"Home is Whenever I'm With You" -Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros...but I think we're all probably in love with that song and knew that already...

My "You" in that line is of course, Y'all. And our beautiful Texas homeland. Last night I was at the last 'Lady's Hamburger Night' here in Bing with my friends Gabriela and Maria who I have burgers and chisme with every Wednesday night. They were talking about missing eachother, how we will stay in touch over summer, and so on. These are all concerns of mine too, but, as I told them, whenever I think "but I'm going to be in Texas" I can almost forget everything else comepletely. It is always my homeplace, and y'all are the only people that can ever make me feel home when we're not there.

Accordingly, all my work has come to be about our home. So, in lieu of continuing to wax sentimental (so I don't yet again start thinking about us and crying in the library as has happened multiple times before), I am pasting below the write-up of the project I will be working on starting this summer and ending fall 2011, when it shows at Co-Lab in, yes, our beloved Austin. I found out they accepted the proposal about two weeks ago. I am insanely stoked. Insanely Stoked.

Quick intro (excerpted from explanatory email to the 'rents, cuz I don't want to retype all the links): It will show at Co-Lab ( www.colabspace.org ), an artspace in Austin, Fall 2011. It's a collaboration with artist Alison Kuo ( http://kuoskies.blogspot.com ) for sure, and we are also inviting Joshua Saunders, aka Gluey Vuitton (www.joshuasaunders.blogspot.com ) and Fabiola Torralba (she took my position in San Anto after I left; she's a performance artist and altar builder).

[Alison just moved to New York, so in the fall we are going to begin sketching, possibly building some things. As you all know, Alison has been one of my biggest art crushes for years; I am so excited to work on a big project with her. (But, seriously, when will everyone just move to NYC already? Our faithful reader Landrie, et al, are here. Now Alison, c'mon bibas...not forever of course, just until we move back to the texas farm to get old and die together) I am going to try to get a big empty space somewhere in Binghamton since things are so cheap in which to work since my apt is tiny tiny. This summer is all about trips with my family to Marfa for research, and writing grants for some muh-nay. Next summer we will build build build. Over next year we will organize talks around the show, clarify/calibrate our roles and visions and design the possible performance and edit video interviews with my grandparents and art-y Texan folks. Travis- we may be hitting you up for some sound styling down the road. Oh, and Claire, as you'll see right off the bat, I don't think this would have happened without you! without any of you really. Much, much ridiculous love. J]

Alright, here goes...

Josh T Franco

Show Proposal: ‘Marfita’ (Little Marfa)

Background:

Last summer I visited a friend during her internship at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX. One day, I was wandering around town alone and found myself in the gallery BALLROOM marfa. I found the space itself attractive from the first moment, engaging that big sliding door like a child entering a room somewhat illicitly. This was not unwelcoming, but just challenging enough to be an enticement. Inside I was met with the well-arranged sculptures of Aaron Curry and Thomas Houseago. I spent the better part of that afternoon going back and forth and around those parched, colorful, temporary desert dwellers. In my notebook, I deployed the vocabularies provided by my Art History and Philosophy degrees. Then I was struck hard by a realization of other terms creeping onto the pages. These terms came from further back in my memories; they too were inspired by the site of Marfa, but from outside the gallery walls.

While this was my first visit to BALLROOM marfa, it was by no means my first visit to the town of Marfa. Marfa is a palimpsest for me. What I realized last summer is the depths to which art can provoke vertigo. As a child, I visited there to pay respects to ancient tias y tios, the brothers and sisters of two of my grandparents. My maternal grandfather grew up in the house that is nearest to the Chinati entrance, the one with the statue of La Virgen under the tree in the backyard. Then, it was a space of Tejano Spanish, dark brown skin, local roots, low income, and familial happiness. In the more recent visit, Marfa became a space where I was read as English speaking, well-educated, worldly, and convivial in that way that puts one at home in the austere artspaces of contemporary hipsterdom. My friends would probably not recognize the child that I was; my family often has difficulty discerning the person I am now. I cannot disown either of these, nor do I want to. Nor do I want to perpetuate this “‘either’ between selves” but rather seek out the historical ingredients of their complicated relevance.

This is what I find to be art’s affective capacity, what provokes my constant awe at the exuberant play on the aesthetic field. Standing amongst the works of Curry and Houseago, within the walls of the gallery, I spun dizzily amongst the layers of the palimpsest. Walking the path alongside Donald Judd’s cement blocks, then up to La Virgen behind my Tata’s childhood home, from one side of the renovated military wall to the other, I faced the enduring question: What is art?

This experience is bound by the organization of space through salient aesthetic markers. Some of these markers are authorized as ‘Art’; others are not. How are they organized in relation to one another? Marfa provides a potent site for thinking about the implications of curatorial practice in relation to what lies outside the space that is its direct concern. In organizing art and its spaces amongst effervescent conversation with mainstream US and international curatorial practices and theories, how are spaces like BALLROOM marfa and the Chinati implicitly re-organizing and aestheticizing the non-authorized, pre-Judd spaces and markers of the small West Texas town in which they are situated? What is the nature of the complicated conversation between those cement blocks and the Virgen who resides just outside the walls that authorize their spaces differently and meaningfully?

What would a show look like that put these questions at its heart?

Installation Description:

I am thinking of a seriously playful map of Marfa reconceived according to the conceptual background given above. I am imagining the entire project as a disproportionate, three-dimensional, interactive cartographical intervention. At its center, there will be a larger-than-life sized model of my grandfather's childhood home, with emphasis on an equally larger-than-life-sized reproduction of the Virgen altar that stands in the backyard. The post-Judd sites in Marfa will be represented as disproportionately smaller than they relate to the pre-Judd sites in real life, but situated in the space according to their real-life spatial relations (with street signs, dirt, gravel, etc). Basic materials will be paint, papier mache and lumber.

I intend on spending the summer researching for other pre-Judd sites of aesthetic interest in Marfa that will be treated in the same way. I will also spend time researching the public records for maps of the area from different time periods. I hope to incorporate the layers of multiple maps into the show, perhaps on the wall or directly on the floor as a sort of suggestive walking guide for attendees. Between the maps and my grandfather's house/altar, the aim is to show both the micro- and macro-social impacts of the social and aesthetic interventions that have occurred in Marfa in the past few decades as a result of Judd's initial move there.

Also this summer, I plan on recording interviews with my grandparents about the changes in Marfa (they all have some relation to Marfa, though only one lived there). I want to incorporate these interviews into the show either by video or just sound. I will decide based on what feels right after the materials are compiled.

Collaborators:

My dream team of artists include two who have already shown at Co-Lab, Alison Kuo and Joshua Saunders. I also want to involve performance artist and altar-builder Fabiola Torralba who currently lives in San Antonio. Alison and I will work closely in New York to prepare, while Joshua and Fabiola might be working in TX. I will also be in TX all summer, and so able to work closely with Joshua and Fabiola. I am eager to come up with the detailed timeline and to work out the cross-country logistics. I am confident in myself and these three artists that the logistics will not hinder progress in any way. I have already spoken with Alison, and will approach Joshua and Fabiola if it turns out that this show is of interest to Co-Lab. Thank you for your consideration.