17X17: A Series Of Lists Of 17 Things About Living In The Mission, Part I.

17 Ways To Become A Mission Hipster Artist


1. Arrive in San Francisco from the anywhere but here, as you do not have a very strong accent except NYC, in which case you will always be the person from New York who relocated to San Francisco.

1A. If you visit San Francisco from eastern states or Europe, or anywhere else in the world, it is cool to accept a kind of limited engagement in a variety of milieus as long as it is temporary.

2. Eat burritos excessively when you first move here.
2A. Make fun of newcomers 1 year later for being so obsessed with burritos.
2B. Become obsessed with food trends.
2C. Make your own kombucha.
2D. Befriend someone that raises chickens.

3. Have certain San Francisco idols: quasi graffiti artists, bad boy artists, and experimental writers and filmmakers.

4. Attend art school.
4A. Possibly drop out of art school.

5. Create a tentatively-stable living/working place to live in the mission. “Tentatively” means that the following series of events could cause you irreparable damage in terms of being able to ever get a below-market-rate place in the mission again.
1. Building is probably going to be condemned.
2. Landlord is aging and when they die the building is sold.
3. Co-op is rented not owned.
4. Roommates do things that may lead to eviction.
5. Your lack of income may lead to eviction.
6. You do things that may lead to eviction.
7. [Accidentally] start a fire.
8. You sublet your apartment to do a residency and your subletters refuse to leave.
9. Your very public break-up forces you out of the neighborhood/city/state/country.
10. Your landlord finds a loophole to the lease and legally evicts you.
11. Your boyfriend/girlfriend/colleague works for a tenants rights organization and this somehow backfires.
12. The master lease holder to your place raises everyone's rent in order to cover their and a tenants rights organization does an expose which leads to eviction.

6. Host concerts in your “space,” preferably to make rent.

7. Have some story that involves escorting or hair modeling.

8. Make work that will never sell. Examples include:
8A. Performance art.
8B. Ink drawing.
8C. Typewriter art.
8D. Photos shot in Balmy Alley.

9. Make “street art” or “outsider art” whilst in art school.

10. Try to sound academic.

11. Put down academics.

12. Put down Dot-Com-ers.

13. Develop strong opinions about Burning Man and discuss them loudly at your neighbor's/employer's Burning Man parties.

14. Date someone of a gender you do not usually go for.
14A. Experience genuine heartache over said person when things don't work out.
14B. Date a quick succession of people that are not logical choices for you.
14C. Become jaded about love.
14D. Move in with your life partner/get married two years later.
14E. Put down young jaded hipsters.

15. Become socially alienated.

16. Join a gym and/or get a pet.
16B. Decide to move and donate your pet/ship pet home to your parents to take care of while you do some soul-searching.

17. Put your possessions indefinitely into a storage locker, either because you do not have a stable living situation or because you have become homeless.

open the curtains of your heart

Walking past churches, doors open. this vast amount of internal real estate, the most anywhere, really, in the city, except for malls. yesterday and then today, we will walk onwards and try to forget again.

excerpt from interview

M: I am aware that your 2007 exhibition at _________ was criticized for being overly diaristic...

K: It was. Yes.

M: So... Do you not see that as being problematic?

K: Well, I mean, yes and no. The self that gets created to put into drawing or video, writing, performance, etc, you know, ... it is a Self that is highly formalized...

M: You mean fictionalized?

K: Well, I guess in a sense. I actually did mean formalized.. Using one's self in their practice always brings up the question about where the line between fiction and reality is. Memory, you know, becomes quite evidently subjective...

M: It seems that you run the risk of being seen as being victimizing by striving to make your self so vulnerable... and/or you could be seen as being quite narcissistic for dwelling so much on your feelings and experiences.

K: I know.

M: Is that a concern?

K: No. I feel that there is a real need to not shy away from being able to relate to people on a human level; why can't I use the medium of performance to express these human experiences?

M: Why performance, then? Why not something that allows to to have it to be more to do with The Human Experience and less about you?

K: Suppose I like the range of challenges that are particular to performance as a genre. Having grown up doing a lot of theater, it was sort of weird in grad school to feel this pressure to make work that is highly formalized and has a conceptual edge... There is this assumption that in doing so, you will be at a safe distance from making work that is drama and will be able to eek out a Truth...a reflection of your authentic self... What happens when you blur the line and at times lose sight of where that line is?

M: So you're saying you don't know what you really feel even though you make work that is highly emotional and very personal seeming?

K: Don't we all go through processes of trying on different reactions to things to see what fits?

M: Some people might see that as being kind of hasty or fickle, and then you say that you don't actually feel the feelings that you perform--so you're projecting a persona that is hasty, fickle, and which lacks genuineness?

K: I feel that there is a lot to be learned from allowing room for having more than one thing going on at any given time. In the space of a performance piece, there is more room for that than most of us are permitted in our real, everyday lives.

M: We were talking earlier about Gilbert and George, who showed at the De Young last year... What do you think about what goes on in their "real, everyday lives" in terms of emotional ambiguity or authenticity?

K: That is a question I think about every day.