tiny, tiny things. They look like teeming miniature cities, or teeming coral reefs, or teeming medical storage facilities sprung to life. They’re clinical, eerie, and magical.

So, Asa laid down on his belly beside each Sarah Sze sculpture, and pointed at this flower, that net, this test tube, saying “ See? See?”

We go back and forth like this: “ I see a flower, what do you see?” I ask, pointing at something. Then he points at something he wants the name of, and prompts me with “ See?” We saw thread, spools, wires, lights, gauze, test tubes, flowers, all sorts of things. Finally I ran out of words, and settled on pretty’. “ Pretty, pretty” the baby would say, stabbing at the covering glass with his little forefinger.

We probably spent a full hour in reverie over Sze’s haunting installations. It made me think: The imagery directed at babies is so relentlessly saturated with teddy bears, farm animals, the alphabet, and such that you kind of assume that that’s the content they’re capable of understanding. However, I have direct evidence now that babies are entirely capable of enjoying abstract, contemporary, sophisticated, non-figurative work – if it’s presented on their level.

Hot Art Injection IV: Full Throttle

Mickey Bloom, WACTAC ‘06

We last left our heroes picking art for the great Hot Art Injection, and now they are left with the ultimate challenge: finishing the show by Saturday. Can it be done? Will our heroes prevail? Will Witt stop distracting our work by repeatedly showing us his “wiggle dance”? With my mutant-driven telepathic powers, I foresee that the answer to all of these questions is a resonating, invasive, yet strangely beautiful “yes.” Our success will be ensured by our work of the past week, which has included cleaning the oh-so-dirty (no, not dirrrrrty, just dirty–sicko) soap factory, placing art, making a lot of phone calls, wiring art with the intent to hang, sanding stuff, spackling stuff, painting stuff, grilling wholeheartedly, and wiggle-dancing towards the land of milk and honey. Anyway, yall best be coming to the show on Saturday which will contain much art and live performances to–how do you say?–oogle at. So tune in next time kiddies for the further adventures of the WACTAC, and remember, as my dad always says to me to instill confidence, keep putting the “f” in art! Huzzah!

Dateline: The Soap Factory

Nick Lalla, WACTAC alum and Teen Programs intern

“It’s not spaced right, but I like it.” It’s good to hear from teen curators, and I just did. The last thing I heard a non-teen curator say was “It’s just like Sophie’s Choice,” which was a little harder to swallow. From what I can see at the Hot Art Injection installation here at the Soap Factory, the attitude expressed by the teens is, comparatively, appropriate and is bleeding into the way the final show is going to look and feel. Things look painting-heavy; a little bit grab bag, but I can’t deny that there are good eyes working the door. Everything I’ve seen was worth the first look and a second. It’s all another fine example of how teens know how to hold the world’s attention better than anyone these days. As a former WACTACer and Hot Art curator myself, I thought I could offer some advice, but these kids are running circles around me, now and as I remember myself then. Since they’re all too busy to listen to me anyway, I’ll give advice here and they can do what they want with it: “Go with your guts, teens, before you go to college and they get all fat with beer and Holocaust sublimations.”

As Chuck Olsen’s interview with Bruce Sterling from last week goes online at the NYC vlog Rocketboom and our webcast of Sterling’s discussion with Rirkrit Tiravanija hits the Walker Channel, I’ve got a good excuse to sing the praises of Education’s Sarah Peters (or “sp” as her blog name goes), whose introduction last Thursday night was superb. How she tied together a semi-itinerant Thai “relational aesthetics” artist and a cyberpunk author whose current obsession is the “internet of things” is…Things.

Tonight we are here to watch two people sit on a stage and talk about stuff. It’s a bit old-fashioned, when you think about it, since we have blogs and vlogs and videoconferencing and MySpace for social interaction and learning these days. Why haul down here and pay for parking when you can watch a lecture like this on the web (as some people are doing tonight)? I get paid to be here, so you all out there are the ones who can actually answer this question, but I think it has something to do with the necessity of human interaction. Which has everything to do with the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Rirkrit, as we all have the permission to call him, is an artist who works with environments rather than objects. He is said to have “transformed the notion of contemporary art by taking his environments out of the museum to the ends of the earth, literally.” In the early 90s he made a name for himself by creating installations during which he cooked curries for gallery visitors and staff. He has created low-power pirate radio stations in museums, a pirate television station in Italy, and built a replication of his entire New York City apartment in a gallery that was open 24 hours a day for visitors to use in whatever way they pleased. His ongoing, long-term project called The Land is a site located 20 minutes outside of Chiang Mai, Thailand that was envisioned as an open space without the concept of ownership. Activities on The Land consist of growing and harvesting rice, gardening, yoga, and performance workshops. This site was not intended to be labeled “ art,” yet with the development of so called “ relational aesthetics” and The Land’s various artist-initiated projects that blend environmental sustainability with architecture and video, the art-world has tuned-in to the endeavor. This is not to say that the art market has figured out it, as collectors are happy to purchase the soiled cooking utensils of Rirkrit’s food-based installations. But who could blame them, really. If you can’t purchase a moment, you’d do best to settle for a dirty frying pan.

Bruce Sterling, on the other hand, likes to talk about objects. His recent book published by MIT press called Shaping Things outlines his thoughts on the future of environmentally sustainable, track-able, user-alterable objects. He calls them “ spimes,” and insists that they are coming and we will need them to live. This book is the product of a year her spent as the Visionary in Residence at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Sterling is foremost a science fiction writer, a genre where his interests in technology, culture and environmentalism merge in fictional futures where massive global-warming induced tornadoes threaten the Midwest, cyber-security experts join the U.S. government to fight against terrorism, and people live in a post-television world.

Back in the present, he is the founder of the Viridian Design movement which strives to popularize ecologically sustainable design. An obsessive blogger, Sterling lives online, blogging his way between speaking engagements in Switzerland, Belgrade, and Texas, giving us web readers the impression that he is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.

There are numerous connections between the ideas and practice of tonight’s accomplished guests, yet their thinking presents us with a interesting conundrum: Sterling claims that the future of spimes and the “ Internet of Things” will fundamentally change our relationship to objects, while Rirkrit’s environment’s ask us to change our relationship to other humans. In what direction are we really headed, and what sort of interaction do we really need? Let’s let the visionaries figure it out. Please welcome Bruce Sterling and Rirkrit Tiravanija.

Photo: Tiravanija and Sterling in the exhibition OPEN-ENDED (the art of engagement).

Following up Reggie’s post linking the Walker’s conceptual Civic Engagement map with Ecotrust’s pattern map of a Conservation Economy, WorldChanging offers a fascinating link-dump on the aesthetics of geographical and conceptual mapping. Of particular interest are a “What if” map that depicts how the actual life of its creator could’ve deviated–or still could as he moves forward, and a French site that correlates the country’s vote on the EU constitution with bloggers and websites that supported the “no” campaign.

Another great mapping project/social critique comes from the Institute for Applied Autonomy: “a web-based application charting the locations of closed-circuit television (CCTV) surveillance cameras in urban environments,” iSee helps users “find routes that avoid these cameras (”paths of least surveillance“) … allowing them to walk around their cities without fear of being ‘caught on tape’ by unregulated security monitors.”

More on mapping at Future Feeder.

Yesterday morning Calvin Klein launched a new “live billboard” in Times Square: around the clock, 40 gaunt models simulate partying (sans sex and booze) inside what’s supposed to be a bottle of CK One. I suppose it’s the next step in the billboardification of the world: we’ve got ad-tattooed foreheads, nuns selling ad space <a href=”on coats that are given to homeless people, even Disney’s less-than-altruistic act of outfitting LA’s street people with Incredibles gear. As advertising’s scales tip even further into the crass, garish, and eye-assaulting, here’s a nice idea for a counter-balance:

In Canada, Them.ca proposes a Beautiful City Billboard Fee, a modest annual tax of $6 per square foot of ad space assessed to billboard companies, with revenues going toward the creation of ad-free public art. In Toronto alone, revenue from the city’s approximately 5,000 billboards could raise $6,000,000 for public art in a single year.

[Photo via Myszka.]

“Civic engagement” is an incredibly broad term, running from get-out-the-vote drives to the Walker’s interest in linking contemporary art with community concerns to… cell phones? Apparently. The global conference MobileActive: Cell Phones for Civic Engagement, to be held in Toronto September 22-24, will look at how this not-quite ubiquitous technology can be instrumental in participatory democracy, human rights work, and community building.

Sound far-fetched?

USA Today reports how SMS (short message service) has been used in political movements from South Korea to the Middle East to the Phillippines, where in a beautiful case of “mobile democracy,” text messages were used to organize the demonstrations that contributed to the downfall of President Joseph Estrada in 2002. WorldChanging catalogues other examples where cell-phone technology has been pivotal in social change, from ways the technology can spark bottom-up economic development in poor nations in Africa to the use of textmobbing as a form of political protest. And Howard Rheingold links to a story about how the poor in the Philippines use “texting” for the collective good:

Finding that his family has run out of its supply of rice, Nestor Santos (not his real name) pulled out a cellular phone from his pocket, keyed in the order and promptly sent it via short message service (SMS) … to his order taker. A few hours later, the ordered sack of rice to be shared by Nestor and his neighbors arrived.

This account may sound like just another technology-assisted lifestyle story, except for the fact that Nestor collects garbage for a living, and lives in a former dumpsite that still has a huge mound of compacted decades-old filth — and a much-reduced stench outsiders still find overpowering — to remind residents of their even sorrier past.