Thanks to the help of many, the show, Pigs and Poop: Visions on a Mobile Class, was a success. Here are images of the installation and other photos not already posted.
As for those thanks, they go to Jobert Poblete, Jaala Berkley, Ashley Clark, and Adam Luetto for all their help manning the gallery. Thanks to my partner Pete Nelson for providing the guidance and technical help in formulating and setting up the show.
In this posting, I will aim at re-creation of the gallery experience. The text was a very important element in this show and served as a secondary mediator for the viewer. I utilized different fonts to eccentuate certain portions of the accompanying quotes. Unfortunately, this website does not allow for photos large enough to show the text, so I will type the quotes beneath each photo.
Please look at previous posts for more detail on the show and its origin.
“Home is a state of mind, if you will. It’s a state of comfort. Most people are dis-eased… That’s why they’re not even home when they’re in their house.”
“Every squatter has a fucking mySpace page nowadays.”
“I’m kind of like the crotch of society.”
“I can totally live without money, for eating and clothing needs, to stay warm. I guess I’m a leach eating out of dumpsters, but I don’t think I need any justification for garbage.”
“I don’t want to own anything– ever. I feel the idea of possession is exactly that: an idea.”
“There’s a lot of people that are in society and they surround themselves with all these extravagant things and worry so much about their car and what people think and their house and yada yada yada, but I mean, whenever you’re on your death-bed, you’re not going to be thinking about that shit at all. You know, I may be living in poverty, but in my pockets, I’m rich with experience.”
“I realized that most people’s troubles have to do with money. I realized that we have all the tools and technology available to accomplish all our basic goals without the money game. In fact, more efficiently without [it] than with [it]. Mostly, I try to operate as much outside of the money game as I possibly can… The real goal, I guess, is just to accomplish a sense of freedom, because freedom is something that everyone has, everyday, whether they’re aware of it or not. I guess I’m just trying to make people aware of it.”
“It’s for the train-hoppers and the gutter punks, not them. It’s our territory. I’m not trying to be an asshole. That’s just how it is.”
Photo by Stormy
“I was really, like, on my own for a while, but after I met Joel, I found out there’s like a huge, like, thousands of kids do it, and I was like, ‘Hell yeah!,’ and I hit the road …
It’s like a tribe, you know?”
“A band or pack is not a rudimentary form, but is a complex way of preventing stable power, and of maintaining diffuse, immanent relations.”
- Deleuze & Guattari
Photo by Stormy
“The nomad has a territory; he follows customary paths; he goes from one point to another; he is not ignorant of points (water points, dwelling points, assembly points, etc.). But the question is what in nomad life is a principle and what is only a consequence. To begin with, although the points determine paths, they are strictly subordinated to the paths they determine, the reverse happens with the sedentary. The water point is reached only in order to be left behind; every point is a relay and exists only as a relay. A path is always between two points, but the in-between has taken on all the consistency and enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own. The life of the nomad is the intermezzo.”
-Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari
“The only way anything can be changed is by a full-on onslaught of revolution, which is never going to happen. People are gonna continue to be blind because that’s what the system wants them to be. Don’t ask questions, don’t ask why, don’t go outside, don’t help anybody out, just stay in your little cubicle, go in another little cubicle to make money to spend on other little cubicle boxes and just sit at home and be a good little Christian soldier, a little remote-controlled angel.”
“I’m probably never gonna settle down and like get a normal job or anything like that just cuz I can’t handle it. I don’t like it. I get stir-crazy and I go nuts, you know?”
“The State needs to subordinate hydraulic forces to conduits, pipes, embankments which prevent turbulence, which constrain movement to go from one point to another, and space itself to be striated and measured, which makes the fluid depend on the solid… The hydraulic model of nomad science of the war machine, on the other hand, consists in being distributed by turbulence across a smooth space…instead of being held by space in a local movement from one specified point to another.”
-Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari
“I can’t see myself going back into society the same way, having an apartment or something. Eventually, what I want to do is grow my own sustainable farm, and just grow herbs and vegetables, goats and chickens.”
“All I see here is money and consumerism. Consume, consume, consume. Like the fucking system has you by the balls and all these people think it’s leading you by the hand.”
“I wanted to change the system. I wanted to change people’s minds. I wanted to change the ideals and beliefs of everybody walking down the street. I wanted to open up their eyes to a system that fuckin destroys their lives through Television and Volvos and fuckin Cap’n Crunch and god-damn top 40 Billboard radio.”
“When they’re young they think they believe something and think they wanna do something, think they can change the world. And then hopelessness and jadedism just takes over and you realize that all you really want to do is be left alone and get a house and work and just be by yourself and collect records and guns. That’s just speaking for myself.”
“Their box, their box, their box… People get in their box to go drive somewhere—to a box, get their food in a box, then they’re eating their food in a box, get home to their box, park their box in the box. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a box in nature my entire life. It’s a really strange shape to me. [It sucks] because that’s the only thing you know. I like to be able to see. Flowing. When I’m tripping, I hate to be inside. It’s like er! er! [makes a right angle with hands] Everything needs to flow. I don’t know how to explain it. When I’m outside, I feel better for some reason. I feel that’s what I should be doing, where I should be, for me at least. These people, that’s all that they do. They never get out of their box. It’s really sad. It’s strange.”
This exhibit was dedicated to Michael “Brett” North, who was loved by his family and respected by his community. His life was lost much too soon, taken in the East River Park by a substance originally made to save.
Michael “Brett” North 1974-2006
