The Victory Garden Trike in action in San Francisco

Amy Franceschini is my favorite kind of propagandist: she creates enticing imagery you can’t help but rally around, but backs it up with dirt-under-the-fingernails pragmatism in service of a nearly indisputable cause: resurrecting San Francisco’s legendary wartime Victory Gardens program.

When I first stumbled upon Franceschini’s work at a small gallery in San Francisco in 2007, I saw it through the lens of the Iraq war that then seemed like it’d never end. The art related to her then-new Victory Gardens project: a prototype rainwater harvester, and documentation of items used to plan and implement trial gardens. Across town at SFMOMA, she was part of the SECA Art Award exhibition, which showcased related sculptures, including hybrids like the “bikebarrow” and “pogoshovel,” which struck me as the result of a collaboration between Beuys’s Green Party and TV’s Mr. Green Jeans.

But two years later, it’s easy to frame the work, which is created under the auspices of Futurefarmers, in the context of the current economic crisis. The 2006 version seemed to respond to an era when the president equated patriotism with shopping, whereas today’s version offers instruction in living in bounty through hard work, communal labor, and a sense of humor.

Victory Garden planting party fliers

Catching up with Franceschini this week, I learned about the history of San Francisco’s World War II Victory Gardens and about her own background that makes this such a winning fit for her. At its heyday, San Francisco had the nation’s most vibrant system of Victory Gardens, plots planted to help grow food for citizens so government could use its reserves with the war effort. Some 250 plots were growing food on public land, but Franceschini says that’s probably a lowball figure, given all the gardens tended by private individuals on their own land. The last time the city studied it, in 1970, there were 1,800 acres of usable land. “If we’re thinking about the city as a farm,” she says, “networking all this open space as an 1,800-acre farm, that’s a pretty big food-producing area.”

Franceschini’s interest in such issues goes back to childhood. She was raised in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where her father owned a pesticide company and ran a 6,000-acre industrial farm. She marveled in her dad’s inventiveness, recounting the time he pondered how to shorten the time spent cultivating fields. “I should invent a twelve-row cultivator,” he told her, laying out specs that include hydraulics, a need to fit in a barn and be highway-ready.

“The improvisation is an exciting part of it,” she said. “Even on the farm when I was a kid, it was so exciting when something would break because the farmer would have to invent some way to fix it or invent something new.”

From her mom, she picked up a love of chemical-free agriculture: When she was five, her parents divorced and her mom started an organic farm.

More recently, Franceschini was fed up with San Francisco and left. “I was mad: ‘I’ve put so much into this city and I can’t afford to live here. I’m leaving.’” She moved with her husband to his native Belgium and marveled at how the city of Ghent subsidized green efforts like capturing rainwater or opening your basement as a bat habitat.

The starter kit

Inspired, the couple returned to San Francisco, and Franceschini began preparing for the SFMOMA show. She decided to “use that time and space to create a utopian proposal for a reimagined victory garden program that I could take to the city and say, ‘Here, here’s a really small portrait of what I wish the city would adopt.’”

“I wanted to invest in a real way in the world and affect a larger population than just the art crowd,” she said.

She began making promotional posters, inspired by the art of the original Victory Gardens, and built starter kits for gardeners that included everything they’d need to get growing, from seeds to instructions.

Wanting to welcome the broadest range of people, she struggled with what role aesthetics should play in the project. “I tried to convince myself that aesthetics could get in the way of a potent message,” she remembers. “Some people maybe would only go to the surface and not go any further. And I think in the last couple of years I’ve tried to figure out a balance. If you look at Futurefarmers’ work, the aesthetic is always very strong, and that’s been a really positive thing. But I think it can also be a negative thing where certain people only see that surface layer…Right now I’m very much like: aesthetics are really important. That’s what people respond to, it lures people in, it lures in people who maybe wouldn’t have looked at it in the first place, and if they only get to that surface level, fine. At least they got there.”

The "bikebarrow"

She sees objects like the pogoshovel as propaganda in sculptural form. She wanted to create a “wonderful and fantastical image —that if someone saw a bike and a wheelbarrow connected, it would make them do a double-take,” she says. “Just to provoke people through a playful image was interesting to me.” (Some of these pieces are functional, as well. When a family is selected to be part of the program, the project delivers their starter materials, fittingly, via pedal-power in a VG Trike/Wagon.)

The program, co-produced with Slow Food Nation, ran gardens last June through October. Now, the project has 15 gardens that receive city funds. And on March 10, Futurefarmers meets with city officials again to see if they can get buy-in for administrative help, more funding or—the cherry on top—the OK to create a permanent demonstration garden at Golden Gate Park, the site of the original gardens in 1943.

Franceschini’s group is also trying to build awareness of the project and get an accurate map of how much open land the city has and who’s gardening where. On Friday, Futurefarmers announced the launching of GardenRegistry.org, a site that allows participants to register where they’re growing or to list what kind of extras they have to share. (A current “surplus alert” shows that one gardener has extra asparagus, should you want some.)

“The main complaint we heard last year is, ‘We have too much food, what can we do with it? So much bok choy, we don’t know what to do with it! So much squash, we don’t know what to do with it!’”

Franceschini’s Victory Garden idea—like her many other projects: the Creative Capital-funded traveling Local Landscape Campus; a collaboration in Cali, Colombia, with artist Wilson Díaz on a new body of work—is going on the road. The project is on view through April 19 at the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s Actions show.

Vincent Lin, the project's "poster child."

But it’s the local impact that seems most gratifying to Franceschini. She excitedly told me about the project’s “poster child,” Vincent Lin, the patriarch of a Chinese-American family that has “just gone mad” with its garden, filling the entire yard with plants and improvised accessories that would make Franceschini’s father proud, like a compost box made from Levelor blinds welded together.

“One time I came over, and [Vincent], who doesn’t speak any English, wrote us a note in Chinese, and then wrote the phonetic translation: ‘we hope we can cooperate in the future,’” she says. “He’s built a green house out of junk, basically. It gives such an optimism to this project and influences other people: ‘I don’t need to have plastic and PVC pipe, I can just use weird old windows or a sliding glass door with broken glass he’d taped.’”

A note Lin, who doesn't speak English, passed to Franceschini

The story seems to epitomize what Futurefarmers’ projects are all about. A fitting motto for the group came up when Franceschini explained the name of Futurefarmers’ Reverse Ark project, which will be revisited in Baltimore in late March.

“It’s a play on Duchamp’s quote,” she explains. “He said the reverse readymade is like taking a Van Gogh and turning it into an ironing board. It means taking everyday objects and turning them into art. Reversing that is flattening the hierarchy of what’s art and not art.”

To me, the best part of Franceschini’s Victory Garden project is that the art—which I understand to be that which results from a sometimes long, always creative process—is something that, in more ways than one, gives life.

Detail of an altered ad by "Princess Hajib"

Learning of Princess Hijab—a Paris-based street artist who culturejams advertisements to include her namesake headscarf—an old question came to mind: where are all the rightwing graffiti artists, stencil afficionados, and conservative interventionists? While we see strictly political graffiti on behalf of all sides in political skirmishes worldwide, I can’t say I’ve seen particularly artful examples on the right side of the political spectrum.

Graffiti that appeared in Minneapolis just before the RNC began.

Around the time of the Republican National Convention, I pondered the question, to no avail, at my day job when a series of unsanctioned artworks started appearing around the Twin Cities. They all included the G.O.P. acronym, but it was clear this was a different GOP: “Greed Over People” or “Get Out Phascists” (which is confusing…Phish fan facists? Big Pharma fascists?). Since then I’ve noticed that while lefty street art is virtually eveywhere, from Noam Chomsky stencils to railroad cars tagged with BAILOUT, TORTURE and POVERTY, there was very little from the other end of the political spectrum (except for the brief blip in Nobama graffiti a few months back).

Freight graffiti by the "Abraham Lincoln Brigade"

When I noticed Princess Hijab’s work today, I thought I’d come across the first interesting street intervention by a person who might, just maybe, fit the bill—if not politically, then culturally. (I recognize a limitation in my thinking: naturally, there are liberal and moderate Muslims who wear headscarves.) But upon further reading, her work seems to be more about covering the shame of omnipresent (and often sexualized) ads than in offering a critique of women’s bodies. Her “hijabizing” of French ads is part of a “Jihad,” she writes, but “she acts upon her own free will. She is not involved in any lobby or movement be it political, religious, or to do with advertising. In fact, the Princess is an insomniac-punk. She is the leader of an artistic fight, nothing else.”

As for rightwing graffiti, I’m not sure why we don’t see more. Are conservatives more respectful of personal property or more fearful of the law? Is their fight in boardrooms or ballot boxes instead of boxcars and subway station walls? Or am I just not looking in the right places?

When I posed the question on Twitter last night, A’yen Tran, a Brooklyn artist I met when the Miss Rockaway Armada was in Minneapolis a few summers ago, responded that perhaps The Splasher was the closest I’d get. The Splasher achieved some notoriety two years ago for defacing New York street art with paint and leaving behind a manifesto that seemed more anti-artist than in tune with the anti-art Dadaists it referenced: “The removal of this document could result in injury, as we have mixed the wheat paste with tiny shards of glass.” “[Y]ou could argue that the Splasher had some echoes of fascism despite a pseudo surrealist facade,” Tran writes.

So, more in the spirit of crowd-sourcing than conclusion-making, what do you think? Is street art an inherently left-leaning domain, or have I not been looking hard enough?

Chakkrit Chimnok at a cafe in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Photo by Paul Schmelzer

Chakkrit Chimnok dreams of a “banana world,” a utopia in which overlooked or discarded items — specifically, the ubiquitous banana leaves that litter the streets in his home city of Chiang Mai, Thailand — can become the material for a renewed world. Chimnok’s recent forays into this idea (or ideal) transformed the ever-present leaves into clothing modeled after western haute-couture.

“One day I was sitting in a banana garden, when a banana leaf fell on me,” he told me last year. He picked it up and felt it: It was smooth and flexible, unlike the dried leaves many locals get rid of by burning. Senses piqued, he began paying attention to how the leaves had different characteristics, depending on where he found them, their age and the level of humidity where they grew.

Installation at Art Space, Japan Foundation, Bangkok. Courtesy of Chakkrit Chimnok

He says he was struck by how perfect banana trees are. Both the fruit and the flowers are edible, and the leaves — as his explorations would later prove — could be made into apparel. Chimnok enrolled in a clothing-design class, taking 60 hours of instruction on sewing and pattern-making, and then set out to make functional objects, including a space suit and a dress (sized for his parents, pictured in the installation shot above), handbags, boots and tennis shoes.

Chakkrit Chimnok, "Body – Imagination – Dried Banana Leaf," 2006. Courtesy of the artist.

This functionality is questionable — as the leaves dry, they become too brittle for regular use — but he appreciates the various layers of symbolism as well. He’s taking gentle jabs at both Thai and western cultures. To often brand-conscious Thai people, he offers fashions from one of the country’s most plentiful, banal and unbranded materials. He patterns his ensembles after western styles, forgoing patongs and flip-flops for western-style skirts and shoes, in order to put the designs both within the vocabulary of fashion but also starkly opposed (the hard, crunchy leaves also stand in contrast to the silk textiles for which Thailand is best known). “We always have the sense that the west looks at us as the third world,” he told me.

Shoes by Chakkrit Chimnok. Photo by Paul Schmelzer.

While his message addresses international audiences — it was featured in the 3rd Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale 2005 and was shortlisted for the 2008 Signature Art Prize by the Singapore Art Museum — it is, in essence, local. In his artist’s statement, he writes, “Following the west is viewed as part of destruction of community culture.” His art is a celebration of the local, he says, even if it celebrates one of that environment’s more overlookable features.

But he’s not Thai-centric about it. During the project’s showing in Fukuoka, Japan, he promoted a local variation of recycling. By the end of his three-month residency, he was showing at a fashion show the 20 kimono-inspired garments he’d created — from bamboo leaves.

Michael Rakowitz, "paraSITE," 1998-present.

This weekend I went to an opening at The Soap Factory, a scrappy and often-excellent nonprofit art space a block or so off Minneapolis’ riverfront. The description of the work, a Clive Murphy installation called Almost Nothing, was intriguing enough to draw me there: he’d filled the entire space with a series of air-filled tubes created from black plastic garbage bags, mimicking the architectural geometry of the space—which, as its name states, was once a soap-making factory, reeking of lye.

But when I arrived, the piece immediately struck me as so much hot air. Here’s my progression of thought: it’s February in Minnesota. This building is virtually unheated. We’re facing twin catastrophes of economic downturn and human-made climate change. And this guy’s art requires electric air blowers to drone constantly on whenever the gallery’s open?

Murphy’s work is what it is—a project influenced by “radical architectural proposals from the sixties” and inflatable carnival games that examine “themes of hierarchy, inter-relationality, and meaning formation”—and I don’t knock it for that. But it isn’t what I’ve been looking for lately: contemporary art with immediacy, that pragmatically or poetically addresses the challenges we face today. Not all art needs to do that, but it’s what I’m looking for. Something more along the lines of another inflatable-bag art project: paraSITE, in which artist Michael Rakowitz collaborated with homeless people to construct temporary inflatable housing designed to leech warmth from heat outtakes from apartment buildings.

In considering “political” art—especially in a non-election year, especially facing the economic and environmental problems we do—I’m reluctantly coming to believe that art doesn’t have the power I once believed it did for bringing about social change.

Suzanne Opton's "Soldier: Birkholz" billboard

Perhaps it’s creeping cynicism. As a journalist covering the Republican National Convention in St. Paul this fall, I saw magnificent, irreverent and funny artworks – from full-fledged contemporary artworks (including Ligorano/Reese’s The State of Things, gigantic ice letters spelling out the word DEMOCRACY, which melted away on the capitol lawn as time passed, or Suzanne Opton’s Soldiers billboard series) to creative protest signs and hilarious chants by nonviolent demonstrators (“You’re hot, you’re cute, take off your riot suit!”). Still, the police crackdown was powerful, unrelenting and sometimes violent—and, if hearing from Republican delegates on the convention floor is any indicator, protesters’ messages didn’t seem to register. The art was dismissed as mere protest.

My doubts also have to do with responses to my oft-asked (and admittedly naïve) question, “Can art change the world?” As an editor at the Walker Art Center and at  Adbusters Magazine, I posed the question to a number of people: critic Robert Storr; artists Rirkrit Tiravanija, Sam Durant, and Thomas Hirschhorn; Artforum editor Tim Griffin and independent curator Hou Hanru, to name a few. While they all said they hoped it had that kind of power, few wholeheartedly agreed it did.

But from some of these same people, I found hope for smaller incremental change—one heart (or mind) at a time, perhaps.

During a residency at the Walker, Art21 artist Guillermo Calzadilla told me his take. Art, unlike protest, is difficult to pin down, he said, and therein lies its power. Overt agit-prop is easy to spot, categorize, and therefore dismiss wholesale by opponents of the message it carries. But art is something… else. Something nebulous and multidimensional and hard to get one’s brain around.

Before we can dismiss it, we have to figure out what it is.

The point was illustrated last week by the novelist Haruki Murakami. Despite being threatened with boycotts by activists outraged by Israel’s overwhelming use of force in Gaza last month, he traveled to Israel to accept the Jerusalem Prize for literature. His speech began in a writerly fashion, musing on the novelist’s role as a “professional spinner of lies”—hardly the ranting of an anti-war zealot.

Haruki Murakami (Wikipedia)

But as he progressed, he worked in mention of a UN report that “more than a thousand people had lost their lives in the blockaded Gaza City, many of them unarmed citizens” and of “white phosphorus shells,” a weapon banned from use in civilian areas, but allegedly used by the IDF. “I do not intend to stand before you today delivering a direct political message,” he said, before launching into a scathingly poetic message, the kind perhaps an artist is best suited for delivering:

Please do, however, allow me to deliver one very personal message… [I]t goes something like this:

“Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.”

…What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them. This is one meaning of the metaphor.

This is not all, though. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: It is The System. The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others—coldly, efficiently, systematically.

I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on The System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the novelist’s job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories—stories of life and death, stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness.

Is that a critique? Mere poetry? Both?

When I asked Hou Hanru about a piece of “political” visual art that affected him powerfully, he named an oft-cited work by David Hammons.

“He was selling snowballs in Brooklyn on the street in the winter. He made different snowballs of different sizes, and he was selling them at different prices. This was such a strong critique about the logic of consumption society and behind it, of course, was the whole notion between white and black and all these social issues. A simple gesture like this can, because the complexity being expressed through a very simple action, the tension between this simplicity and complexity, make a very strong social statement.”

And one that, unlike an anti-John McCain poster pinned forever to Fall 2008, still has resonance many years later.

Citing Joseph Beuys, Hanru summed up the thinking well: “I think his way of trying to change things is more metaphysical somehow.”

Art didn’t overturn Israel’s policies about Gaza. Art didn’t shut down the RNC, result in any changes in the GOP platform, or prevent the concussion grenades from being fired. But I sincerely doubt art did nothing. Perhaps it laid a thought, the sliver of a doubt or the germ of an alternative way of thinking in the minds of people, delegates and demonstrators, lovers of literature and Israeli politicians.

This week, I’ll be looking at some of these kinds of art. Art that I hold no illusions will up and alter the face of history, but that I do have hope will at least plant a seed.