Building in the Post-Apocalypse

BUILDING IN THE POST-APOCALYPSE

An exhibition that explores and documents options of community, collaboration, and education through socially engaged practices.

Please see below for details about times, events, and goings-ons.

APRIL 10TH-23RD

MK GALLERY

2000 SW 5th (2nd Floor) Portland, Oregon

SCHEDULE OF EVENTS:

Go to beerandscifi.com/exhibition for schedule updates.
Some events appear twice because they are in multiple categories...

GALLERY HOURS:
Monday - Thursday 9-5
Saturday April 18th, 12-4

ARTISTS RECEPTION:
Thursday April, 16th
3-6pm - Public Social University event
6-9pm - Exhibition Reception
9-12pm - Sci-Fi Screening: Panic in the Year Zero & The Man From Earth

SCHEDULED ACTIVITIES:
April 13th - Monday - 10pm - Sci-Fi Screening - The Man Who Could Work Miracles
April 16th - Thursday - 3-6pm - Public Social University event
April 16th - Thursday - 6-9pm - Exhibition Reception
April 16th - Thursday - 9-12pm - Sci-Fi Double Feature (see above for titles)

MOVIE SCHEDULE:
Daily movies subject to change:
April 13th - Mon. - playing all day - The Lathe of Heaven
April 13th - Mon. - 10pm screening - The Man Who Could Work Miracles
April 14th - Tues. - playing all day - The Man Who Could Work Miracles
April 15th - Wed. - playing all day - Fantastic Planet
April 16th - Thu. - playing until 3:00 - The Man From Earth
April 16th - Thu. - 9-12pm screening - Panic in the Year Zero & The Man From Earth
April 18th - Sat. - playing 12-4pm - Panic in the Year Zero
April 20th - Mon. - playing all day - The Man From Earth
April 21st - Tues. - playing all day - A Boy and His Dog
April 22nd - Wed. - playing all day - Silent Running
April 23rd - Thurs. - playing all day - The Lathe of Heaven

What Would Eric Blog?

You've got to see this site. Someone created a blog that's all about my blogs and my blogging. It's for real!!! Go to What Would Eric Blog Now?

But they didn't get all my blogs:
psuart.blogspot.com
http://inconversationwithericsteen.blogspot.com/
http://glisanwindowgallery.blogspot.com/ (I closed this one though)

New Greenwashing Blog

I just launched a new blog. It's The Greenwashing blog. The blog is dedicated to showcasing pictures and videos of greenwashing advertisements, or advertisements that use "green" and environment subject matter to trick you into buying products.

Anyone can submit their greenwashing pictures too and I will post them. In some respects, it functions as a postsecret type thing, but with a different focus.

Please join in to the fun!

news

Cyrus and I met at a bar called Beulahland yesterday. We talked about being professional amateurs.

Building Relationships, Drinking Beer, Free Serving Trays, etc.

I believe that drinking good beer with someone else inspires great conversation and serves as a catalyst for developing relationships. I find that the conversation will often be centered on great beer and how what you are drinking at the moment compares to some other beer you drank last month. From this connection you can talk about many other things and a relationship can bloom over a pint or two. When I organize events around drinking beer I am mindful that it is a relationship building activity.

Last Sunday, I organized another beer event as part of a larger event series at Portland's Igloo Gallery. I hand-made serving trays that people could take home with them. The serving trays would hold two sampling glasses at the same time - a gesture I thought was symbolic of relationships between two people. So I paired beers based on who I was talking to, the nature of the conversation, as well as attempting to explore taste pallets. The best part of the event, for me, was that I had put a large amount of energy and effort into building these serving trays that I was just going to give away for free. In other words, the product of my labor was an object that was designed to cultivate relationships, as opposed to my labor being used by some business to make more money for that business.

Beerandscifi.com

Recently my beerandscifi blog got a tremendous amount of attention. It all started when io9, one of the leading sci fi news blogs wrote an entire post about my blog. Within a matter of hours I had been linked to by many other blogs and my latest post "Top 10 Sci Fi Flicks for the Thinking Man (beerandscifi version)" had received lots of attention on Plime, Metafilter, and Reddit. That post was basically a response to Rotten Tomatoes, who created a list with the same name, but I found it a little dull. Maybe this attention normal for most blogs, but this is the first time something like this has happened to me so it was very very exciting. I thought I'd share that with you.
Here's the io9 post:

It's just nice to know that I've spent all this time watching sci fi movies, thinking about their relation to issues I'm interested, and that when I have something to say it about it all...people are interested.

And then here is an image from another blog that I found particularly flattering. I can't post the images from every place that linked to me because that would just be a little weird:

Beer Pairings for “Everyday Magic” at the Igloo Gallery

Everyday Magic is an events series that will activate the Igloo Gallery in Portland. It ran in December 2008 finishes up in January 2009. Based on the concept of the Everyday, events will include presentations, demonstrations including how to brew beer at home, skill sharing, project sharing, dance parties, experimental meditation, film screenings, music, and potluck food-making and eating.

For my contribution to Everyday Magic I am handmaking serving trays (see image above) that guests will be able to take home with them. On the serving trays I will be pairing beers for them that will match the food they are eating and the conversations they are having in the gallery. The idea behind my project is to show that the act of drinking beer with friends can be one that builds relationships and has the power for social change. Good beer makes for good conversation.

Where? Igloo Gallery - 325 NW 6th #102 Portland, OR 97209
When? Sunday, January 18th from 2-5pm

Stopping, Breaking, and Moving

Over the Christmas Break I purposed to not make any art. I visited my family in California and I asked them not to talk to me about art or school. I wanted to spend my break enjoying my family and friends and not become worried about all the looming deadlines coming up. Maybe I need to learn some skills in time management or some techniques for relieving anxiety. Maybe I need to realize that my job, my art, is okay to talk about and that it doesn't need to stress me out...but I'm not there yet...I'm sure my parents would have loved to know what I have been up to but I really needed time for my brain to settle down and I needed to rethink what I was doing and why.

When I got back home and started up school again I began thinking about a few things:
-I am under no obligation to like art, attend art events, or talk about art with anyone if I don't want to. Here when I say "art" I think I'm talking about the scene of art and the systems in place to support and cultivate that scene.
-Why should I make art just to make it? If I have something important I think I need to do, then I can do it. If not, why bother? Explorations can be included, and I think it's good to explore.
-Let's get priorities straight: Family and Friends are first. Then a few other things. Art is way down the list.

When I got back from school I dropped a few different things that may have been keeping me from doing things that I feel I need to be doing. These may have been because of time constraints and/or from my increasingly evolving ideas about productivity; I don't need to pile things into my schedule just so that I have things that fill my time. Now I have more time to rethink what I'm doing and really make sure that I'm satisfied with the choices I've made.

On another note, I've been reading through an online summit about the paradoxes of slackerdom and I would recommend it for all you interested in what it means to enjoy life, doing what you think you need to do, and the differences between leisure, procrastination, sloth, and slacking off. Not sure exactly what to make of it all at this point but it's fun to read.

Holiday Ale Fest

I went to Portland's Holiday Ale Festival to experience some great beers and some beer culture. There are more pictures below. If you want a more detailed account of the event go here.

Public Social University Part 2 on Dec. 3rd

Upcoming Public Social University Lecture Series

PUBLIC SOCIAL UNIVERSITY PRESENTS
Free Lecture Series Part 1
Public Social University is a free school and workshop group created by the members of the art and social practice undergraduate class at Portland State University. On Nov. 24th, they will present a mini-lecture/presentation series to the public on the topics of: Making something new with your old shoes, How to be brave, Printmaking, and Capoeira Angola.

FREE
Date: Mon. Nov. 24
Times: 2:00-5:00pm
Place: Downtown Central Library; U.S. Bank Meeting Room
More information: Click here

A Call to Artists: Support Parecon

"A HISTORY OF ART over the last hundred years, not as the history of the product, the piece, but as the history of decision making within our industry, is the history of investors acquiring greater control over the distribution, definition, and making of art products - and thus over who we are. It is the history of power slipping further from the people who make the piece to the people who profit from the piece. Yes, there are individual art stars aplenty. But as workers in an industry, we are being ground into dust.

"I would argue that our responsibility as artists is to help invent institutions that protect and expand the opportunity for autonomous creative work. Our responsibility, in light of our current situation, is to help build an economy sympathetic to the notion that art, as access to a creative life, is the province of every human being.
[...]
"Unless we make building socially just institutions part of our understanding of what it means to be an artist, all the verbiage about "content" and all the pieces of art dedicated to peace, equality, and a better way of life will, in the end, serve only as evidence that we got it wrong, that we fundamentally misunderstood what it is we do. All that stuff will serve as evidence that when we needed to and when we were called upon to build better ways of being creative as a people, we thought that art was simply about things."

What you just read was the introduction to A Call to Artists: Support Parecon by Jerry Fresia, an article in the book Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21st Century, edited by Chris Spannos. I've only read a couple essays from this book but I'm becoming quite fond of it. The book seems to contain lot about determining and participating in the building of our own present and future, and in a very tangible way. The articles I've read so far talk a lot about parecon, or participatory economics, as a viable political model. There is also a text from Michael Albert who wrote Parecon: Life After Capitalism, what seems to be an initial text for this participatory economics. I am positive that some of thoughts in this blog will be influenced by this book, so I will continue to update you.

The work that I will be doing this year with The Committee will be heavily related to the text you just read, and I am assuming we will be researching more what Parecon is and how it may be utilized by artists.

Everyday Speech at A Grass Mound (With Kind Regards To Utopia)

From Anthony Marcellini's project A Grass Mound (With Kind Regards To Utopia)

September 13: 3-5pm
THE LITTLE WORLD AND EVERYDAY SPEECH
Artist Matthew David Rana will perform a series of speeches that explore art’s relationship to theater and everyday use by looking at the tensions between the ‘little world’ of the art space as a site for experimentation and the events that take place in the ‘big world’ exterior to it. Topics range from a polemic against Utopia, to how to devise the ‘perfect schedule.’ With contributions from artists Amy Balkin, Gustav & Oscar Ekdahl, Justin Fiset and Eric Steen, this event will include commissioned speeches, selections from a film and a re-speaking of the oral argument of a case heard before the United States Supreme Court.

PSU Art Department Building Remodel

At the end of the last school year we had a final review where we were to give a presentation about the art we had been making, or the projects we had been working on. Since a number of faculty were at these presentations I took the opportunity to explain my vision for a new art department. I talked mostly about the physical makeup of the building we use. I think a lot of faculty were interested in the changes I suggested so I would like to post a couple of those images here just as a reminder. I rearranged the space to make more sense as far as entering the building and the utilization and function of space. For example, the gallery is on the first floor, instead of the second. The main office would also be on the first floor, and all the faculty offices would be on the third floor. The foyer would be remodeled so it had concrete floors and new tables and chairs.
Besides the three images you see here, I gave visual examples of things that should change (like that ugly bench in the main foyer), I showed examples of spots where murals could be painted by new painting classes, among many other ideas. Many of the ideas would be very easy to enact. If you would like the entire presentation, or any of the other images including images of the current floorplan, just let me know and I can get them to you. If you are one the PSU art faculty members, feel free to forward this to other faculty members. These images get much larger when you click on them.



An image with the current floor plans and the new floor plans:

PSU Visiting Artists 2008-2009

I think we have a wonderful list of visiting artists this year. These all occur on Mondays if you are interested.

Location: PSU Shattuck Hall - SW Broadway and Hall
Time: 7:30pm

Fall Term - 2008

Oct 13th Andrea Zittel

Oct 20th Buster Simpson

Oct 27th Matt McCormick

Nov 3rd Darren O'Donnell

Nov 10th Courtney Fink

Nov 17th Stephanie Smith

Nov 24th Matthew Higgs

Dec 1st Hamza Walker

Winter Term - 2009

Jan 5th Lucky Dragons

Jan 12th Daniel Bozhkov

Jan 19th Holiday (no lecture)

Jan 26th Michael Brophy

Feb 2nd Edgar Arceneaux

Feb 9th Julie Ault

Feb 16th Mark Beasley

Feb 23rd Althea Thauberger

Mar 2nd Modou Dieng

Mar 9th J.Morgan Puett

Spring Term - 2009

Mar 30th MK Guth

Apr 6th Michael Rakowitz

Apr 13th Larry Sultan

Apr 20th Neighborhood Public Radio

Apr 27th Doug Blandy

May 4th Mark Dion

May 11th Frances Stark

May 18th Mierle Laderman Ukeles

Am I Getting Famous?!

I googled my name today and found a blog that placed an image of one of my projects right below a photo of Felix Gonzalez Torres' Perfect Lovers piece. I was thinking, wow, that's really special.





Turns out it was my friend Cyrus who posted it. That doesn't make me feel any less special. But it got me to thinking about how you could use the tactic of posting images of your work next to famous work as a way to get totally famous. Not a bad idea, eh?

TBA Fest 2008 - Drinking Beer With Friends

The art and social practice group will be participating in this year's TBA Festival. For this, Eric Steen invites you to experience labor and leisure with him as he drinks beer with his friends. Each day of the TBA fest, he will be enjoying one of his favorite east-side Portland pubs while he talks with his friends about anything that comes up. He will also have information available about his work and a jar for tipping him.

Here is more information about the social practice group's projects for TBA.

Eric Steen also gives tribute to Tom Marioni's "Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art."

Dates and Locations:
Sept 5 – Fri - - Horse Brass Pub (4534 SE Belmont)
Sept 6 – Sat - McMenamins Kennedy School (5736 NE 33rd Ave.)
Sept 7 – Sun - Laurelwood Brew Pub (5115 NE Sandy Blvd.)
Sept 8 – Mon – Amnesia Brew Pub (832 N Beech St.)
Sept 9 – Tues - Lompoc Hedge House (3412 SE Division)
Sept 10 – Wed – Lucky Lab (915 SE Hawthorne Blvd.)
Sept 11 – Laurelhurst Theater (2735 E Burnside) Movie - The Fall 9:35pm
Sept 12 – Fri - Hopworks Brew Pub (2944 SE Powell Blvd.)
Sept 13 – Sat - Green Dragon (928 SE 9th)
Sept 14 – Sun - McMenamins Barley Mill Pub (1629 SE Hawthorne Blvd.)

Times:
Monday-Thursday 3:00pm, Friday – Sunday 9:30pm
Movie on Sept 11 is The Fall at 9:35pm

My new blog - Beer and Sci Fi

Just wanted to update you all really fast in case you had not heard. I have started a new blog at beerandscifi.com. I am very excited about this blog as it combines discussions about beer, science fiction, utopian visions and dreams, activism and a few other things. Some of the articles have been looks at Portland political landscape, and others have been playful movie suggestions for dystopian fans, and there will soon be posts about beer. I encourage you to not only check out the blog but to also subscribe to it with the links on the right side of the beerandscifi.com page.

If you are interested in something specific, here's what I've posted so far:
-A massive list of sci fi utopian/dystopian films arranged from best to worst
-Rise - a dystopian film portraying Portland's future
-Portland's Gentrification and The Lathe of Heaven
-The Driver, playing at the Laurelhurst theater-pub

Of Using an Art Show as Leverage: The United Poor People at City Hall

Photo credited to Larry Reynolds

The art and social practice group has recently put up together two group shows scheduled during July. The first was at City Hall (SW Portland) and the second at Worksound Gallery (SE Portland). For both of these shows our group decided to have a specific question or theme that would unite the show. For City Hall our work simply had to be something new that addressed City Hall in some fashion. Concerning the show at Worksound, I will address that another time.

I've been interested in using the exhibition as a means for leveraging ideas and I think, in both these shows, this interest came out stronger than it has before. My interest in this came from what I know about the artists Joseph Beuys and Pawel Althamer. Beuys used Documenta, a giant art exhibition, to gain attention for the Free International University by hosting a series of lectures, presentation, and questioning sessions. Pawel Althamer used the Berlin Biennale to attempt to secure a residency permit for an immigrant. He went to Germany, found an immigrant, and attempted to jump through the bureaucratic processes with little success. As the crowds came in to see his "installation" they saw a piece of paper on the wall addressed to Berlin's interior minister pleading for the residency permit.
* * * * *

For City Hall I teamed up with Amy Steel and we worked with the United Poor People (UPP) - an activist group here in Portland that is largely made up of the homeless population. They are protesting the sit and lie ordinances, which make it illegal to sit and lie in public places downtown, as well as anti-camping laws. They also want short-term solutions such as realistic shelter options that can also accomodate couples and families. UPP has been meeting daily to discuss plans for green spaces and to give each other updates on their activities. They also meet up at City Hall every Wednesday where they can give 3 minute addresses to City Hall representatives.


Amy and I decided that the voice of UPP was one that could not be overlooked and we decided that instead of doing our individual projects, we would give UPP the opportunity to say what they wanted at City Hall. So, they gave us their information, pictures, communications, etc and we arranged it for them. You know what was great though, all this information is on the wall directly outside Sam Adam's office (Portland's mayor-elect). Sam Adam's currently supports the sit-lie ordinance but seems to maintain an open-mind and healthy attitude toward the whole situation. Members from UPP were able to chat with Sam Adams during the opening reception of the show at City Hall.

The posters will continue to be on display in Sam Adam's office area until the end of July.

I've written more about this subject on my beerandscifi.com blog here.


More reading about the sit/lie ordinance and the protests can be found here:
Willamette Week - Protestors Dissatisfied After a Meeting with Mayor Potter
Portland Mercury - Sit and Lie Ordinance is a Terrible Idea and Unconstitutional
Willamette Week - Park Exclusions Laws Need Changing say City Hall Protestors
Willamette Week - Homeless Protestors Not Swept From City Hall as Expected
Portland Mercury - Police Arrest Protestors
Portland Independent Media Center
Portland Tribune

Within A Seven Minute Walk From Worksound Gallery

Here is the flyer for another show in July. The opening for this is July 11 from 6-9pm at 820 SE Alder. For this show, each person in the social practice group is coming up with a project using affinity groups as well as a 7 minute walk from Worksound Gallery (the venue) as a point of departure. Here's the flyer: