July 27, 2006

[Originally published in the 2005 Expo newspaper]

[Read about other guerrilla art interventions in the Expo DIY Library.]

Another art show, actually.

It was called "Illegal Art" and featured appropriation-based work. You know--Mickey Mouse-made-porny, U2-sampled-by-Negativland, that sort of thing.

First my collaborator and I stole their website.

Well technically, their site was (and still is) illegal-art.org. Dot Org? They were begging to be hacked!

So we launched an "erased de Kooning" version with the url illegal-art.com. What could be better than appropriating an appropriation show?

Sure, it's great to blur the lines of ownership in an "ownership society." But to traffic in "illegal art" seemed to us to be setting up a necessarily simplistic binary, an "us versus them."

What, the guys in U2 aren't artists? And moreover, if you ran a record company, you wouldn't want to protect your investment?

It seemed like the age-old avant garde contempt for so-called "mainstream" culture (nowhere more on display than in the Bay Area).

It's a worldview that says this culture in which we all participate was foisted on us, as if by UFOs or something.

So we thought, "We want to be the other guy. They want illegal art? Well, I Want a Mainstream!"

That was our show, mounted at the now-defunct Build art space.

That too was a theft--we "stole" the gallery space (read: subverted its traditional function) and made it instead a "Transit Center for Cultural Exchange & Social Interaction."

Still more thievery--we took images of the "illegal art" from the mainstream conduit of the World Wide Web (which at that time, July 2003, were also on display at the SF MOMA Artists Gallery).

In the spirit of seeing them as cultural artifacts, we liberally placed those images in the space along with any other objects attendees wanted to bring, fished from or offered up to that slippery, ineffable, yet oft-invoked territory known as The Mainstream.

Stanley Kubrick, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sleater-Kinney, Terry Gilliam, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Thelma and Louise, the cover of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures ... all this and much more combined to make a delirious concoction which, at its height, saw participants simply submitting to being carried along, and giddily, joyously going with the flow.

But it was more than that. "I Want A Mainstream!" was also meant to challenge the audience (in this case, the arts community) to question their assumptions and beliefs--something far more productive in a city where championing "illegal art" is preaching to the choir.