Social Practice

The most curious element in The Gatherers: Greening Our Urban Spheres, at San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, is “The Gatherers Timeline,” an extensive ‘root system’ located toward the base of the gallery walls. Originating in a corridor off of the main gallery and feeding a stump, a kind of bizarrely truncated stem, these orange and brown mottled vinyl roots spread throughout each of the center’s second floor galleries and are punctuated by small text boxes, contextualizing and textualizing the exhibition with various historical facts, reflections and anecdotal information from both the artists and the curators. However, the timeline’s dates are not organized chronologically, instead forming a field of information that literally underlies the works. Indeed, with their unnatural coloration, patterning and abstract form, one is encouraged to forget that the timeline is intended to represent roots at all.
If to gather is to some degree the act of assembling parts in to a whole, the timeline, as awkward as it is visually, accomplishes this task, serving as a visual indicator of consistency in an exhibition otherwise lacking formal cohesion. It is thus that the movement between the rural and the urban is shown through the operative logic of the rhizome, with its networks of crabgrasses and fungi spreading horizontally throughout knowledge systems and the ‘global village.’ The rhetoric of sustainability is a rhetoric of scale, a collection of semi-autonomous nodes, creating various networks across disciplines and practices. The institutional focus has shifted from one of aesthetic experience and contemplation to one of networking and knowledge sharing; a kind of farm, one might say. Yet unlike a farm, the exhibition offers little in the way of either productive resources or practical knowledge.
And while it can be said that the works in The Gatherers explore non-traditional methods of distribution, challenging the ways we engage with art and indeed where that engagement might take place, the content of the work remains philosophical; a collection of research-based projects that are largely non-conclusive. The majority of the works in the exhibition are text driven, offering histories, dialogues and project narratives while giving viewers the opportunity to take one of the multiple newspapers and text-based posters that appear throughout the show. The exhibition that, according to curators Berin Golonu and Veronica Wiman,  “brings together a diverse group of practitioners who combine art with cultural activism to explore questions of to explore questions of how we ensure sustainability for our growing urban populations,” is weighted on the side of activism. Yet, if ensuring urban sustainability is what is at stake, the number of works that actually forward a strategic vision are surprisingly few.
Of those that do, the installation from Public Matters, a collective based in Los Angeles, proposes one of the more socially engaged or ‘activist’ practices. Featuring three monitors of programming from three media channels (Neighborhood Network News, Market Makeover TV and YumTV), the installation documents part of an ongoing collaboration with youth in South Los Angeles to create a Television Network dedicated to issues surrounding food ecology and healthy eating. Indeed, public Matters has been working with the community in Los Compadres for the last two years in an attempt to address local concerns surrounding the area’s status as a “food desert.”
Equally relevant is a video documentary about the “Slow Food Nation Victory Garden at City Hall,” a collaboration between Slow Food Nation USA, artists John Bela (Rebar), Amy Franceschini (Futurefarmers) and several local not-for profit community groups and urban farming initiatives that took place in San Francisco during the fall of 2008.  Drawing on tradition of victory gardens, a New-Deal era government supported agricultural initiative whose aim was to increase domestic food production, had the broader aim of increasing awareness of sustainable farming practices among the general public. The video is displayed on a small monitor and viewers are encouraged to sit on one of many stacks of cardboard sheets donated by one of the city’s informal recycling programs.
Ted Purves and Susanne Cockrell’s “The Meadow Network,” a series of broadsheet newspapers distributed free in the gallery and other public spaces, is based around interviews with city residents from varied backgrounds in an attempt to examine what rural traditions (such as growing, preserving, festival and bartering) persist in their daily lives. The installation by Turkish collective Oda Projesi (which translates to ‘Our Project’) titled “Please Don’t Step on the Green!” features a collection of several postcards each with an image, map and story of informal green spaces throughout Istanbul. The postcards, which are laminated hang on industrial strength steel hooks alongside place names that are crudely painted in black and arranged to approximate a map of the mega-city. Nearby several plywood shelves house stacks of the postcards, while a text entreats the viewer to take their favorite. The postcards carry information directing viewers to the project blog where visitors are able to download and print the postcards themselves.
Similarly, Fallen Fruit, a collective from Los Angeles whose work revolves around informal fruit economies throughout the city, presented “Double Standard,” a video of one of the group’s nocturnal fruit harvesting tours that was posted on YouTube. The video was re-edited with the wide range of user comments appearing across the middle of the screen as subtitles while the video plays on loop. Rebar, a group of artists and designers based in San Francisco, contributed an installation of several of their “Bushwaffles,” pink modular inflatable outdoor furniture pieces that can be assembled in to quasi-architectural arrangements. The “Bushwaffles” are arranged in various ways, creating a space for what the group calls “social greening,” the softening of urban environments through practices of togetherness and play.
With The Gatherers, the urban context, with its zones of conflict, emergence and ‘becoming’, is a surface on which rural practices are not so much reconciled but rather, overlaid.  The wanderers of late-capitalism’s global village have adopted a local and pastoral practice. In an attempt to ensure the sustainability of our cities, it appears that the Deleuzean fetish for the nomad has ‘re-territorialized’ itself as a fetish for the farmer.