SITE WORKS this Sunday!

(Running continuously unless otherwise noted):

Cheyenne's Men Don't Get Killed Travis Diehl
Projection. A shaky video eye traverses the husk of myth, strewn with bodies perfectly preserved in their cinematic persistence.

Lucky Luke Rasmus Røhling
A Franco-Belgian comic series, set in the American Old West. One of the most popular and best-selling comic book series in continental Europe, but only a minority of the series' adventures have been published in the US. Three of these comics will be given to the ranch library and are on view here.

Seeing the Converse Home Movies Chiara Giovando
The home movies of the Converse Family (original builders of the Ranch, circa 1908) were found recently at a yard sale. Little is known about the imagery, who is pictured exactly and when. What is known can be discerned from the site, the ranch, and clues in the landscape and clothing. This site work is an investigation into the transferring process that occurred after the original film rolls were found and how that seemingly unbiased technical process has left us with a specific narrative film.

Animals, Spectators, Hay Rena Kosnett
3 sound installations comprised of: the noises which would have been made by a selection of the exotic animals that roamed the property of Safari West (this property, now named Deep End Ranch) as it was in the years 1970-1984, then owned and operated by Peter Lang (son of filmmaker Otto Lang)/ human spectator sounds made when viewing enclosed wild animals/ an interview with Richard Haller of Santa Paula's Haller Hay company, whom delivered hay for Lang's animals and some of the animals themselves.

We Cross Sometimes Alison J Carr
During various periods of its history the ranch has been unoccupied and abandoned leading to rumors that it was haunted. Carr invited 3 psychics to the ranch and recorded their conversation paying attention to one of the psychics 'automatic writing'. A lot of what they revealed can be substantiated and the new stories also seem very plausible.

The Golden Lemons of Baron Apthous Von Canker Lakshmi Luthra and Brica Wilcox
Between 1849 and 1852 the Deep End ranch was the site of production of Baron Apthous Von Canker's golden lemons. During this time the golden lemon nearly replaced federally minted coins as the money of California. Come pick-up a map for our self-guided walking tour and learn about this fascinating but little known episode in our country's history!

Our Homeland Security, a work in progress Karolina Karlic
Encounter documents of the American unreason... As immigration and the auto industry have climaxed in popular media discussion, this installation raises and grounds the current issues at hand and brings them together through the site of Santa Paula.

Pony, Farming, Immigration and Labor Sage Paisner
A story that deals with the issues of how this and other countries are built on the labor of immigrants and an old man’s story of how he traded his red bike for a one-eyed pony. Video.

Housing Development Grafting Project Zach Kleyn
Site-specific sculpture examining the relationship between modern housing developments and the practice of grafting organic plant life.

En Plein Air Erich Bollman
A survey of the ranch and surrounding geography through the local tradition of plein air painting, which will be displayed on site, and also used in virtual space (online in Google Maps & Panoramio) as a recording of the space.

Kitchen Window (Eldhúsgluggi) Bjarki Bragason
In this video installation a dichotomy of two failed farms, one in Santa Paula (CA) and the other in Eastern Iceland is put up. Both farms stem from epic ideas of life in the country and subsequently fail, only to be resurrected into artist residency projects.

Artists Work Greg Wells
Documenting an experiment where artists work alongside Gerardo Patiño (ranch foreman) and me during a regular day as a ranch labourers.

Timed events:

3:00 pm Seminar – with Sage Paisner

Strategies of Native gardening and understanding of the land as well as a discussion about gardening as art and activism, establishing a co-op for the summer to help feed our communities. Topics also include the mental and physical healing that gardening and eating your own food can have on a community. Held on the site of Paisner’s Hopi Zen influenced community garden. 1 hour.

4:00 pm California Hates You! Rachel McRae
The drowsy, golden surface of the Californian landscape stretches taut over an unstable substructure, pleasantly masking its "distinctly catastrophic" nature. (Clarence King, first head of the United States Geographic Survey) Here is the illusion of solid ground. P.S. California hates you! An informal walk along the surface of a scar that runs through the Ventura Basin. We will travel a tiny fragment of this 70 mile fracture, the Oak Ridge Fault, considered to be a possible cause of the Northridge quake. Bring sunglasses and a hat.
45 minutes

5:00 pm We Bought The Farm David Bunn
David Bunn and Ellen Birrell (farmers!) lead a tour of the farm. With 33 acres under cultivation, they’re growing lemons, tangerines and avocados. They have just grafted 100 orange, grapefruit and avocado trees and are preparing to plant 1000 more tangerine trees before July 1. 1 hour

6:30 pm Harvest feast
A lemon inspired dinner. Bring a dish to contribute if you wish (lemons not required).

8:30 pm Collage-cowboy sings forlorn song to a New Frontier
Performance by Orlando Tirado Amador with Projection Loop by Rhys Ernst.
10 minutes

9:00 pm DJ Cowboy Gerardo Patiño
From a pickup, resident cowboy and ranch foreman Gerardo Patiño will mix from his special collection of Mexican and Anglo Country Western music

Greg Wells and Sage working on garden and cooking breakfast

Fantasy/Animals/Spectators/Hay: Follow Your Dreams, Kid

At the root of it all is fantasy. Every technological advancement, every literary masterwork, every civilized progression of humanity is, arguably, a development of fantasy. Some of the most ubiquitous cultural representations of fantasies date back to base mythology about the desire to move beyond the limits of the human body.

The desire to be invisible.



The desire to fly.



The desire to move quickly.



As we've gathered from watching these myths on the big screen, the pursuit of fantasies can have dire consequences, or be rewarding, depending on how and why fantasies are pursued.

(Be careful what you wish for)



(Follow your dreams, kid)





It is the norm that many of our day-to-day activities are qualified depending on how they stack up to our fantasies. Statements like, "It's better than I had imagined," or "It's not as good as I had hoped," are judgments based on ephemeral constructions of the mind; yet daily value is often placed on expectation over reality, from something as simple as the sweetness of a cantaloupe, to something as dire as the potential impact of a variable interest rate.

As a woman born and raised in the city of Hollywood, I have experienced, throughout my life, people moving to my hometown to fulfill their fantasies. And because, as CalArts resident thinker Norman Klein has elucidated upon extensively in The History of Forgetting, we are not a city that tends to hold on to the past, there is always the opportunity to reseed-- The permanently clean slate state.

Deep End Ranch, although an hour and fifteen minutes outside of Los Angeles and situated down a dirt road, does not escape this track. On the contrary, it is a location that is emblematic of the cycle of fantasy-prompted renewal: the property of Deep End has a history of blood, colonization, xenophobia, and more recently, safaris, tea gardens, and English Bulldogs.

When learning about this varied history, one former use grabbed my attention. In the years 1970-84, Peter Lang, son of the filmmaker and TV director Otto Lang, housed and fostered his African-native exotic animal collection on the ranch property, which eventually came to be known as Safari West. Some of the animals roamed free, some were kept in pens. The desire, and the ability, to establish an African native species reserve in California, through the encouragement of a family that made its mark in directing TV episodes of Dakarti ("The Chimp Who Went Ape," "The Killer Lion," "The Elephant Thieves," to name a few) is an amazingly literal congruence of fantasy that has been generationally pursued to reality.
(Lang eventually moved his operation north to Santa Rosa, where it currently exists as a private facility which guides adventure tours and established a non-profit foundation, the Safari West Wildlife Reserve.)

To represent and reflect on the Santa Paula existence of Safari West, I will install 3 sound pieces on the property. The sound pieces are comprised of exotic animal sounds that may have been heard while walking the property of Safari West (Egret, Scarlet Macaw, Zebra, Stork, Antelope, East African Crowned Crane, Vervet Monkey), human spectator sounds made when viewing enclosed wild animals, and an interview with Richard Haller of Santa Paula's Haller Hay company, the former hay delivery man for Safari West in Santa Paula.


(Harry McGowan)

(Greg Bows)

Reality / The Real at Deep End

My Oxford Dictionary of Current English defines reality thus:

 

• n. (pl. realities) 1 the state of things as they really exist: he refuses to face reality. 2 a thing that is real. 3 the state of being real • adj. referring to television programmes based on real people or situations, intended to be entertaining rather than informative: reality TV.

 

 

But I still don’t know what reality is. 

 

‘The Real’, my semiotics and psychoanalysis class taught me, is not what we experience.  We experience a representation of reality (even our memory and brain is a representing device).  The only possible exceptions are those experiences that are so experiential, they only exist in the experience (extreme pain, sex, death). 

 

My reality of life on the ranch, therefore, is not a reality of the ranch.  The ranch does not generate my experience of it.  I generate my experience through interactions with components of it.  The totality of the ranch is not conceivable. 

 

Deep End has served its respective landlords with a fantasy space, ready to be overwritten.  Traces of previous fantasies are still perceivable around the edges, but really, with each new lord of the manner a re-boot process has occurred.  Perhaps the ranch’s seductive quality is its blank canvas-ness. 

 

The ranch can never be experienced in its own terms; it is always performing a function for the landlord.  There is no real ranch, no pure ranch-ness we can access.  Perhaps it should become the subject of a reality TV show?  Then we could access the ranch.

Where is Robin?





In reality TV – it is not what the cameras are shooting; what is being broadcast to me on my TV that is the real. I know that. I know that it is the cameras shooting what the production behind it claims to be real - but which is fake - that is the reality – to TV - or maybe TV production as a job - Which I guess is closer to the real world where they go to work and stuff. And I know that I don’t get to see that – and that is the real reality.
And I know that the real nature is somewhere else than within the designated area – that it could be east or west or whatever but in any case that I have to go beyond. For an example if I was in a city – Let say LA – I would have to out of LA – any direction but west – to find the real.
And I know that Eastwood’s Unforgiven – when he rolls around in the mud with those pigs – is more real than most western that were actually supposed to be the first indicators of the real “real” for that setting.
I know that it is after – after he is done (for the sake of the real it should be mentioned that in the movie, it is actually in the beginning) with being a cowboy – that that is probably more real than he ever was in any of the other portraits.
So yeah – I know that the real isn’t only something that refers to that which it originated from – I know that it can also be “after”. But those days when I’m feeling like Will – and Robin asks me about truth and I look at his shitty painting and tells him the truth about him self – and when he then gets up and crabs my collar and calls me chief – then I just don’t know where to look for it – I can only feel my body being pressed against that big book shelf. It makes me feel like a schoolboy; Robin is standing on the desk with that smile – come up here he says – look he says – but I just can’t se it.





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3ZaeAq8ImY&feature=PlayList&p=C8F96312B7C770C8&index=58






http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQf7O3GeHVk





http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EdWgsTUhmI&feature=related

HOME MOVIE IMAGES

SEEING THE CONVERSE HOME MOVIES

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The Converse Family home movies were found recently at a yard sale. Little is known about the imagery, who is pictured and when. What is known can be discerned from our knowledge of historical documents, the site of the ranch, and clues in the landscape and clothing.

The seemingly unbiased technical process of transferring five original rolls of film onto digital formats, both DVD and digi-beta occurred with in the last year. This digital form was then the first way that I viewed the home movies.

This site work is an investigation into the transferring process that occurred after the original film rolls were found and how that seemingly unbiased technical process has left us with a specific narrative film. Because of arbitrary and pragmatic decisions made by the telecine technicians at Fotochem and the Santa Paula Historical Society, we are left with an exact series of moving pictures that evokes not only a story but an emotional content as well.

There was no indication of sequence inherent in the original rolls of film, yet the Fotochem technicians who complied them onto a dvd and digi-beta tape assembled the five rolls into a chronological order. Perhaps this decision was made randomly, a kind of luck of the draw as the technician pulled the rolls of film from a box one by one. There were no explicit directions given as per chronology on the order sheet. Next, this constructed series of images was taken by the Santa Paula Historical society and parts were further manipulated. Some frames of the original film were damaged due to the age of the film. The Santa Paula historical society choose to slow down specific images in order for the viewer to "see" them better. Thus, whole sequences are portrayed in slow motion. In Film theory: critical concepts in media and cultural studies it is stated that; "Slow-motion can be brought to the most natural activities to reveal them in a texture of emotional and psychological complexes." This again is a "technical" or pragmatic response to the material of the historical object, the film, that dramatically alters its content. Casually and by accident, the film which started out as found footage is being given the elements of a piece of work which can be considered both through the annals of film theory as well as through private interpretation.


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Lucky Luke is a comic book series that sets in the Old American West. Through caricature the Series accumulates both the image of the old west and the myth it produces. While it is completely unknown to most Americans, it is one of the best selling comic books in Europe. Drawn by the Belgian illustrator Morris and written by the French/Polish Goscinny, Lucky Luke not only plays an essential part in European popular culture – for many Europeans it is the main source of knowledge in their perception of the Old West.
Many of the stories uses actual historic material from the west, however allot of the figures used to play out these narratives, are modulated from what was then (1953 – 1983) contemporary cultural figures, such as Alfred Hitchcock, W.C. Fields (see above) and Jack Palance – just to name a few.
The Series had an awareness not only towards how it touched on its historical subject matter, but also how it was received, and affected its contemporary society. For an example, after the second Marlboro Man died from lung cancer, Lucky Luke’s cigarette was replaced with a straw.



On May 17th 2009 three Albums of the Lucky Luke comic book series will be added to the Library at the Deep End Ranch in California. Providing a take on the old west that the culture itself has largely ignored – this gesture cannot deny its educational nature and the arrogance that inevitably follows such an act – however this is not meant as Christopher Columbus second coming; – Lucky Luke has been introduced to the American marked before – but was for various reasons (most of them very inscrutable) not a success. Further more, even though this gesture carries an actual object, its destination is not monumental. It is not the site for the history of the Old West (one might ask oneself if such a place even exists) – but a site. What qualifies the Deep End Ranch as site for this discussion is not that it physically happens to register within the map of the Old west, it is in the way that it – by using the site as a platform that allows reevaluation of this position – maintains a sensibility towards its own identity.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ke6JNVK3AWQ
Still from one of the cartoons made from the Series. The narrative is animated in an exhausted version of the west: The landscape is densely inhabited with an accumulation of its own myth – almost to the point that this becomes a static "landscape within the landscape".


Opening one of these comic books the reader is confronted with the story of how the Old West was founded through European immigration and ideals, but the story is told from a European point of view that - at the time - is influenced by the very result of the myth that it is portraying: Contemporary American life.
In other words this colorful hybrid – in form of a Comic Series - raises the question (and confuses the order) of how identity forms through trans(Atlantic)actions of culture.
However, because of the archival nature of this gesture, this layer is not directly available. By closing the album and putting it on the shelf at the Deep End Ranch, this sensational format must submit to the subtle, latent language of a library. Once again the order of "authenticity" is shuffled, and what in Europe might be the primary reference point to the Old West, is now one version among many.


Installation shot from the Deep End Ranch


Installation shot from the Deep End Ranch





Title card

My piece titled "Pony, Farming,
Immigration and Labor" is going to be
located in the saddle room it is
 a 25 min loop on a video monitor using
head phones and the viewer
 will be sitting on a saddle to watch the
stories.

The second piece is entitled

"Hopi Zen influenced community garden"
it is located at the old pumpkin
patch and will be going on all day.
 At 3:00 I will lead a hour seminar
talking about strategies of Native
gardening and understanding of the land
as well as a discussion about gardening
as art and activism and hopefully
establish a co-op for the summer to
 help feed our communities. Topics also
include the mental and physical healing
gardening and eating your own food
can have on a community.


"Pony, Farming, Immigration and Labor" is
a story that deals with the
issues of how this and other countries
are built on the labor of
immigrants and an old mans story of how
he traded his red bike for a one
eyed pony.

"Hopi Zen influenced community garden" is
 a piece of land art trying
activate the deep end community to use
the land in a way that gives back
to the community and helps strengthen that
 community, through the growing
and sharing of food stories and physical work.

I also would like to buy 1/2 a pig and have a pit
roast down where I have
been camping, 

Pony, Farming, immigration and labor

Garden progress you can start one too

Hopi and Zen influenced garden in progress camping on the land to gain a greater understanding

My Site-Work

"Epic story of a mysterious stranger with a harmonica who joins forces with a notorious desperado to protect a beautiful widow from a ruthless assassin working for the railroad."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49FsaizH9tQ

The bodies are here (1:44 in the trailer above):

Taking the Cinematic Real or a Pictures reality as my site--this same real which has brought us all here to the Deep End Blog, by way of Site Work, by way of CalArts, by way of a cinematic (that is to say image-based and illusionistic) perception of the American West--I have re-staged the preceding scene of cowboy carnage at Deep End Ranch.

From an industrialist's fantasy ranch to a giraffe infested safari to a Los Angeles-area artist residency, the image-reality of the site- is continually molded by its occupants. If not progress, then at least a reiteration: my fantasy onto Sergio Leone's definitive WESTERN, onto the Deep End's definitive terminal fantasies.

As the railroad signals the end of the West, Leone's film connects a constellation of classic Westerns into one epic terminus. The cinema at once generates and suffocates the fantasy (this being my site-). The video is littered with corpses, confusion, poetry. A sunset for the Western itself to ride into, or to track into on a dolly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqyBMK-XRrE

Brica Wilcox plays the recognizable corpses,
the litter of character actors. Instead of a train car
at the end of the railroad, there is a ranch house,
a swimming pool, an orchard at the edge
of the sprawl of Los Angeles.

"You interested in fashion, Harmonica?"

"I saw three of these dusters a short time ago,
they were waiting for a train.

"Inside the dusters there were three men."

"So?"

"Inside the men there were three bullets."

"That's a crazy story, Harmonica. For two reasons.
One:
Nobody around these parts got the guts
to wear those dusters except Cheyenne's men.

"Two:
CHEYENNE'S MEN DON'T GET KILLED."

CHEYENNE'S MEN DON'T GET KILLED.

Well but the women? But those of us that aren't Cheyenne's?
But the images? Can you kill an image, or does it just move,
the bone smashed down and resurfacing elsewhere, the blood
squirting out another hole?

CERTIFIED 

an installation located in the Variable space 

As I mentioned last week during our discussion, I have struggled with accepting my presence on the Deep End Ranch in regards to finding my purpose there. As we talk about site specificity, we can start to think of the term as " a problem idea".  The specific in my case is what becomes a certain type of politic; a specific context, debate, audience, community, project, not a genre nor a place. With this approach I came to terms with what I, or an artist, can contribute to a site work by bringing my personal interests of the current state of the auto industry, immigration rights into conversation with our current contributions on the ranch. As the world economy had been greatly effected by the auto industry plunge so has the city of Santa Paula. In the year 2008, 881 new auto dealerships have closed their doors. California has the largest percentage of closed dealerships in the US. 

The reality is that just down the street a Ford dealership and a Chrysler dealership have closed their doors for good. This effects California tax laws in a very significant way not too mention all the local jobs that were lost. Here is a letter of concern from the California New Car Dealers Association addressing this years projections.

But, not only is California concerned with it's auto sales declining more than anywhere in the world but immigration has been on it's hot plate for quite a while. Immigration laws, workers rights, undocumented migrants all are relevant topics surrounding the Deep End Ranch as it sits in the citrus capital of the world. I propose to invite my own personal experiences with immigration and the auto industry to raise the notion that these issues are complex, broad, and have great resonance in Ventura county. 

CERTIFIED will question what it means to be eligible for American citizenship. What used to once stand for a gateway into freedom, a thriving economy with great accomplishments now can be examined for it's failures even through the lens of the auto industry.

En Plein Air (gentleman painter)

For my site work proposal, I hope to use the tradition of plein air painting as a way to comment on/engage with site-specificity. The tradition of plein air painting is part art groups/movement (see Barbizon school, Canada group of seven, etc.), part gentleman artist (see naturalist recorders and 'sunday painters') and part documentation (of land and people pre-photography). The remarks made that the Deep End Ranch was for a "gentleman farmer" are interesting in the sense that the perceived level of 'dedication' or expertise is evaluated by an outside source based purely on economic/production concerns (i.e. the ranch doesn't meet a certain level of produce). To extrapolate this onto an art context, are there economic rubrics (cultural capital) that are placed upon artists in order to decide what definitions of dedication (or legitimacy, expertise, etc.) they have? The contemporary context for an artist who engages in scene or landscape paintings is located in a specific art world. Like David mentioned last Wednesday, there are a variety of art arenas, and for the space of Santa Paula, CA, it seems that landscape/plein air painting is the primary focus. Attempting to channel this tradition will be another connection in this project.

Another source of discussion has been virtual spaces, especially the way technologies shape perceptions and realities (see Bjarki's post). By uploading my series of plein air paintings online and releasing them into the world of shared information, they will become another part of the "reality" of Santa Paula. In class it was mentioned the use of Google Earth to check out a place before actually visiting, to "see" it before experiencing it. Using these painted views to create a new 'view' of Santa Paula and the Deep End Ranch will place it within both arenas (virtual and historical) and hopefully create some sort of link or comment about 'site'.

I originally mentioned Flickr as the posting place for the work, but was mistaken and Google maps (and Google Earth) are actually linked with Panoramio, which tags the photos. I have uploaded one of the first paintings (View from Enbankment I (with dogs)), and will upload more once I have them completed and scanned. I tagged this photo in the closest approximation of the original painting location, as I do not have GPS, it will unfortunately be slightly innaccurate. (The last time I checked google maps a half hour ago, the photo did not pop up in the map view, so perhaps it takes a period of time before it appears in a general search?) The selection of locations for the paintings will hopefully adhere to the pastoralism and romanticism of landscape painting (and the West (capital W) / frontier, etc). The actual paintings will be displayed as part of the group show on the 17th in a TBD place.

Peter Lang of Safari West

I am interested in the land and what I can do to benefit and heal the land by gardening and using the food to feed the Deep End Ranch community. I feel that the history of the ranch is well documented for the most part except for the history of the Chumash Indians. This land and all the land of the Americas is Indian land and until every one understands this and starts to heal the land and acknowledge the Native tribes of the Americas the US will fail at healing relations at home and abroad. I have researched the Chumash tribe and they were a tribe that numbered at one time over 20,000 Chumash who lived all along the cost of California. My project is going to deal with gardening planting the trinity corn, squash and beans. The Chumash were not gardeners but I will use the Hopi model of growing food. The Chumash were hunter gatherers and skilled fisherman and sea men. I will also build a traditional Chumash home from the materials on the land. I have to go to class but I will keep you posted.
Thank you .
http://www.chumashindian.com/

A Day in the Life

It takes a lot of effort to keep a working ranch like Deep End functioning as a productive farm and site for all your work. I am going to ask you all to take part in ‘a day being a labourer’ on the ranch, all this involves is a day of your time to work alongside Gerardo and me. Following your day, I would like you to write a short piece of text describing the work you have done and how you would feel doing the job day in day out, like many farm labours do.

These are not the jobs you dream about while you are at school, they are not taught at universities, people that do not know you are not going to look up to you for doing these jobs and say ‘you have done well for yourself’. Most of what is done to keep these farms running is boring, repetitive hard work. And the only reason people do this work is not for love but for money, to survive. But if it was not for these labourers, places like Deep End would not be able to function.

My project is the time you spend working, the work itself, how you feel about it and the text that comes out of it. My project depends on the collaboration of the artists involved. The text responses will form a piece that will be displayed outside “the shop” on the 17th May.

Land Slide Cloister

LAND
SLIDE
CLOISTER

Working idea for the Deep End Ranch project,
Connecting the failed ranch Skriðuklaustur, Iceland to the Deep End Ranch

As previously mentioned in the Reality letter about reality and naked women and or couples and how it relates to the idea of failed dreams, dreamt by city folk who venture into the country to live out their fantasy, I´ve been interested in drawing a parallel between the two ranches in separate corners of the world. I´m still thinking over the best way to go about it and there are several projects I am doing (some might shrink, disappear and produce new babies).




1)In the kitchen window at the Deep End Ranch, placing a TV playing a still shot of the view from Skriðuklaustur. Voicing over the silent room in which the video was originally shot, I´ll read a section from the writer who built the ranch, as he contemplates on the farm in one of his pieces.

2)For a show at Skriðuklaustur (direct translation Land Slide Cloister) this summer (a group show of folk, outsider, contemporary, non and every other kind of artist that the director is contacting, its not a professionally organized thing and is very misch-masch) I will send a picture of the Deep End Ranch. The show in the Iceland Ranch is supposed to be only photographs, drawings or paintings of the house at Skriðuklaustur.

3)Sound piece at the hot-tub at Deep End ranch. A vocal piece, conversation, monologue or dialogue, still needs to be decided, about public nudity and communal bathing.

(this might be edited out, but at the moment i´m doing a piece which will be carried out at the olympic swimming pool in Reykjavik, its a blurp-based sound piece, spoken through loudspeakers directed at the hot tubs, by life guards from a guarding tower in the pool, and will reflect on the issue of communal bathing and the idea of public nudity.)

SITE, SIDE, SIGHT
The site specificity of these projects is based on the idea of connecting two linked sites. Establishing a link that would not otherwise excist. The idea of placing the video of the view from the writers ranch kitchen to the artists ranch in California and dubbing it with a translated text about home and identity talks to the process of settlement, attempts to establish a place.

A extract from one of the possible texts,
"one are the years when I was young and still innocent except for original sin . . . the years when adventures brought me experience without bitterness . . . the years when my sympathy with all things living was uncritical and intense . . . when God seemed to me a generous, friendly grandfather, the Devil a rather dangerous and moody but, on the whole, essentially stupid and harmless godfather . . . the years when light was triumphant indeed, and all evil, all fear, could be turned aside by an Our Father or the sign of the cross . . . the years when in the morning I could but dimly foresee the evening, and sat safely in the shelter of a wall of sods playing with straw . . . these indeed are the years that will never return.
And it is not only the years that have passed. Many of those then living are now dead, others scattered to the winds; even their memory only peeps out intermittently, like stars between the breaks in a cloud-covered sky."

How The West Was Won

PROPOSAL FOR SITE WORK: How The West Was Won

Site: Outside Barn, Deep End Ranch
Funded by Interdisciplinary Grant

Addressing cultural miscegenation as it relates to the myth of the West and its misgivings, a series of collage animations will be produced in collaboration with animation artist and filmmaker Rhys Ernst (MFA1, Film/ Video). Together, using our different practices, we are seeking to bring ideas of deformation and hybridization to problematize the ideal space of both agricultural and cultural aesthetics as they relate to sexuality, labor, and the iconographic. The looping animation piece, initially shot upon my chest, will then be projected upon my back during a live-action performance piece to take place outside the barn the night of May 17, 2009 at the Deep End Ranch. The work attempts to respond to the negation of race, labor, and sexuality within the workings of the agricultural industry, which we take to be emblematic of the so-called nature-culture divide that prioritizes the ideal versus the hybrid and the deformed, and subjugates the labor that upholds it. Our work attempts to re-embed these issues into the landscape and architecture to bring forth a self-consciousness that might yield a new identity for the Deep End Ranch.

The Golden Lemons of Baron Apthous Von Canker

The first part of our project would be a map of the ranch detailing the role of the ranch in
the history of the golden lemon. On the map significant spots would be marked out and at the corresponding spots on the ranch historical recreations would illustrate the significance of that spot.

Our fictional lemon time line goes something like this:

-1849, California lemon industry takes off when lemons are brought in as a treatment for gold miners suffering from scurvy.

-Gold/lemon grafting is accidently discovered when a miner attempts to hide his stash of gold by sewing it inside of lemons. This leads to more formal experiments in grafting.

-In what comes to be a specialized process of lemon and gold grafting, permutations that affect the skin, seeds and flesh meat of the lemon occur. The possibility of the ranch as a place to process the gold through the lemon hybridization process is considered.

-1850 The lemon money commodity. The ranch becomes the site of an experimental gold/lemon mint founded by Baron Apthous Von Canker. By minting the gold in California miners and mining companies were saved the long and treacherous trip to the U.S. mint in Philadelphia, Further, the lemon/golds minting process was far more difficult to counterfiet than the crude industrially produced coins of conventional minting processes. It didn't hurt that Von Canker was involved in developing early forms of hydraulic mining.

-At the height of its success Von Canker installs a hot air balloon lemon slice with golden seeds above the mint for promotional purposes. This ominous symbol becomes more dramatic still as it marks a reversal in the fortunes of the mint and the downfall of the golden lemon.

-Fall of the lemon. Sour business deals lead to a boycotting of the Von Canker mint by area mining companies. There is also an a federal investigation based on suspicion that there is not enough gold in Von Canker's coins. Improvements in minting technology make the golden lemon less appealing to investors and Von Canker falls into bankruptcy. The ranch is sold at auction.

Some Notes on Site Specificity:
If the phenomenological approach to site specificity emphasizes the body, and the social/institutional approach emphasizes the mind, our approach emphasizes the imagination. This project is an experiment in allowing the imagination to run amok in a specific site with a specific materiality and a specific history. This project is not a controlled illumination of any aspect of the site but an attempt to disturb the way the site signifies through narrative. It is a strategy of play. In some ways it is analogous to the way myths are generated in advertisements.
Fictional associations endow the orange with meaning which increases the value of the orange juice. We buy an idea of family, of nourishment, of purity, of nature, the juice is merely the bearer of these ideas (as money is merely a piece of paper that serves as a bearer of value).
Our idea is that these myths, motivated by profit, need to be countered by other myths which disturb these disturbing processes of signification and this instrumental use of the imagination. This strategy approaches the ranch as a site for the generation of meaning.

The Hidden History of the Ranch Exposed by a Psychic

On Sunday 3^rd May, a psychic and automatic writer are coming to the ranch to ‘psychic profile’ the ranch.  I will show them around and they will prepare and set up and then I shall video both the writing and the psychic.  I intend to turn this in to a sound piece  using the audio of the psychic.  I would like to set up the sound piece in the front room (dining room) of the empty residency house, with speakers in the corners above eye-level.  I will film the text being written by the automatic writer and this could be a soundless accompanying piece displayed on a television in the front too.  I’m interested to see what the footage looks like, and what the automatic writing looks like. Maybe I could do something with the text – either just presenting in the room or photocopying as a take-away.

 

I’m interested in thinking through my collaboration with the psychic beyond the class.  I’d like to use the material in the future, but it is obviously very specific to the ranch and therefore suits a site-specific outcome.  But I want to think about using the material in different ways – I’m thinking, what happens to site-specific work when the site is not present physically in the work?  Can the material be reworked?

 

A second idea I’ve been thinking about, may not be practically possible to do before the 17^th, (but if I can, I’ll give it ago).  Below our house, in the tack room, is a poster advertising the Richard Prince retrospective at the Guggenheim last year.  It features one of Prince’s appropriated ‘Malboro Men’.  I would like to take a photograph of Gerardo practicing for the up-coming rodeo season and get this printed as a poster at Kinko’s and pin this near the Prince poster.  It’s a small thought, but perhaps placing a poster of Gerardo, the authentic article (who, by the way, smokes Marlboro Lights) next to the Prince piece will both illuminate some of the ideas Prince is interested in around constructed identities in advertising, and perhaps make Gerardo smile.

Lemon work

More to come on the project. Some pictures of lemon work for now...

-Brica + Lakshmi

Unsuccessful Grafting

In an age which, despite cultural self-labels such as “progressive” or “advanced,” there exists a fiery political debate around stem-cell research, one is reminded again and again of the sacredness we humans reserve for that which we all share, our bodies. This sacredness of human flesh manifests itself through the curious act of “setting apart,” reserving as different or special that which objectively seems to be made of exactly the same biological materials and behave in many similar ways to other bodies that inhabit this earth. Setting the human body apart is also curious because other “non-human-body” biological manipulations are often carried out without nearly the same amount of controversy or anxiety.

 

Surely cultural narrative plays a large part in the privileging of human consciousness. Within the context of Christianity we read in Genesis that “God created man in his own image,” and then told his human creatures to “fill the earth and subdue it[,] rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air [and] every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth” (Genesis 1:27-29). In this very influential Western narrative, humans are set apart at the beginning as the rulers over the rest of life. This mindset persists.

 

One of the oldest examples of human subjugation over plant life is grafting, a practice which has been around for thousands of years (at least before 2000 B.C.E. in China). Grafting is simply a method of asexual plant propagation, where tissue from one plant is fused with tissue from another plant. In a book about grafting which David kindly lent me is a caption to a photograph of a successful graft: “EACH COMPONENT RETAINS ITS IDENTITY.” It goes on to specify that even different bark textures of the English and Black Walnut trees do not “intermingle;” they keep their distinct and unique characteristics. This is certainly the modernist dream of dominion over the landscape at its most confident. I think of the phrase, “have your cake and eat it too,” or “the best of both worlds.”

 

Behind the idea of grafting is the larger idea of hybridity, and with this term comes mostly positive connotations. A hybrid is an improvement, it is an accelerated evolutionary jump, it denotes progress and forward movement. It brings to mind current trends involving “hybrid” cars and the fashionable implications this has for the image of the hybrid owner as ecologically conscious. We could think of the word hybrid as often involving positive human manipulation, as opposed to the word mutation, which carries negative inferences that are not directly willed by humans and frequently equals biological life run amuck.

The gesture of grafting involves human choice in the selection of traits which are either desirable or unwanted. It operates under the presupposition that the human creature knows what is best for all biological life (again, the Genesis establishment of human rule) and that the choices that humans make move life progressively forward (more resilient plants to withstand climate shifts, a type of avocado which is sellable on the market). We now understand that there are a multitude of choices made by humans throughout history (most noticeably within the last 100 years because of the scale of environmental damage) that do not involve progress at all, but actually designate a danger to all life on the planet.

 

In light of human failure, several key questions arise: Do human beings have the right to manipulate biological life in anyway? Is it possible to accurately predict whether choices will have positive effects over long stretches of time? How much time is required to know whether the changes are positive or negative? Who decides what are positive or negative changes?

 

When I think of grafting, I think of other human attempts to bring together two seemingly  separate biological entities. One of these is the human need for habitat, for shelter. With some imagination and a slight shift of perspective one could view current housing developments as an extremely unsuccessful “graft” of human beings to the land that they occupy. Levels of consumption, unsustainabilty, dependence on outside systems for basic needs, and the decentralized nature of new housing developments – these are just a few of the reasons the graft is unsuccessful.

 

My project, as occupying the same space as a ranch undergoing a major grafting project, and within the larger community surrounding Santa Paula (which with the rest of southern California has seen unprecedented housing growth prior to 2008) seeks to ask questions about the manipulation and utilization of organic matter for human purposes. These could be questions surrounding the hybridization of biological forms, such as grafting, or the development of land for building human habitation.

 

Some key questions, to end: Does human development of the land form a kind of hybrid in which “each component retains its identity,” as the book on grafting suggests, or does this hybrid become something new and entirely different, something which moves the “progression” of life into uncharted biological territories? Do we want to go to these places? Do we have a choice?