TUESDAY, JULY 6, 2010
Marjan Vayghan (July 6)
Solo Exhibition, Dedicated to the BP Oil Spill. Please scroll down to the bottom of the page for the Breakdown of the Exhibition Title and wall didactics.
Posted: July 24, 2010 01:30 AM
Read More: Anarchism , Anarchy , Art , Art Exhibitions , Art Exhibits , Exhibition , Los Angeles , Los Angeles Art , PØSt , Arts News
Take 31 artists, writers, and curators. Mix in dozens more artists and art of all kinds. Toss in a key exchange, beer, wine, and sundry snacks, mix in a room, and voila–Summer Kamikazes: a series of one-night exhibitions and events throughout the month of July at POST, the downtown Los Angeles art space founded by artist and curator, HK Zamani in the nineties.
In the press release for the project, Zamani writes, “Difficult times invite difficult gestures. By design, these exhibits remain close to art and distant from the other stuff.” ‘Difficult times’, we understand–from oil spills to warfare, bad news is abundant of late. ‘Difficult gestures’ is ambiguous but intriguing, and one-night exhibits aren’t easy, but what’s all the ‘other stuff’?
[eros/thanatos, curated by Tricia Lawless Murray, September 2009, with installation by Nancy Popp]
Curious, I agreed to organize one of the evenings, thus joining 30 others invited to host a single night for this second incarnation of Kamikazes. The first Kamikazes took place in September of 2009, when difficult times most certainly read as economic and I was still living in Hollywood and too busy or traffic-weary to make it to the Kamikazes. But not this year.
When Habib (the H of HK) invited me to organize one of the evenings, I was deeply immersed in research about anarchism for an assignment but gave a fast and enthusiastic “yes!” and hoped my night would fall after my mid-July deadline. (Zamani uses a lottery to choose the dates.) Happily, I pulled Friday the 30th. As the date approached, I couldn’t help but see the parallels between anarchy and Kamikaze–and not in a guns and mayhem way.
[Matt Wardell, July 2010]
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, anarchist radicals imagined a new way of organizing society based on mutual aid, voluntary participation, and a lack of hierarchy. This fascinated me–not least because the word has since been hijacked to mean all variety of destruction–was their brand of harmonious, egalitarian society possible now? The Kamikazes offer a template, with shared space, an abundance of creativity, and the reign of independence.
I decided to base my night on anarchy too but quickly learned that asking artists to participate in an anarchist experiment is not unlike asking fish to swim. The bigger challenge emerged in juggling order and freedom, equality and difference, trying to listen to each response or lack of response and modulate the process accordingly. Anarchy depends not on chaos but on trust and love and faith in humanity. It asks us to join and weigh in, difficult gestures that tend to get moved to the back of to-do lists except during trying times.
[Cynthia Minet, July 2010]
Meanwhile, the Summer Kamikazes roll on, each different from the next. Art is put up and placed and performed. From the multi-media Mannlicher Carcano, a music-art-performance night hosted by Doug Harvey, to an evening of performance works re-enacted by artists and organized by Carol Cheh, and an exhibition of playful conceptual work from 1971, a la Huffington Post art writer, Peter Frank, there is no Kamikaze template. Some are crowded, some intimate. Some have snacks; other don’t. But throughout, there is art–on the walls or floor and sometimes in the parking lot or elevator or hallway. Art you aren’t likely to see in a museum made primarily by artists whose work you have seen, or will see, in museums and galleries. For one month, POST remains close to art and far from, well, whatever all that other stuff is, a place where the bad news subsides for a time and the good stuff inspires.
[Marjan Vayghan, July 2010]
[Portraiture and the Like, curated by John O’Brien, September 2010]
[All My Radiohead Songs, Dane Picard, part of Anarchy at POST, July 2010]
For information about Summer Kamikazes, please see: http://post-la.blogspot.com/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/annie-buckley/asking-fish-to-swim-anarc_b_657986.html
TUESDAY, JULY 6, 2010
Marjan Vayghan (July 6)
Solo Exhibition, Dedicated to the BP Oil Spill.
April 20, 2010 (who got fucked up?)
Breakdown of the Exhibition Title and wall didactics: Below is a timeline of the BP disaster and its ongoing impacts.
April 20, 2010 – Explosion and fire on Transocean Ltd’s
drilling rig Deepwater Horizon licensed to BP Plc (BP.L)(BP.N);
11 workers are killed. The rig was drilling in BP’s Macondo
project 42 miles (68 km) southeast of Venice, Louisiana,
beneath about 5,000 feet (1,525 metres) of water and 13,000
feet (4 km) under the seabed.
April 22 – The Deepwater Horizon rig, valued at more than
$560 million, sinks and a 5-mile (8 km) oil slick forms.
April 25 – Efforts to activate the well’s blowout preventer
fail.
April 29 – U.S. President Barack Obama pledges “every
single available resource,” including the U.S. military, to
contain the spreading spill and says BP is responsible for the
clean-up.
April 30 – An Obama aide says no drilling will be allowed
in new areas, as the president had recently proposed, until the
cause of the Deepwater Horizon accident is known.
— BP Chief Executive Tony Hayward says the company takes
full responsibility and will pay all legitimate claims and the
cost of the clean-up.
May 2 – Obama visits the Gulf Coast. U.S. officials close
areas affected by the spill to fishing for 10 days. BP starts
drilling a relief well alongside the failed well, a process
that may take two to three months to complete.
May 7 – An attempt to place a containment dome over the
spewing well fails when the device is rendered useless by
frozen hydrocarbons that clogged it.
May 9 – BP says it might try to plug the undersea leak by
pumping materials such as shredded tires and golf balls into
the well at high pressure, a method called a “junk shot.”
May 11/12 – Executives from BP, Transocean RIGN.S(RIG.N)
and Halliburton (HAL.N) appear at congressional hearings in
Washington. The executives blame each other’s companies.
May 14 – Obama slams companies involved in the spill,
criticizing them for a “ridiculous spectacle” of publicly
trading blame in his sternest comments yet.
May 19 – The first heavy oil from the spill hits fragile
Louisiana marshlands. Part of the slick enters a powerful
current that could carry it to the Florida Keys and beyond.
May 28 – Obama tours the Louisiana coast, saying “I am the
president and the buck stops with me.”
— BP’s Hayward flies over the Gulf.
May 29 – BP says the complex “top kill” maneuver, started
three days earlier to plug the well, has failed.
June 1 – BP shares plunge 17 percent in London trading,
wiping $23 billion off its market value, on news the latest
attempt to plug the well has failed.
— U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder says the Justice
Department has launched a criminal and civil investigation into
the rig explosion and the spill.
June 2 – BP tries another capping strategy but has
difficulty cutting off a leaking riser pipe.
— U.S. authorities expand fishing restrictions to cover 37
percent of U.S. federal waters in the Gulf.
June 4 – Obama, on his third trip to the region, warns BP
against skimping on compensation to residents and businesses.
June 8 – Obama says he wants to know “whose ass to kick”
over the spill, adding to the pressure on BP.
— U.S. weather forecasters give their first confirmation
that some of the oil leaking has lingered beneath the surface
rather than rising to the top.
June 9 – U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar says BP must
pay the salaries of thousands of workers laid off by a
moratorium on drilling, at a congressional hearing.
June 10 – In his first comments, Prime Minister David
Cameron says Britain is ready to help BP deal with the spill.
— U.S. scientists double their estimates of the amount of
oil gushing from the well, saying between 20,000 and 40,000
barrels (840,000 and 1.7 million gallons/3.2 million and 6.4
million litres) flowed out before June 3.
June 11 – Supportive comments from Britain lift BP’s shares
in London by 6.4 percent. But the rise does not mend the damage
done — the company is worth 70 billion pounds ($102 billion)
against more than 120 billion pounds in April.
June 14 – Obama, on his fourth trip to the Gulf, says he
will press BP executives at a White House meeting on June 16 to
deal “justly, fairly and promptly” with damage claims.
— Two U.S. lawmakers release a letter to Hayward saying:
“It appears that BP repeatedly chose risky procedures in order
to reduce costs and save time and made minimal efforts to
contain the added risk.”
June 15 – Lawmakers summon top executives from Exxon Mobil
(XOM.N), Chevron (CVX.N), ConocoPhillips (COP.N), Royal Dutch
Shell (RDSa.L) and BP.
— Obama says in his first televised speech from the Oval
Office: “But make no mistake: we will fight this spill with
everything we’ve got for as long it takes. We will make BP pay
for the damage their company has caused.”
June 16 – BP agrees to set up a $20 billion fund for damage
claims from the spill, suspends dividend payments to
shareholders and says it will pay $100 million to workers idled
by the six-month moratorium on deep-sea drilling.
June 17 – Hayward faces the wrath of U.S. lawmakers as he
appears before a congressional hearing. He apologizes for the
spill and says everything is being done to stop it. Members of
Congress accuse BP of cutting corners and ignoring warnings for
the sake of profit.
June 18 – Anadarko Petroleum (APC.N), part owner of the
gushing well, says BP’s behavior before the blowout was
“reckless” and likely represented “gross negligence or willful
misconduct” that would affect obligations of the well owners
under their operating agreement.
June 22 – Hayward is handing day-to-day control of the
spill operation to Bob Dudley — a reflection, says BP, of the
need for the chief executive to return to other aspects of the
energy giant’s business.
June 24 – A U.S. judge refuses to put on hold his decision
to lift a ban on deepwater drilling imposed in response to the
spill.
June 27 – Oil washes ashore in mainland Mississippi for the
first time, although some had tainted its barrier islands.
June 28 – BP is forced to defend its chief executive after
Russia’s deputy prime minister said he expected Hayward to
resign soon.
— BP says it is now spending $100 million a day on efforts
to cap the well, clean up the spill and compensate those
affected, bringing the total bill so far to $2.65 billion.
(Writing by David Cutler, London Editorial Reference Unit)
BP Spill Timeline Collected and Compiled by Marjan Vayghan for the PØST
exhibition POSTED on http://post-la.blogspot.com/2010/06/marjan-vayghan.html
BY HK AT 11:19 PM