Temporary Services

Extensive interview about Dan Peterman's building at 6100 S. Blackstone in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The enormous building was gutted in a suspicious fire and eventually rebuilt and reorganized under the name The Experimental Station. Peterman describes the character and cultural life of the original building and the endless political and bureaucratic challenges that he faced in the struggle to rebuild. A good window into Chicago city politics and the difficulty in maintaining an autonomous cultural practice in Chicago. The Baffler and magazine and the initiative Blackstone Bicycle Works - tenants of 6100 S. Blackstone - are also discussed.

In response to the torture inflicted by the Chicago Police from 1972 to 1992, and as part of The Chicago Torture Justice Memorial Project, Lucky Pierre is creating 1000 actions for Chicago torture justice.

Anthony Rayson heads South Chicago Anarchist Black Cross Distro.

This zine is part of the Temporary Conversations project by Temporary Services, which publishes unedited interviews with various artists, activists, and thinkers. In this zine, Nicolas Lampert interviews Aaron Hughes, an Iraq War veteran who currently is an anti-war activist with the group Iraq Veterans Against War (IVAW).

This booklet, designed by Temporary Services, is authored and illustrated by an Illinois-based group of artists, teachers, activists and prisoners. It sensitively explores the movement in time in prison, as compared to the speed of life and labor on the outside. (from halfletterpress.com)

Marc Fischer wrote "Against Competition" in 2006. The essay takes on the pervasive and corrosive problem of competition that exists and is created between artists by a market-driven art system. The essay also explores productive collaborative models in art, as well as in underground music subcultures whose approaches to generosity and working together might be something for artists to learn from. (Abstract from http://www.halfletterpress.com) This 2014 publication includes an afterword that reflects on how global changes in technology inform Fischer's original piece.

Dan S. Wang interviewed Dan Peterman about a range of topics: Peterman's art practice, the community that inhabited the building at 61st Street and Dorchester, the fire that destroyed the building, the struggle against the city to rebuild, and the rebirth of the building as the Experimental Station.

Continuing stereotypes of art and artists in mainstream media reveal to us the real impact (or lack thereof) that artists have on the world around them. The minimal presence of living, working, visual artists in these media spheres contributes to the kinds of generalizations and misunderstandings that many people seem to have about the power and function of the visual arts. It is our contention that by continually watching, cataloging,and analyzing these portrayals, artists can also gain a better understanding of their own responsibilities to their viewers and how the stereotypes hurt their ability to effectively communicate their ideas. *

Photographs of signs and phenomena around Chicago taken in an effort to document vernacular culture in publicly trafficked space.