"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.
I write about art (and design) for a number of publications, and make art about writing (and reading) and language.
My piece on design, "Designing the Good Life," for Oregon Humanities' Summer Issue: Look, is online at the O.Hm. website.
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.
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
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.
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.
This review was initially published by Portland Monthly's Culturephile.
Portlanders who frequent visual arts events likely know Paul Middendorf, director of Gallery HOMELAND, as a tireless curator, artist, and administrator who has been bringing the work of Portland artists to the public eye for a number of years now—first at the Modern Zoo and Disjecta, and more recently through HOMELAND’S Scratching the Surface festival. It is wonderful that he has an exhibition at our region’s premier independent art venue just as his most ambitious project, East West Berlin, is taking off. East West Berlin is a collaboration with NY gallery Dam Stuhltrager, exhibiting artists from Portland and New York in Berlin.
For “The Dregs” at the Art Gym at Marylhurst University, Middendorf does as an artist what he does best as a curator/administrator, he collaborates…here with Brandy Cochrane. Made from the items that were left behind after an estate sale, “The Dregs,” we are told, is meant to “honor the story” of the family to which the objects belonged. Specifically, the story concerns the family’s grown son who continued to live in the family home with his mother when his father died, and alone after she too passed away.
Some material is presented as-is in consciously selected groups. There are two large wall collages—one laying bare a number of facts about the family from their papers and another made up of the colorful paper ephemera one tends to accumulate: greeting cards, ledgers, and notebooks—a double-sided display of a multitude of travel-sized soaps and assorted brushes (“Clean/Dirty”), and a small back room painted a yellow that I suspect was sourced from the home in question, filled with odd items displayed as if in a particularly good thrift store.
The rest of the works are crafted of found object as in the lively assortment of oversized papier-mache spheres like the cleverly-titled, satin-beribboned globe called “Don’t Take Larry” which sounds ominous or odd until one finds, in a Welch Ade box in the yellow room, a cardboard spool of satin ribbon on which Elsie has written in pen, “Don’t Take Larry” by which she meant, I’m sure, “Don’t take, Larry.” (Commas matter!) Falling as well into this category are the bedsprings embellished with the word “Crestfallen” in purple neon letters.
It would take an extraordinarily sensitive touch to allow the deceased to speak for themselves through their things. Where “Dregs” trips is when the artists speak on their behalf. One worries that whereas the artists mean “The Dregs” to be a work of narrative anthropology, it ends up feeling closer to the voyeuristic fiction of a “reality” television show, editing the lives of real people—their names, addresses, places of employment are revealed—into the authors’ version of reality. Their neighbors and relatives may see this show, one can’t help thinking.
One of the most beautiful pieces in the show is an arm chair upholstered with a tangle of octopus-like tentacles in shades of pastel pink and peach reaching up from the bottom of the chair, roiling across the seat, and curling up the back. “Beloved Mother” is crafted of the mother’s undergarments, the grasping mother holding on to her “Beloved Son” (the title of a trio of found portraits nearby of a beautiful young man) or comment on the grown man who can’t leave mother. Does it “honor” the family to draw this conclusion? Even trickier is the piece across the room, the embroidered drawings of two sleeping men on a stained Beautyrest mattress. They create three collages of the silhouette of a man with an erection (one cut from a male beefcake photo), and include in the yellow room a cardboard box of gay-porn videotapes. Airing a family’s dirty laundry in more ways than one—we have to consider the possibility that a man of the son’s generation (he was in his 70s when he died) might well not have been out to all who knew him—the artists veer toward exploitative, tabloid territory.
Remind me, if you know me, as I teeter at death’s threshold, to set the bloody house on fire.
Which brings me to the installation in the Art Gym’s second gallery, “The Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things” by Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen. This too is a narrative told through objects, and it is intensely personal. The few charred objects (the neck of a guitar, a computer, a stack of notebooks) that are embedded in or hugging the walls of the space were salvaged after their home burned. These objects have previously appeared in the duo’s book project about the fire, Integrating a Burning House.
The center of “The Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things” is a video poem nestled in a box of boxes (a massive chipboard crate half full of cardboard storage boxes), an apt representation of the limbo in which the artists live as their home is rebuilt. Their poem richly addresses the dawning of the realization that the path taken to be circular (going home again) is in fact a curve approaching, but never reaching its asymptote. “A lot is different,” the artists say in the introduction to their book.
I puzzled over the relationship of the charred objects to the walls. Why does the plaster and paint seem to melt over a stack of newsprint, while the postcard and paintbrush appear to have been blown outward from the center embedding themselves cleanly like shrapnel? Why does the computer sit at a remove? And yet the whole, bound around the poem, is poignant and real.
It’s a subtle art to mine autobiography while avoiding the maudlin. In less capable hands their work around the burning house would fall to pieces like a bad teenage diary entry. Something about the way Gray and Paulsen treat the material, in a manner that is matter of fact yet deeply considered, makes it work.
This review initially appeared on Portland Monthly's Culturephile.
Like a pairing of a work by Sol Lewitt with one by Matthew Barney, a Mies van der Rohe building with one by Frank Gehry, John Cage with Richard Wagner, the White Bird program of two Portland-based dance companies, Tere Mathern Dance and Minh Tran & Company at the World Forestry Center is a study in contrasts. Mathern‘s work, “PIVOT,” is the meeting of intellectual and physical exploration while Tran’s “KISS” is narrative, emotional spectacle.
The two pieces are so different, in fact, that it’s right that there is a palate cleanser between them. And “Twine,” the piece Mathern and Tran perform together is a perfect bridge between the two. I’d not seen the two dance together before, but they have, and are so well matched it’s a shame that they won’t dance together again (Tran has said this is his last performance). In the dance’s most riveting sequence Mathern and Tran symbiotically curl around one another, unwind and intertwine again, making, for some time, a single, shapeshifting form. They do not clutch or hold but wrap and unwrap as connected but independent figures.
Pivot is both the point around which something turns and the act of turning. Beginning slowly, moving like spokes of a wheel around a hub, Mathern’s six dancers moved in trios and duos through rigorous sequences with dispassionate purpose that made for some extraordinarily beautiful contemporary dance. In unison and complimentary variation, the grounded dancers move into and out of lunge and turn with extension of arm and leg drawing invisible lines, creating angled forms. Mathern cleverly plays with juxtapositions of pace between groupings sharing the stage and creates moments of tension as a lean becomes a cantilever becomes a fall. In one remarkable sequence four dancers gather in a corner, execute a series of independent cross-floor movements in close quarters, then return to the corner, reset and scroll through the actions again as time pivots back and forth on the moment of now. The score by Tim DuRoche, performed live by viola, saxophone, electronics, and drums, is at times melodic, loose, swinging, and insistent.
The six dancers of PIVOT share the stage with a giant sculpture by David Eckard that inscribes a circle on the square of this “theater in the round.” Four truss-like metal arms high overhead extend from a center hub to the edge of the dance space. From each is suspended (at varying heights) a length or three of canvas strap with a metal cage plumb bob suspended from it. Periodically, the dancers rotate the arms of the sculpture and/or slide the straps to the center or edge of the stage. Could the choreography have been more circumscribed by the sculpture than it was, its areas of operation more clearly delineated by the position of each pendulum? This might have strengthened the relationship between movement and sculpture.
Like the moment when one has finished shuffling a deck of cards together and 52 become one, it is not until the dancers of Minh Tran and Company strut onto the stage and strike poses in ripped t-shirts with words like “rice queen,” “fem,” and “top,” that the many episodes of “KISS” cohere into the personal narrative/identity piece that it is.
Early on, Tran’s capable dancers engage in duet after duet, scrolling through the many variations that a couple can enact: embrace, clutch, move in parallel, challenge one another. The Margretta Hansen and Suzanne Chi duet crackles with an erotic charge and angular power concluding with one blowing the other off lightly as one would a dandelion. Then there are episodes depicting isolation in ways that are at time benevolent—the blindfolded dancer is guided, prevented from leaving the stage by the rest of the company—at times ominous as when another dancer moves on the ground as the company circles him. Heather Perkins’ score sustains a tension and forward momentum that prods and girds the choreography.
The end of the strike-a-pose episode, when the dancers take off first one slashed t-shirt then another down to skin, sums up the nature of the piece’s tendency toward over-the-topness—e.g. colored strobe lights and a full-floor video projection of red satin sheets and skin—which culminates in Tran’s final entrance in a remarkable leather cage corset and bent wire tutu…one flutter of his lovely outstretched arms and Tran is tellingly Odette. Presumably just at the moment that Tran is free, he dances his swan song.
Full disclosure: Composer Tim DuRoche is my partner.
This review initially appeared on Portland Monthly's Culturephile.
Kudos to Archer Gallery Director Blake Shell for curating a group show magnetic enough to draw most of Portland’s plugged-in arts worlders over the river and through the freeway interchanges to the gallery’s Vancouver, WA location. The works in VANTAGE dealt with the altering, questioning, or redefining of perspective or space. This meant bending reality both sonically, as with Greg Pond’s “That Intricate Never” and visually as with Isaac Layman’s photos and Avantika Bawa’s installation.
Layman makes hyperreal photos of everyday objects. Shooting objects from subtly different vantage points and depths of focus, Layman then digitally layers them together to create a single, vivid, oversized image of a kitchen untensil drawer or the back of an old stereo. If Daniel Peabody of Elizabeth Leach Gallery hadn’t pointed out the minute distortions of angle on “Stereo,” (Layman’s work is part of a group show at Leach next month, I believe Daniel said), I’m not sure if I could have identified what was odd about the photos other than their unusual crispness and feeling of being somehow more-than. In a way he’s Andreas Gursky writ small, borrowing method and mundane subject, but focused in on a micro-level, object rather than landscape. By compositing the photos, Layman is actually able to load a finished work with more visual information than one photo could ever contain. In this way, like Stephen Slappe’s work with video (see below) Layman toys with the viewer’s expectations of the medium.
I’ve seen Victoria Haven’s photos of angular geometric forms and their shadows at PDX Contemporary Art. The forms fascinate me because they capture the ongoing fascination with and ubiquity of crystal-like and triangle-based forms in design and because they’re created by running string ’round points or nails hammered into a wall recalling both Naum Gabo and 70s craftsy string sailboats nailed into redwood boards, but have a sketch-like looseness making it seem as if the nails fell where they may. I love their drawing-like nature and their subtle implication of dimensionality.
I walked in on Stephen Slappe’s video, “Bear Witness,” near the end of its running time, the camera panning across a man’s mouth open wide and the serene scene of a cemetery framed in a horizontal rectangle as if viewed through a doorway or a slot. The panning was a device I’d seen him use before: the camera slowly and repeatedly panning 360 degrees. Watched from the beginning, the figure, a male in a hoodie is first pictured standing still. As the world turns (ha!) he appears closer and closer to the camera slowly enacting the arm stretch and gaping mouth of a yawn. As he gets closer to the viewer, the figure seems to detach from the background and float free until the open mouth consumes the field of vision on each swing of the camera with what could be a yawn or a scream. Either is an entirely appropriate and inappropriate response to the pastoral and tragic setting of the cemetery, making the detachment multivariate—physically and emotionally. But what’s more interesting is the work’s comment on the “realness” of the medium. If we have not yet lost our illusion that the camera can be trusted to bear witness, Slappe asks us to reconsider.
Like a wallpiece in a Karim Rashid boutique or the disco great-great-granddaughter of a Hans Arp relief, Golan Levin’s animation appeared to be a futuristic, pulsing grey blobject hovering in a white field. Levin has digitally mapped points on Merce Cunningham’s fingers and knuckle joints during a performance to create this “field of simulated energy.” Cunningham, himself, extensively used a 3-D motion creation software program called Life Forms (now called Dance Forms) as a choreographic tool. If for Cunningham the software’s representation of the body was a midpoint on the way to movement, for Levin the representation is the end, body in abstraction carried to extreme in isolation. I’d be interested to see a choreographer take this animation as a score to create a piece for ten dancers.
Avantika Bawa’s corner installation “Points (for Brunelleschi)” deals most directly with vantage point or perspective, a fact she shouts out in her title with a nod to the man credited with the discovery of linear perspective. Her installation features a pink sawhorse and simple geometric wall drawings that comment on their surroundings including the oblique angle the corner of the floor creates. What interests me about Bawa’s work is that she’s found a way, using shape and color, to move forward Robert Irwin’s minimalist project of making installation in response to the interior space when one might have thought Irwin had exhausted that line of inquiry. It’s not unrelated to work by Portland artist Damien Gilley whose wall drawings, if busier and more illustrative, seem to come from a similar place. Bawa has begun a residency at Milepost 5. I look forward to seeing what she does there.
As always with a sound piece that is responsive to its environment, who could know what Greg Pond’s “That Intricate Never” was really up to when the room was as crowded and loud as it was at the opening. Its form reminded me of a good old fashioned coastal foghorn, an octagonal box with a speaker on each face connected to two mic’s on the ground and a box (in which the guts of the machine must have been) resting on a white fuzzy rabbit fur (nice touch, as were the braided cords cascading from the speaker box). We’re told via the show notes that the sculpture modifies the room’s sounds depending on their wavelength and volume using open source software. I appreciate that Shell included this sound piece to expand the notion of our vantage point to include other than the sense of sight. I wonder whether it might not have been better placed in the center of the room. And of course, I’ll have to return to truly hear it.
