FULL TBA FESTIVAL 2011 COVERAGE

On Tuesday night, I was trespassed from, or more accurately (and more irritatingly) shooed out of a TBA art installation for overinteracting. I had made two previous visits to Ohad Meromi’s Rehearsal Sculpture, Act II: Consumption on the previous Friday, the space was closed, but the day after that, I went in with some friends and was pleasantly surprised by the various beautiful objects we found there. The room was packed with hand-painted crates of American Spirit cigarettes, a pile of paintings of a single egg on Samsonite, painted feathers, floppy foam cowboy hats in a variety of sizes, a dress-up closet with fringed costumes, generic green plastic ashtrays, a projected animation of a spinning assemblage, and a series of brightly-colored hoops, frames, slatted screens and other stage-ware that smacked of El Lissitsky’s Constructivist exhibition design.
Gorgeous! Engaging! Thought-provoking! Finally, a TBA installation I could not feel ambivalent about. The American Spirit is moved by cultural consumption; viewers were originally intended to smoke while enacting dramas of cowboys and Indians in an environment of community participation. We were apparently supposed to enact scenes from the artist’s Stage Exercises for Smokers and Non-Smokers; if such a script was present, I didn’t find it, so I assumed the performance we were supposed to enact would be of our own devising, as inspired by the environment we found ourselves in. I was so enthralled by the loveliness of the space, the stimulation of the architectural and pop cultural associations, and the sense of infinite possibility, that I almost decided to overlook how politically loaded it was for an Israeli artist to make a work that cheerfully appropriated Native American imagery*.

My friends and I politely arranged some egg paintings into a pinwheel using the ashtrays as supports, and departed.

On Tuesday night, I had survived a number of disappointing performances, my dander was up, and I’d had a whiskey, or maybe two. There was anarchy in my soul, murder on my mind, and I was looking forward to exploring the possibilities this installation seemed to present for a little creative chaos. I wandered into the Meromi exhibition with a friend, and said, “Oh no! They cleaned it all up!” The exhibition attendant responded encouragingly, “Well, go mess it up!” I acquiesced.

I moved some pieces of scenery around, and then we discovered the stereo in the corner. I turned it on, we plugged my friend’s iPod into it, and put on “Stuck in the Moment” by Justin Bieber, which had a surprisingly appropriate tribal-drum-circle beat to it. I put on a fringed costume and started to dance in the middle of the room, as my friend beat on the provided tom-tom drum. Then, just as it was getting good, the party got shut down.

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A PICA employee, who I recognized as a co-volunteer from TBA a few years ago, approached us, and informed us that, “everything in here is art, so be careful.” I remember him saying something like, “you can definitely interact with it, but just be gentle, that’s all we ask,” and “the drum is actually very delicate.” It is hard to convey exactly how prohibitive and condescending the tone of these remarks was by just writing the words that were said, but the message was clear: our behavior was unacceptable; we obviously didn’t understand the significance of these objects and needed to be told by someone “in the know.” It was, in short, a major cockblock. We packed up our performance and left.

It is a depressing experience to be told to have fun and interact, and then be scolded for disrespecting the art. It seems to me that if you find a drum and some drumsticks in an interactive exhibit, it is not untoward to think that you can play the drum. We were not hitting it particularly hard. There were no informative stickers on the drum proclaiming “Handle with Care,” or “For Display Purposes Only,” no ropes or fences, and no apparent rules for how we were supposed to conduct ourselves in the space. As a matter of fact, I’m fairly sure we were doing it right.

From what I’ve read about the installation and the artist’s intention for it, I believe he would have been excited about our participation in his space, and possibly as irritated as we were at this officious interpretation of his work by a gallery attendant. As an artist, I tend to be psyched when people really enter into the spirit of my work; it is inspiring to see what an audience can bring to the table, and the conversations I’ve had with random people about what my work means to them has taught me as much about my practice as anything else I can think of. I also think that good art deserves a responsive audience, and if I like a work, I am going to interrogate it as thoroughly as I can, within the boundaries that the artist has delineated. Whether that means bearding the artist at their opening and peppering them with questions, or politely exploring the rules of an interactive game played between a performance artist and his audience, I am basically a thorn in the side of lazy creative people everywhere. In my view, there’s a reason it’s called art “work.”

I wish I knew how this sad disconnect between the apparent intention of the space and the actual experience I had there arose. I don’t think the intervention of the PICA employee was in line with the artist’s original intent, unless Meromi intended it as a commentary on the constant threat of censorship and Gulag experienced by the Soviet avant-garde. I also doubt that the PICA leadership would have laid down these restrictions either, though who knows? A friend of mine was banned from a museum in New York for three years for getting into a pickup truck that was parked, unlocked and with the windows open, in an “interactive” exhibition there. My reaction to this story was that I would have done the exact same thing, and it puzzles me that art audiences are assumed to be so shy and unimaginative that they would never dream of exploring an unlocked car that was presented as art. “Everything in here is art?” Well, yeah, that’s why I’m playing with it. Do you suppose I would start a dance party in the mall, or go into someone’s bedroom and rearrange their furniture? Perhaps I would, but in those spaces I would consider those actions transgressive, and expect to be accosted by bedroom-owners and mall cops. Are contemporary art audiences supposed to be so astonished by being allowed to interact with art that they will be overtaken by bashfulness, and unable to do more than move a few things around and then leave?

My intuition is that this particular PICA employee has taken it upon himself to protect the art from the teeming hordes of barbaric audience, and to assert his authority, mall-cop style, over the creative work of others. I spoke to others who had had similar run-ins, apparently with the same person; notably one woman who was accosted in Kate Gilmore’s Sudden as a Massacre installation, and told not to step on the clay. In the exhibition in question, there is clay, approximately 5,000 pounds of it, literally all over the floor. She asked him if she was supposed to leave, since there was no place to stand that was not damaging to the work, but he kindly allowed her to stay. She wondered to herself if this interference was, in fact, part of the art, and then asked him, by way of conversation, if he was a volunteer. He responded brusquely, “No, I’m staff!”

Well done, PICA. All TBA was lacking was a petty tyrant, given the power to moderate the viewers’ experience of the work; a wandering Kafkaesque meta-residency adding as much to the tone of the installations there as the crumbling walls and rusty pipes of Washington High School. I wish for Meromi’s sake that I could do better justice to his piece, maybe I can go back again when that other artist is not performing there. If only he had a posted schedule, like the rest of them.

* This would be a footnote, if the internet had footnotes. But, come on, you can’t reference Soviet avant-garde theater and expect to avoid a Marxist critique, right? America is to Native America as Israel is to ________. I am still not sure what to make of the TBA website’s description of the installation as “primitivist,” or Meromi’s comment in an interview on Artforum.com that the American Spirit logo is a “sort of a suppressed primitivist figure.” What does Gauguin have to do with all this? What sort of Rousseauian Arcadia are we supposed to be discovering here? Primitivism is a product of a colonial mindset, and it is strange to me that the artist casually points out the way that Native American tribes have had to create cartoonish, marketable versions of their indigenous culture in order to survive, as if to say, “Isn’t that funny?” and then just walks away from the subject. No, actually, it’s not funny, and now it’s the elephant in the room.

– Eleanor Ray

FULL TBA FESTIVAL 2011 COVERAGE

Here’s a disclaimer before I get started. I auditioned for the installation component of this show back in July and didn’t get in. Not that I have any hard feelings — the audition itself was a fascinating experience. I’ve been a huge fan of zoe | juniper ever since I saw The Devil You Know Is Better Than The Devil You Don’t at the 2007 TBA Festival. Attending the audition was great just to see a bit of the inner-workings of a zoe | juniper show.

At TBA 2011′s A Crack In Everything, the audience was invited to walk through the installation prior to the performance. First, we were required to cover our shoes with paper booties, which was good because the floor in the installation seemed sticky. Once inside the installation, there was complete and total immersion into the zoe | juniper world, which was dark, bizarre, stylized, vile and beautiful. The closest thing I can think of to compare it to would be entering the unfathomable reality of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle.

After entering the installation, the audience lined up against either side of the walls while scantily clad dancers with dripping wet porcelain-powdered skin filed by in procession. At the front end, a hairless male dancer sat at a desk violently thrusting a wooden spike up and down in the spaces between his fingers. In the back, a female dancer was partitioned off behind a clear sheet of plastic. She rolled against the plastic wall with one side of her body while holding a red marker in her other hand, tracing the fluidity of her own moving figure onto the transparent wall.

The main stage production mirrored many elements of the installation in both spectacle and tone. At the beginning of the performance, another dancer was also tracing her moving body against a plastic division. I remember when Zoe Scofield introduced this gesture for us to perform for her during the audition; it had hit me then as a gorgeous metaphor for self-exploration and memory.

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At times, performers bit down on long strings of red yarn that sometimes linked two performers together from a distance. At other times, the yarn tied a dancer to unseen points offstage. Occasionally a video projection of a dancer appeared on the stage like a ghostly double to one of the performers — and though I can appreciate the inherent symbolic potential, I found the projected dancers to be distracting from the far more engaging live performers.

The most memorable scene involved Scofield and dancer Raja Kelly sitting in two chairs facing each other, mirroring one another’s bodies while stripping off their clothing. Then they spent a long time intensely staring into each other’s eyes before angrily barking in each other’s faces like a pair of rabid dogs. Simultaneously another performer did a graceful dance on the other side of the stage.

Later in the show, Kelly engaged in a beautiful struggle, manipulating the positions of the other dancers while they fought against his body through a series of shift and complex twists. zoe | juniper’s work offers many such conceptually rich moments. If you were to see one dance performance at TBA, I would not hesitate to recommend A Crack In Everything.

– Jamie Marie Waelchli

FULL TBA FESTIVAL 2011 COVERAGE

Ambiguity is one of the most powerful tools performers are using to draw us into their work. In the case of Japan’s Offsite Dance Project, uncertainty dictated everything the audience did, starting with when we gathered into the Olympic Mills Commerce Center and were unsure of where to look or what the performance was even going to be. The audience was talking and buying drinks when out of the blue everyone started looking up because two dancers, Mika Arashiki and Mari Fukutome, were peering down through a ceiling window in a series of adorably exaggerated poses.

Arashiki and Fukutome appeared and disappeared on upper level stairways, into an elevator, and out into the open air while the audience looked up and down and followed them around the building. All the while the dancers were playfully bopping and kicking to what I can only think to describe as go-go music. They weaved in and out of the audience while throwing paper airplanes, and in a childlike way, even acting like the planes with their bodies.

The audience was then guided south for a couple of blocks to a second location near the Morrison Bridge at Water Avenue. Dancer Yukio Suzuki began a seemingly improvised series of motions with halting tensions rippling through his body. As fortune would have it, a train roared past us and Suzuki masterfully drew the train’s thunderous rumbling and the rhythm of it’s horn into his performance. Suzuki’s dance grew increasingly compelling when he incorporated three large light bulbs which had been inconspicuously laying around on the ground. At first the rawness of Suzuki’s movements indicated this to be a spontaneous and haphazard choice, as if the bulbs were just there to light the show and he’d reached for them on a whim. So I was a bit nervous when he started whipping one around over his head on it’s chord like a lasso, but the intentionality of the bulbs became clear as the lights alternately brightened and dimmed to punctuate his movements.

We were then lead about one block north to a loading dock were Yoko Higashino took the stage in front of a pac-man-meets-the-twilight-zone video backdrop that was projected over the garage doors of the loading dock. The projection became a stage set for a symbolic paranormal world and Higashino, in a distinctive red dress, became a vulnerable character in it. She commenced in a thrilling series of intense robotic movements expertly fused with dramatic audiovisual effects. At one point projected circles appeared to radiate out of her body, in another moment she ran frantically up and down while the hand of a projected clock spun wildly out of control above her. Somehow she managed to pull off a fascinating video illusion that gave the sensation she was running up the wall while her legs cycled above her in the air.

When I heard about Offsite Dance Project I was nervous that the novelty of the concept would dominate the show, but the performances kept getting better and better throughout. By the end it was a truly unique experience that surpassed my assumptions at every turn.

Jamie Marie Waelchli

FULL TBA FESTIVAL 2011 COVERAGE

I had no idea what to expect from Fin de Siècle by Portland composer Sarah Dougher. The show turned out to be unlike anything else I’ve experienced in all of my five years attending the TBA Festival. Dougher’s performance was described in the TBA booklet as combining Leslie Scalapino’s abstract narrative of war, labor, and class struggle with projections and music. That description was spot-on, but for some reason, I was unable to visualize the resulting manifestation: a pianist, a percussionist, two musicians on horns, two on strings, and a five person chorus. This might have been the first time I’ve heard choir music since high school. As a result, I had more church flashbacks during this show than I did during Andrew Dinwiddie’s reenactment of a Jimmy Swaggart sermon!

Images from the uprising in Cairo were projected over the musicians during the performance. I had a hard time synthesizing these photographs with everything else that was happening in the poetry and the music. The auditory aspect of the work was so peaceful, restrained, and melodious that it served as a dissonant contrast to the dark and sharp nature of Scalapino’s writing.

This isn’t to say that I didn’t enjoy the harmonies and poetry of the performance. It was a refreshing change of pace from the rest of TBA, and it rightfully expanded my concept of what the scope of the festival could be. The audience was just as packed for this show as they are for any other TBA event. Everyone seemed enthusiastic about the work, and when the performance ended, there was hearty applause and appreciative energy from all the people around me. Prior to the show, Dougher spoke briefly about some writings related to time-based art. She suggested works that incorporate time make you more present in your being. This sentiment resonated with me throughout the night. Being present seems especially important now because the pace of our lives has changed so dramatically over our lifetime. Some of the technological changes have a way of making us feel disconnected from our existence. I wonder if this might be related to why so many artists are drawn to using new media and incorporating experiences into their work.

– Jamie Marie Waelchli

FULL TBA FESTIVAL 2011 COVERAGE

As of Day 9 of TBA, I’m tentatively awarding Michael Reinsch’s Gallery Walk “Best in Show.” Reinsch’s performance involves him lumbering about the city in a big white box, embodying the construct of the modern white cube gallery. His monstrance, supported by an elaborate harness system and including pockets for crackers, grapes, cheddar and Perrier, features a series of compact, well-curated shows by emerging artists. As he goes, he recites an approximately 40-minute poem he has composed from artists’ statements that were submitted to him, and some which he found online. This diatribe veers wildly from cliché to cliché, occasionally producing gorgeous turns of phrase and moments of insightful nonsense. His reedy, disconnected tone sounds like the inner monologue of a fatigued and hallucinating museum-goer, or a palavering Jenny Holzer feed with a slight hangover. In his own words, as scribbled down haphazardly in my notebook:

“I’m for an art of the… Oh my god, what just happened?!”

“Let’s chastise the feelers! Let’s clarify the mud.”

“Immoral compass, pointing due south.”

“I’m for an art of the 25 ideas that you don’t do because you’re afraid, and you have a long list of excuses why not.”

“It’s a passive aggressive revolution, where we beat around the bush.”

“Let’s overthrow the government, it’s now technically feasible.”

“I eagerly await my insides being on the outside.”

“You would dissolve optically, making beans on the windshield.”

“Lecherous animalism — it’s nicer.”

Reinsch is accompanied at all times by one of a bevy of hip, stylish and attractive gallery attendants (all, like most gallery attendants, artists in their own right), who offer Perrier and interpretive assistance to passersby: “Photography is allowed, but please, no flash.” The micro-shows chosen were excellent, too. I was sorry to miss Nicole Eriko Amagai-Smith’s gorgeous, strange, kinky drawings, but on the day I was there, Katie Dunbar’s It Is, But It is Not the End, with its inadequate and mysterious electrical apparatuses, echoed the larger work’s exploration of sources of power, and the invisibility of “the way things work.” Her oversized electrical plug emerging from Reinsch’s left side made him look like a gigantically mutated Apple product, transforming the larger work, and the artist’s body, into a source or conduit, a disconnected component of an enormous, enigmatical machine.

Gallery Walk creates a sharp, playful parody of the conventions of artistic culture, while proposing a warped, but uncommonly modest and approachable alternative. It provides a statement that rejoices in, rather than conceals, its own irrelevance, and an opening that doesn’t close. Coming from a week of slogging through galleries and performances, a couple of which were great, I identified strongly with Reinsch’s exhaustion when he said, “I can really feel the weight of a room sometimes, oh! It’s really heavy.” It was a relief to see someone constructing a well-rounded and mature disillusionment, carried off with panache, which also incorporates genuine creativity and love for his subject.

– Eleanor Ray

FULL TBA FESTIVAL COVERAGE

Andrew Dinwiddie has meticulously recreated a live sermon by the evangelist preacher Jimmy Swaggart, recorded in Van Buren, Arkansas, circa 1971. In a remarkably fluent echo of the original (peppered with emphatic interjections, “Huh!”) Dinwiddie inhabits the persona of the Pentecostal firebrand as he spits and fulminates up and down a tented catwalk, his mic cord wrapping itself around and around the tent poles and occasionally pulling him up short, like a leashed pit bull.

It’s an impressive performance of a powerful piece of oratory, and it is hard to decide whether the original sermon or its reincarnation as a performance piece is more compelling. Obviously, Swaggart’s sermon, which rails against “homasexiality,” miniskirts and The Beatles, and draws a causal link between premarital sex and fatal car accidents, is not likely to convert anyone from a TBA crowd — but his rhetoric is informed by some interesting and sympathetic insights into the problems facing the young Boomer Generation, and his quips and arguments follow each other as regularly and unstoppably as the shipping containers on a freight train. The sermon also clearly marks a crossroads in the evolution of American Conservative Evangelical culture; Swaggart recognizes the power and danger in American popular culture (rock n’ roll music and television in particular) to conservative Christian values, and the importance of producing an alternative mass culture that uses some of the same tools for Godly ends. In the years that followed Swaggart, Billy Graham and others established charismatic television ministries helped mobilize and consolidate the Religious Right and brought us, among other delightful things, Ronald Reagan.

Get Mad at Sin! shows us how it was done. The assembled crowd on either side of the catwalk looked more like a Fashion Week audience than any sort of religious assembly (with PICA Executive Director Victoria Frey as Anna Wintour), and chattered gaily as Dinwiddie took the stage. For the first five minutes or so, ironic laughter followed many of the performers’ pronouncements, but after a while, we were mostly laughing with him. The actor’s earnestness was remarkable; he looked right into my eyes as he proclaimed some particularly titillating condemnation of the perilous miniskirt, and I found myself blushing up to my ears and readjusting my dress self-consciously. It wasn’t exactly Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, and I didn’t find myself either shaking and taking my clothes off (which, as Swaggart/Dinwiddie proclaimed with obvious fascination, rock n’ roll makes people do sometimes) or shaking and speaking in tongues (the Pentecostal equivalent), but it was effective as art, in that it was also effective as preaching.

TBA in recent years has featured other recreations of specific performances (notably that guy who did a Beyonce concert verbatim a couple years ago), and I’m going to unscientifically claim that this is a trend in contemporary performance art that’s just popping up all over the place. While (as I mentioned in my review of David Eckard’s ©ardiff), contemporary art audiences really can’t get behind anything that smacks of historical reenactment (too fantastical and theater-geeky), the recreation of historical recordings has become a failsafe way to make an authentic cultural experience in an age when everything is streaming in HD. Wouldn’t it be cool if we could go back in time and experience X or Y momentous cultural event, that history has confirmed was, in fact, momentous — and not just a total waste of time like most of the new performances people make? Why risk being bored and irritated by mediocre new work, when you could check out the original at the library or dial it up on YouTube ahead of time? Not that either Beyonce’s tour video or Swaggart’s sermon were necessarily of great historical importance in and of themselves; the Swaggart record is out of print, and was not among the 489 records by that preacher that are available on eBay as of right now (although someone I talked to at the show recognized the rock n’ roll rant from a sample in a techno song, c. 2000, so perhaps it has had more impact than one would think?). Both, however, are evidence of “rock star” performers at the height of their powers, now available to you in the reinterpreted flesh. Whether it makes you feel sexy, or righteous, or cool, a good act is hard to find, and its power cannot be denied.

– Eleanor Ray