Steve Lambert

It’s been hot in New York, so the Red Ball headed back to the beach. It hasn’t mentioned Lee Walton once.

The Hunterdon Museum of Art in Clinton, New Jersey has put together a group show that examines how contemporary artists respond to suburban sub-division houses. My work is featured in the show along side nine other artists. The opening is on Sunday, June 4th from 2-4 pm with a panel discussion at 4 pm. Hope to see you there!

This weekend Eyebeam is having it’s Open Studios event.

June 21, 2008
3:00 PM - 6:00 PM
540 W. 21st St. NYC

Visit Eyebeam for the biannual Open Studios, showcasing ongoing projects by current fellows, residents, and student residents.

Get a behind-the-scenes peek at Eyebeam’s state-of-the-art labs, and talk with artists and technologists about their current work.

The June 21 Open Studios will feature work by fellows, student residents, and outgoing Winter 2008 residents, including: Read on…

The Anti-Advertising Agency with Dara Greenwald and Josh MacPhee are in an exhibition this weekend in New York. The group show includes the AAA’s Samaras Project.

“The Audacity of Desperation”
Presented by PS 122 Gallery at DEMO Space 122
150 1st Avenue, enter on 1st Avenue, take stairs to second floor
June 19 – June 22, 2008

The Audacity of Desperation is an art exhibition expressing and unraveling states of political desperation. Activists, artists and very concerned people have created posters, manifestos, DIY kits, postcards, stickers, buttons and multi-media projects for free distribution.

DEMO Space 122 is pleased to present the NYC stop of “The Audacity of Desperation,” a 3-day nomadic exhibition of take-away projects (initiated and curated by Jessica Lawless and Sarah Ross and organized by Steven Lam) in conjunction with a series of performances and workshops responding to the spin of the upcoming election.

Stephen Duncombe wrote one of the catalog essays for “Wish You Were Here: Postcards From Our Awesome Future” and Packard and I both thought he did a great job pulling out ideas we had embedded in the beginning of the process. After reading Duncombe’s book, it was a great honor that he wrote this piece for the catalog.

Art of the Impossible

Stephen Duncombe

If “politics is the art of the possible,” as the 19th century German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck once wrote, then what sort of politics are Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert proposing with their posters? Movable skyscrapers. A martial arts studio on a BART train. Public transit by elephant back. Commuting by zip line. Transforming San Francisco into wildlife refuge. Turning a football stadium into a farm (and linebackers into human plows). Every one of these proposals for our “awesome future” is patently impossible. Urban planning is a serious business: the domain of accredited academics, trained technicians and pragmatic politicians. What’s proposed by Jennings and Lambert – artists, of all things – is not serious at all.

Which is exactly why one needs to take them so seriously. Enlightenment pieties aside, politics is not solely, or even primarily, about reasoned thinking and rational choices; it’s an affair of fantasy and desire. People are rarely moved to action, support, or even consent by realistic proposals; they are motivated by dreams of what could be. This is something Conservatives understand quite well. It is highly unlikely that we will do away with income taxes or become a Christian nation any time soon, yet this doesn’t stop Republican Party standard bearers from making allusions to these futures. An Islamic Caliphate is not in the offing, but dreams of such a possibility convince a disturbing number of Muslim militants to strap bombs to their chests.

Not too long ago imagining the impossible was the job of the Left. Conservatives, after all, wanted to conserve what was, while progressives wanted to move toward the awesome future. What were democracy and socialism if not leaps into the unknown? Who, after all, is remembered for proclaiming “I have a dream”? But things have changed. Think of the Liberal uproar a few years back when Karl Rove told a New York Times reporter that the goal of the Bush administration was to “create new realities.” When this senior adviser to the president then went on to describe (and denigrate) Liberals, reporters, policy experts, and the general Times readership as the “reality-based community,” the Left, far from taking offense, adopted this appellation with pride.

As I write this essay, Democratic candidates for the 2008 presidential election are making appeals to audacious “hope” and unspecified “change,” but the past quarter century of progressive politics has been dominated by the opposite: professionalism, pragmatism, and predictability. And where has all this seriousness gotten the Left? An unprecedented rise of the Right, from Neo-Cons on the Potomac to Fundamentalists from the Bible-belt to Jihadists in the Middle East. A triumph of the dreamers. It’s true, in the United States at least, that some of these dreams are finally being recognized as nightmares, but it’s a bittersweet victory since the Left has little to offer in replacement.

The absurd proposals offered up by Jennings and Lambert have the quality of dreams. The artists explain that they asked experts in the fields of architecture, city planning and transportation for ideas on how to make a better city. These plans were then “perhaps mildly exaggerated.” It is exactly in this exaggeration that the artists’ visions have their political power, and their morality. The problem with the dreams offered up by the Right (and commercial advertisers, who share the technique) is that their fantasies are meant to be taken for reality. Vote for this candidate or buy that product and this phantasmagoric future will be yours. Since these impossibilities can never be delivered, the result is another search for a new fantasy (endless consumption), increased fanaticism in an attempt to will the impossible (terrorism), or disenchantment when the promised future is not delivered (witness the current implosion of the Republican Party).

What is so inspiring – and honest — about the visions of our future offered up by Jennings and Lambert is their transparent impossibility. A city could become more “green” with additional public parks and community gardens, but transforming San Francisco into a nature preserve where office workers take their lunch break next to a mountain gorilla family? Ain’t gonna happen. And that’s the point. Because it is not going to happen their fantasy fools no one. There is no duplicity, no selling the people a false bill of goods. It’s a dream that people are aware is just a dream.

Yet at the same time these impossible dreams open up spaces to imagine new possibilities. The problem with asking professionals to “think outside the box” and imagine new solutions is, without intervention, they usually won’t. Their imaginations are constrained by the tyranny of the possible. By visualizing impossibilities, however, Jennings and Lambert create an opening to ask “what if?” Standing in front of one of their posters on the street you smile at the absurd idea of practicing Tae Kwon Do on your train ride home. But you may also begin to question why public transportation is so uni-functional, and then ask yourself why shouldn’t a public transportation system cater to other public desires. This could set your mind to wondering why the government is so often in the business of controlling, instead of facilitating, our desires, and then you might start to envision what a truly desirable State would look like. And so on, ad infinitum. Jennings’ and Lambert’s impossible solutions are means to imagine new ones.

There is an important place in politics for the sober experts and bureaucrats of the “reality-based community.” These people take the impossible dreams of artists, visionaries and revolutionaries and bring them down to earth, transforming them into something possible. But you cannot start with the possible or there is nothing to move toward (and nothing to compromise with). Otto von Bismarck was famous in his own century for his practice of realpolitik, a hard-headed style of politics that ignores ideals in favor of what’s possible given the real conditions of the times. Our times, defined by the ubiquity of Las Vegas style spectacle and “Reality TV” entertainment, where the imaginary is an integral part of reality, necessitates a sort of dreampolitik. Conventional wisdom may insist that “politics is the art of the possible,” but Packard Jennings and Steve Lambert make a much more inspiring and, ironically, serious case that politics is the art of the impossible.

My collaboration with Packard Jennings, “Wish You Were Here: Postcards from Our Awesome Future”, has been chosen as the “Best Public Art of 2008” by the San Francisco Weekly. The project, which ran from November 12, 2007 to March 14, 2008, installed visionary illustrations on utopic futures on Market Street kiosks in San Francisco.

An essay I wrote about the foundation and experience of the WikiMarathon has been published in the New York Foundation for the Arts‘ online magazine, Current. The essay, The Great Internet Wiki Marathon talks about how the Art Wikimarathon began and how it works.

Note: you need to create a login for NYFA to view the article.

This video will give you a brief intro to Add-Art and demonstrate how to install the add-on to your Firefox browser. If you have any additional questions, check out the forums - http://forum.add-art.org.

Intro video Remix Contest on http://fffff.at - $100 prize.

Introduction to Add-Art from Steve Lambert on Vimeo.

As part of the release of Add-Art, I will be on a panel with other Rhizome Commission winners, Evan Roth (of Graffiti Research Lab) and Ben Engebreth, eteam, and Rafael Rozendaal.

Add-Art is the web browser plugin that replaces advertising on the web with art from a curated database. I have been working on with a team of volunteer open-source developers off and on for the past year. As with most open-source projects it’s a work in progress – for example you’ll notice the site is rather plain – but we’re preparing for a more public announcement Friday.

Rhizome Commissions 08
Conversation with eteam, Steve Lambert, Evan Roth and Ben Engebreth, and Rafael Rozendaal

$6 members, $8 general public

The Rhizome Commissions Program was founded in 2001 to provide support to emerging artists working with new technologies. The forty-four works commissioned to date represent some of the most innovative, pioneering efforts in the field. Tonight, artists eteam (Hajoe Moderegger and Franziska Lamprecht), Steve Lambert, Evan Roth and Ben Engebreth, and Rafael Rozendaal, who received support in the 2008 cycle, present their finished projects as well as other select projects. Additional Rhizome Commissions will be presented in August and October.

2008 Commissioned projects:
http://www.rhizome.org/commissions/2008/

Shot during a show of my drawings from the Wish You Were Here series. Watch me take a drink. …did you see it?