Ajna Lichau’s video installation “Dominion,” which just closed on Saturday at the Tribute gallery (625 NW Everett #102), explored the representation of control and resignation without being polemical. The video, composed of a single shot, was mostly filled with dense foliage. The only action in the frame was the face and shoulders of the artist and an anonymous hand, presumably male, which alternated between gently caressing and brutally pulling the woman’s hair. The barely on-scene face of the artist was continuously forced down to the bottom edge of the projection where it threatened to disappear from view altogether. Her facial expression hinted at moments of anguish interspersed in dull acceptance. The combination of the composition of the shot and the incomprehensible position of the figures made the dynamics of the interaction nearly illegible. The question that the video poses became who or what is being controlled and what is the nature of the power being exerted.
The initial connection that I made when viewing the video was with Andy Warhol’s “Blow Job” that was recently on view in an edited form at Reed College’s Cooley gallery. What connects these videos is the ambiguity of the off screen action and frustrating uncertainty of the mental and physical state of the onscreen subject. In “Blow Job,” the implication of a sex act is frustrated by the inability of the viewer to visually verify and therefore participate in the act itself, as is presumably the goal in pornographic imagery. With the title “Dominion,” Lichau implies a power structure and some brand of struggle but gives few further cues into the dynamics or cause of the interaction. In the same way that Warhol frustrates the pleasure seeking ability of the pornographic viewer Lichau frustrates the viewers ability to sympathize and/or identify with the figures in the video. Rather than being able to assume a role in, or participate in the narrative of the power struggle one is left searching for hints of pleasure and pain that would allow for the assumption or prescription of a binary power relationship. It is precisely this disavowal that gives “Dominion” its power.
Film still from “Blow Job,” Andy Warhol, 1963.
POSTED: August 24th, 2010 | AUTHOR: Michelle | FILED UNDER: art | TAGS: ajna lichau, andy warhol, the cooley gallery, the tribute gallery | No Comments »
Though the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s Time Based Art Festival doesn’t officially kick off for another couple of weeks, programming begins today at 3 PM with a conversation between TBA:10 artist Anissa Mack and Sarah Miller Meigs and Kristan Kennedy about Mack’s residency, My Heart Wants More, at Miller Miegs’ lumber room, and the collaboration between artist, curator and patron. The program is free and provides a rare opportunity for the public to see the lumber room (419 NW 9th).
Although frequently referred to as “disposable” in our society, objects often predate and outlast us, continually cycling through owners and contexts over time. Museums, junk shops, curio cabinets, auctions, and collections all serve as sites that help to define the narratives and emotions that we bring to our things. Anissa Mack takes this flow of objects and images as inspiration in her sculptures, installations, and performances and will spend her residency at the lumber room integrating her work within Portland’s collection of objects.
POSTED: August 14th, 2010 | AUTHOR: admin | FILED UNDER: art | 1 Comment »
Peripatetic, pedestrian, a film as a series of moving postcards. Very Large Array at Nationale (811 E Burnside) last evening featured Elizabeth Jaeger, Jenna Kaës in a silent “film” shot by Thomas Oliver, a travelogue, really, of short segments of the performers executing movement phrases at picturesque locales across this great land of ours. In short black frocks and spectacles with long hair blowing in the wind, they hop, stand on their toes, lean, and do awkward arm movements in on red clay soil before a purple butte and a big blue sky, in front of a Loretta Lynn tour bus, in a field of cows, beside a freeway, and in tall pale grass among Donald Judd’s concrete works in Marfa. The colors of the film were occasionally so remarkable, so lush, like the colors of a 50s postcard, saturated but a bit off. Turns out the film was sort of herky-jerky because it wasn’t a film at all, but many digital stills compiled into a very fast slideshow.
When the film was finished, we audience members crammed into Nationale were instructed to execute a series of movements (helpfully read out by Jaeger and displayed on an overhead) making it clear that the performers in the “film” had been executing just this set of instructions in the film we just saw. It was a smart little revelation. And we were funny in our efforts to simply do as told (or maybe only I was funny). In the end Jaeger told us that the instructions were text messages sent by their fourth collaborator, Sarah Elliott, from July 15-30, while she was in New York and the rest were on the road. Accompanying the performance was a booklet entitled MOVEMENTSCORE containing the instructions and an abstraction of the path of the road trip during which the piece was made.
One couldn’t help but be reminded of the robbinschilds performance/installation at last year’s TBA. Both works employed mundane movement by a pair of women in picturesque non-urban locations. What I liked about Very Large Array is its layering, or I should say the iterative revealing of layers of information and its self-referentiality in regard to its making via “film,” audience performance, and booklet. The notion of performer as receiver is intriguing, the Very Large Array, you’ll recall, is an array of radio telescopes…receiving/reading radio waves.
A DVD of the VLA will be available at Nationale in the near future. Check it.
POSTED: August 5th, 2010 | AUTHOR: admin | FILED UNDER: review | No Comments »
Tonight at Fourteen30 (1430 SE 3rd) at 6:30 PM, eavesdrop on a Skype session with Justin Luke from Audio Visual Arts in New York talking with Tom Greenwood (Jackie-O Motherfucker) about the life and work of John Fahey.
More:
Legendary guitarist and iconoclast John Fahey is best known for his adventurous catalog of music. From 1959 until the time of his death in 2001 Fahey released upwards of 40 albums exploring the territory of blues, classical, hillbilly, spirituals, folk, musique concrete, rock, and noise. Lesser known is the fact that he was a fantastic writer in addition to being a hyper productive and explosive painter toward the latter portion of his life, which he spent living in Oregon. This summer, AVA and artist John Andrew present the furiously beautiful paintings of John Fahey.
Justin Luke is the owner of AVA, a for-profit art space in the East Village of New York that has a particular interest in sound. Since 2008 AVA has presented a variety of projects including sound, sculpture, costume, world wide web, minimal drag, painting, chats, flicks, chomps, performance, palabras and once again, the sound.
Portland-based multi-media artist and musician, Tom Greenwood is known for both is passion for collaboration and aversion towards structure and convention. While perhaps most noted for his musical career, founding the band Jackie-O Motherfucker, Greenwood’s background is solidly located in the visual arts and his two practices form an undeniably symbiotic relationship.
POSTED: August 5th, 2010 | AUTHOR: admin | FILED UNDER: art | No Comments »
Summer Reeding continues today in the basement of the basement of the Reed College Library with a selection of rare art books by Justin Bland and Matthew Green from the Reed College Library Archives. View by appointment only, today, August 5, and next Thursday, August 12 from 10 AM -12 Noon are the final days. To schedule a viewing time contact Justin Bland.
I was wowed to find a 1919 copy of F.T. Marinetti’s Parole en Liberté (but published in Milan so why the French title?), aka Parole in Libertà with a bunch of his concrete writings as fold-out posters in this haggard-looking little paperback. Rad.
Josef Albers
Carl Andre
John Baldessari
Louise Bourgeois
John Cage
Jenny Holzer
Jasper Johns
Allan Kaprow
Richard Long
George Maciunas und Fluxus-Editionen
F. T. Marinetti
Bruce Nauman
Raymond Pettibon
Gerhard Richter
Edward Ruscha
Lawrence Weiner
Christopher Wool
POSTED: August 5th, 2010 | AUTHOR: admin | FILED UNDER: art | No Comments »
