The SF SPCA issued a condemnation today of an exhibit that’s been featured this month at the SF Art Institute, claiming that it is “barbaric and depraved”. Entitled “Don’t Trust Me”, the exhibition (originally slated to run through May 31 — but now canceled after outcry) was on display at 800 Chestnut St. and was featuring six short videos that are looped footage of animals getting hammered (and nope, we don’t mean getting drunk in North Beach ).

The critters, including an ox, a sheep, a horse, a pig, a goat, and a small deer are shown being beaten with a sledgehammer by the “artist”.

The invited presenting “artist”, born in Algeria, but based out of Paris, is Adel Abdessemed, who according to his own hype:

is open and generous, sensitive albeit controversial. For materials, he relies on bodily or embodied experiences (human and animal), ordinary household objects, industrial products, and even buildings. His work consists of the stark contrasts between beauty and violence, impulsiveness and rationality, romanticism and radicality, life and death.

Whatever ya wanna say about the guy, he’s from France and his money is worth more than yours these days, so there.

I actually wanna thank SFAI’s Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs and animal hammering fan Hou Hanru for bringing this unique artistic endeavor to my attention, where I once might have had to travel to a Chino slaughterhouse to see similar art. Hou’s SFAI website bio says of his curatorial and department chairing expertise :

“Hou is one of the first curators and thinkers to examine postmodern issues of nomadic identity, hybridity, globalized mobility, what he calls “in-betweeness,”

Way to go Hou !!! You impressive idea thinker you !!! Keep it up and I bet our board of supes will be fighting over which street to name after you !!!

For over 25 years, dedicated family farmers and independent food purveyors from all over California have arrived at SF’s UN Plaza at dawn on Wednesdays & Sundays, setting up their temporary tents & tables to sell their produce and sundry products til about 5pm. Whether you like the wide array of greens or roasted nuts, dried fruits, dates, baked goods, cheeses, olive oils or even fresh fish & fowl, there’s something for everyone. Unlike the more pretentious and prosperous scene at the fashionable Ferry Building, this inauspicious & authentic farmer’s market is frequented by the denizens of the neighborhood, office workers on lunch break, old Chinese folks and some occasional tourists that find it upon emerging from BART. The prices are often half of what the other fancy farmer’s market might charge, and the scene about as bucolic and community orientated as one can get in “The Heart Of The City”.

If it wasn’t for the farmers & vendors who twice a week make the United Nations Plaza a lively civic gathering spot, the place is generally a desolate, if not dangerous empty expanse populated by sleepy doped up miscreants, drug dealers, ne’er do ‘ells, tweakers, stolen property salesmen and a spectacular variety of shady criminal thugs. The same city and it’s bloated bureaucracy, which had a big hand in letting the UN plaza slip into a symbolic cesspool of urban decay in the first place, now wants to manage the sole successful independently operated revitalizing factor in the area ? How uh, original…

The “Heart Of The City Farmer’s Market” at UN Plaza has long been organized and managed by an independent non-profit that was formed in 1981 starting with just 12 farmers, and some of the same vendors have been there since the inception. John Fernandez and his mother Christine Adams help manage the market that the city now has plans to “take over” after two+ decades, and they are not amused. Neither were at least a half dozen stall operators that I spoke to in an informal survey today, some who’ve been at UN Plaza since the very early days. They already dealt with this threat back in 1995, and here we go again, with a basically bankrupt bureaucracy that’s trying to dip it’s incompetent tentacles into something that isn’t broke, so why bother to fix it?
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