(Please Forward)
Dear Willie,
We send this official invitation to let you know that you are always our guest at Life is Art West. We especially hope that you can join us for our inaugural opening. As a natural friend and fellow farmer, we look forward to meeting you. Forgive us for being bold, but we would be honored if you would consider a position here as resident artist at Life is Art West.
Very Best,
Life is Art Foundation
Artwork is underway at Life is Art West, our new site on 120 acres in Sonoma California. Artists have arrived over the last month to set up the artists residency and land art exhibition space (ie, architectural plans and the County Code process), and to reap the benefits of the farm that will make Life is Art Foundation's large-scale installation art grants and community work possible. We remained mum until the release of Randy Kennedy's New York Times article, but the cat is out of the bag and we hold secrets no longer. May the program be successful, long may it run! And, let us affirm our belief that Willie Nelson will love this land (and farm), and our wish that he will be our first resident artist at Life is Art West.
xo!
Life is Art Foundation at Life is Art West
Above, Life is Art Collective performing The Work on Eiffel Society, photo Luke Gilford
28 June 2010
9:35 am
Lisa Lozano: (over coffee) When I work on a piece I lose myself so completely that I become a part of it. It's almost as if there is a nail connecting me to the work.
5:45 pm
Lisa: (working) Ohhhhh! Ouuuchiiieee! Aiiiiiiiii!!! (the nail gun sent a nail into her finger and attached her to the sculpture she was working on!!! It was a very fine finishing nail, thank god.)
29 June, 9:37 am
Lisa: (over coffee) There is so much magic happening with the sculpture!
KK: Yes?
Lisa: Yes! Because of the 35 degree angles! (she and Benjamin Heller are constructing mammoth mirror octagons.)
KK: Tell me about the 35 degree angles.
Lisa: I'll show you. Stand there. Now walk. See..? They make you disappear... So when you walk around them you lose yourself for a moment- you are dissolved. Then, there! Look. You rediscover yourself. Again and again.
KK: Oh my god. (shuddering)
Benjamin Heller: Yes, it gives you the Truth Chill.
5:45 pm
To be reported.
Life is Art Collective Portraits Sessions with Luke Gilford
It is a revelation to learn the origin of witches on broomsticks. This was learned from a rare and beautifully printed quarterly on myth and entheogens, published by a brilliant (and handsome) Italian whose name has escaped. The witches would smear a psychoactive salve, or flying ointment, on their broomsticks and ecstatically ride, absorbing the hallucinogenic compounds through the mucus membranes of their delicate parts. They would then lie still, passed out to the mundane eye, but in flight high over country and town by their own recollections.
With Luke Gilford present to shoot, Life is Art Collective and our Eiffel Society guest artists decided to reenact the ritual.
And it was good.
Luke Gilford: I would like you to do a ritual. I would like your to bury eachother...
Tora Lopez: A ritual? Oh that is SO unusual for us. ...He he he.
LG: You four, go into a pile in the compost. This is very beautiful. ...The two of you will drive up- you, take off your clothes as well. Ok, all of you are naked... Now you four, get in the car, yes, you two in the trunk. The four of you, I would like you to splay yourselves out in the compost. Yes, like that. Tom will pull up and the red taillights will shine on you, then you will be buried.
Kirsha Kaechele: Please tell us the car is almost here!!! (bugs crawling, Camphor mulch in the compost burning!) Please tell us it is almost here!
LG: Yes, that is perfect. Okay, I want you to really feel like you are dead now.
KK: Ahhhhhh!!!!!!
LG: Good. A little more open with your right leg. That's perfect.
TL: Remember the Ayahuasca session you had, where the bugs were eating your flesh?
KK: Yes! Well I would like to be buried like this AFTER my nerves have ceased to experience!!!
Elliott Coon: (Nothing. Perfect Calm.)
Pamala Bishop: (Sleeping, upstairs in Eiffel.)
Gilford had us in a pile, buried, while onlookers stood shocked or awestruck. "Yes, it is for Eiffel Society" he explained simply as eight partially buried naked bodies lay in a heap on St Charles Avenue (a very formal, conservative, New Orleans avenue. ...If you were a fifth generation neurosurgeon, of retirement age, you might live here).
Elegant Design / Communal Cleaning
Last night in Eiffel Society, over Campari and Pernod, Tom Beale (sculptor and founder of HoneySpace, Chelsea, NY) unveiled his plan. Beneath a golden pyramid (a vast sculpture in the making by Rya Kleinpeter, also an artspace founder- of Sassafras commune in Tennessee) he began flooding our octagonal abode with water from a hose (ordinarily in service to our ancient claw-foot bathtub). Those who had not bathed took the opportunity after a long day of art making, gardening, engineering education (thank you professor John Norwood) and another fascinating photo shoot with Luke Gilford- this one not nude(!). The results were streamlined and elegant. Bodies were cleaned, an evening of dancing was enjoyed and the sheetrock dust which nearly banished Daphane Park (builder of the beloved sculptural monolith, Super Conductor) from our presence, was squeegeed down a strange hole that, months earlier, Kirsha insisted the building's developers leave in the floor (for art). Out in the garden, Tora Lopez wrapped Pearl, the sculpture made from all the trash generated during our month long residence. Elliott Coon performed original biodynamic gardening work.
Above in the glass octagon, conversations were of forms and patterns through which the universe expresses itself. This, (we being nature), the subject and driving force of our every action and word...
Will you remind us of these forms? Bubble, dendritic / branching... Didn't someone write a book on Deleuze in which the seven or so recognized patterns are explored? If you know please assist: info@kkprojects.org.
Daphane Park's SuperConductor
The Eiffel Society experience is in full process. Artists have arrived from across the world to live and work in our current exhibition / commune in the building that was once part of the Eiffel Tower. Life is Art Collective has been in the space for 25 days and is finding the stay miraculously peaceful. It has felt very easy so far (see Eiffel Society under exhibitions - the collective does not leave the grounds of the building for a month). Guest artists:
Louise Riley
Edward Burtynsky
Robert Tannen
Tom Beale
Anne Koch
David Ford
Susan Neely
Lisa Lozano
Tom Shannon
Daphane Park
Benjamin Heller
Benson Trent / Eyetrap
Rya Kleinpeter
Michael Cohen
Nels Erickson
Luke Gilford
Aaron Rentrope
Edward Burtynsky showed up two nights ago for a feast with a bounty of wine and a beautiful print of our tragic oil disaster. He is in Louisiana shooting the spill and is donating the print for a custom wall we are building, a slanted surface inspired by the disorienting spaces of Richard Serra and Dan Flavin. I would post the print but it is being kept secret until the unveiling.
David Ford is arriving next week to install his magic carpet:
Do You Want Gold?
Life Is Art hosted our first NY feast at HoneySpace in Chelsea April 15, 2010. It was so beautiful. Everything was golden, stunning, and the space had the feeling of a fairytale / spring fertility rite in the center of New York City.
The next Feast will be in August in Sonoma California as an unveiling for Life is Art West- our 120 acre artist retreat / land art exhibition space.
And the Feast after that will be in Paris in the Spring. We hope to find a developer with a dream space, or a beautiful bridge across a river as site for the event. Do you know someone with the right spirit and space?
If you would like to attend either of these, let us know early. They are ticketed events which allow the art installation (in the form of the Feast) to happen. We are coming to terms with the fact that they are not fundraisers. Who cares?! They are too fabulous and have so much detail that we are grateful for them to support themselves.
The colors and themes for the next two will be...
...Still a secret.
Do You Want Gold? Photo: Benjamin Heller
