The Mission School (of Painting)

I was asked to respond to the question, "Was there ever a Mission School?" for an upcoming catalogue accompanying Barry McGee's retrospective at Brooklyn Art Museum. When I told a few friends about my attempt to document some other Mission 'schools' it seemed that most of them were not aware of any aesthetic or market phenomenon called The Mission School, which was first named by art writer Glen Helfand to identify a certain 'neo-folk' 'urban rustic' hybrid under the influence of graffiti, comics, mural traditions, skate and zine cultures, recycled wood, sign painting, and SFAI art school painting concerns, that emerged in the mid-90s as a kind of Bay Area style, centered in the Mission neighborhood. The style, or collection of resonanting styles, is linked to many artists including the following: Barry McGee (Twist), Alicia McCarthy, Chris Johanson, Andrew Schoultz, Ruby Neri (Reminisce), Margaret Kilgallen (Meta), Rigo 23, Aaron Noble, Clare Rojas.

Work shown above: Clare Rojas (top) and Margaret Kilgallen (lower). Kilgallen demonstrates one of the Mission school exhibition tactics, a group of tightly bunched paintings that accumulate to mural-scale.

A few of the schools I know in the Mission (in-process draft)

Keith Hennessy

For those of us who were in the Mission before the mid-90s and are still here, the idea of a Mission School (of painting) is an odd joke. The work that blossomed here at that time can’t be separated from the vibrant and complex scenes – artistic & political, migrant & resident – that have made this neighborhood noteworthy for generations. Naming a Mission School in the 90s masks the problematic complexity of the School’s roots in both SF indigeneity and gentrification. San Francisco and Oakland in the 90s were vibrant and engaging sites for artists and activists. Pre 9/11, pre-dot-com boom and bust, street artists around the Bay were mostly ignoring the gentrification of the world. We watched the rents get higher as more and more of us moved to Oakland (or LA, Portland, Tennessee, Berlin…). We flooded the streets in ’91 to protest the first Gulf War and whether we were queer or not, we were somehow moved by both the devastation of AIDS and the queer cultural tsunami that crashed against the hetero shores. Many of us, but not all, blossomed in this fast-paced and turbulent time. But the art structures that supported us (or not) and the aesthetics that inspired us (or not) had been evolving since at least the early 70s, since the cultural revolutions of Chicanos, feminists, gays and lesbians rewrote the text of San Francisco streets, especially in the Mission and Castro and the evershifting borders between them.

Mission High School

– the visual focus and community center. A big underfunded vibrant public highschool that frames the south end of Dolores Park, where Latino teens and SF Mime Troupe audiences and gay guys in speedos and hella hipsters and dog walkers and babysitters and tennis players and pot/smack dealers and the homeless have been getting schooled for generations. Doloroes Park is also home to both the Dyke and Trans marches and countless other gatherings of folk that make up the other America of Mission School ethics and aesthetics, which in DC are referred to as San Francisco values.

Mission Mural School

– since way before the mid-90s, thousands have come here, and even more have grown up here, getting schooled in the art of public wall painting. From Muralistas Feministas to Galeria de la Raza’s digital murals, from Precita Eyes ongoing schooling and public touring to Clarion Alley Mural Project and all the alleys where Mexican/Mission style murals meet the latest trends of art school kids and the anarcho politics of everyday life in the activist Mission.

Mission School of Public Performance

– From weekly low-rider processions on Mission Street in the 70s to Contraband’s dance rituals in the Gartland Pit at 16th & Valencia (site of a landlord arson that killed elderly and disabled tenants) to Jo Kreiter’s 2010 performance with dancers flying along the epic muraled walls of the Women’s Building on 18th Street. The Aztec dancers are probably the most ongoing phenomenon of Mission School performance. They always lead the annual dia de low muertos procession and can be seen blessing many events, from the anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium to marking the site of a recent murder at the corner of 24th & Shotwell.

New College of California

– Now a dead and defunct school but its legacy lives on in the visions and labors of the many of us who studied and/or taught here when no other university wanted us. From 1971 to 2008, NCOC was a site for leftist schooling, community organizing, political fundraisers, feminist psychology, socially-engaged conferencing, and three generations of activist artists and lawyers.

The book stores of the Mission

– For many of us, this is where we really went to school, I mean in the traditional sense, of (re)learning how to read books and the world. Modern Times is the flagship of leftist bookstores but it has always thrived in relationship to a social and spatial eco-system that includes so many other independent (say what!) bookstores and zineshops including Adobe, Dog Eared, Borderlands, Needles and Pins, Goteblüd, Bolerium, Forest… And most of these bookstores exhibit local art, and talks about local art.

The Roxie

– This is where Mission residents and tourists go to get schooled in independent film, specially the low-budget, the local, the weird, the queer, and the dissident.

Dance will never be sold like art, so there will never be a noted

Mission school of dance

that is written about in the NY Times. But there is and has been for 30+ years a Mission school of dance that is marked by some of the same hybridities and tendencies of what is referred to as Mission school painting. Thousands of dancers live here and come here to take class and rehearse. Mission dance schools include Dance Mission (home of the world’s longest running feminist dance company, The Dance Brigade), ODC, Capoiera Abada (now renting the former site of Dancers’ Group/Footwork, site of an occupation in 2000 when the dot-com era landlords raised the rent 400%, forcing eviction), and the many smaller studios in Project Artaud and the Sears building. Dancers in the Mission rehearse all year long for Carnival which showcases dances of the entire world, with a particular focus on dances of the Americas.

The Mission (like any complicated, dense, and historically rich neighborhood) has a diverse and rich eco-system of schools, that share and/or compete for, limited architectural, social, and fiscal resources. If we scratch the surface of Mission School painting to reveal the values, ethics, aesthetics of the movement, we find the same things taught at

Meadows-Livingston School

, a 30-student elementary school for African-Americans looking for any alternative to education systems that will always expect them to fail. Meadows-Livingston operates out of a converted farmhouse under a massive freeway vortex at Cesar Chavez & Potrero. Called

The Farm

when it was reclaimed in the 70s, the building has been host to punk shows, Mime Troupe performances, countless exhibits, artist housing, the Pickle Family circus, and Survival Research Laboratories, while also operating as an actual urban farm for Mission youth. Clearly this scene is a significant tap root for Mission School painters who hybridize high and low, folk and pop, legal and illegal, cartoon and fresco, white dude and everyone else.

The Burrito School

– If you are what you eat then the Mission School is about 50% burrito, the SF indigenous hybrid of Mexican fast food. Without El Toro, Cancun, El Farolito, La Taqueria, Papalote, Mission Villa, La Rondella, El Tonayense, El Mariachi, and the margaritas at Puerto Allegre the Mission painters would have starved or made some other kind of art. The late night crowd is also well-fed on Salvadoreña and now Oaxacan food, especially pupusas.

PS

about nationalism and capitalism

The visual and conceptual tendencies of the Mission School can be spotted in trendy art scenes all over the world. That is to say, that globalism with its inescapable hegemonic tendencies, is always in effect. What makes a dollar in San Francisco will inspire and influence the work that gets made elsewhere. And vice versa. We used to call it co-optation or selling out.

Keith Hennessy is one of tens of thousands of queer and dance refugees in the Bay Area. He has been working (studying, teaching, performing indoors and out, protesting, altering billboards) in the Mission since 1982 and lives on Folsom near 24th.

Kirk Read performance at Too Much! (Jan 2010)

Chicken Shit (meditation is supposed to make you less crazy)
Performance by Kirk Read

Kirk Read walked on stage carrying two milk crates. He was wearing a short white shirt-dress or choir robe that read ceremonial. The robe was closed at the throat but open to the torso, revealing gold lame bikini pants. A voice over of Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield’s trance inducing monotone introduced us to some kind of meditation practice. A wall-sized video projection of someone, someone white, touched and then later licked a small brown-skinned doll. The effect of the close-up fondling was creepy but almost camp, especially in contrast with what we hear.

Kirk stood on the two crates and attached a carabiner to a cord extending from the ceiling, lengthening its reach to approximately 3 feet above the floor. A (frozen) chicken on a silver platter was passed through the audience. Kirk received the chicken, which had been prepared with some kind of wire harness, and suspended it from the cord.

The voice over and projection continued. Kirk’s mood was calm as he moved slowly and methodically to set the stage. Some of us knew what was going to happen, but we knew that not everyone knew. The audience mood was unsettled, caught between images (real and imagined) that were both ominous and absurd.

Kirk moved the crates, with platter on top, away from the chicken. He turned his back to us and flipped the robe over his head, revealing his back. He pulled his pants down, and backed up, straddling the crate, which was positioned diagonally between his legs. He leaned forward, reached back, pulled his butt cheeks wide. The audience started to squirm, giggle, moan, recoil, chat. The first sign of shit elicited both gasp and light applause. The applause returned louder when the first turd was pinched off and dropped to the plate. Then he pooped a bunch more. Some walked out. Some applauded. The rest of us tingled, stared, squirmed, squeezed our neighbor’s hand or thigh, commented, took pictures with cell phones, laughed.

Just getting to watch an asshole open and release, for most of the audience, was a once in a lifetime event. Read crafted the event in a fresh hybrid of shamanistic body art vaudeville that somehow made the taboo acceptable, watchable, even interesting. Read’s onstage pooping was simultaneously funny, magical, and formally precise. How did he do it? I can’t believe he’s doing it! I can’t believe I’m watching this! Wow, look how much is coming out.

Then it stopped. He pulled up his pants (without wiping), fixed his robe, and turned around. He brought the crates, with platter of shit, back to the chicken. As if performing a demonstration in home ec class, Read dressed and stuffed the chicken. He dressed it with a skirt of streamers and stuffed it with spoonfuls of his own poop. He took his time, making sure not to waste any.

Then he moved the crates out of the way, looked up at us and smiled. The smile was coy, suggesting possible danger, but we didn’t have time to imagine what he might do next. When he pushed the chicken towards the audience, it swung over the first row and folks jumped out of their seats to get out of the way. Swinging it more erratically, to challenge even more of the audience, we laughed and squealed and more folks scurried out of the way. Some took their chances and remained seated, ducking their heads as the poop-stuffed chicken came their way. The shock was tempered with the ridiculous.

Before the chicken swing had come to rest, Kirk stopped it with two hands. He unhooked it and placed it in one of the crates. There was intermittent applause as Read reached up to detach the carabiner and gathered his props. He returned to the unhurried state of executing simple tasks, closing the ritual as he had opened it.

Read walked out. The applause was strong. He left no visual trace but the smell now seemed overpowering. The door to the small theater was opened, several people left and the rest were engaged in animated chatter, while fanning their hands in front of their noses.

I questioned the video and wondered what would be gained or lost without it. I adored the creepy vibe and the licking shots were really strong - I mean evocative, suggestive, inappropriate - but what did the video bring to the larger gestalt of the work? It introduced a juxtaposition or tension with the live performance that wasn’t sustained. Insufficiently developed video projection is too frequent an occurrence in dance and live performance.

In brief discussion with Read I know that this work was inspired by both a meditation retreat and a book about the horrors of factory farmed chicken. These diverse sources both crack the denial of how we’ll eat shit – real and metaphoric - as long as we don’t know what we’re eating. Read’s Chicken Shit (meditation is supposed to make you less crazy) is a provocative yet nuanced meditation. It will be notorious as a poop performance, but the complex resonance of the work ripples in ever-widening concentric rings to disturb the social surfaces of our denial.


Chicken Shit was one of over 30 performances at
Too Much! a marathon of queered performance
Mama Calizo’s Voice Factory, Jan 10 2010
Produced by Zero Performance as part of Keith Hennessy’s A Queer 20th Anniversary

ONLY IN SAN FRANCISCO? Homegrown trends and traditions (2005)

Observations and projections by Keith Hennessy, guest performance curator Bay Area Now 2005.
Written for the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Bay Area Now 2005 catalogue

• Burlesque, sideshow, circus, fire arts and a return to artists who entertain.

For the past decade there’s been a steady increase in aerial acrobats, fire spinning and sculpting, nostalgic & campy burlesque, and the word circus being used to describe just about everything from the entire genre of Tom Waits meets gypsy/Roma music to the Schwartznegger election. After years of deconstructing the spectacle, entertainment is back. For a few years anyone who could spin fire or climb 25 feet of fabric earned respect but that moment is over and for a few dancers, aerialists, contortionists, fire sculptors and spinners, and even hula-hoopists, it’s all about quality now, pushing craft and performance and obsessive training to the next level. It used to be that half of the adventurous contemporary dancers in SF were working as strippers and erotic masseuses, dividing their time between sex work and art. Now the sex work is art, whores R us, and all the straight people are talking publicly about butt sex and SM.
(Harlem Shake, Velocity, Vau de Vire, Devilettes, Xeno, Mystic Family Circus, Jade-blue Eclipse, The Lollies, Flaming Lotus Girls, Diamond Daggers, SF Circus Center, Odeon Bar, Frank Olivier, Fairy Butch, Va Va Voom, Big Burlesque/Fat Bottom Revue, Circo Zero)

Then there’s the almost high art cousin of all this entertainment: Aerial Dance. From annual festivals in SF, Boulder, and Boston to a plethora of suspended dancers everywhere from Vegas (Soleil) to off-Broadway (de la Guarda), from Half Dome (Bandaloop) to Islais Creek (Flyaway), aerial dance may be on the rise in the US and beyond but the Bay will always be seen as the source (Motivity, Zaccho...)

• Youth Speaks-inspired slam and spoken word.

Yes the hip hop generation has been around for years and slams are almost as ancient, but until you’ve been to the Living Word Fest or an event organized by Youth Speaks you haven’t seen the dynamo future of the word performed. Youth Speaks has mentored, inspired, incited and reclaimed urban youth voices that dare to break social taboos of hip coolness with intensity, intimacy, and wild honesty.
Of course we’ve still got the world’s most abundantly queer and kinky lit scene with half the authors in pervy anthologies around the English world coming from our libertine Bay. Performance venues range from bathhouse (Smegma at Eros) to STD testing site (Smack Dab at Magnet), with specialty events for any and all kinds of erotica (Blacksheets, Good Vibes, SF in Exile, Center for Sex & Culture).

• Trannybois and gender queers of the Mission-based dyke/post-dyke world.

SF has always been among the gayest, the queerest, the most feminist of art and performance communities, participating in a homegrown, Wild West meeting of art and politics, experimentation and evolution of art practices that’s as old as the first Gold Rush brothels. Today’s tranny fags, drag kings, and gender queer rappers, strippers, choreographers, writers and actors are appearing in many of the clubs, galleries, theaters, and art spaces around the Bay.
And then there are the new faces and voices of Hip Hop, which seem to branch into and out of both gender queer and progressive spoken word scenes. The folks in this list don’t even know each other, but they’re all pulling and pushing the squarest tendencies of hip hop mass culture where the kids just know it has to go. (Katastrophe, Bamuthi, Deep Dick Collective, Aya de Leon, Sisterz of the Underground, JenRO, Skorpio, New Style Motherlode, and Micaya’s annual Hip Hop Fest)

• Burning Man-inspired participatory art happenings.

These ubiquitous events (Bunny Jam anyone?) defy boundaries between club cultures and street arts, folk arts and Situationist interventions, kitsch and eco-art, mixing money with arte povera, from East Oakland and Hunters’ Point warehouses to the Commonwealth Club. Burning man is all kinds of things to all kinds of people but despite the way too many rowdy drunks hooting at bare flesh while showing none of their own, it remains one of the world’s biggest participatory art festivals, with hundreds of thousands of dollars spent on making interactive sculpture, installation, architecture, vehicles and performances. Even the biggest gossip and political debate re: B’man is about the quality & control of the art. (borg2.org)

• The ladyboys, faux queens, drag & genderfuck superstars of Trannyshack

Nine years ago, just when we thought avant-drag had atrophied or calcified, long before the Cockettes movie reminded us that SF is all about genderfuck and glam anarchy, Hecklina started Trannyshack, SF’s best and cheapest site for weekly performance art. Yes I miss some of the crazy shit that happened there in the early years (now you’ll start reminiscing about Uranus and Fiend) but where else can a bio-girl named Fauxnique play a man playing a girl and win a drag queen contest with a conceptually fierce lipsynch performance and a chorus of modern dancers? Only in SF. Go now cuz Hecklina’s thinking to shut down the T’shack when it hits 10. Queens still hate to age!

• A fierce renewal of DIY anarcho culture

From the activist runway of excess (Gay Shame) to pay-what-you-can warehouse events in Oakland (it’s been too long since Studio Four, Diesel Cathedral, and other SF warehomes!), from anti-capitalist fashion recycling in the middle of Ellis Street (In the Streets/Luggage Store) to daytime punk shows and late-night open mics at 16th & 24th St. BART, the newest breed of activist artists continues a long tradition of enriching the abandoned sites of city, body and imagination. (Kudos to whoever wraps/knits the dead bikes and locks of the Mission)

• Art about torture and war at home and around the world

From Ferlinghetti to Mattilda, from Extra Action to Brass Liberation Orchestra, from Dance Brigade to Campo Santo, the dance studios, theaters, bookstores, house parties and streets of the Bay are alive with political inquiry, protest art, community fundraisers, strategic mobilizations and poetic terrorism. Whether it’s the air we breathe, the ground we march & skate on, or the waves we surf on, San Francisco, & it’s Nor Cal surrounds, flaunt an unbroken lineage of weaving art with politics and spirituality that’s tough to recognize anywhere else.

PS.
The best next thing: a return to body art & body-based performance. Part of an international renewal from China to art school kids studying Ana Mendieta, Karen Finley, and others as the new canon. Maybe it’s part of the same late 70’s/early 80’s revival that brings us disco-inspired electro. I don’t care. Just keep finding new ways to get naked, push limits of belief and comprehension, obsessively leak or contain body fluids, and use your body to reframe alarming social contexts.

PPS.
There’s a missing paragraph about dance, the work that’s closest to my own trends and traditions. When I get to it, I’ll mention Leslie Seiters’ little known dance company, Scott Wells, Erika Shuck Performance Project, Navarette x Kajiyama, Jess Curtis/Gravity, Lauren Steiner/Eat Cake, Lizz Roman taking over the ceiling of Cellspace, the weekly contact jams at 848 (soon to be CounterPULSE) in SF and 8th St in Berkeley, Inkboat and the East Bay scene that weaves butoh, art punk rock, Action Theater, and more...
And probably something about how Dance Brigade, Joe Goode, Sara Shelton Mann/Contraband, Zaccho, and others continue to be relevant, even from an ‘underground’ point of view... something about the inability for 99% of dance to remain outside of mainstream cultures.