street smART: all agog about HOTTEA

Last month I celebrity-sited HOTTEA (Eric Rieger) while at the MIA (Minneapolis Institute of Art). He was taking down his recent installation. I spotted him on the 3rd floor of the newest MIA wing, up on a scissor lift playing with string. I nearly freaked out. Nearly. Wasn't sure it was him at first.  I'm not ashamed to admit I did that "OMG, omg, omg, is that who I think it is?!"routine.

He not only started up a conversation while at the top of the lift, but also came down to earth on the first floor to continue the conversation. I was a bit agog... and HOTTEA is deserving of agogness. He showed me pics and some audio from a recent outdoor installation at a tennis court in a semi-neglected Minneapolis neighborhood. Though the installation is gone, the neglected tennis court is now on the radar of people who might be willing and able to return it to a usable space for the community. Keep on eye on his Flickr feed for more of that work.

I've been too busy and too far removed from internet access to pass on my recent agogging of HOTTEA, but then while out & about I came across a hidden piece that made my day, and is about to make yours.



I don't care what you think about art, street artists, artists who make it, artists who don't make it, pop art, etc., etc., etc....  HOTTEA has made me stop and look and notice and think and SEE since 200?, has made my transition from country girl to urban rat so much more enjoyable... that I hope that just a smidgen of my agogness will rub off on you. Maybe it is as simple as the softness of string surrounded by metal and concrete... or maybe it is the tropical colors surrounded by the lacking-of color. Definitely something to do with the temporary bit of street art. Here, then gone.

Don't know. Don't care. Just stop and look and notice and think and SEE for a minute. That's enough.

HOTTEA Yarn-bombs the Lower East Side (includes daytime video of Eric at work in Minneapolis)

Eric Rieger.HOTTEA: Letting Go (MIA installation)

My teandoranges stalking profile of HOTTEA:

street smART: HOTTEA string theories
street smART: worth the wait

(thank you, Eric)

GOALS FOR 2010: toilet tags

This wall is now painted red. fuck the buff.

LEFT COLUMN
Goals for 2010:
1. Grow a vagina (scribbled out)
2. See what fits up there.
3. Blog (scratched out) TWEET (scratched out) friendster
4. ???
5. Profit!!!
(1) LOVE ONE ANOTHER!
4. UNDERPANTS!!
6. BREAK SOMEONE'S HEART
7. Chill. (A little.)
8. grow a pair and start school!
(Have they grown yet?)
17. KEY WEST OR BUST ... BABY.
#1? Nail Keba - she's so hot. No. Really. Keba is fucking smoking hot.
20. purge self of all narcissistic tendencies

RIGHT COLUMN
21. Dance like everyone is watching!
22. Get a life and stop
writing on bathroom walls <<---- HATER
23. Find a Lover
24. GAY'S number in Brazil
24. LOSE MY ANAL
VIRGINITY
26. fuck bad bitches
smoke big blunts
who am i to tell ya,
ya only live once!

POLE ART: a cat in its natural habitat

Am I the only one who looks at a telephone pole and visualizes the forest it once stood in, the birds of the air that nested and rested in its branches, the whistle of wind between needles?

Nope - finally came across telephone pole art that acknowledges that trees are for climbing and cats know it.

street smART: HOTTEA string theories

Finally, HOTTEA string tags a telephone pole which makes it easy to photograph. I've photographed his work for over a year, but the string on chain-link fences doesn't show up very well. I've been photographing telephone poles anyway - because I love the mass of nails and staples and left-over posters.

My sticker-artist friend and I like to speculate on what HOTTEA stands for.

My Theory: a round-about way to spell HAUGHTY

Her Theory: he goes by the nickname T - and tags as HOT T(EA) - because she's seen him doing his thing - and he is a hottie :)

General Theory: he doesn't give a fuck about how we interpret his tags.

Finding Satori, Bypassing Diva-hood

Some people get high on airplane glue, on laundry detergent- complicated stuff. My satori is this: the zen experience of spreading butter. You can look. The knife disappears. The bread disappears. The butter disappears. What remains is the repeated gesture of the hand… a movement. And space. It is emptiness.

-Gorodish (Richard Bohringer)
DIVA (1982)
___________________
In the middle of Gorodish’s blue loft is a giant jigsaw puzzle derived from Hokusai’s The Great Wave. The surrealism of Jean-Jacques Beineix’s movie masterpiece became apparent when I realized that the mounds of jigsaw pieces for the king-bed sized puzzle would never fit in the notebook sized box at Gorodish’s feet.

Puzzles have long been one of my own satori: a form of meditation, creativity, and path to enlightenment. Once the puzzle is completed, you destroy and restore it to its original chaos in a box.

Like a pre-determined, modernized sand mandala, jigsaw puzzles take shape in order to be destroyed.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Consider our world of cameras. How does the act of recording and immediately revisiting static moments take us away from being eternally Present? How does the study of non-attachment and photography collide? How often do we, in our everyday life, photograph mandalas of sand: relationships, dogmas, art, words?

Arguably, graffiti and tagging are industrial versions of sand mandalas. Stenciled works of art and free hand tags often disappear overnight under whitewash and graffiti fighting technology. Once the ownership realm detects a "defacement of property" the grim beauty inevitably disappears. What are my motives behind photographing temporary urban art? What is gained, and what is lost, in the act of photographing graffiti?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
In college, artist friends turned an old building scheduled for demolition into a work of temporary landscape art. They brought the outside inside. They hung tree branch mobiles in the halls. They turned found-items from the attic into sculptures. They encouraged brave students on a well-behaved campus to scribble permanent marker ideas on crumbling plaster. The building became a haven of risk and rebelliousness. Knowing full well that whatever beauty, décor and drama we brought to the structure would be destroyed by the wrecking ball, we blossomed during the doomed building's swan song.

Though I remember the picture and words I drew, I don’t have the need to repeat them here. It was a cathartic expression of non-attachment and non-permanence.

Occasionally I wallow in the glow of canonized art on museum walls and relax into the shadows of architectural enlightenment. Nevertheless, I developed an undeniable thirst for the un-recordable, a fascination with art that invites destruction, whether the walls of rotting buildings or private, non-recorded concerts.

While I attempt to digest the complexities of the Situationists and satori, in honor of bypassing my own diva-hood, I write on digital walls as a personal practice of non-attachment.
_____________________________
Words of the Diva (Wilhemina Wiggen Fernandez) at the press conference regarding her unwillingness to be recorded: I sing out of passion. And I can’t sing alone. I need my public. A concert is a privileged moment for the artist and the audience. Music: it comes and it goes. Don’t try to keep it.
....
Journalist: So you are against making art a business?

Diva: Not at all, but business should adapt to art, not the other way around.