On a broiling afternoon at Washington High School, a crowd of people stood around and watched a very slow, deliberate car accident. Three beige Chrysler minivans, perched on a pile of slowly inflating blue air mattresses, raised their boxy rear-ends to the sun. By the time the chorus of laboring fans had done their work, the vans were resting on their front bumpers, like three rotund synchronized swimmers diving out of a plushy blue fountain. I can’t say that sublimity abounded, but it was present and pervasive, like the smell of the thing at the back of the fridge that you still can’t find even though you’ve thrown away everything.
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I’m going to be a jerk and position this piece as the Oregon response to Cai Guo-Qiang’s 2008 flying exploding car installation, I Want to Believe, in which a series of identical cars were suspended from the roof of a Guggenheim gallery with neon explosions emanating from them as they appeared to flip in stop-motion, as though excerpted from the middle of an action movie. The cars in Lido are non-identical, as are the air mattresses, but the menace of the car as a thing that would just as soon crush you and blow you up as take you to the store for groceries is as undeniable as it is invisible. A car that is not positioned parallel to the ground is an inherently strange object, and while the vans in Lido are not going to snap their incredibly expensive Guggenheim cables and come crashing to the ground, you really hope that they have their parking brakes on, and that Sugarmann won’t bump one of them too hard as he scrambles among the bulging, wobbling mattresses to release the bulky vehicles from their cushiony stress positions.

The Oregon-ness of this piece cannot be attributed to its do-it-yourself cost-effectiveness alone. The creative use of camping gear, which somehow has avoided remark in everything written about the work so far, despite the ubiquitous display of costly outdoor lifestyle paraphernalia as a touchstone of Northwestern identity construction that far outweighs the social (and even monetary) value of many Portlanders’ cars, is also only part of the picture. I am uncompelled by this work as a reference to the hubris of the American auto industry; the “nosedive” metaphor is a bit banal, although things that are supposed to move themselves being laboriously moved by many tiny exterior engines is undeniably pretty funny.

What I really like about this piece, however, is the problem that is proposed, and the resulting solution. How do you half-tip some minivans, and keep them half-tipped? At the performance, the artist remarked on the expense and difficulty of righting a car that has fallen on its top or side, and it became clear that this piece is as much an engineering challenge as anything else; I also had a very interesting conversation with another attendee about artists who have been grievously injured or killed by their projects. Sugarmann is looking forward to the later stages of the performance, when he can stop being careful and really fuck some shit up. This is how we do it here, people, take note.

(Photography by Jamie Marie Waelchli)

The story of the Cardiff Giant, a colossal “petrified man” unearthed from a fake archeological site in upstate New York in 1869, is a phenomenal object lesson for cultural production, and David Eckard’s ©ardiff performance makes the most of that potential. Rolling up on intentional and incidental audiences around town this week, Eckard uses this theme to expound on the value of wonder and mythmaking from a magnificently crafted traveling podium/snake-oil wagon/museum-quality display case for a (genuine?) Historical Artifact of Mystery!

Storytelling can be a tough sell to art audiences; notwithstanding the idolatry that Ira Glass is met with in any liberal intellectual enclave, sophisticated people who have been steeped in irony and postmodern detachment shrink from anything that resembles “reenactment,” as if Mickey Mouse had come up to them at Disneyworld and tried to hug them with sweaty, fake-furry mouse arms in sweltering Orlando heat. Actually, they love Mickey Mouse, because he is ironic, but history as a lived experience is something they cannot countenance. Eckard is no Ben Franklin impersonator, bellowing historical dialogue in the first person at disaffected high school field trips to Historic Philadelphia, but the specter of cheesiness lurks; the artist is aware of it, and it makes him strangely vulnerable and likeable.

On Thursday night, the TBA opening crowd at Washington High School was in full effect. The giant bouncy castle throbbed gently against the night sky, and every art hipster in Portland was crowded into the beer garden, yelling and checking each other out. David Eckard set up shop in an ill-lit part of the field, near enough to the beer garden to be dimly perceived through the hurricane fencing, and to be almost inaudible over the din of frenzied networking. He was not miced, nor did he use one of the outlandish, oversized megaphones that feature prominently in his earlier work. This was apparently an intentional choice to make his audience come closer and hang upon his lips, but it was a risky move for a rather unpolished, unprojecting and manifestly nervous performer. His get-up was outstanding (the man has build skills like whoa), but it was touch-and-go for a while whether he could channel the magnetic bravado and bluster of P. T. Barnum and the other hucksters involved in his tale, as he lost his place in the script several times and shuffled papers and props around to disguise his confusion.

Soon, however, the momentum of the story took over, and his somewhat amphibious approach to the narrative (neither immersed nor removed, alternately brash and bashful) became more endearing than embarrassing. It also didn’t hurt that there was a mystery box (or rather, a series of inset mystery boxes, which unfolded as the plot thickened) built into the podium — a trick that he openly acknowledged as a lure to bolster his somewhat lackluster oratory skills. His monologue was peppered with similar admissions, reveals and anachronisms, but he was genuinely and rightly fascinated with his subject, and teased out a lot of interesting conclusions about the role of evidence, display, media, intellectual property and popular imagination in creating art and other sensational hoaxes. He revealed that an ancestor of his was a master cabinetmaker who built the stage for P. T. Barnum’s replica of the fake giant, implicitly linking his own box-building practice with a family history of turning bits of grit into pearls, oyster-style. This deeply personal touch accompanied the emergence of the artifact, and though his concluding remarks veered a little cheesy again (the beauty of wonder and fiction, etc.), the work as a whole was compelling, courageous, and certainly food for thought.

My parting thought as I left the scene was whether his artifact and ancestral connection were indeed genuine, or in fact a third (fourth? I lost count) inset fiction; it would be a truly masterful piece of theater if he had led us all by the nose to a thing he had made up out of whole cloth. I would doubt it, however; the reflexive insecurity of the post-modern creative makes the outright, bald-faced lies of their similarly bewhiskered predecessors an impressive, impossible dream. And today’s audiences are too smart to be taken in by a chunk of gypsum… right?

It’s a life-long fantasy of mine — and maybe this is true of many creative people — to find a group of like-minded artists that could I band together with to form an experimental collective, living solely for our art. The Rude Mech’s Method Gun explores the dynamics of one such group through the story of five intensely devoted actors who join forces under the tutelage of their fiery mentor, Stella Burden. Burden is purportedly drawn from an obscure acting guru who taught in the 1960s and ’70s. However, she could also be the fictionalized dark side of renown method acting instructor Stella Adler. The ambiguity surrounding Burden’s origins reflects the production’s persistent blurring of life and stage.

Stella Burden pushes her students via an unorthodox doctrine she calls “The Approach,” where even minor roles become fraught with tension and rehearsals go on for years. The Method Gun examines what happens after Burden abandons her pupils. In her absence, her students grapple on through the final months of their nine-years-in-the-making production of A Street Car Named Desire. They continue looking to Burden as a Christ-like figure while they move forward with rehearsing the exercises she imparted, such as lining up for crying practice while struggling to contain their nagging inner turmoil. Burden’s students perpetually question the value of their work and mourn their inability to return to normal lives. They struggle with the complicated feelings they have for each other and the pressured disappointments they feel in their careers.

The performance’s sharp emotions and biting regrets are relieved through hypnotic timing and fanciful amusement. One character suddenly reveals himself as a captivating dancer while tangling up in a roll of tape. In another sequence, a balloon surprise makes for a delightfully transcendent moment.

At its core, The Method Gun provokes a personal reflection of one’s own mentors and the value and or costs of their influence on our lives.

Rude Mechs – The Method Gun
Friday, September 9th, 2011, 8:30pm to 10pm
Saturday, September 10th, 2011, 8:30pm to 10pm
Sunday, September 11th, 2011, 8:30pm to 10pm
Monday, September 12th, 2011, 6:30pm to 8pm
Tuesday, September 13th, 2011, 6:30pm to 8pm
@ Imago Theatre (17 SE 8th Ave., Portland, OR 97214)
$20 Members / $25 General / All Ages

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.

In this video, João Ruas and Andrew Hem draw from their rich cultural backgrounds to create a painting that seems to group together three widely different individuals with varying cores.

Song: Working For A Nuclear Free City – “Black Rivers”

Australian artist Rena Littleson‘s latest self-portrait series puts her in situations and postures occupied by the self-conscious, the martyred, the shamed, the belligerent, and the confused. It’s not stated overtly whether these images are actually a reflection of her mind-state at any given time or not, but the drawings, though excellently rendered and realistically grey-scaled, hint towards some enticing darkness embedded within her character (which sometimes manifests through a love for Justin Beiber?). Possibly.

More can be seen on her website.

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.”

If you’ve ever been to a metal show, you’ll know that they’re funny. Simultaneously really cheesy and really hardcore, metal dudes are quite frequently just nice guys that revel in the irony of it all. You can’t constantly be wearing shirts with upside-down crosses and heavy ass phrases and mean it all of the time. (Note: We are definitely not including those from the second wave of the Nordic black metal scene in these generalizations.)

If you don’t believe my statements about metal dudes, though, perhaps these hella heavy metal quilts by Ben Venom will convince you. In his statement of work, he says:

“I’m interested in juxtaposing traditional handmade crafts with one of the more extreme musical genres, Heavy Metal. My work can be described as a collision of Iron Maiden Metal ballads with the outrageous stage antics of Ozzy Osbourne. Serious, yet attempting to take on a B movie Horror film style where even the beasts of Metal need a warm blanket to sleep with. The question remains… Can I play with madness?”

Let’s keep in mind these quilts aren’t a one-time creation with little thought put into them. Venom not only needs to craft the blankets, but he needs to attain the materials, which probably involves hours of sifting through thrift store piles to find heaps of Slayer, Def Leppard, and AC/DC discards. Then, after fighting the arduous mental battle to justify that art is greater than the sadness of the few individuals offended that he is tearing apart t-shirt classics, Venom repurposes the shirts into cozy creations. Sure, the blankets are centered around calaveras, wolves, and other stereotypically metal shit, but come on, they’re blankets. You definitely get the idea that Venom’s probably not that serious most of the time… which is just really metal of him.

Don’t Wake Me Lucifer! / 83″ x 95″ / 2010

Am I Demon? / 41” x 51” / 2010

Listen to Heavy Metal While You Sleep! / 73” x 99” / 2010

White Magic / 21” x 21” / 2010

Raised by Wolves / 19” x 19” / 2011