No No Deluxe

This is a word cloud visualization of "No No Deluxe or Change Radio, a poem for O." Last Sunday, July 18 was Spare Room Collective's Portland Polyvocal Poetry. As one of the pieces for the event, Washington-based poet and publisher Crag Hill inscribed the word POETRY on a map of Portland and invited five other poets to walk a letter and write a poem (in an hour and a half) based on the words we saw on our walk. I was the "O." Thank you for visualization to Jonathan Feinberg and IBM.

A larger version.

Shattering the Glass Wall

"Hey, you got your peanut butter on my chocolate."
"You got your chocolate in my peanut butter."
Narrator: Two great tastes that taste great together. [sing] Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.

It's the Reese's Peanut Butter cup of curation: art strategies in the craft museum, craft in the art museum. My piece, Shattering the Glass Wall, is in July issue of art ltd.

Hello

I write about art (and design) for a number of publications, and make art about writing (and reading) and language.

The Mine King I/O

THE MINE KING I/O

A practice gets a frame. A framing gets a desk. On the desk there is a catalogue, with a hundred more to follow.

The Mining is the practice, the digging down through rich vein of idea (and, not incidentally, language) captured in text, page to dog-eared page (repeat) through to bibliography to jump into another text in the vein.

The Min(e)ing, making mine of mined, refers to repeated readings of beloved writings (gathering books like family), assimilating ideas into my own constellation of ideas, and my practice of “reading” texts, which is to say making-poem-of-found-text via an intuitive paring for sound.

The Mind King [deprecated] was the intermediate step (suggested by sound) from min(e)ing to The Mine King.

The Mine King is both the project and the Mine King. The Mine King is an archive of books, essays, PDFs, handwritten notes, recordings. The Mine King is a set of publications that address the mining and the mined. The Mine King is text constructed from text.

The Mine King I/O is the first public outing of The Mine King. At Gallery HOMELAND from June 11-July 5, 2010, for the exhibition Doing It To It, I'm going to be in residence more or less during gallery hours and do the work of The Mine King while writing catalogue after catalogue to document the The Mine King I/O. I will make one for you. One aspect of The Mine King is its online incarnation (it approximates a card catalogue for project).

Designing the Good Life

My piece on design, "Designing the Good Life," for Oregon Humanities' Summer Issue: Look, is online at the O.Hm. website.

Review of Portland2010 for Drain

My review of Portland2010 Biennial is in the latest issue of the online arts journal Drain—Journal of Contemporary Art and Culture. Even though the journal's editorial board is far flung, it's heart is in Atlanta. Lucky for Portland, co-editor Avantika Bawa recently moved here from there which explains the handful of Portland contributions to the REWIND issue including an essay by Micah Malone and a work by Seth Nehil. If you're in town, there's a launch party for the issue on Saturday night at the Templeton Building. See you there.

OPEN

OPEN is a collaborative, co-written book, a real-time, writing-in-public experiment that was written by more than two dozen contributors (some anonymous) during the 2010 Open Engagement Conference: Making Things. Making Things Better. Making Things Worse. in Portland, Oregon, co-sponsored by Portland State University’s Art and Social Practice MFA concentration, Pacific Northwest College of Art, and Portland Community College.

We set out to address the concerns, practices, and issues around socially engaged art, but equally important was the idea of a performative, inclusive thinking-in-public that this project represents. We threw the door to participation wide open, taking all comers.

We wrote for four days at all hours of the day and night in a single online document from May 14 through 18, with two drop-in sessions at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art's (PICA's) Resource Room where we had WiFi and a number of computers available. On PiratePad.net we were able to chat with each other in a sidebar while we wrote and edited and responded to one another's salvos in the main editing window. (This chat is documented in the chapter entitled The Back Channel.) Friends checked in from all over the country (New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles), and we met new contributors from Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, Toronto, Stockholm, Sweden and Limerick, Ireland.

We invited contributions of statements by conference presenters and participants, responses to questions posed in the initial conference prospectus, responses to existing texts, conversations, essays, interviews, statements, project reports, and a bibliography of related documents and books for further reading

The result is OPEN. Some contributions are anonymous. Some contributions stretch the premise to the breaking point and beyond. There are manifestos, queries, interviews, critiques, essays, and even a poem.

Catalog: Quadratic Logogram of Almost Everything

Just picked up this catalog for The Quadratic Logogram of Almost Everything (February 4 to March 20, 2010) curated by Derek Franklin at the Half/Dozen Gallery. Quadratic featured work by David Corbett, Alex Felton, Kristan Kennedy, and Sterling Lawrence. Sam Korman, director of Carhole Gallery, and I wrote essays. Thanks to gallery director, Tim Mahan and Derek for the opportunity.

Here is an excerpt:

Here we are again. We're the people, the Greek demos that with kratos (power) becomes the democracy to which curator Derek Franklin refers in the subtitle of The Quadratic Logogram of Almost Everything: The Democracy of the Contemporary Art Object. Ozymandian art or spectacle requires spectacular concentration of power and capital to the detriment of the people—it's no wonder that wonders of the world are built at times when power structures are pyramid shaped. In contrast, the pieces in Quadratic, by refusing scale and embracing humble means are subtly subversive in their stance vis a vis art production. (This is not to say artist and curator take the Lloyd Dobler stance on production.i These objects are, after all, for sale and the artists are represented.) What's more important is that they have the subversive potential to help us recreate our sense of “we,” who we are and what we can be or what Castoriadis calls the “social imaginary.”

While many of their contemporaries pursue a literal form of intimacy in the interests of recreating “we” by creating situations of direct interaction (in a relational aesthetics/social practice vein), the artists of The Quadratic Logogram are not situation makers but object makers. And yet these works, at human scale and with a sense of the ordinary, of the familiar, open the door for a new intimacy between we who are involved in the primary art transaction: artist and viewer (and as well for viewer and viewer). Poet, Fluxus artist and delightfully lucid everyman-theorist Dick Higgins borrows from Hans-Georg Gadamer to talk about the viewer merging his or her (Higgins insists on writing “s/her.” It's maddening.) horizon with that of the artist via the work.ii While Higgins is talking about the viewer's experience specifically of the avant-garde, the point is universal: that when the outer reaches of the viewer's experience and understanding encounter the outer reaches of the artist's (if he or she is not a traditionalist but is exploring his or her horizons) the viewer cannot help but be altered, challenged, refreshed. Or as Nicolas Bourriaud puts it, at an exhibition, “there is the possibility of an immediate discussion, in both senses of the term. I see and perceive, I comment, and I evolve in a unique space and time. Art is the place that produces a specific sociability.”iii

Review: Dark: A Show to Winter

MATT GREEN Nilbog, 2010 Cedar 33 x 16 x 15 inches. image courtesy the artist and Fourteen30 Contemporary.

This review initially appeared on ultra.

As unpredictable and welcome as the weather of winter 09/10, Dark: A Show to Winter at Fourteen30 Contemporary, opened 2010 with a bang as a strong group show with an international scope. Rather than fighting fire with fire (or darkness with blunt darkness for darkness' sake), curators The Rainbow Family have put together a subtly conceived panoply of visual manifestations of darknesses from the serene to the disturbing.

Let's start, in this international show, by recognizing an artist from the home team, recent PNCA MFA Matt Green, whose burnt readymade "Nilbog" is the mascot of the show and its mute witness. The black gaping mouth of this charred knee-high figure issues a silent Munchian scream, its eyes are dark hollows, but the ash striations on the blackened cedar make the figure unexpectedly beautiful. Green created the piece by purchasing a chainsaw sculpture in rural Oregon and throwing the piece on a bonfire, making this in some ways a document of a performance, "a show to winter," indeed.

SVEN STUCKENSCHMIDT Lake, 2009 Acrylic, lamp Dimensions variable. image courtesy the artist and Fourteen30 Contemporary.

Among its many rewards, Dark offered a number of works that read as portals one might fall into and through. Arnold Kemp's matte black canvas with its tantalizing hint at unviewable underpainting beckons to something beyond/behind the canvas. Sven Stuckenschmidt's (Berlin) jagged "Lake" of gleaming black acrylic strips onto which a moon's reflection is cast by a utilitarian lamp is simply magical/magically simple, its lakeness making it a penetrable surface one could step right into. Molly Vidor's black painting "Odile," active as it is with alternately matte and glass brushstroke, paradoxically prevents entrance, holding you on its surface (looking at light plays on its textures), even as it's cleverly hung low as to imply an enterable void. Thomas Moecker's "Curtain" is a large reductive landscape of grey triangle forms repeating as trees against a washed out red horizon line. Because its features repeat without landmark, because of its size (114"x226"), and because it hangs unstretched, "Curtain" envelopes the viewer to the point it threatens to swallow one up. Meanwhile Alex Hubbard (Brooklyn) creates three portals one might choose not to enter in his video "The Paranoid Phase of Nautical Twilight, 1-3." In this theatrical rendition of a mundane act, the artist uses a chainsaw to cut a hole in a wall from behind. Lit from behind, the act is rendered as drawing with light...it's extraordinarily beautiful, but the implications of the chainsaw/the unseen intruder make the piece as threatening as you care to be paranoid. More on Hubbard in a moment.

(foreground) SEBASTIAN GOEGEL Figur, 2007 12 x 6 x 6 inches Bronze, plywood AP (background) THOMAS MOECKER Curtain 2009 114 x 226 inches Acrylic on canvas. image courtesy the artist and Fourteen30 Contemporary.

So what is Sebastian Goegel's (Leipzig) "Figur" beckoning to in the fog of "Curtain?" More than the sum of its parts, one of the best things about Dark is the way it's hung. "Figur" is a roughly executed, hoary little figure who beckons with a bony finger toward "Curtain." When you stand with your back facing "Curtain," "Figur" both issues his invitation to you and takes the place left blank for him on the wall behind between two untitled pieces—the show's most overtly (a creepy painting of an almost-skull) and most abstractly dark (a white-coated lattice wire X)—by Frank Haines (Brooklyn). Too, the show's most disturbing piece with all of its implied violence, Jo Nigoghossian's untitled sculpture of a woman's wig stiffened with concrete is situated before Alicia Love McDaid's "Tierra de Sueno," making for a darker reading of this photo of a naked woman jumping on a bed while a man lies reading impassively.

Alex Hubbard's video piece, "Weekend Pass," is a playful respite from the dark, a brilliant take on the kind of mischief one might get up to spending long hours in the studio. As the camera continuously circles on a sometimes visible track, the artist conducts various "I-wonder-what-would-happen..." experiments like piling wax slabs on an electric burner and letting them melt/catch fire, drilling a hole in a rubber boot full of something, smashing a hunk of clay with a sledgehammer. "Weekend Pass" and "The Paranoid Phase..." exist at this great nexus where in-studio conceptual process piece with all of its history as a strategy and its deadpan execution (only here the artist is only at the margins of the work) intersects with the trajectory of experimental abstract narrative film. PNCA grad and native Oregonian now living in Brooklyn, Hubbard currently and unsurprisingly has work in the Whitney Biennial.

Dark sets a high bar for group shows, Portland. Open through the 13th.

Check out OPENWIDEpdx where you can find more images from the opening of Dark, their Show of the Month.

Review: Domestic Wild

This review intially appeared on Portland Monthly's Culturephile.

At the root of it, Domestic/Wild at Performanceworks Northwest this past weekend hinged on the question asked by artist Karin Bolender in one of her monologues, “What distinguishes the wild outside the door from that within or that within ourselves?” Ten women (dancers, artist, performers) addressed this and related issues via movement, movement video, and monologue in a performance “devised” by Emily Stone.

Thematic threads loosely tangled around introducing wildness into a domestic situation (and mining the wildness just under the calm domestic surface) and the domestic entering the wild (dancemaking beyond the studio walls). One moment, three women in white danced sequences that were both gentle and frantic, borrowing movement from the domestic life. The next, white-clad dancers doing what looked like involuntary movement pulled by unseen forces jerked and spun into and out of the door (a recurring motif) of a shed in a video piece or did mini-dances in kitchens that felt feral. Shot throughout were a sequence of videos shot in the out of doors in which dancers explored grass, mud, bramble, and water and explored animal-like movement (once wearing Muppet-like animal-ish costumes). One captivating segment found dancers in house dresses dancing in the headlights of a car on a country road. Three dancers on the dimly lit stage mimicked the movements, melancholy shadows.

A claustrophobic video sequence found Stone crouched on a kitchen counter, yanking on the edge of the countertop, bouncing with a jackhammer insistence. Here and elsewhere she’s exploring a whole new vocabulary of movement, movement that is one part machine and one part animal, movement that is accompanied by vocalized sound that might be a whir and a click, might be a throaty growl. And this is the heart of Stone’s project, of which one might guess that Domestic/Wild is a single moment. Like that of Woolly Mammoth Comes to Dinner (Kathleen Keogh and Rikki Rothenberg represented for WMCTD here), Stone’s movement is often unexpected and unexpectedly beautiful, particularly given that it occasionally comes with slapstick overtones.

Providing a gentle throughline, the delicious score, improvised by Jonathan Sielaff (bass clarinet) and Matt Carlson (synthesizer) was both pensive and playful with subtle synth-generated texture.

At the beginning of the piece, there was a pile of crumpled brown wrapping paper on the back wall and floor, a hanging rack of white clothes, and tangles of branches overhead. At the end, the floor was strewn with a pile of laundry, ping pong balls, dirt, and hay, and the back wall smeared with mud.

During intermission with the many children who attended the matinee performance messing around on the stage, Rikki Rothenberg danced a flailing dance in a rectangle marked off by masking tape on the floor. Kestrel Gates taped the rectangle off smaller and smaller as she danced. A subplot of the performance was not only the domestic, but life with small children (four of the performers are mothers of small children). By addressing in her performance practice the boxing in that can happen when one is a mother of small children, Stone, with one daughter in attendance and another child on the way (she ended the performance by stripping to her underwear from the bear costume she wore for much of the show) demonstrates she’s clearly transcended it. Lucky for us.