sfweekly.com | News | Space, the Final Frontier

As part of its spring 2003 "property" issue, the quarterly arts magazine Cabinet had bought half an acre in the middle of nowhere on eBay and dubbed it "Cabinetlandia." The editors offered readers 3-square-foot plots of the undevelopable desert at a penny apiece in a bizarre avant-garde statement of the illogic of ownership and the very idea of property. When Passmore proposed the equally bizarre idea of building a library on the site — every town needs a library, after all – the editors approved, doubting he'd ever actually go through with it.

Eighteen months later, what began as a single goof-off project has ripened into Rebar, a loosely organized collective based in San Francisco. The group's silly-but-serious endeavors tackle issues of space and land use with an odd mix of artistry, activism, performance, industrial design, and a heavy dose of ironically detached criticism. Its members are too issue-oriented to be pranksters, too cryptic to be activists, and too hilarious to be taken very seriously as artists, but they've managed to tap into a growing awareness worldwide about how space determines our daily reality, and what the public might do to regain control of its surroundings.