Human Resources
410 Cottage Home Street . Los Angeles . 90012
presents
MAKING PLANS
MAKING PLANS brings together a coalition of artists engaging with issues of labor, access, invisibility, and power through various actions. In the introduction to Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974), a transcription of interviews with working people, oral historian Studs Terkel begins by likening work to violence. This “daily humiliation,” is at the root of a Capitalist condition which, as Marx wrote many years prior, “uses up its material factors, its subject and its instruments, consuming them,” yet continues to endure, despite an established discourse and data all but exhausting its systemic flaws and troubled histories.
This violence also emphasizes a search for daily meaning, rationale for the empty hours, dissent and hopelessness of that condition. In MAKING PLANS, new economies of production emerge or return in retaliation, deliberately positioning life and practice in such a way that acknowledges complicity, yet still consistently working to eradicate that which does not work.
If we accept that Capitalism has failed us, but that a true Communism cannot [yet?] be achieved, how do we proceed? As Paulo Freire’s writes,“only human beings are praxis;” a constant and vigilant re-examination of the pervasive, endangering methodologies are needed, so that something else, something better, might arise. MAKING PLANS unsettles politics of the felt sense, the haptic, oral, performed and unforming; laboring for emancipation through an indeterminate apparatus, unfolding through the show’s duration.
“I’m not so much despairing as asking a question about making plans.”
Fred Moten
Artists in the exhibition include: Astrovandalistas (Rodrigo Frenk, Lleslie Garcia and Thiago Hersan), Díaz Lewis (Alejandro Figueredo Diaz-Perera and Cara Megan Lewis), Ishi Glinsky, Nuttaphol Ma, Jimena Sarno, Aram Han Sifuentes and Kim Zumpfe.
MAKING PLANS is organized by two artists, Kyle Bellucci Johanson and Matthew Lax, who work as preparators, facilitating and fabricating the work of others.
Time: Sat 18 Mar 2017 – Sun 26 Mar 2017
Opening Reception: Sat 18 Mar . 7p-10p
Film Screening: Sun 26 Mar 6-8p > work by Nuttaphol Ma, Behrouze Rae and others will be presented.
Gallery Hours: Wed – Sun 12-6p
Directions: http://humanresourcesla.com/visit/
Link: http://humanresourcesla.com/event/making-plans/
_______________________________________________
My proposed work is entitled Mr. Proud, why do I have to memorize the Star Spangled Banner? It is a durational performance resulting in a site specific wall intervention in reference to the sketch above. Over the course of the performance the intervention shall transform a wall space into a form of a flag – a nameless, stateless flag that honors the heroic mundane with the dimension repurposed from the standard size of a typical drywall, often referred as the “4×8 drywall”. The intent is to flip this around to an 8’ x 4’ size that shall serve as the blueprint to house the flag.
The labor of these wall markings will take place during Human Resources “off” hours at 8hr shift intervals starting on Mon 13Mar to Thu 16Mar from 11pm to 7am. These hours replicates the graveyard shift and shall be my proposed work hours. It is suggested not as an artist’s attempt to romanticize and patronize the idea of invisible labor but it is my honest truth. I, too, juggle multiple jobs between teaching and my retail day job. The only available hours in the day to navigate around this is from 11pm to 7am.
The resulting evidence or marks of my actions on the wall shall be accompanied with a screening of a film entitled A Grain of Rice Under a Microscope. Together, they make a contemplative couplet on the heroic mundane.
秉宏 