What may seem like a mere supplement for the lack of gallery visibility from external view, White Flag Projects’ vinyl banners were initially produced to hide the street-facing garage door. Slowly evolving from a witty, ad-hoc solution that functioned as an oversized poster – including text to advertise events and exhibitions – the banner now operates as a public art initiative, enlisting artists to create new work within the 13 x 13′ space.

The banner’s transformation into an art object began with the 2009 exhibition FX3, when the banner revisited the most memorable bikini scene in cinema history, presenting an enlarged, cropped film still of Phoebe Cates just before unclasping her red bikini top. Themes and scenes from the 1982 film Fast Times at Ridgemont High were appropriated in fragmentary distillation as images to promote the third iteration of the Fast Times student exhibition series. Introducing the banner as public art, the provocative image at once became a platform for controversy as it elicited several complaints from the local government and members of a nearby senior living home. In an attempt to quell complaints, a citation was made against White Flag Projects but ultimately failed as an insufficient case of impropriety.

The second “fine art” banner was created for the exhibition Destroy All Monsters: Hungry for Death. Celebrating 1970s Detroit-based noise band, White Flag showcased items culled from the collective’s large archive. The exhibition’s banner, a recreation of an original collage by Jim Shaw, displayed a highly graphic image of Charles Manson’s face against a winsome blue and cloudy sky, with the text “Love means never having to say you’re sorry – Erich Legal, Love Story”. Juxtaposing the tagline of the popular 1970 melodrama with the image of the notorious 60s counterculture cult leader and serial killer generated both emotional and volatile responses from viewers. One evening at the building’s entrance, Matt Strauss recalls the angered reaction of a middle-aged woman drawing her knife in an agitated state of rage at the sight of Charles Manson. The lady showed ready signs of slashing the banner with her weapon, but was eventually calmed, as Matt assured her that a member of the arts collective would gladly answer any questions she had about the banner’s content if she attended the exhibition’s opening – thus redirecting her wrath.

In September 2010, the New York-based artist Garth Weiser produced a new painting as the banner for his solo exhibition. Starting with a blank square of white vinyl, Weiser rendered in water-soluble media a new work his highly graphic practice of geometric abstraction. Originally designed as a time-based piece that would erode from wind and precipitation, the blue acrylic paint remained steadfast, not bleeding into the white areas or disintegrating as Weiser anticipated. Thus the banner now remains a lasting piece from Weiser’s show, accompanying the his two other works exploring temporal effects.

In the following group exhibition, Which Witch is Which? and/or Summertime, artist Tamar Halpern created two original works using the exhibition banner as a template – producing one for the gallery floor and the other, titled See No Evil, for its usual spot at the building’s exterior. Resisting strict formal categorizations, Halpern presented the banner as a sculptural art object. For both works, Halpern printed a black and white image onto the banners’ surface, leaving a border of blank white vinyl instead of covering the whole area. This gesture plays against the banner’s parameters, asserting the work’s pictorial value while calling attention to the banner’s physical presence, material and form. The placement of Untitled on the gallery floor re-iterated this experience as viewers were allowed to walk across the work, as image and material exchanged roles.

Loosely constructed around ways in which humor informs art, the group exhibition Time Wounds All Heels presents the banner as an original artwork in a piece by Adam McEwen. Currently on view, McEwen’s banner enlarges publicly what was once a much more private, virtual form of exchange –a text message. In a practice that focuses heavily on society’s perception of human progress, this work emerges from McEwen’s collection of text messages sent from friends, as he refigures them into framed works on paper – or in this case, in a work on vinyl. Untitled Text Msg (Vicodin), an inkjet print on vinyl, displays a reproduced image of a private caller’s text to McEwan’s cell phone: “Hey happy new year. Do u know anyone I can buy vicodin from?”. This work, along with others from the text message series, upsets the banal and the familiar by thrusting it into a context with an unaccustomed degree of public exposure – i.e. the highly trafficked, municipal route of Manchester Boulevard.

The transformation of White Flag Project’s banner into an art object is traced along a natural line of collaboration between the curatorial and the art practice. No longer a means to merely advertise exhibitions, the banner is now property of several artists’ bodies of work. Whether facing the busy thoroughfare on the building’s exterior or within the gallery space, the banner has become absorbed as a signature fixture of White Flag Projects’ programming.

Time Wounds All Heels is open through Saturday, February 26, 2011. For more information about this exhibition and other upcoming programs and events at White Flag, please visit www.whiteflagprojects.org.

Destroy All Monsters Opens Saturday 9/19, 7-10 PM

Formed at a house party in 1973, Destroy All Monsters was originally equal parts The Stooges, Albert Ayler, Sun Ra, Velvet Underground, and Sci-Fi B-movie shtick. The band’s music was accompanied by artwork, performances and films, as well as a self-titled zine of drawings, prints, and collages inspired by sci-fi movies, underground music, and iconic elements of 1960s counterculture as filtered through to the collective’s industrial Midwestern hometown of Detroit, Michigan. In 1995, the original collective of Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, and Jim Shaw reunited, and have been in a lot of shows since then, including the 2002 Whitney Biennial, and Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967 at the MCA Chicago.

Destroy All Monsters: Hungry for Death opens Saturday, September 19 from 7 to 10 PM, at White Flag Projects. We’re going to have a public conversation with curators James Hoff and Cary Loren that Sunday afternoon, September 20 at 2 PM.

In 1976 Mike Kelley wrote about DAM for Destroy All Monsters Magazine:

WHAT DESTROY ALL MONSTERS MEANS TO ME

The first point to make is: Destroy All Monsters is not a band. Our main intention is to be engaged in an activity that provides an instantaneous and powerful cleansing noise. We are not interested in making music. A one-to-one relationship is set up, whereby each action is answered by a growling response, like that produced by poking an animal with a stick, or crossing a threshold and setting off an alarm. Once in motion, this response can go on regardless of the actions of the initiator. To produce something, like a sound, and then have it mature enough to keep going without your assistance causes a pleasant sensation – one of creation. Destroy All Monsters is therapeutic. Destroy All Monsters can be a sedative, a pleasantly gurgling muzak to file the rough edges off, an emotion-deadening machine repetition setting up a rhythm for you to live more easily by. Destroy All Monsters can be electro-shock therapy to wake you up when you slip into a coma. It can blow away the cloud with speed and volume and then move away into a rarified atmosphere where each hum in an inaudible mess becomes more clear and an inaudible mess in itself. Yes, Destroy All Monsters does all this, and more. It’s good American physical work to do something over and over again, factory-style. It makes you sweat the poisons out of your system. It’s hard to push a button and have to sit there and listen to it. You can have a nervous breakdown being an air-traffic controller, having the responsibility of choosing which button to push on the drum box. Destroy All Monsters is a hard way of life. It’s a backwards battle toward a cliff that goes down into chaos and silence. But, it’s a rare treat to be involved in the Destroy All Monsters scene. It’s so esoteric, or so you think. Really, it’s easy, just like staying alive. Lastly, Destroy All Monsters is a call for a new therapeutic popular music. I’m sure, by now, everyone realizes the importance of popularization, of mass-production, of the easing of the lives of as many people as possible. Why not mass produce the Destroy All Monsters achievement? Everyone should pump out Monstrous, destructive Destroy All Monsters black noise. If everyone let their aggressions voice themselves in such sound there 1) wouldn’t be any need for popular entertainment of any kind, and 2) wouldn’t be anything – just an existence of total comfort. I told you so. Let us show you too.