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.

ARTICLE CONTINUED BELOW

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

There were no bouncy castles to be found where I grew up, so I’ve been waiting all my life to finally get in on some inflatable jump room action. Naturally, when I arrived at the launch of TBA’s 2011 festival at Washington High School, I beelined to get to the head of the queue for Oscar’s Delirium Tremens, TBA’s humongous inflatable forced-air elephant, (and a likely mascot for this year’s festival.) Oscar was developed by Patrick J. Rock of Rocksbox Fine Art in North Portland. On TBA’s site, Oscar is described as evoking “all the ecstasy, absurdity, and ensuing nausea in the life of a modern artist.” I was one of the first to slide through Oscar’s clever anus hatch, into the vast interactive bounce chamber of his belly. It’s hard not to get carried away while encapsulated in a vibrant pink jump dome, so I bounced up and down until I was as nauseous and dizzy as a recent art school graduate opening their first statement from Sallie Mae.

Once my stomach chilled, and after a scare caused by the fake feet under one of the stalls in the unisex bathroom, I was ready to explore ON SIGHT Visual Art. In room 102, artist Michel Groisman organized playing cards that have images of different body parts. Players sat in circles and helped make each other into momentary body sculptures. Groisman’s piece illustrates one of the festival’s core strengths: its ability to induce interaction with both the art the participants.

I was captivated by Claire Fontaine’s matchstick map of the United States in room 204, made out of over 10,000 matchsticks. In addition to being a sculptural marvel, there’s an undeniable and provoking tension in its fragility as a symbol for the impending complications of our country’s future. Then there’s also the inherent suspense of standing next to something with the perceived potential to burst in flames at any moment. Rumor has it that the original plan was to light the map on fire. Ambiguity about the final incarnation of the map is adding to its mystique.

In room 202, Kate Gilmore’s Sudden As A Massacre involves a video loop of five woman, all in identical floral dress, dismantling an enormous five thousand pound cube of wet clay. The performance occurred one month ago in the same room where the work is now being shown, so visitors are also able to peruse the physical evidence of the performance. You can see marks on the wall where they flung the debris while they toiled, along with their white strappy sandals, now ensconced within the hardened clay. It’s clear that this was a grueling endeavor. No matter at which point you arrive in the video loop, the ladies perpetually grow evermore exhausted as they claw, fling, moan and pant, up until the anticlimactic ending.

The opening’s festivities concluded with a high octane performance by Portland’s Bounce music favorite Beyondadoubt. Once her aggressive booty originals got rolling, the crowd went crazy. A gorgeous hard-bodied gentleman took the stage and went to work on a rhinestone covered chair, wearing an elaborate feathered headdress and assless chaps. The music throbbed and swelled, and everybody bumped to the auditory jolts. By the time the show concluded, diverse booties of all sizes and genders were twerking all over the place.

- Jamie Waelchli

For the seventh installment of Scion’s Art Tour, Matt Goldman — former Senior Art Director for Shepard Fairey’s Studio Number One — has put together a hilariously brilliant video that takes wacky inflatable arm men (that look like ice pops) and sets them to Spanish language dance jams in a way that gives actual personalities to each vocal segment of the song.

About the video, Goldman states:

“Air Dancers was conceived on the first day of a college 3D animation course I would eventually drop a week later. At the time, I was also enrolled in a video class and both were such a heavy load that they couldn’t possibly taken simultaneously. Forced to choose, I shelved the 3D class and Air Dancers with it only to bring it back 8 years later, predictably, as a live-action video. Both parodying and critiquing a (somewhat) bygone pre-recession era of over-produced, low concept music videos, this was a great opportunity to create something fun that glorified limited resources. Embracing the childhood notion that whenever you’re not watching inanimate objects they take on a life of their own, this video is an exploration of what these civic fixtures must all be doing on the holidays when every tire shop, mechanic, and linen outlet is closed and observing.”

Below, Gluekit creates Pop Art, which examines brightly colored inanimate objects, held by hands with brightly colored fingernails, set against brightly colored backdrops, to give a saccharine sweet look at just how still a human hand can hold an object.

As stated in their artist statement:

“Concentrating on things that “pop!” in a variety of ways– our video highlights acts of presentation and interaction using a simplified vocabulary, repetition and bright colors. Aesthetically somewhere between instructional video and infomercial, this work follows our interest in clichés by employing a range of popular video tricks. We were also interested creating a “still life” that moves… ever so slightly.”

Hello psychedelic neon world! Those adjectives have certainly been used ad nauseam recently to describe art trends, but Maya Hayuk and Jen Stark have combined their hyper-colored, geometrically-driven pieces to create a multi-disciplinary show — one which explores subtle differences within a symmetrical framework. Despite following similar thematic structures, Stark’s paper and wood sculptures seem to burst outwards while Hayuk’s acrylic and tempera paintings seem to encourage reflection on their inner details.

Visit the Show & Tell Gallery in Toronto (1161 Dundas St. West) now through June 12th, 2011.

maya hayuk

jen stark

Sometimes I’m a little bit wary about supporting the Kickstarter projects of various artists; all too often, people feel entitled to your money while giving little in return, and even less to the community at large. A new project by photographer Tyler Kohlhoff and Justin Gorman is fine by me, though; their Kickstarter effort offers prints, clothing, and publications which seem like an even trade for a few extra bucks… but more importantly, their project has a foreseeable benefit for the greater good.

Kohlhoff and Gorman’s upcoming collaboration, Exhibit B: Lines Of Work, celebrates the joys of real, honest work, by focusing on all aspects of an average workday. Those of you who have been the SE industrial district have probably seen Rinella Produce‘s distinctive building. If you’ve ever wondered what happens there on a day-to-day basis, the first of these case studies will use photo essays and videos to capture the processes and behind-the-scenes functions of running a business such as Rinella’s.

The duo describes the piece on Rinella Produce and the ones to follow, saying:

Exhibit B features a number of case studies, the first of which is Rinella Produce, a venerable, family run produce distribution company located in South East Portland. Our focus with this study was on the owner David Rinella, and the pride he takes in employing 65 people in an age where his work is increasingly disappearing. The photo stories and video provide an honest look into the worker and the processes surrounding that work. The project will be rounded out by case studies including the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) and with their road crews, Columbia River Boat Pilots and a day in the life of a butcher.

Profits from the Kickstarter will go towards print costs, large-format exhibition photographs, and the exhibit installation, to take place at Wieden + Kennedy (24 NW 13th Avenue, Portland, OR) on June 2nd, 2011. The duo says, “We will be making a run of 2000, 12 page, magazine size publications featuring photo essays, typography, info-graphics and a guest essay by artist and writer Victor Moldanado. The publication will be take-aways at the exhibition.”

Kohlhoff and Gorman have already met their $2,000 goal, but if you would like to donate to the Kickstarter, it ends on May 14th, at 2:59am.

Tonight, at Pioneer Place Mall in Portland, from 6:00pm to 9:00pm, the galleries on the top floor will be having a very exciting official opening. Below, Recess Gallery’s event, to take place at The Settlement. It is the last in a ongoing series entitled The Synthesis Series, where rotating pairs of partners create and evolve works and themes over the course of time.

Hannah Piper Burns and Abraham Ingle – Fake Collaboration

A 4-channel video work that results in a “mash-up” of their previous video pieces. By re-cutting the interviews and conversations together, they’ve created a “fake collaboration”: a conversation between Allison, Gabe, Abe, and Hannah that never happened in real life but that discusses relationships, collaborations, difficulties, etc. Layers of artifice will be multiple.

Jason King and Delphine Bedient – Oral Culture

Oral Culture consists of a series of spoken word performances, occurring periodically throughout the evening. Five microphones, scattered throughout the gallery on stands, serve as stations for their performers’ recitations. Following the previous performance and sound installation, they address man’s relationship to his devices, the activity of listening, and memory.

Chloe Womack and Tori Abernathy – Where Are You?

Responding to the issues of translation central to the previous works, they’ve turned the attention to the space itself, or more particularly, to the space that is not there*, the people that aren’t there, the sound that aren’t there, the flickering lights that aren’t there. All the absence that renders spectator’s environment ‘liminal’ and the outside, abhorrent. There is an analog answering machine in the space. There is clean, vinyl prompts around the city asking viewers where they are. The prompts ask them to respond by calling a number. In Our space, their responses will be heard (along with all that urban chitter-chatter and hustle-bustle) in real time as they calls are received; thus, the content of the work will be activated by those who are not there.

Shawn Patrick Higgins and Jamalieh Haley – Conversation Data Project

An interactive sculpture presents conversational directives to the viewers. The viewers will follow sequential instructions that ultimately return them to the sculpture and allow them to document their own experience, which will then become part of the sculpture. The sculpture is a carryover from the antithesis show, stringing ribbon from floor to ceiling, essentially creating a forest to walk through on which text from conversations will be projected. The viewer will have to navigate the sculpture to access the cue cards, and, ultimately, become part of the sculpture, both in their presence and in their
documentation.

Cathy Cleaver – CakeHole

By removing the domestic act of baking from its traditional place in the home and using the cake as a brick-like building material, I shift my role into something ambiguous. I am questioning constructs of gender roles, issues of obsessive behaviors, futility and failure. While Delaney Allen’s role in this project is officially that of cinematographer, I feel like it was a collaborative process. I told Delaney my basic idea for the piece but then gave him complete control over filming. During the editing process, I realized how much of his creative eye could be seen in the footage. In this way we are collaborators.

Dasha Shleyeva and Gabe Flores – Manyoufactory

Dasha Shleyeva and Gabe Flores are responding to the industrial workspace of the initial project between Shawn Patrick Higgins and Jason King and the intimacy of Higgins’ and Shleyeva’s Heart Hive. Together, Shleyeva and Flores created a semi-industrial architectural space based on interviews they conducted on each other. Each tempered glass panel, reminiscent of a microscopic slide, reveals a different level of the human process in regards to their art process. The surrounding painted shadows are reflective of the temporal time-based nature of understanding and nods to the impossibility of
ever isolating the variable enough to speak in a truly knowing voice, even if it’s one’s own.