Slide archives #1 - Jeffrey Vallance portal

I've recently got my slide scanner up and running (for a forthcoming Moldy Slide project) and have been doing some rough & ready archiving of my own and others' olde documentation.Here's Jeffrey Vallance's little-known 1988 series of gold frames around cut-away rectangles of wall, exposing the backrooms and interstitial spaces of the old LACE gallery this one's called "Elevator Shaft" and according to JV you could actually see the elevator moving up and down through the frame! I think I have a couple more of these in the mounds, so I'll add them if I come across them...

Zen and the Art of Make-Believe: A Date with Mister Rogers

I figured since that documentary's all the rage (and my Post Office has sold out of his stamp TWICE) this was a good time to revive this Skipping Formalities column from 1998


So when I did a google search to see if I'd put it on my website yet, I found out it's been cited in two grown-up books about Mr. Rogers in the last couple of years. Cool! Can I have tenure now?


"As I was becoming a connoisseur of the subtleties of the goings-on in this filigreed anarchist utopia, I began paying more attention to the bracketing segments of each episode; the parts where Mr. Rogers actually appears, setting up the thematic pins for the puppets to knock down, then clearing them away afterwards. I noticed the non-linearity of his thoughts- “A dream of being with your mom on the beach can give you a warm feeling inside BUT a dream of a monster is just a thought in your head, and not real” A reassuringly logical sounding sentence, but with a strange subtext: you can choose your reality from what you can imagine. I found myself wishing I had been exposed to this kind of programming in my infancy: ‘You are special. There’s only one person in the world exactly like you. People can love you just the way you are.’ It surely beats the tape loops most of us inherit..."

from "Zen and the Art of Make-Believe: A Date with Mister Rogers" Art issues. 52

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Under the Radar: Temporary Services

"I first heard about Temporary Services when—under the aegis of the Outpost for Contemporary Art—they occupied a vacant lot at the corner of Sunset and Alvarado in 2005, building a proto-selfie-museum from shopping carts, perfectly good headboards and other curbside scavengings; holding potlucks, DJ sets, urban foraging workshops, film-screenings, and giveaways of their zines. At that point their publishing output must have been around 60-something titles, and their most recent items left a big impression: Framing the Artists—an extensive, incisive and deadpan compendium of depictions of artists and art in movies and TV; Public Phenomena: Informal Modifications of Shared Spaces—the second in an ongoing series compiling documentation of homemade basketball hoops, parking space savers, roadside memorials and other vernacular art and engineering projects; and a poster iteration of what is possibly still their most famous anthropological study, Prisoners’ Inventions, a simultaneous celebration of human ingenuity and indictment of the prison-industrial complex. (All of these are out of print but available as free PDF downloads at temporaryservices.org).


And this is just the tip of the iceberg..."


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