July 27, 2006

[Originally published in the 2005 Expo newspaper]

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

"New Mission Cafeteria" (April 2004-April 2005) was a public collage installation on the wall of an abandoned restaurant, the New Mission Cafeteria, on 18th and Mission streets.

The collages were weathered, covered, mutilated and embellished by the elements and street life. Rather than merely replacing one collage with another, I incorporated and responded to these temporal and social elements as contributions to the work, and in that way the project was ultimately collaborative. It was often unclear what I had done, what others had done and what was the result of weather and time.

Mounting the collages on the street was an attempt to engage the aesthetics of public life. The collage was comprised of both factual and fantastical elements, mirroring the fact that what you see when walking down the street is never merely objective. The reality of public life is constituted through networks of signs, images, and interpersonal dynamics, and the installation was an on-going dialogue with passersby on the realities of street-life.

This process changed the way that I make collages in my studio. I began to collect flyers from lampposts to add to my work, and tear into my materials to mimic the effects of the elements and spontaneous human collaboration.

I never got into trouble when working on the installations. I was careful to work at night, and would prepare the collages beforehand so I could install them as quickly as possible.

I documented the installations during the day, and this afforded me the most interaction with passersby. Some people would ask if I had put them up and, when I said yes, would compliment the work.

Other times, people would see me taking pictures, presume that I hadn't put up the installations, and would present them to me with comments like "pretty crazy," or "pretty sick, huh?"

"New Mission Cafeteria" also aims to address the commodification of public space as a form of censorship. The boarded up facades of abandoned buildings are de facto public spaces--blank spaces that are among the only places left in the city for public artistic expression.

Big advertisers don't post on abandoned buildings, but low-profile advertisers have succeeded in commodifying these spaces by postering them to sell movies, music and other products.

Posting art or political posters here is illegal. Though it is not stated explicitly, one could argue that any form of expression that is not commodified has been criminalized and reduced to vandalism.

This specific conflict can be seen as characteristic of a much broader trend in the regulation and deregulation of media outlets--privatization rules the day. "New Mission Cafeteria" addresses the politics of space, and in modest fashion works to defend the project of public discourse.