art, review
Oh, Mostlandia
“Visitors are invited to view the show from multiple angles: as an anthropological study of a short lived sub-culture, as a straight forward artist retrospective, as the estate sale of an eccentric family or as an artist’s memorial to a profoundly meaningful set of memories and friendships.” — wall text at BOX SET: The M.O.S.T. Remastered by Katy Asher
Katy Asher’s recent exhibition, BOX SET: The M.O.S.T. Remastered by Katy Asher, (Autzen Gallery at PSU May 18-May 29, 2009) was both document and invitation. Like any box set, it offers the collected works, serving as a point of reentry for those who where there when the works were first released into the world, and serving as introduction for those who weren’t. But there the analogy breaks down because this box set additionally contains photo album, documents tracing the actions and interactions of the group, and an actual member of the “band” (Asher) who sat the gallery every day to answer questions…and serve you an ice cream sandwich.
This enhanced box set comprises two layers of activity, the public and private faces of a four-person collaborative arts group called the M.O.S.T. In 2003, Khris Soden (the M), Katy Asher (the O), Jen Rhoads (the S), and Rudy Speerschneider (the T) met through Red76 curated Ministry of Small Things residencies at the Modern Zoo. That meeting became a five-year collaboration centered around Mostlandia, a country whose form they discovered in a spot on the floor in friend Matthew Yake’s bedroom, and whose customs, geography, politics, culture they explored (developed) together through group meetings and participatory events.
The objects in the main gallery are evidence of the public face of the M.O.S.T., its interaction with its audience. There are the burnt orange Mostlandian uniforms the M.O.S.T. wore at The Mostlandian Embassy at the Melbourne International Arts Festival, the four cardboard boxes that served as machines for an early performance, the rubber stamp collection employed during its Misplaced Items Authority at Reed College, and the highest realization of the project, the Mostlandian Embassy Presents: The M.O.S.T. at PICA’s 2005 Time-based Art Festival (TBA) as forms were completed for immigration, passports, great ideas, high-fives, and plenty more in a series of shifting departments and bureaus. The 63-card trading card set, (including series: Hole to China, Super M.O.S.T. Friends, and Searching for a Heart of Gold) cards of which were given away at Mostlandian events provides some of the best evidence of the sense of play the group embodies.
In both social experiment and in play, the normal rules of social interaction are temporarily suspended. Much of play is the allowing of a new set of interactions to be explored. And this is at the heart of the work of the M.O.S.T. Through participatory events, parties, “athletic” competitions, the M.O.S.T. issued an invitation to imaginative play whether the participant was pretending that the big white box was really a machine that could provide answers to one’s questions or pretending that a Pearl District storefront was truly an embassy for a country called Mostlandia. What’s more, this state of play stands in pleasantly stark contrast to confrontational performance pieces of the past like those of Vito Acconci or Adrian Piper, in which the viewer/participant is the object of experiment. The M.O.S.T. engages a fully-committed, loving theater of the everyday. The participants co-create the experience of Mostlandia, the shared social activity and memory and its relationship to place both real (a meeting in a bedroom) or imagined (Mostlandia) while addressing what it is that comprises knowledge of place, what it means to be a native, a tourist, a member, an outsider.
It might be said that the exhibition may have had the most impact for those who participated in Mostlandian activities as the main output of the arts group was experience. Given that, the exhibition critiques the notion that any experience of performance or participatory art can be adequately documented and imported into a gallery setting. More importantly a second, robust layer of information about the collaborative processes of the group change the nature of the exhibition from simple document of the experience to exploration of the internal workings of the group, a lifting of the curtain for a view behind-the-scenes executed in true Mostlandian style.
The second layer is captured by the wall of maps, mostly by Speerschneider, documenting in a whimsically visual form, the individuals, relationships, and processes of the group juxtaposed with an imagined geography of Mostlandia. And Asher provides access to volumes of emails and file cabinets packed with research and meeting notes—the complete records, every scrap of paperwork (extant) in beautiful, ancient wooden file drawers—showing, among other things, the depth of the group’s investment in collaborative process as well as the rigor behind the imaginative play. Because in spite of its engagement with the world the M.O.S.T. is above all an artful collaboration. Asher may say that in May 2008, the M.O.S.T. dissolved, but the friendships and connections live on and will likely result in future projects.
Incoming: more of Asher at PSU MFA show, It’s Possible, at Disjecta, opening this Sunday, June 14 from 4-8 PM.
POSTED: June 12th, 2009 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: art, review | TAGS: art, exhibition, jen rhoads, katy asher, khris soden, M.O.S.T., portland artist, portland exhibition, psu mfa, visual art | No Comments »