DOOR TO DOOR

(video shot by Lee Montgomery, edited by me, with music by Everlasting the Way)

DOOR TO DOOR : A FREE HALF-HOUR OF SERVICE

Exhibition spring 2005 at the Richmond Art Center
DOOR TO DOOR EXHIBITION AT THE RICHMOND ART CENTER
APRIL 12 to MAY 27, 2005
RECEPTION MAY 6, 6 to 8 PM
ARTIST TALK SATURDAY MAY 21, 3 PM
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PHOTOS ABOVE AND BELOW FROM THE ARTICLE FROM THE SF CHRONICLE!!

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INSTALLATION VIEWS

INSTALLATION VIEW - LEFT TO RIGHT:
• CODE GREEN - EVERYTHING'S FINE (46 REFUSALS)
• REPAIR CENTER (DESK AND TOOLS)
• SORRY - I WAS ONLY TRYING TO HELP (looping video on monitor, 58 minutes)
• PROJECTING A PROBLEM - INTERVENTIONS ARE SO DUMB, SO LAST YEAR (looping video projection, 2 minutes)

• REPAIR CENTER (DESK AND TOOLS)
• I WORK IN THE SPACE ON SATURDAYS ACTUALLY REPAIRING THINGS
• BRING IN YOUR BROKEN THINGS TO BE REPAIRED FREE OF CHARGE

• CODE RED - WHERE DID WE GO WRONG? and THE RIG (all sorts of stuff - zip ties, casio, spackle, caulk, pliers, tape, um..)

• CODE RED - WHERE DID WE GO WRONG? (detail)

INSTALLATION VIEW, LEFT TO RIGHT:
• REPAIR CENTER (DESK AND TOOLS)
• CODE GREEN - EVERYTHING'S FINE (46 refusals)
• SORRY - I WAS ONLY TRYING TO HELP (looping video, 58 minutes)

Dates: April 12 to May 27, 2005
Reception: May 6, 2005, 6 to 8 PM

Bring things in to the Richmond Art Center to be repaired or serviced!
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Here's a great article by Monique Beeler in The Oakland Tribune (YES!)
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house where i cleaned up a little with no approval or otherwise!
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inventory sketch

the worksheet corresponding to the video still sequence below
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video stills from "Manuel: Cutting Grass"
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Exhibition and repair center NOW OPEN!! at the Richmond Art Center

Dates: April 12 to May 27, 2005
Reception: May 6, 2005

Bring things in to the Richmond Art Center to be repaired or serviced!
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from a recent proposal seeking funding and/or technical assisstance for the project...

The focus within my current project, entitled "Door to Door: A Free Half-Hour of Service", has been to con/fuse creative practice, conceptual art, physical labor, handyman skills, sales, and structured improvisation in an extremely comprehensive and dynamic process, ultimately raising more questions than synthesizing quantifiable results. I have considered it an exercise in failure from its inception, acknowledging that I will most likely not be able to engage very many strangers in a creative process or perhaps even in conversation, but I see the merits of continued attempts and failures within the problematized process as valuable contribution to humanity in general, social practice, and as a means of (self-effacing) comic relief in stressful and isolated times.

I wish to explore and expand my "Door To Door" project, slightly shifting focus to more prominently focus on media, technology, isolation, connectivity, interactivity, and fluidity of information in an attempt to positively affect and stimulate the general public's awareness or dis/comfort with, access to, and empowerment through, use of, or even the possible avoidance of technology and mass-media in their day to day lives. This shifting of focus within my project would most likely entail replacing my handyman/tool pouch/musical instruments shoulder-bag with an intentionally lessened or heightened technological presence within the "toolbox."

The project ultimately aims to question media's and technology's affect on interpersonal affairs and our evolving methods of decision-making on very localized levels, such as judgements of character, intentions, commerce, value, cultural production, etc. This is fairly long-term project involving gathering and synthesizing data garnered from making cold calls, within a humane and commerce-free framework, in efforts to project and possibly determine future directions in social, technological, or cultural engineering.

Ten Keywords to describe the proposal:
interactive social media disruption improvisational intervention survey problematized hybrid art

I would like help initiating a more comprehensive and interactive web project related to the overall "Door To Door" process, such that the entire project could be very accessible after-the-fact and also help serve as a conduit for all persons involved to become familiar with each other and with the technology incorporated (however visible or invisible), from the people forced to reconcile with me at their doors, to the project volunteers, to gallery visitors, and beyond. I would hope for space or time to present my process and findings and help promote other acts of humanity within an increasing technological and consumer climate.

Additionally I would like to explore streaming or broadcasting some or all of my process - including making cold calls via telephone - and explore the concerns and issues related to the simultaneous technological encroachment into "private space" and efforts to make accessible to the general public various forms of broadcast media such that they realize media could, after all, be a tool for local expression free of commerce, or other possibilities.Other than streaming, broadcasting, or setting up a more dynamic web presence for the project, I have everything needed to go forward with the project and future exhibitions of my findings.

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more videos (click photos for video), both shot in Richmond by me, no one else would claim to have shot the footage anyway!

"another attempt"

"hose"
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Also now showing at the M.O.R.E. exhibition - curated by Mitch Cope - at the Detroit Artists Market

Dates: March 4 to April 17, 2005

Reception March 4, 2005, 6 pm to 10 pm

clockwise: postman, rodney, andy, and "fast walker"
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here are a few preparatory drawings...

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audio driving tour map sketch, all of my attempts to buy the talking house transmitters in bulk have been futile, so the drawing is starting to seem overly ambitious

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below is the latest version of the "avon case", slightly more portable, easier to organize, and makes better sounds while walking

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select worksheet drawings

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Press Release, updated 3/8/05

Conceptual artist Jon Brumit, for his upcoming solo exhibition at the Richmond Art Center, will present documentation and artifacts from collaborative projects resulting from cold calls as a Door to Door Artist. Offering his business card and a brief introduction, Jon offered a half-hour of free creative services as an artist, handyman, entertainer, helper, or musician.

Armed only with a modified electrician's shoulder bag containing drawing materials, musical instruments, various tools and hardware, and samples of past work, Brumit made unsolicited house calls throughout select areas in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as several locations in the greater Detroit, Michigan area.

His attempts to collaborate with strangers in the production of art, music, home repairs, or other creations will be on display at the Detroit Artists Market from March 4 to April 17, 2005 with a reception March 4 from 6 PM to 10 PM. This project will also be on display at the Richmond Art Center April 12 through May 27 with a reception for the artist on May 6 from 6 PM to 8 PM. The public is invited to bring in items for Jon to repair or service during the exhibition. In addition to the work displayed in the Richmond Art Center, there will be an audio driving tour of Richmond wherein, by tuning your car radio to AM 540 while following the driving tour map, you can listen to the audio portion of the exhibition broadcast from participating homes.

Jon Brumit has exhibited nationally in various places including SF MoMA, Flux Factory, AVA, School 33, Tangent Gallery, Southern Exposure, and New Langton Arts. He has performed at venues as diverse as Remote Lounge in NYC, SF's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Luggage Store Gallery, Detroit's Gold Dollar, Fillmore Street, Chattanooga Tennessee's Market Street Bridge, the San Fransisco Dump, and Oakland's 21 Grand. His solo and collaborative work has been featured in Artforum, the Oakland Tribune, NBC, WGN Chicago, WNYC, and Discovery Channel International.

He collaborates regularly on such projects as Neighborhood Public Radio - a free radio project with Lee Montgomery and others, and Sliv & Dulet Enterprises - a creative services company he co-founded with Marc Horowitz. He plays drums in the improg / no-az duo Van Boven (Edgetone Records) with guitarist Wayne Grim and recently did a solo performance of a composition entitled Round Trip at the Pacific Film Archive which he scored using a found steel model of the Golden Gate Bridge and his typewriter piano. He created an annual "parade" of sorts with BYOBW: Bring Your Own Big Wheel - a one-minute long ride down historic Lombard Street on children's big wheels approaching its fifth year of observance and Vendetta Retreat - a walk-in revenge clinic based on creative sublimation, discussion and collaboration.

His recent performances include a traffic conduction over a singing bridge in Tennessee to create a community car-band cover version of the song "TAPS" with conspirator and fellow traffic-conductor Sarah Wagner, as well as Sliv & Dulet's Sixty Second Symphonies featuring conducted improvisations of audience members playing their pocket change, bags of chips, and forced laughter.
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Project Statement

Door to Door is an attempt to combine my many interests and occupations into one organic structure. It is my hope that improvisation, performance, collaboration and community service could converge, as I have with strangers, to reveal a kind of solidarity through creative expression and connect people through conversation, drawing and sound. At its foundation, the project was developed to explore personal and communal creative space within a globalizing and isolating media condition. This is not a condition specific to the areas or neighborhoods I have visited, but rather the select neighborhoods, as exhibited through this project, can serve to illustrate as models of larger social conditions.

Trying to uncover the way in which people express themselves in their homes, arranging or repairing things, creatively and quietly, is very much a part of the project, as well as exploring and documenting each reaction to an offer of free service. Generosity is of great interest to me as a dynamic social force and also as a creative practice, arising from my experiences listening, sharing, socializing, and attempting to understand the family and folks in my day to day life as an artist, handyman, musician, and otherwise chatty or sociable person. I am completely invested in the idea of community wellness, and as utopic or idealistic as it may seem, I feel that engaging people within a creative context and without cost may prove valuable or at the very least entertaining to everyone involved in the project.

Many people hold that an artist needs a requisite amount of suffering, heartache, or such to really create, or perhaps that art is limited to paintings, prints, or handicraft. Of course I can't singlehandedly change the face of conceptual or contemporary art to the general public, but there must be some way to expose people to new ideas offline and outside of mainstream media, and I would assume that doing so in person would be of significant value for affecting a real shift in perception. Maybe some people have never met an artist, or maybe they don't want or need to: this is my charge. I am not interested in perpetuating the myth that artists should work for free, as we often do and are requested to do, often for legitimately great causes, but my interest has been in designing a method of engaging and disarming people (by offering a free half-hour of creative services) for long enough to afford myself a raw or authentic experience. This goal is never to be achieved at anyone's expense - I wish only to offer an unmediated experience of creation, be it mundane or profoundly absurd in nature.

Also, having realized I am genetically pre-disposed towards socializing and - much to my own confusion - salesmanship, I decided to address these issues directly and concurrently. Several phases will necessarily follow the "Free Half-Hour of Service" phase, such as actual attempts to sell and immediately install art in homes via door to door sales, focusing on other modes of interacting with people such as photography of them in their favorite seat in their home or in front of their favorite painting or print, or perhaps trying to procure their dryer lint or other such domestic residue if possible. Any of these variations or deviations will invariably involve a curatorial element in either the work available for sale or in the presentation of the resultant photos and will help me develop a more sensitive and dynamic method of synthesizing the many forms of a cultural "pulse" pertaining to openness to and willingness to interact with a strangers, as well as revealing pre- or mis- conceptions about conceptual or contemporary art, generosity, or possible interconnectedness of any of these disciplines.

I am inviting people to bring in items for me to attempt to repair or service during the exhibition at the Richmond Art Center.

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DOOR TO DOOR SERVICES
INVENTORY CHECKLIST

SMALL KEYBOARD
SMALL, MEDIUM BOW
ROSIN
WIRE BRUSHES
SCRAPER / PUTTY KNIFE
FLUFF AND STUFF
LEATHERMAN
SMALL HAMMER
NAILS / SCREWS
SMALL STRING CLAMPS
COOKING CHOPSTICKS
TENNIS BALL MALLETS
SMALL CYMBALS
WOOD SHIMS
PAIR SHIELDED SCREWDRIVERS
BLACK SHARPIE
WATERCOLORS
BRUSHES
CARPENTER PENCIL
COMPACT SAW
SMALL, MEDIUM, LARGE ZIP TIES
SHOW CARDS
AA BATTERIES
MEGA MIC
RELEASE FORMS
POINTED BRUSHES
BLACK INK
SKETCHBOOK
COLOR WHEEL
SMALL FLASHLIGHT
MOUNTING TAPE
5 MINUTE EPOXY
DUCT TAPE
PAINTER'S TAPE
PACKING TAPE
MINIDISK RECORDER
MINIDISKS
SMALL MONO MIC
BINAURALS
CAMERA, CF CARD
BUSINESS CARDS
EXAMPLES OF PAST WORK
PHOTOS
DUMP CDS
BALLPOINT PEN
OLFA KNIFE, BLADES
RUBBER GLOVES
SMALL ROLLER
TAPE MEASURE
PAPER HATS
LEVEL
CAULK
BALLOONS
HOT GLUE GUN, GLUE STICKS
LIGHTER

The initial script/score for DOOR TO DOOR:

approach
knock/buzzer
hello/introduce/handshake
display/charm
pitch/invite
enter
encourage/inquire
options/custom
display/broadcast
create
draw/record
encourage/affirm
demonstrate/engage
evaluate/enjoy
forms/conclude
thanks/handshake/hug
exit

This project will be exhibited at an upcoming solo show at the Richmond Art Center Spring of 2005. Includes drawings, photos, video, and an audio driving tour of Richmond featuring "TALKING HOUSE" transmitters at select homes. These transmitters are commonly used for "drive-by audio tours" of homes for sale.

More about Richmond, California here and here.
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Here are some fun facts about the Talking House Transmitters.

Wouldn't it be great if you could personally talk to every car that stopped near your location? Now, you can!!

Here's How it Works

1. The transmitter sits inside the property. Safe and silent. No one notices its there. Record your message onto digital voice chip using the handheld microphone.

2. Yard sign works 24
hours a day, 7 days a
week encouraging people to "tune in". And they do!

3. Prospects hear all the features that make your home special. The home stands out, so it sells faster and for top dollar.