shelflife by visitor

I started this project a little over a year ago, but haven’t had much time to seriously sort out the distribution logistics. I’ll mention it here as a way of thinking aloud. Retailers and gallerists tend toward cognitive implosion when they try to decode the pricey-fair-wage-USA-produced/low margin/charity-project puzzle. That leaves me in a bind with projects like this.

In the Spring of 2007, Korean cab driver, Heo Se-Wook sacrificed himself to the elemental hunger of flame. His self-immolation was an effort to awaken his country to the threats of the Korea-US Free Trade Agreement. $119 billion dollars in aid over ten years was agreed to be paid to Korean farmers to mitigate the adverse impacts of the KORUS-FTA. Two critical points of contention between farmers and both the Korean and American governments were that rice and beef should be eliminated from the trade agreement. The import of these commodities into Korea from America would devastate family farmers. Unable to match American prices, Koreans would be forced to foreclose on their farms.

Heo Se-Wook’s protest was neither without reward nor without peer. Self-immolation has always been a rare but notorious, Artaudian, theatrical form of protest. Other Korean farmers allegedly followed in Se-Wook’s fiery footsteps–which had likely been inspired by the actions of monks and farmers before them. Following Se-Wook’s self-immolation and a series of large, organized protests, rice was ultimately eliminated from the implemented KORUS FTA. Sold to the Korean people as a path to cheaper goods and prosperity, KORUS FTA has adversely impacted industries as disparate as agriculture, textiles, pharmaceuticals and the Korean legal market. KORUS joins NAFTA and CAFTA as another slow-release Amerotoxin in the resource-rich waters of emerging markets.

Not directly influenced by any imagery of Se-Wook’s protest, “Acts of God: Rugs for Lost Homes–Vol. 1: Korean Farmer” is an homage to the contributions of those who have sacrificed themselves in the Theater of Pain to sustain the viability of local production. The 10′ x 5′ hand-made berber wool rug is the first in a series of 5 Acts of God rug editions intended to benefit NGOs with missions to mediate grass-roots land and property conflicts in emerging economies. A dark play on western imperialism, the Acts of God rugs amplify and glorify the actions of people who would otherwise go largely ignored in popular culture–laying these heroes out to be stomped upon by people who unconsciously and compulsively fill their homes with the products of exploitation. Collectors involuntarily tithe 5-10% of the price of the AOG pieces to organizations founded to protect the individuals upon whom the wealthy and powerful habitually traipse so viciously with the contents of their shopping bags and the thoughtlessness of their votes.

Pricing available on request. Each volume editioned at 25 rugs and intended to benefit a different NGO involved in a different conflict. 10% of sale donated on direct purchases or sales where retailers match a 5% retail donation.

The time that Sensational Fix curator, Roland Groenenboom, has spent with the work of Sonic Youth and their friends seems to have been superbly digested. Something that many of the artists involved in the show share widely in common is an involvement in the production of accessible, serial ephemera. Most are still generating print editions, publishing or writing zines, books, broadsides, chapbooks or pamphlets, printing tshirts, making records… Regardless of perceived value as artists, most everyone in the show is still actively making collectible works available to admirers of their creativity via channels beyond the hyper-inflated fantasy-priceland of galleries.

Having completed an exhibition catalog potentially priced beyond the reach of many young exhibition attendees, Roland decided to tap the over-arching communal belief in democratic content distribution and enlist exhibiting artists to contribute new work to a series of cheap, numbered, thematic, xeroxed zines. I contributed the piece below to the first issue, SILENCE. I can’t wait to stuff a sliver of my shelves with the entire series.

So, someone wants to have a naked-lady-t-shirt-wearing-night out at a bar. Great idea. I don’t go to bars. I hate ‘em. They’re depressing shitholes–but nonetheless–great idea. Someone else jokes about naked guy shirts. Equally great idea. I mention that I have drawings I’ve made of plenty of both and offer up stencils so that anyone with a wardrobe lacking in smut may rectify the situation and participate. Someone volunteers to come grab the stencils so I can avoid both setting foot in Williamsburg Brooklyn and a bar. I stencilify three of the drawings that I don’t already have drawn up as stencils and think–”Fuck. These would look good bigger–bigger and in an orgy.”

So, a small laser cut batch for the pervs at the bar and a larger knife-cut batch for me. Then I realize how sick I am of spraying stencils, but how I could use some unwinding. A friend asks if I’ll be working on Sunday or at “choir practice.” I start obsessing about choirs and realize how well orgies and choirs compliment one another. Instead of working on finishing the drawings for Volume 3 of But They Don’t Blink, I take a detour, whip out the watercolor and decide to do an edition of 50 hand brush-painted, 3-color, 18″x24″ paintings on 140LB cold-press watercolor paper. I finish the first and decide, “Choir Practice.”

It includes a mobius of gay guys fisting themselves and one-another, a woman shoving her fist down the throat of another–much heftier–woman and a guy penetrating a contortionist in utter enuii.

I’m only gonna make them available via this post, cos they take too long to paint. $80. Signed and numbered. Edition of 50. Email me if you want one.

When the Sonic Youth studio still sat hovering in the chasm of Echo Canyon and the band collectively exploited it as a well-worn sonic workshop, I was there at least a couple of times a week filming.

A lot of that material is now in the Sensational Fix exhibition as it tours museums peppered about the globe. I actually still need to edit a couple of new films for that. Apparently, aspects of the show will evolve and change in each museum anyway, so I’m excited to contribute to its dynamic nature thru my tardiness.

One of my favorite pieces in the show–an utterly failed exercise in improvisation and cogent filmmaking…and stupid as sin–is ECHOSCAM. We used to have this 24/7 webcam installed at the studio. It was accessible from the homepage of sonicyouth.com and people watched it compulsively. It was this creepy stalker destination that was A-OK to frequent–so frequented, it was.

One afternoon in 2002, Thurston was working on some overdubs with Jim and Aaron. While I was documenting that, I got to thinking about stalking, obsession and the stereotypical Sonic Youth fan. Somehow that train of thought detoured and I began pondering petty theft and wondering how frequently criminals used the internet for research. Would engaging in online communities to research a heist leave the well-read criminal touched by any sort of fandom or tainted by residual trivia–to be mnemonically unleashed when presented with the appropriate stimulation?

I asked Thurston to bring a ski mask to the studio the following day. I’d bring two flashlights. “What’s my motivation?” Thurston asked, curiously. “You saw the place on the EchoCam. You’re a criminal, but you also kind of get the fan thing. We break in thru the fire escape and case the place. We’re pretty clueless. We comment on shit that we see, but the comments are absurd. Before we get to steal anything, Jim chases us out.” As evidenced by the video, neither staying in character nor any sort of planning were part of either of our motivation. Also…I can’t act–let alone act and film simultaneously.

I’m warning you–this is ridiculous. Your 12 minutes will not be refunded. No re-entry. No returns.

I’ve done a bunch of work for Analog over the years. Most of my favorite projects for them are those they’ve rejected. They first asked me for submissions for either the first or second season they released. The jpeg below’s a bit of that.

Whenever possible, I tend toward physical illustration–screen-printing, painting, stamping, 2-D sculpture…anything anti-computer-centric. These five assemblages were entirely physical and intended to be all-over sublimated–though I’m not sure Analog was doing that at the time–or that I even conveyed that intent to them. Mostly, I think I just had so much fun burning screens, cutting stencils, having lucite laser-cut (this was before I bought a laser) and stealing/sewing construction barricades that I didn’t much care whether they’d buy the work or not. For that line, they picked up a couple of pieces–but not these. Too bad, so sad.

Here’s an 8-minute long reduction of the hour long process required to make each copy of BUT THEY DON’T BLINK. I wish I had documented the illustration, stencil making and stamp making processes. Too late now. I’m not going back and faking it for the sake of documentation.

I’ll do one of these for FORE in the next few weeks.

I submitted a bunch of artwork for DQM’s Fall/Winter 08 line. Most was so outlandish that I couldn’t quite imagine it being printed on anything–Nazis, foot fetish imagery, crack addicted bald eagles… They went with the eagle. For the shirts, I had to tone his addiction down to nicotine from crack. I still think the crack pipe would have made for perfect irony on the chests of the drug addled children of Republican donors in Greenwich and Chappaqua, but crack–it’s the real thing.

Here’s my original pencil drawing along with the final vector artwork that I submitted to DQM.
I reckon they’ll update their website with the new stuff in a few days. They’ve got some gorgeous new vans and some beautiful waxed cotton jackets in for the season as well. There are some special Nikes too, but fuck Nike. I bought a pair of Colette’s weird-ass French dictionary Adidas while I was there today.

I was just going to post the blocks I etched for the packaging and titling, but since last weekend, the project’s evolved quickly. BUT THEY DON’T BLINK is a story about walls–hand-stenciled onto wallpaper. The story is a social snapshot reduced to a set of three five-line stanzas and spread out over fifteen 18″x24″ pages. Like FORE, it’s a poem and a children’s book. I’m considering delivering the story serially as a set of three five-page books–more or less making the volumes available as I finish illustrating each stanza and doing my best to make the overall project affordable to collect.

I’ve been disappointed lately in the cost of things like t-shirts and art prints. I always thought that the point of a print was to give people something exclusive at an accessible price. I’m not sure how deeply illustrators and designers are shoving their wrists up their asses to produce their prices, but arbitrary pricing, hyphy meatheads, corrupt gallerists, ebay and agenda-driven journalists have all had a hand in contaminating access via unrealistic artificial inflation. There’s no excuse for a hand-printed poster to cost more than 25 dollars. Frankly… traditional ink screened/stenciled/stamped posters on paper shouldn’t crest 10 dollars.

So, here’s the skinny. I have enough material to make 400 15-print books and 300 un-stenciled five-sheet poster sets. This isn’t set in stone yet, but I think I can split the book edition up into 200 fifteen-print books at $120 a pop and 200 three-volume print zines at $50 per volume. The 300 poster sets would be $25 per set. Books and zines–signed and numbered. Posters–numbered. I’ve never understood how people feel justified signing things they haven’t printed themselves.

If you want to reserve a copy of anything, email me: protest {at} visitordesign {dot} com
No commitment. I’ll just let you know as soon as whatever you’re interested in is ready.

page1&2:

page3&4:

page5:

BUT THEY DON’T BLINK VOL.1 OF 3
pinkslip in her purse, pink panties on feet, mom sells her ass to buy babies meat
when belts tighten up and it’s hard to pay bills we sell off our children to farms in the hills
to keep ethics low and prices less high, x mart takes cashiers to the dumpsters to die
gas guzzles dollars and trucks guzzle gas, so the makers of trucks are all out on their ass
they’re drinking away the economy spook as they pass out in puddles of piss and of puke

illustrations, text and wallpaper ©2008 chris habib / visitor

I’ve mentioned before that I was asked to create and gather work from material in my archive for the upcoming Sensational Fix touring Sonic Youth exhibition. Something I’d been meaning to make for a long time, but never got around to–until last week–was an impressionistic audio/video collage about the making of Harmony Korine’s Sunday.

I shot 3 hours of material the day Harmony made the video. That was over 11 years ago, and re-visiting such old footage is difficult. Different equipment, shooting styles, subject-focus… I get this one thing I want to make–it’s done in my head–been done for years–ready to encode, burn and rip–but I jog thru the footage and the fragments I’ve edited in my memory don’t exist on the tapes. I experienced them, but never recorded them. Maybe I misremembered them over time.

So, a simple 8-minute edit becomes this painful exercise in compromising memory while trying to convey some sense of the experience to a viewer. All the while, I don’t really want to convey the experience–at all. I never really do. I just want to frustrate people, so I’m not so isolated in my perplexed recollection. This is why I’ll never be a real filmmaker.

I’ve got no stories to tell. I’ve just got this compulsion to document things and these thoughts I reflect on while I re-examine footage. I lack a fundamental interest in structure and basically want a viewer to vicariously experience my high blood pressure, confusion and angina more than anything else. Always Seems To Move So Slow is representative of that process–but somehow, the jarring sound edit, lack of anchors and surreal, sensual and sensational subject matter make a looming aneurysm slightly endearing.

Maybe I’ll stream it after the opening on June 17th. For now, I leave you with stills.

Just after America decided that war was the answer to terrorism, Thurston sent me a tiny little jpeg–a thick black outline on aged, cream-colored newsprint surrounding a single word set in Gil Sans–”PROTEST.” He wanted to start a record label that sold nothing and acted solely as a curated platform to support dissent in the form of song. He put the word out that we were looking for tracks with which to build our downloadable mixes. The call exploded with molotov urgency in the pre-blogosphere web.

We bought the domain for protest-records.com. I drew a bunch of stencils that we would link to and I built up a quick and simple site. Thurston sifted through the submissions and together we made playlists. The site was a hit. People were writing protest music, listening to protest music, playing previously unknown artists’ work on the radio–it was nuts. All of the voices were congregating in these playlists and speaking to individual concerns with unique, personal vernaculars. For at least the total duration of the tracks available on the site, it felt like you could suspend your disbelief just long enough to garner a glimpse of hope just off of the crest of the shitstorm that would come breaking down upon us, in seemingly endless slow-motion, to this very second.

The problem with reviving dormant phenomena is that you soon come to realize why so many forms of expression are cyclical. Someone sent me a pretty simple email with a few questions about protest-records and dissent the other day. I wrote an honest, meandering reply.

Basically, this country deserves neither democracy nor freedom, cos we’re all just a bunch of agenda-driven whiners with no interest in bridging divides or sacrificing for the greater good. We’re hardly even interested in examining what exactly “the greater good” means. My reply to the email is below. I guess I put it out there as a sort of challenge. Who’s got what it takes to really bring America together to collectively tell our government what they’d damn-well better give us? Who’s got that Fred Hampton desire to walk on up to the front door of the Whitehouse and announce herself with, “This is a stick-up, motherfucker! We come fo’ what’s ours.” My guess is… nobody.

______________________________________________

It’s hard to say. It’s obvious that people are angry–I’m just not sure they really know why anymore. As attention spans wane and the number of potential social, political and economic irritants multiply, it’s difficult to say–with any degree of confidence–that people aren’t just jumping on the first annoyance they educate themselves about. 

I stopped updating the site a while ago because of that. It just felt like people were boarding another genre bandwagon–the lyrics were all getting samey. The music was multigenerationally xeroxed and beginning to lose the definition that artists like the fugs, Pete Seger, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Woody Guthrie, Neil Young, crass, the Dead Kennedys, Bodycount, Rage Against the Machine, fugazi, Bikini Kill, Kimya Dawson and so many others had brought to the table.   

I have a hard drive full of submissions. It’s just difficult for me to decide how to shape any sort of context from them. I need to make some playlists to share with Thurston and instigate some sort of dialogue about it. I’ve been meaning to for a while.

Though hardly a musician, my fundamental gripe is that what this country is selling as democracy–is not democracy. The system needs to be scrapped and re-built as it was envisioned during the American Revolution. We need a new revolutionary democracy. It’s easy to say that, but damn near impossible to do anything about it. The systems that exist to counter any sort of revolution have metastasized, mutated and bulked up to the degree where overthrowing them is more or less a pipe dream without the most remote of opportunities for success. The leadership, organization, focus and determination simply do not exist to do much of any consequence beyond the partisan, trite, laughable, polarizing and stereotypical “dissent” that United for Peace and Justice, ANSWER, moveon.org and worldcantwait have taken to endorsing.

Change is, and has always been, only possible through unity.

I’m not really getting any songs about that. Obama, Hillary, McCain–none of them will notably change a thing, yet I’m mailed advertune after advertune praising the empty rhetoric of someone or another. Politicians don’t want to end plutocracy and empower Americans with direct democracy–it’s simply not in their interests. War? OK. Go for it. Write another anti-war song. Maybe you’ll explore a concept that’s not yet been euthanized on that beltway track. Hegemony? Sing that tune. Maybe you’ll find an as of yet unplucked key. These songs have all been sung before. Dissent is healthy, but there’s a point at which the choir tires of the reverberation and wants to see a fucking miracle or burn the damn church down.

Or, as is the case in contemporary America, they just angrily acquiesce and watch as the preachers stand there, conducting in some imaginary and illegitimate semaphore–status quo in hand–dragging, shoving and shuffling the lot around but keeping it always on a tight leash, never out of reach. That pseudo-active state of stagnation has been the bureaucratic disaster that America buys and sells as democracy for as long as Americans have provided a market for it.

I really don’t remember much about my time at college. I was at Boulder for Environmental Design. I swung by Cooper Union for Civil Engineering–walked out one day and decided to get a diploma from Parsons for design. At Parsons, I spent a lot of time absent from my classes. William Bevington was an incredible department Chair and gave me a lot of leeway to travel with clients, friends and collaborators while generating credits thru independent studies of my own design. I’m grateful for the freedom I had in school. I remember it fondly. One of the only other things I remember from my time at Parsons was the day Cecilia Dean came to hang out with one of my classes.

Zipped, pinned and coiffed to an immaculate T… this woman had class. She dropped by with a slideshow about VISIONAIRE. At some point in her discussion, she brought up heroin chic (it was 1995 or 6, after all). I told her she should do an issue of VISIONAIRE etched on the skin of a heroin sheep. She was not amused.

A few years later, I get this cryptic letter in a crimson envelope from VISIONAIRE. It references some work I’d done with Sonic Youth, includes a concept briefing about a Parisian future punctuated only by a finite palette of Pantone greys and includes an invitation to submit a project for inclusion in the Hedi Slimane edited VISIONAIRE 34. “Damn.” I thought aloud. “I guess she forgot about the sheep.”

I considered Paris. I imagined the future. I recollected the past. I spun my wheels on the palette of greys. I wrote an elegy for a grey Paris. It mourned the misinterpretation of the DNA of Jean Prouvé and pondered how digital chromosomes would look on a tactile, luminescence-free computer monitor as they scrolled on by–anonymously–lacking the context of a life’s work of sublime brilliance.

So, that’s what I drew–a single moment of scrolling, digital chromosomes. The thing was… the tactile display–that was important to me–as was this sound I created that went with the illustration. I tried to convince VISIONAIRE to let me use IC-chipcorders embeded in the spine of the edition to generate the sound I associated with my piece. They’d trigger as my spread was opened. Cecilia and Stephen seriously considered it. They even actually fought for it. Just in showing that sort of interest in preserving the context of concepts, they gained my undying respect. Ultimately, though–sound was not to be in Paris’ stark, grey future–so sad… No color. No sound. Pauvre Paris.

Anyway, VISIONAIRE *did* give me a 2-page, glossy, blind-embossed spread. I got my tactile terminal screen. It’s really hard to photograph the spread. It’s super-subtle, but the curves and angles are actually hyper-intricate. Below are a photo and an illustration of the same piece.

The coolest thing about the issue was that Hedi’s case for it mirrored my spread in a lot of ways. It was an awesome, injection-moulded contour map of vertebrae type of a thing set inside of powdercoated steel. I love that issue.

I’ve been trying to hold off on posts until the 77BOADRUM series started airing on VBS. I guess I’m clueless as to when that’s happening (now officially slated for the anniversary of the event). Over the past month, I’ve been super-busy with a bunch of films, design projects and gathering work together for the big Sonic Youth retrospective. Most importantly, though–I’ve been cranking out prototypes for a custom bicycle saddle edition I’m working on.

I’m doing an edition of 25 bespoke saddles, each etched with a different one of my drawings. Experimenting with upholstery, different leathers, adhesives and laser-techniques is starting to shape a concept for the next book edition I have planned.

 Anyway, here’s where I am so far with these. 

I’ve been fiddling around with variations on this pattern I drew in December–different contexts and constructions. I have a Canadian military surplus parka that I grabbed in Montreal while filming an as of yet unfinished documentary on the Ecstatic Peace More Hair, Less Bush tour.

The parka’s almost nonsensically fragile for a piece of military clothing. Knowing full well that it’d likely disintegrate if exposed to this caustic printing I’ve been doing, I played the nihilist card and hit it. Needless to say… it’s disintegrating.

I shot some photos of it today for posterity and plan on wearing the thing into moth-eaten oblivion. I need to note that light colored drawings on light grounds vex me. They look wrong. You never really know what you’re gonna get with this process til you get it though, so this little jaunt’s filed under, “just a study.” I’ll get the actual illustrations on here when the items they appear on in their correct and impossibly psychedelic configuration are done.