I haven't updated about art I've seen in a while, but a couple of the shows I saw last night made a strong enough impression that I feel like remembering them here.
Andrea Morales' exhibition "Public Play" at Practice Gallery spoke to me as an investigation of the complex social dynamics involved in dating--specifically, how we perform personas within varying social contexts. The premise of the exhibition was Morales having organised a consecutive series of dates through OKCupid and Craigslist, to be carried out within the gallery. Documentation of her correspondences with her dates were plastered on the walls for viewers to read when they weren't acting as voyeuristic observers of the activities of the dates themselves. The dates/ exhibition were all documented throughout the night, and the plan is for the edited footage to be exhibited at Practice for the remainder of the month.
There is so much about the concept and the execution of this piece that I love. I love that the artist is directing and composing these interactions for the express purpose of manifesting this exhibition, while leaving room for risk, chance, play, and vulnerability (to her collaborator and her audience). I love that live performance, the documentation leading up to the performance, and the documentation of the performance itself are all integral aspects of the piece. I love the fact that, even though you are in the room with the artist and her dates, observing their interaction and reading their correspondence, there are elements of their conversations that do remain private/ intimate/ just between them. Sure, you can see their body language, maybe even catch snippets of dialogue, but you remain at a distance, a member of the crowd--you can't see and hear every element of the exchanges that build the date they are on.
I only had the chance to see one of the dates--the third of the night. When I walked in, the space was illuminated by red lights. There was music playing, and I could see the artist and her date sitting on a bench behind parted curtains. They were both hunched over a camera, presumably shuffling through images. In speaking with one of the members of Practice, I gleaned that this date had actually been photographing the earlier dates, so they were looking through the images he had taken. I wanted to make it back to the final date of the evening, which was supposed to be with a female partner, and verge on more sexually charged content, but I missed it unfortunately.
I was sorry to miss the rest of "Public Play," but I was so happy I made it out to New Boone for "Forever," a collaborative exhibit featuring paintings by my studio-mate Kim Altomare and audio commentary by Anne Pagana. If I had to express my overwhelming impression of the exhibit in one adjective, I would use 'refreshing'--everything about the approach felt like a sigh of relief followed by a breath of fresh air. First and foremost, the experience of seeing Kim's paintings hung and lit within the context of a gallery space was thrilling for me--so much luster and detail that is hard to recognize when they're leaning against a studio wall came suddenly alive. It felt like the paintings themselves had been energized/ taken on a new life, and I was so filled with joy for them! The curatorial detailing--the incorporation of a friendship bracelet-making station [they'd run out of string by the time I got there :( ]; the integration of vibrant pom poms, shimmery sequins, tinsel, streamers, and googly eyes; the coordinated vignettes built out of objects contributed by Kim and Anne's artist friends, placed to keep the paintings company; the hand-articulated signage and decorated CD-players with headphones whose color matched the vibrancy carried throughout--all contributed to the overarching spirit of friendship and collaboration coursing throughout the show. Walking into the space, every aspect seems to squeal, "Hi! We're so glad you're here! Come be our friend! Stay a while! Look and listen and contemplate with us!" And how can you refuse that?
Which isn't to say that the content of the work presented is necessarily light or superficial--Kim's paintings incorporate symbolic imagery that alludes to death and violence, and Anne's commentary is deeply meditative. There is an audio track corresponding to each painting. I didn't listen to all of them, but those I did made it clear to me that Anne's spoken words access avenues of thought that are quite serious, and speak to a genuine desire for mutual understanding within the insular context of a friendship that exists within the broader, but still insular context of art-making. There is a sensitivity and consideration for the differences and commonalities in hers and Kim's experiences with and approaches to art and life. There is frustration and confusion, but also serenity to the acknowledgment that not everything can necessarily be fully understood between two people. I felt honored to be invited to listen to these meditations, and though they were focused on a personal relationship, I felt included because the concepts being considered speak to interpersonal relationships in general, and art-making practices more broadly. I got the sense that, though these are complex and difficult territories to navigate, underlying currents of hope, togetherness, and fun can carry us through.
Looking at the show through a feminist lens, I was struck by how it sits within the context of art history, which is so frequently dominated by men celebrating, commenting on, responding to, competing with each other, usually in a very egotistical way that has a lot to do with proving who has the most "genius". The mode of collaboration in "Forever" is definitely in dialogue with that tradition, but from a much more authentic, sincere, down-to-earth perspective. Celebrating each other does not have to be about proving anything--it can be about inviting everyone into this dynamic of mutual consideration and dialogue, of approaching things in a genuine way, together.
I think I responded to strongly to both of these exhibits because I like what they indicate about where art practice and art exhibition is heading. There is a sense of breaking things down and exploring them from new angles that I find so empowering and exciting. It makes me feel a sense of freedom, like there is license to explore new territories and just try things to see where they go. As there should be. No more musty, tired art shows ever please!
Showing posts with label Engagement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Engagement. Show all posts
Saturday, March 7, 2015
Monday, October 1, 2012
Great Things I've Seen Lately
I've had some recent sojourns to NYC, which involved some experiences worth keeping track of.
I visited the Brooklyn Museum for a job interview. I didn't get the job, but I did see an incredible Keith Haring retrospective while I was there. I was particularly in awe of his experimental video work (surprise surprise), which I'd never seen before or known existed in the first place. The one that kept me mesmerized was called Machines--it's 7 minutes of a close-up on a mouth wearing red lipstick (ehem...). The mouth is speaking lines from a text, but the sounds and movements of the mouth are disjointed. The words spoken are over-enunciated, and the mouth pauses to pucker, smile, and grimace throughout the speech. The meaning of the words is lost to the image of the mouth speaking them--the physicality of speech is emphasized in a way that causes one to lose track of what is even being spoken. There is a complex multiplicity of focus, with a great deal of repetition and rhythm (fluctuation between things being in- and out- of sync, the same motions or words being pronounced over and over in succession before the sentence moves forward). I watched it loop at least twice, and was completely overwhelmed by feelings of dislocation/ alienation/ the urge to understand, but being unable to do so, and losing track of what I was even trying to understand. I was frustrated and captivated. It seemed to me that there was a duality between the language of hearing and the language of seeing, and they were being held in an amazing tension. When I stopped trying to make sense of the words he was speaking, I focused more on the saturation of the color, his sweat, his blemishes, his teeth. I was constantly deciding where to focus, changing my focus over time, going back and forth, catering to multiple focuses at once. The fact that it was an identifiably male mouth with an identifiably male voice wearing the red lipstick was an extra layer for me. The words of the statement that stood out/ were repeated most were phrases that included "things," "machines," and "she said." The complexity of a male voice giving an account of a female voice, while wearing red lipstick was pretty joyous.
There was a whole other room of videos. One of them was called Tribute to Gloria Vanderbilt--it's only 3 minutes, and it's just Keith dancing in front of the camera and occasionally kissing the lens, with rabid enthusiasm. I loved that he was recording this kind of moment--it was full of joy, and felt welcoming, but also weirdly voyeuristic (to be watching)/ exhibitionistic (of him to have recorded), and confrontational in the way he kisses the lens--it isn't soft, it's pretty violent/ aggressive.
The Brooklyn Museum is also the permanent home of The Dinner Party, so I had the chance to actually confront it in person. For me, the most powerful aspect of the project is the "Herstory Gallery" that accompanies the table. It's a very impressive documentation of the role of women throughout history, incorporating examples of significant female figures. The narrative exists on walls that you can stroll among, reading the accounts. The whole point of The Dinner Party as a project is to "bring women to the table of history," and I think the Gallery is the more impressive mechanism. It's written like a timeline/ text book, with pictures and quotations, and it's clear how much research went into its existence. It successfully incorporates and asserts the importance of figures that have gone ignored within the iteration of history that was constructed to exclude or reduce the incorporation of women. It offers an alternative--a more expansive, inclusive potential model, which is undeniably an important thing.
The problem I have with the piece is the way in which the table reduces women to their vaginas, and the way the entire project uses that reduction to imply an essential "female experience,"complete with an overarching set of "female values" that exist in opposition to the "male values" that rule our society. I'm not arguing that patriarchy is not a very real thing--it absolutely is. A binary concept of gender has been polarizing people into opposing roles based on their anatomy for centuries, and the ideal attributes of one role have certainly been valued over the ideal attributes of the other for just as long. It's annoying and frustrating and it's perpetuated constantly by companies and governments and individuals who are too insecure to entertain the idea that everyone would be a whole lot happier if a set of unattainable expectations weren't imposed upon them at birth. I don't enjoy an approach that further perpetuates the notion of "inherent female values" as opposed to "inherent male values" because I find it counterproductive to the goal of everyone existing as mutually respected individual human beings, with differences and similarities that all serve to make life interesting and educational and surprising. I don't enjoy being told that I am inherently a certain way by virtue of the fact that I was born with a particular sort of genitalia. The experiences I have as a result of society's assumptions/ presumptions/ behaviors regarding my body are very real and certainly affect and shape the way I live my life, but that's a problem, and asserting that yes, women are innately this way and that's why we're better is still a part of that problem. *Deep breath...
I ALSO finally saw Sleep No More. My friend Adrienne has been trying to get me to go since she first saw it when it opened in Brookline, MA, and she obsessively attended multiple times a week until she knew the whole cast. After that, she managed to get a job working behind-the-scenes, and stayed involved after the production moved to NYC. She managed to score tickets for us (herself, me, and our friend Emily who was visiting from San Francisco) while I was in town installing my video at BWAC and oh boy do I regret not seeing it when it was in Brookline! Every single experience of Sleep No More is different. It's an interactive performance that unfolds around you as you navigate through the space. Visitors wear white masks that render you anonymous as you observe/experience the action of the cast members. The plot is based loosely on Macbeth, and the scenes repeat three times during the three hours from when the show begins, which means that you have the opportunity to encounter scenarios and discover rooms you didn't notice during the first hour, or that you might witness things multiple times. I'll describe my experience:
We walked into a dimly lit hotel lobby area and checked our coats, where a woman handed us each a playing card [I kept mine and have it in a little shadowbox frame on my wall]. Then we navigated through a series of dark hallways, led only by the flickering light of candles marking the dead-end walls where we needed to turn. Adrienne made Emily and me go first because we'd both never experienced it before. From there, we spilled into what I can only describe as a David Lynch night club. Or maybe a cheerier manifestation of the hotel bar in The Shining. There was a woman in a shiny green dress with perfectly coiffed hair, crooning into a microphone stand on a small stage. Cocktail waitresses in costume mingled through the smokey air, passing out small glasses of absinth. I felt a little edgy, realizing I might not have adequately prepared myself psychologically for what was about to happen, but I felt relieved to be there with Adrienne, who knew these people out of character. And I felt familiar enough with this kind of vibe anyway. I've always wondered what it would be like to wander around inside a David Lynch movie...
Adrienne told us the basics of what was about to happen: one of the slicked gentlemen would announce that people holding aces [the first wave--we among them] were to board the elevator. There, we'd be given our masks, which were not to be taken off for the rest of the night [very Eyes Wide Shut]. She told us to hang back with her in the elevator so that she could bring us to a solid starting point. From there, she felt we should separate so that we could each follow our own journey. The prospect of this made me nervous, but also excited. At the behest of our accordingly coiffed leader, we were shepherded into the elevator, where we dutifully donned our masks. The conductor said scripted things to us--generally, iterating the mask consistency and no talking rules, but also encouraging us to explore. "Fortune favors the bold," he said as he stopped the elevator on the 6th floor. "Everybody off," he told us, moving aside so that one person could exit. Before anyone else got the chance, he closed the doors again and re-started the elevator [Adrienne told us later that he'd let that person out alone on the asylum floor. Not a place I'd liked to have begun, especially alone. A thrilling notion in its dirty-trick cruelty]. When Adrienne squeezed our hands as a signal to exit with her, she led us to the nearest stairwell. We crossed through a graveyard that I made a mental note never to return to alone [which I did later--it was as terrifying as I'd anticipated], and down into a great hall, where a party seemed to be ensuing. This scene introduced us to the full cast of main characters. I was particularly drawn to one erratic character with dark eyeliner and spiky, tousled hair. He seemed to be able to see us while the others ignored the audience. His dancing was more sexually charged than the others' and he seemed to have a manipulative power over the other characters he danced with, particularly another young gentleman. I should probably admit here that I've never read Macbeth, so I was at a slight disadvantage as far as the plot/ character identification layer goes. My only real option was to respond to the way things were being performed, and connect to the narrative that way. Adrienne and Emily left the hall when the party scene shifted, and most of the cast members scattered. Many people left at this time, following particular characters to new locations, but I decided to stay because the eyeliner-wearing fellow was still there, along with one of the female cast members. The lighting in the room changed from bright warm yellow tones to mysterious blue/purple. Their dancing became interpretive and intense. The woman removed what turned out to be a wig, revealing her completely bald head. Her shoulders and neck were mesmerizing. I decided to try to follow her for the rest of the night.
When she exited the room, I and the remaining horde of masked visitors followed her up a winding staircase and down a hallway toward a doorway, where we were ushered into a room. Her eyeliner friend was there, along with another woman. All three of them had that same kind of restless, knowing energy about them. Once everyone was inside, they gathered around a table and we gathered around them. I was struck by how incredibly creepy it was to see more than 50 masked faces crowded together, all watching the behavior of these three people, close enough to touch them. To be one of them was bizarre. It felt very voyeuristic, but there was also an eerie sense of belonging about it, and a freedom to the anonymity [My photography professor liked to drive home this quote about how photography gives us permission to stare. Well, masks do that as well]. What ensued inside that room was what I later described to Emily and Adrienne as "a bloody disco orgy." They both knew what I meant--Adrienne because she'd seen Sleep No More hundreds of times, and Emily because she'd managed to encounter that scene too, in its third incarnation, toward the end of her experience. "Oh good! I was hoping you'd both get to see that scene! It's one of the most important ones," Adrienne gushed. "I saw it within the first 15 minutes," I asserted with a deadpan emphasis on how intense a formative experience that had been.
From there, it's mostly a blur. I lost track of the woman I'd been determined to follow and wandered through various rooms. I found myself in a hotel suite where there was a pregnant woman agonizing and dancing on top of high bureaus with her husband. I entered the master suite and saw the Macbeths quarrel, and found myself back there to see Macbeth return, bloody--Lady Macbeth drew him a bath in the claw foot tub on a platform in the center of the room. I saw her bathe later, on the asylum floor, which was how I knew she was Lady Macbeth. There was a banquet scene back in the great hall, which became a forest of evergreens afterward. I saw a man carrying a door, and was briefly convinced that this was some kind of Hogwarts situation where the staircases moved. Time and space were bizarre, ethereal entities that I lost track of. I felt disoriented in my wandering, but felt comfortable in that sense of dislocation--like that was the point somehow. I got lost and kept coming upon the same people and places. It was extremely surreal. I managed to see several in-between sorts of moments, when the performers were setting up for the next scene (they did so in character, making each action part of the performance). It was strange, but I felt gratified that I was having a meta experience of the production itself, which I appreciated because I found the entire dynamic so fascinating--the requisite trust between the performers and the audience to be coexisting and navigating together; the cyclical nature of everything; the extreme intimacy but simultaneous anonymity/otherness. There were the black-masked attendants strategically scattered to maintain some security for the performers/ offer assistance to the visitors when necessary, but other than that fact, it felt very...nebulous. It was like having gone down the rabbit hole and entered a world that included everything decadent, lavish, covetous, alongside everything ominous, treacherous and terrifying. Which is a captivating tension. I felt completely ambivalent the entire time. Ambivalence is sort of my natural state, but this was a much more intense brand, and it felt right in its ambiguity--appropriate, encouraged even. It was a place that nurtured confusion and reveled in it, and I felt comfortable in a reality whose only concrete truth was the power of mystique.
I had expressed a fear to Adrienne before we went in about getting lost. "How will I know when it's over? How will I find my way out again?" "Oh, you'll know. And it's not like you're going to stumble into a janitor's closet or something," she had laughed. I proved her wrong at one point by pushing open an industrial-looking door behind a curtain, which turned out to be concealing a florescent-lit storage closet. We laughed about that later. "Oh god, you're such an artist! You would reveal the storage closet!" It was around that point that I started to become frustrated, knowing that there were many more floors that I couldn't seem to access, feeling trapped in a spatial loop. I wandered down a hall and walked into another room that felt like I shouldn't have found--it was completely empty and the walls, table, ceiling and floor were painted black. That was when I noticed a black-masked attendant and silently indicated that I needed help. She kindly directed me through a curtain that magically led back into the Lynchian lounge from the beginning. I felt relieved and thirsty and immediately went to the bathroom to splash water on my face and stare at my reflection in the mirror for several minutes. It was nice to be grounded in a place. I'd left my phone in my purse, so I had no idea how long I'd been inside. I asked someone for the time and figured out that I still had 40 minutes to wait until Emily and Adrienne and everyone else came back out. I considered going back in, but decided against it, feeling mentally and physically exhausted enough to just revel in the air conditioning with my glass of water, watching other wayward people slowly trickle out.
It was excellent to hear Emily and Adrienne's accounts of their respective experiences once they were out. They were so completely different from mine! Emily had had a "one-on-one," a hallowed occurrence in which a cast member chooses you and whisks you off to a secluded location. Hers involved entering a wardrobe, where the woman told her a creepy poem about being trapped, and then left her locked inside the wardrobe, unable to go out the way she'd come. She had to discover a secret passage that led her out in a different direction. They were both surprised that they'd never seen me--they'd run into each other a couple times. I told them about my bizarre in-between/ meta experience and neither were surprised, as this seems to be my way. They described places and scenes I hadn't seen, and scenes I'd seen being prepared. It was fun to piece together the plot and the layout of the place based on our subjective journeys, and it was great to hear Adrienne's behind-the-scenes anecdotes and tidbits--she was so thrilled to finally be able to share it with us (I mean, she had been since it opened in Brookline, but it finally meant something to us!).
A singularly unique experience that I'll probably be processing for the rest of my life
I visited the Brooklyn Museum for a job interview. I didn't get the job, but I did see an incredible Keith Haring retrospective while I was there. I was particularly in awe of his experimental video work (surprise surprise), which I'd never seen before or known existed in the first place. The one that kept me mesmerized was called Machines--it's 7 minutes of a close-up on a mouth wearing red lipstick (ehem...). The mouth is speaking lines from a text, but the sounds and movements of the mouth are disjointed. The words spoken are over-enunciated, and the mouth pauses to pucker, smile, and grimace throughout the speech. The meaning of the words is lost to the image of the mouth speaking them--the physicality of speech is emphasized in a way that causes one to lose track of what is even being spoken. There is a complex multiplicity of focus, with a great deal of repetition and rhythm (fluctuation between things being in- and out- of sync, the same motions or words being pronounced over and over in succession before the sentence moves forward). I watched it loop at least twice, and was completely overwhelmed by feelings of dislocation/ alienation/ the urge to understand, but being unable to do so, and losing track of what I was even trying to understand. I was frustrated and captivated. It seemed to me that there was a duality between the language of hearing and the language of seeing, and they were being held in an amazing tension. When I stopped trying to make sense of the words he was speaking, I focused more on the saturation of the color, his sweat, his blemishes, his teeth. I was constantly deciding where to focus, changing my focus over time, going back and forth, catering to multiple focuses at once. The fact that it was an identifiably male mouth with an identifiably male voice wearing the red lipstick was an extra layer for me. The words of the statement that stood out/ were repeated most were phrases that included "things," "machines," and "she said." The complexity of a male voice giving an account of a female voice, while wearing red lipstick was pretty joyous.
There was a whole other room of videos. One of them was called Tribute to Gloria Vanderbilt--it's only 3 minutes, and it's just Keith dancing in front of the camera and occasionally kissing the lens, with rabid enthusiasm. I loved that he was recording this kind of moment--it was full of joy, and felt welcoming, but also weirdly voyeuristic (to be watching)/ exhibitionistic (of him to have recorded), and confrontational in the way he kisses the lens--it isn't soft, it's pretty violent/ aggressive.
The Brooklyn Museum is also the permanent home of The Dinner Party, so I had the chance to actually confront it in person. For me, the most powerful aspect of the project is the "Herstory Gallery" that accompanies the table. It's a very impressive documentation of the role of women throughout history, incorporating examples of significant female figures. The narrative exists on walls that you can stroll among, reading the accounts. The whole point of The Dinner Party as a project is to "bring women to the table of history," and I think the Gallery is the more impressive mechanism. It's written like a timeline/ text book, with pictures and quotations, and it's clear how much research went into its existence. It successfully incorporates and asserts the importance of figures that have gone ignored within the iteration of history that was constructed to exclude or reduce the incorporation of women. It offers an alternative--a more expansive, inclusive potential model, which is undeniably an important thing.
The problem I have with the piece is the way in which the table reduces women to their vaginas, and the way the entire project uses that reduction to imply an essential "female experience,"complete with an overarching set of "female values" that exist in opposition to the "male values" that rule our society. I'm not arguing that patriarchy is not a very real thing--it absolutely is. A binary concept of gender has been polarizing people into opposing roles based on their anatomy for centuries, and the ideal attributes of one role have certainly been valued over the ideal attributes of the other for just as long. It's annoying and frustrating and it's perpetuated constantly by companies and governments and individuals who are too insecure to entertain the idea that everyone would be a whole lot happier if a set of unattainable expectations weren't imposed upon them at birth. I don't enjoy an approach that further perpetuates the notion of "inherent female values" as opposed to "inherent male values" because I find it counterproductive to the goal of everyone existing as mutually respected individual human beings, with differences and similarities that all serve to make life interesting and educational and surprising. I don't enjoy being told that I am inherently a certain way by virtue of the fact that I was born with a particular sort of genitalia. The experiences I have as a result of society's assumptions/ presumptions/ behaviors regarding my body are very real and certainly affect and shape the way I live my life, but that's a problem, and asserting that yes, women are innately this way and that's why we're better is still a part of that problem. *Deep breath...
I ALSO finally saw Sleep No More. My friend Adrienne has been trying to get me to go since she first saw it when it opened in Brookline, MA, and she obsessively attended multiple times a week until she knew the whole cast. After that, she managed to get a job working behind-the-scenes, and stayed involved after the production moved to NYC. She managed to score tickets for us (herself, me, and our friend Emily who was visiting from San Francisco) while I was in town installing my video at BWAC and oh boy do I regret not seeing it when it was in Brookline! Every single experience of Sleep No More is different. It's an interactive performance that unfolds around you as you navigate through the space. Visitors wear white masks that render you anonymous as you observe/experience the action of the cast members. The plot is based loosely on Macbeth, and the scenes repeat three times during the three hours from when the show begins, which means that you have the opportunity to encounter scenarios and discover rooms you didn't notice during the first hour, or that you might witness things multiple times. I'll describe my experience:
We walked into a dimly lit hotel lobby area and checked our coats, where a woman handed us each a playing card [I kept mine and have it in a little shadowbox frame on my wall]. Then we navigated through a series of dark hallways, led only by the flickering light of candles marking the dead-end walls where we needed to turn. Adrienne made Emily and me go first because we'd both never experienced it before. From there, we spilled into what I can only describe as a David Lynch night club. Or maybe a cheerier manifestation of the hotel bar in The Shining. There was a woman in a shiny green dress with perfectly coiffed hair, crooning into a microphone stand on a small stage. Cocktail waitresses in costume mingled through the smokey air, passing out small glasses of absinth. I felt a little edgy, realizing I might not have adequately prepared myself psychologically for what was about to happen, but I felt relieved to be there with Adrienne, who knew these people out of character. And I felt familiar enough with this kind of vibe anyway. I've always wondered what it would be like to wander around inside a David Lynch movie...
Adrienne told us the basics of what was about to happen: one of the slicked gentlemen would announce that people holding aces [the first wave--we among them] were to board the elevator. There, we'd be given our masks, which were not to be taken off for the rest of the night [very Eyes Wide Shut]. She told us to hang back with her in the elevator so that she could bring us to a solid starting point. From there, she felt we should separate so that we could each follow our own journey. The prospect of this made me nervous, but also excited. At the behest of our accordingly coiffed leader, we were shepherded into the elevator, where we dutifully donned our masks. The conductor said scripted things to us--generally, iterating the mask consistency and no talking rules, but also encouraging us to explore. "Fortune favors the bold," he said as he stopped the elevator on the 6th floor. "Everybody off," he told us, moving aside so that one person could exit. Before anyone else got the chance, he closed the doors again and re-started the elevator [Adrienne told us later that he'd let that person out alone on the asylum floor. Not a place I'd liked to have begun, especially alone. A thrilling notion in its dirty-trick cruelty]. When Adrienne squeezed our hands as a signal to exit with her, she led us to the nearest stairwell. We crossed through a graveyard that I made a mental note never to return to alone [which I did later--it was as terrifying as I'd anticipated], and down into a great hall, where a party seemed to be ensuing. This scene introduced us to the full cast of main characters. I was particularly drawn to one erratic character with dark eyeliner and spiky, tousled hair. He seemed to be able to see us while the others ignored the audience. His dancing was more sexually charged than the others' and he seemed to have a manipulative power over the other characters he danced with, particularly another young gentleman. I should probably admit here that I've never read Macbeth, so I was at a slight disadvantage as far as the plot/ character identification layer goes. My only real option was to respond to the way things were being performed, and connect to the narrative that way. Adrienne and Emily left the hall when the party scene shifted, and most of the cast members scattered. Many people left at this time, following particular characters to new locations, but I decided to stay because the eyeliner-wearing fellow was still there, along with one of the female cast members. The lighting in the room changed from bright warm yellow tones to mysterious blue/purple. Their dancing became interpretive and intense. The woman removed what turned out to be a wig, revealing her completely bald head. Her shoulders and neck were mesmerizing. I decided to try to follow her for the rest of the night.
When she exited the room, I and the remaining horde of masked visitors followed her up a winding staircase and down a hallway toward a doorway, where we were ushered into a room. Her eyeliner friend was there, along with another woman. All three of them had that same kind of restless, knowing energy about them. Once everyone was inside, they gathered around a table and we gathered around them. I was struck by how incredibly creepy it was to see more than 50 masked faces crowded together, all watching the behavior of these three people, close enough to touch them. To be one of them was bizarre. It felt very voyeuristic, but there was also an eerie sense of belonging about it, and a freedom to the anonymity [My photography professor liked to drive home this quote about how photography gives us permission to stare. Well, masks do that as well]. What ensued inside that room was what I later described to Emily and Adrienne as "a bloody disco orgy." They both knew what I meant--Adrienne because she'd seen Sleep No More hundreds of times, and Emily because she'd managed to encounter that scene too, in its third incarnation, toward the end of her experience. "Oh good! I was hoping you'd both get to see that scene! It's one of the most important ones," Adrienne gushed. "I saw it within the first 15 minutes," I asserted with a deadpan emphasis on how intense a formative experience that had been.
From there, it's mostly a blur. I lost track of the woman I'd been determined to follow and wandered through various rooms. I found myself in a hotel suite where there was a pregnant woman agonizing and dancing on top of high bureaus with her husband. I entered the master suite and saw the Macbeths quarrel, and found myself back there to see Macbeth return, bloody--Lady Macbeth drew him a bath in the claw foot tub on a platform in the center of the room. I saw her bathe later, on the asylum floor, which was how I knew she was Lady Macbeth. There was a banquet scene back in the great hall, which became a forest of evergreens afterward. I saw a man carrying a door, and was briefly convinced that this was some kind of Hogwarts situation where the staircases moved. Time and space were bizarre, ethereal entities that I lost track of. I felt disoriented in my wandering, but felt comfortable in that sense of dislocation--like that was the point somehow. I got lost and kept coming upon the same people and places. It was extremely surreal. I managed to see several in-between sorts of moments, when the performers were setting up for the next scene (they did so in character, making each action part of the performance). It was strange, but I felt gratified that I was having a meta experience of the production itself, which I appreciated because I found the entire dynamic so fascinating--the requisite trust between the performers and the audience to be coexisting and navigating together; the cyclical nature of everything; the extreme intimacy but simultaneous anonymity/otherness. There were the black-masked attendants strategically scattered to maintain some security for the performers/ offer assistance to the visitors when necessary, but other than that fact, it felt very...nebulous. It was like having gone down the rabbit hole and entered a world that included everything decadent, lavish, covetous, alongside everything ominous, treacherous and terrifying. Which is a captivating tension. I felt completely ambivalent the entire time. Ambivalence is sort of my natural state, but this was a much more intense brand, and it felt right in its ambiguity--appropriate, encouraged even. It was a place that nurtured confusion and reveled in it, and I felt comfortable in a reality whose only concrete truth was the power of mystique.
I had expressed a fear to Adrienne before we went in about getting lost. "How will I know when it's over? How will I find my way out again?" "Oh, you'll know. And it's not like you're going to stumble into a janitor's closet or something," she had laughed. I proved her wrong at one point by pushing open an industrial-looking door behind a curtain, which turned out to be concealing a florescent-lit storage closet. We laughed about that later. "Oh god, you're such an artist! You would reveal the storage closet!" It was around that point that I started to become frustrated, knowing that there were many more floors that I couldn't seem to access, feeling trapped in a spatial loop. I wandered down a hall and walked into another room that felt like I shouldn't have found--it was completely empty and the walls, table, ceiling and floor were painted black. That was when I noticed a black-masked attendant and silently indicated that I needed help. She kindly directed me through a curtain that magically led back into the Lynchian lounge from the beginning. I felt relieved and thirsty and immediately went to the bathroom to splash water on my face and stare at my reflection in the mirror for several minutes. It was nice to be grounded in a place. I'd left my phone in my purse, so I had no idea how long I'd been inside. I asked someone for the time and figured out that I still had 40 minutes to wait until Emily and Adrienne and everyone else came back out. I considered going back in, but decided against it, feeling mentally and physically exhausted enough to just revel in the air conditioning with my glass of water, watching other wayward people slowly trickle out.
It was excellent to hear Emily and Adrienne's accounts of their respective experiences once they were out. They were so completely different from mine! Emily had had a "one-on-one," a hallowed occurrence in which a cast member chooses you and whisks you off to a secluded location. Hers involved entering a wardrobe, where the woman told her a creepy poem about being trapped, and then left her locked inside the wardrobe, unable to go out the way she'd come. She had to discover a secret passage that led her out in a different direction. They were both surprised that they'd never seen me--they'd run into each other a couple times. I told them about my bizarre in-between/ meta experience and neither were surprised, as this seems to be my way. They described places and scenes I hadn't seen, and scenes I'd seen being prepared. It was fun to piece together the plot and the layout of the place based on our subjective journeys, and it was great to hear Adrienne's behind-the-scenes anecdotes and tidbits--she was so thrilled to finally be able to share it with us (I mean, she had been since it opened in Brookline, but it finally meant something to us!).
A singularly unique experience that I'll probably be processing for the rest of my life
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
BWAC Opening
BWAC
The crowd
Putting My Face On, officially installed.
I realized pretty quickly that the installation across from mine actually provided the perfect lurking spot. I could hear what people were saying from there, and I could conceal myself among the hanging objects while I took photos.
Watching people look and listening to them talk to each other, I got the idea to add my notebook to the podium with a note asking people to write down their thoughts and feelings about the video. I wanted there to be a more direct vehicle for people to communicate their thoughts to me, but I didn't want to interrupt their experience or color it by talking to them as the artist.
And people actually wrote things!
I wish I could have left the notebook there for the entire run of the show, but it's the notebook I'm currently using as my sketchbook, and my mom and I went right from the show to the 2-week family beach vacation I'm currently on, so I really couldn't bear to leave it behind. It's definitely a prototype for the kind of engagement I'd like to incorporate in future installations though.
I think the smaller scale did lend itself to a different, more intimate experience of the piece--it was powerful to see people standing face-to-face with it.
Also, the nature of it playing on a loop became important. People would walk up to it when it was already halfway through, and they would stay to see how it began. I like the idea of the process revealing itself in a different way to certain people, depending on when they encounter it (more specifically, I like the way it messes with the chronology, expectation, narrative, suspense of the experience).
Watching children engage with it was also great. There was a pair of little girls who were sisters. I saw the younger one sitting and staring for a while. She got up and returned with her older sister...
She squealed, "Isn't it SO CREEPY?!"
The older one agreed that it was, and lingered, watching it for a full 2 loops before scurrying off to catch up with her sister and mom, who'd migrated to a different area of the floor. I saw her tug her mom's skirt and point back at the video and I heard her say, "Mommy, I like the red one!"
Some other overheard responses include:
"I don't know if I'd call it art...I mean, I know it's art...it's just not my kind of art"
"Now that's an interesting piece"
"I wonder what motivated her"
"It's a shame it's not larger. The installation itself leaves something to be desired"
"[looking at the title] That's hilarious! [watches closely] It really does make you think about getting ready to go out...how you cover your face to do it..."
"Her face is so pretty. I don't know if the lipstick is enhancing or detracting from it"
"The ending is great--I just wish it were longer"
"I feel weird watching this--kind of perverted...voyeuristic?"
"It's like she's putting on war paint. Look how she's sweating. Look, you can see the sweat!"
"The technique of how she's applying it--so measured and even...and what a color"
"That red! It's so...it's overwhelming. Powerful. Yeah, powerful"The piece won Best Assemblage/ Installation, as chosen by Brooke Kamin Rapaport herself! They added a ribbon label to the podium and gave me a certificate and even some prize money!
Exciting stuff folks. The show is up through August 19--go see it for yourself if you find yourself near Red Hook before then.
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Artistic Anarchy?
Who wants to join me for another late night/early morning thought process?
Great. So here's what's swirling around in my head:
I've been thinking about how works of art can engage people (you know this already). But I had an idea: what if the Artwork (as in the physical object) is not the complete Work of Art. Bear with me here. The painting, rather than being the whole shebang of the Art being presented could instead function as the stimulus for a larger experience that encompasses the Art being presented. Here's a specific example that's been marinating for a while:
What if you encountered an enormous canvas covered in tactile layers of paint, and you were actually allowed to touch it?? Yeah, think about that...Rather than the Painting being the Art Object that you're supposed to contemplate and revere, your interaction with that object becomes something more--an Art Experience. Think about the implications of this process--as people touch the surface of the painting, they will slowly change its presentation by eroding away at the layers. And the most tactile spots, the places that people feel most compelled to touch, will wear away the fastest. The painting will eventually wear away completely and die, but everyone who had the chance to touch it will carry that experience with them for the rest of their life! The painting, in this way, sort of becomes human (in that it dies and lives on through the memories of others).
Or, what if you could be inside a painting, or at least have the sense that you were. This is a really new idea, so I haven't come up with more details as far as the execution (something about building layers that you could pass through visually or physically), but these are the sorts of concepts I'm kicking around.
Anyway, the most important part of these ideas for me is the concept of the painting as a stimulus rather than an end product. There is a whole discourse surrounding work that functions as a void upon which the viewer can project an idea (I'm thinking of Rauschenberg's white paintings, or even Lygia Clark's Arquitecturas Biológicas, which she deemed "completely void of meaning and with no possibility of regaining life except by human support”). But I'm not even talking about the void here. I'm talking about work that functions as the impetus for a larger experience that becomes the Work of Art (maybe a better example would be Edward Keinholz' The Beanery, but even that piece had a clearly defined divide between viewer and object). The point is, I'd rather create objects that incite lasting experiences with the proviso that they won't last forever than create pristine fetish objects that incite nothing but the same tired old viewing processes for centuries. I feel like breaking down the barriers of acceptable behavior is paramount to making something that will last in a real way that isn't just about a surface, image, or object. The potential for interaction--that's the key difference.
I guess we'll see how my upcoming paintings manifest given all of this...I'm definitely gonna try to make the Touchable Paintings, at the very least.
Great. So here's what's swirling around in my head:
I've been thinking about how works of art can engage people (you know this already). But I had an idea: what if the Artwork (as in the physical object) is not the complete Work of Art. Bear with me here. The painting, rather than being the whole shebang of the Art being presented could instead function as the stimulus for a larger experience that encompasses the Art being presented. Here's a specific example that's been marinating for a while:
What if you encountered an enormous canvas covered in tactile layers of paint, and you were actually allowed to touch it?? Yeah, think about that...Rather than the Painting being the Art Object that you're supposed to contemplate and revere, your interaction with that object becomes something more--an Art Experience. Think about the implications of this process--as people touch the surface of the painting, they will slowly change its presentation by eroding away at the layers. And the most tactile spots, the places that people feel most compelled to touch, will wear away the fastest. The painting will eventually wear away completely and die, but everyone who had the chance to touch it will carry that experience with them for the rest of their life! The painting, in this way, sort of becomes human (in that it dies and lives on through the memories of others).
Or, what if you could be inside a painting, or at least have the sense that you were. This is a really new idea, so I haven't come up with more details as far as the execution (something about building layers that you could pass through visually or physically), but these are the sorts of concepts I'm kicking around.
Anyway, the most important part of these ideas for me is the concept of the painting as a stimulus rather than an end product. There is a whole discourse surrounding work that functions as a void upon which the viewer can project an idea (I'm thinking of Rauschenberg's white paintings, or even Lygia Clark's Arquitecturas Biológicas, which she deemed "completely void of meaning and with no possibility of regaining life except by human support”). But I'm not even talking about the void here. I'm talking about work that functions as the impetus for a larger experience that becomes the Work of Art (maybe a better example would be Edward Keinholz' The Beanery, but even that piece had a clearly defined divide between viewer and object). The point is, I'd rather create objects that incite lasting experiences with the proviso that they won't last forever than create pristine fetish objects that incite nothing but the same tired old viewing processes for centuries. I feel like breaking down the barriers of acceptable behavior is paramount to making something that will last in a real way that isn't just about a surface, image, or object. The potential for interaction--that's the key difference.
I guess we'll see how my upcoming paintings manifest given all of this...I'm definitely gonna try to make the Touchable Paintings, at the very least.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
VTS
I've been thinking a lot about the institutionalization of art. I feel like there's this disconnect between the way art is presented and the engagement that art institutions purport to promote. A lot of the people I've spoken to who say they don't like art or don't enjoy visiting museums often feel polarized by Art or by Art Institutions. When they enter an exhibition and are confronted with a sea of information that they're supposed to already know in order to understand what they're looking at, it automatically sets off this defensive thought process that inhibits them from having any sort of real connection with the work. There's this inherent dichotomy in art presentation that places the Art Object on an unknowable pedestal. Essentially, visitors are told, "This is Art--you cannot know it; you cannot touch it; as a non-artist, the closest connection you can hope to have to this object is through reverence or ownership." That is so not what art is really about! There has to be some way to engage people with work that doesn't end up making them feel insecure, invalid, or insufficient.
Well, today I participated in a VTS (Visual Thinking Strategies) session, and it was completely revelatory. Basically, the facilitator chooses a work of art and waits for the group of viewers to start discussing the work. The facilitator's job is to validate and reiterate the thoughts expressed by the viewer and encourage deeper thinking. For example, if someone says, "This makes me think of winter," the facilitator would respond, "what do you see here that makes you say that?" It's like a physically acted out formal analysis, and it is one of the most empowering things I've ever experienced. It makes the viewer realize that they have things to say about a work of art, and not only that, but that the things they have to say are completely valid! Rather than pragmatically imposing a set of defined meanings on an audience, VTS allows viewers to interpret pieces in a way that allows them to build their own meaning, and more often than not, the meanings they intuit are spot on. Works of art speak for themselves; they speak to people; they engage people in thought processes that they haven't necessarily considered before. That's the entire point of their creation, and that is exactly the kind of experience that people want to open themselves up to. But when the viewer is made to feel right off the bat like they're imposing, or like they inherently don't belong because they never got an MFA, that wonderful, fulfilling relationship is cut off before it can even start.
Every artist's mission is different, but I think it's safe to say that we all hope the things we create will mean something to someone. We want people to connect with our work--that's one of the main reasons we create things in the first place. The majority of the artists I've spoken to or have heard speak have some anecdote about how the greatest critique they ever received came from a child who innately understood how to interact with their artwork without being inhibited by social convention. Kids have a way of interacting with the world that is still about building connections rather than maintaining differences. I saw an installation at Mass MoCA last spring that perfectly illustrated this point: it was a room full of cushions and books, with shiny staples and multicolored wire creeping over the floor and up the walls. Adults walking in felt compelled to appreciate the environment at a distance, taking in the aesthetic choices the artist had made, making judgments; their kids on the other hand dove onto the cushions, picked up the books and started reading. They ran their fingers over the variously textured fabrics, rolled around on the carpeted floor. They totally got the point, and their parents couldn't even see it! It's because their parents have been systematically conditioned to engage with art in a certain way--stand at a distance, appreciate, don't touch, move on. You get yelled at if you do anything else--an alarm might even be set off if you get too close. But the only way you can truly hope to engage with/ understand a work of art is by getting right up close to it to see how it's made (the Process Gallery at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA provides a fantastic experience that breaks down that barrier and actually invites visitors to see how the art they just viewed was produced: http://www.decordova.org/art/processgallery/aec.html). If you haven't gone to art school, you haven't had a professor tell you that, so you assume the museum personnel know what they're talking about and have your best interests in mind. But they don't--they're concerned with keeping the Art safe from whatever harm you might inflict on it. Yes, they want to educate you, and ideally they want you to leave having had a profound experience with a work of art...just as long as you didn't get too close.
My point is that there is something profoundly wrong about this setup. People are clearly capable of having brilliant moments of clarity and connection, and they should be encouraged to have those moments with art most especially. When conservation is the primary concern, those moments of profundity are tabled in the name of some warped systemic interplay, and that's not right. Yes, artists want to live on through their work, and keeping the objects they created in pristine condition for as long as possible helps achieve that, but if the preservation of those objects prevents people from having an experience, then there's no real point in preserving the object in the first place because its purpose is no longer being realized. Art objects are meant to be engaged with; people want to engage with works of art. It's only when some constructed thing gets in the way that those facts fail to coalesce into a memorable experience...Or the art might just be bad, which is another issue entirely...
Well, today I participated in a VTS (Visual Thinking Strategies) session, and it was completely revelatory. Basically, the facilitator chooses a work of art and waits for the group of viewers to start discussing the work. The facilitator's job is to validate and reiterate the thoughts expressed by the viewer and encourage deeper thinking. For example, if someone says, "This makes me think of winter," the facilitator would respond, "what do you see here that makes you say that?" It's like a physically acted out formal analysis, and it is one of the most empowering things I've ever experienced. It makes the viewer realize that they have things to say about a work of art, and not only that, but that the things they have to say are completely valid! Rather than pragmatically imposing a set of defined meanings on an audience, VTS allows viewers to interpret pieces in a way that allows them to build their own meaning, and more often than not, the meanings they intuit are spot on. Works of art speak for themselves; they speak to people; they engage people in thought processes that they haven't necessarily considered before. That's the entire point of their creation, and that is exactly the kind of experience that people want to open themselves up to. But when the viewer is made to feel right off the bat like they're imposing, or like they inherently don't belong because they never got an MFA, that wonderful, fulfilling relationship is cut off before it can even start.
Every artist's mission is different, but I think it's safe to say that we all hope the things we create will mean something to someone. We want people to connect with our work--that's one of the main reasons we create things in the first place. The majority of the artists I've spoken to or have heard speak have some anecdote about how the greatest critique they ever received came from a child who innately understood how to interact with their artwork without being inhibited by social convention. Kids have a way of interacting with the world that is still about building connections rather than maintaining differences. I saw an installation at Mass MoCA last spring that perfectly illustrated this point: it was a room full of cushions and books, with shiny staples and multicolored wire creeping over the floor and up the walls. Adults walking in felt compelled to appreciate the environment at a distance, taking in the aesthetic choices the artist had made, making judgments; their kids on the other hand dove onto the cushions, picked up the books and started reading. They ran their fingers over the variously textured fabrics, rolled around on the carpeted floor. They totally got the point, and their parents couldn't even see it! It's because their parents have been systematically conditioned to engage with art in a certain way--stand at a distance, appreciate, don't touch, move on. You get yelled at if you do anything else--an alarm might even be set off if you get too close. But the only way you can truly hope to engage with/ understand a work of art is by getting right up close to it to see how it's made (the Process Gallery at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA provides a fantastic experience that breaks down that barrier and actually invites visitors to see how the art they just viewed was produced: http://www.decordova.org/art/processgallery/aec.html). If you haven't gone to art school, you haven't had a professor tell you that, so you assume the museum personnel know what they're talking about and have your best interests in mind. But they don't--they're concerned with keeping the Art safe from whatever harm you might inflict on it. Yes, they want to educate you, and ideally they want you to leave having had a profound experience with a work of art...just as long as you didn't get too close.
My point is that there is something profoundly wrong about this setup. People are clearly capable of having brilliant moments of clarity and connection, and they should be encouraged to have those moments with art most especially. When conservation is the primary concern, those moments of profundity are tabled in the name of some warped systemic interplay, and that's not right. Yes, artists want to live on through their work, and keeping the objects they created in pristine condition for as long as possible helps achieve that, but if the preservation of those objects prevents people from having an experience, then there's no real point in preserving the object in the first place because its purpose is no longer being realized. Art objects are meant to be engaged with; people want to engage with works of art. It's only when some constructed thing gets in the way that those facts fail to coalesce into a memorable experience...Or the art might just be bad, which is another issue entirely...
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