COOL ART. Amy Yao. 2010.

“What if…there was a gallery that barely existed?” This is the question that inspired COOL ART. Because artist and curator Rob Halverson’s follow up question was, “What if you only have the ability to produce the announcement for the show? What if the announcement was the show?”

COOL ART is an art publisher whose first show at Stand Up Comedy in Portland was a show of “announcements, posters really,” Halverson says, “but screenprinted on archival paper in editions.”

In 1966, Roberto Jacoby made a “proposal for a show to consist entirely of information, taking the form of a standard exhibition catalogue, presented as if there were an accompanying exhibition, which wouldn’t actually exist.” What Halverson has done is to conceive of that line of thinking as a mobius strip that comes back from the dematerialized to the materialized art: a series of prints by artists like Noam Rappaport, Santiago Cucullu, Lucas DeGuilio, Matt Connors, Matthew Higgs, and Amy Yao. Each is printed in an edition of 50 with 10 artist’s proofs. Prints are $100.

For a gallery that barely exists, COOL ART expands outward in a lot of directions. So while it’s an art publisher, it also is and can be, as Halverson says, “an itinerant exhibition, an element of other exhibitions, an artist collaboration.” Halverson likes the idea, in an era of hyperdocumentation, of having the project document itself.

COOL ART. Noam Rappaport. 2010.

I like the idea that COOL ART is self-aware enough of its own predecessors to include in its first series a print by British curator, artist, publisher Higgs on which the words “NOT WORTH READING” are written in what looks like Sharpie. Higgs is perhaps best known for founding the art press Imprint 93, doing artist editions and multiples and eventually exhibitions of work by artists like Martin Creed and Jeremy Deller.

Rob Halverson is a Portland-based artist and curator. He has shown internationally at HaNNa Gallery, Tokyo, Cinders, Artists Space and Little Cakes in New York, and the Soap Factory in Minneapolis. He has organized exhibitions for PICA’s TBA Festival, at Ooga Booga (LA) and Pizza Paul Gallery, Chicago. I talked with him recently at little t in SE.

Why posters?
I’ve done lots of posters and invitations in my life. I am very connected with that. I have always wanted to have a gallery and probably never will. So I thought “What if…there was a gallery that barely existed? What if you only have the ability to produce the announcement for the show? What if the announcement was the show?”

When we can have the opportunity to show all six posters as we did at Stand Up Comedy, it’s great. Sometimes the poster will be integrated into another solo exhibition that the artist is doing. I also have this idea of a free standing poster stand—a cross between a sculpture and a kiosk—kind of a billboard village.

How did you select this group of artists?
I have a lot of love and respect for these artists. I’m working with emerging and established artists. Santiago and Lucas were friends I met at MCAD. They’re all basically people whose work I love and wanted to work with.

So how do you work together on the piece?
Sometimes it’s a collaboration, sometimes it is a matter of editing down choices, and some artists know just what they want to do. Some say, “I’ve always wanted to do a poster.”

I know you are both artist and curator. How does COOL ART dovetail with your own art practice?
It has become part of my practice.

Can you talk a little bit about the artists?
Amy Yao recently showed at Jack Hanley Gallery in NY. Her poster is part of a larger body of work that deals with the rain pattern, dealing with mood, sadness. It’s a collage that she made. We scanned it in actual size.

It’s great.

Then Noam Rappaport will have a solo show at White Columns in June.

I love his piece. I am very into drawings of structures.

It’s from his sketchbook. They’re “unrealized paintings.” It’s like a prediction.

What’s coming up?
COOL ART is going to Art Since the Summer of 69 in NY in September with a new piece by Scott Reeder. We’ll also be at the Art Swap Meet at Andrea Zittel’s High Desert Test Sites. And I’m talking with the people who have acquired The Poor Farm in Wisconsin about doing a group show there.

Where do you see COOL ART going? You’ve said you’re working on a number of different projects. For the posters themselves, do you imagine different formats?
I want to do, budget permitting, anything the artist wants to do: experiment with scale, size. I am open to doing offset. One artist is interested in doing something with newsprint. Another is asking, “How large can we go?”

I’m interested in installation, in performance. Sue Tompkins will do a performance in conjunction with her poster.

I want it to grow to be anything.

NOTE: This post has been edited. If you care to know more email me at radon at ultrapdx.com.

Edge of my seat. Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) announces the artist lineup for the 2010 Time-Based Art Festival (TBA) at its annual gala, TADA! next weekend, Saturday, April 24 from 6-10 PM at The Bison Building (419 NE 10th). A few tickets are still available ($150) for this main fundraiser of the year for PICA’s programming, especially TBA.

Portland-based choreographer (and TBA:10 artist!) Noelle Stiles and Unrecognizable Now perform with Delaney Kelly (music), and Chris Lael Larson (video). Simpatica provides dinner.

Below is a detail of artist Storm Tharp’s “Suit,” just one of the items at auction. Tharp, who, as I mentioned in an earlier post, is one of two Portland-based artists with work in the Whitney Biennial, will be an artist in residence for TBA:10. !

Storm Tharp, Suit. detail. image courtesy: PICA

Amy Yao. Mind Rain for COOL ART

COOL ART
Stand Up Comedy
811 E Burnside
April 1, 2010 7–9 PM

Join PICA and Stand Up Comedy as Cool Art unveils the first six editions from its ongoing poster series. Cool Art produces artist posters and exhibitions in morphing configurations; the first edition features new work by Noam Rappaport, Santiago Cucullu, Lucas DeGuilio, Matt Connors, Matthew Higgs and Amy Yao. Cool Art is a project by Rob Halverson, an artist and curator whose exhibition Space is a Place was presented at PICA’s 2007 Time-Based Art Festival. Cool Art will be on view and for sale at Stand Up Comedy. Future presentations will be held at Art Since The Summer of ’69 in New York later this year.

c-o-o-l.org will be live April 1.

How are Portland-based choreographers Tahni Holt and Linda Austin raising money to support the creation of new work in 2010? They’re doing a dinner series with two guest performers, artists, or writers in conversation with each other and guests at each monthly dinner.

Austin and Holt say the series was inspired by, “Our love for communal eating, a desire for more discourse that touches upon performance as an art among other arts, and a curiosity about other people’s processes: what and how and why they make what they make and do what they do.”

And if you come on May 22, you can eat and talk with me. I’m honored to be in such company.

Feb 27 Angelle Hebert (tEEth)+ Angela Fair

March 20 Linda Austin+ Kristan Kennedy

April 24 Tahni Holt+ Ethan Rose

May 22 Cydney Wilkes + Lisa Radon

June 26 David Eckard + Linda K. Johnson

July 24 Tiffany Lee Brown + Joshua Berger (Plazm)

Each dinner has room for 20 guests. You can email hello@tahniholt.com for reservations. Every dinner is at a different, secret, location that will be given upon reservations. $30-$100 (sliding scale) for one dinner / $100-$200 for four dinners.

From the press release:

Linda and Tahni are both active members in the performance community in Portland whose performing lives have intertwined in interesting ways in the past several years. As individuals they both have received numerous regional grants and awards. Most recently Linda’s work has been seen in New York, PICA’s TBA Festival, and at Performance Works Northwest. Over the past summer Tahni performed in Vienna, Austria and in Seattle, WA. In the summer of 2004 Linda and Tahni were two of ten selected to participate in Regional Dance Development Initiative (National Dance Project/NEFA) in Seattle. In 2005 they fundraised together in order to travel to Scotland for Deborah Hay’s Solo Commissioning Project. They performed back to back solo adaptations of Hay’s Room at PICA’s TBA( 2006), at Reed College Art week (2007) and in the Fusebox Festival (2007) in Austin, TX. They continue to find ways to support each other’s work and have a deep appreciation for the other’s creations.

PICA brings monologist Mike Daisey back to Portland with a workshop of his new monologue, The Last Cargo Cult,
Saturday August 1 at 8 PM at the Wieden+Kennedy Atrium (224 NW 13th).

According to the press info, Last Cargo Cult “tells the true-life story of his time on a remote South Pacific island whose inhabitants worship America at the base of a constantly erupting volcano. In this riveting tale, Daisey explores their religion alongside our own to form a sharp and searing examination of the international financial crisis. Daisey wrestles with the largest questions of what the collapse means, and what it says about our deepest values. Part adventure story and part memoir, he uses each culture to illuminate the other to find, between the seemingly primitive and the achingly modern, a human answer.”

Oh, Ethan Rose. We nicknamed our city after you. We planted a flower for you. Because you are one of the reasons we want to listen to the next music, because someone as relentlessly innovative (in the very most subtle ways) as you might be making it. Gertrude Stein was wrong when she said “rose is a rose is a rose.” Meeting you, she’d need to differentiate, delineate. She’d obviously never heard Oaks, your lush new album (unlike any other) crafted by capturing and layering the many and varied sounds of the Wurlitzer organ at the Oaks Park skate rink, another Portland Treasure. Hear here.

Holocene and PICA know a good thing when they hear it. They’ll host the coming out party for Oaks they call “Skate Night” Tuesday night from 8-10 PM at Oaks Park Skate Rink where everyone but you, we imagine, will skate and skate while you manipulate the live and once-live sounds of the mighty Wurlitzer.

A little present for you, a present for the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. Unwrapped is PICA’s annual holiday fundraiser, and evening of performance with chanteuse Meow Meow doing it up with Pink Martini front-man, Thomas Lauderdale. It’s at the Wieden + Kennedy atrium (224 NW 13th) Saturday, December 6 from 7-10 PM. Tickets are $50.

ultra cannot make any higher recommendation than this: The most important Portland cultural event of the year happens Sunday, September 14 at 1 PM and 4 PM. City Dance takes place at four public spaces/fountains in Portland that are among our public treasures, if little known by many of us.

It delivers likely the only truly site-specific work you will see this year, work that could happen nowhere else, where the choreographers craft work that interacts with space (and water) in ways that are dramatic, compelling, quirky, magnificent; where musicians (and audio technology) deploy in these spaces to use the sonic properties of proximity and distance (and water) to great effect.

It delivers likely the only chance you will have this year to hear work by important avant-garde composers Morton Subotnik, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley performed en plein air led by Ron Blessinger the fine musicians of Third Angle.

It shines the spotlight both on the groundbreaking work of landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, and his wife, choreographer Anna Halprin, whose aesthetic and spirit infuse the works by four Portland-based contemporary choreographers: Tere Mathern, Cydney Wilkes, Linda Austin, and Linda K. Johnson.

It introduces a crop of exciting fresh contemporary dance blood like Jennifer Camou, Lucy Yim, and Kaj-anne Pepper,  integrating them with Portland’s finest like Keely McIntyre, Carla Mann, Jenn Gierada, and ultra faves Rikki Rothenberg, Emily Stone, and Julie Katch.

This is the crown jewel of PICA’s TBA Festival. As much as we appreciate the yearly importation of great work from around the country (and the world), how beautiful it is that this best of all possible dance events is challenging, illuminating, and so very local.

We are particularly interested in Lucy Yim’s work; prior to coming to Portland, she did a collaborative piece based on the way bees communicate through dance (!). From what we’ve seen so far (including a piece at the recent Richard Foreman Festival at Performanceworks Northwest) she incorporates brief tableau, beautiful movement that is dancerly, but not too (as danced by Yim, Jen Camou, and Sara Naegelin), and plays with spinning dancers in and out of unison. That’s a bit reductionist, but we’re eager to see more of these dancers’ work. Yim will be performing in City Dance with Cydney Wilkes.

Hot Little Hands, directed by choreographer Suniti Dernovsek and visual artist David Stein, have employed a high theatricality (costume, set, prop) in works like Lawn of the Limp and Avian Fable. For TBA, dancers Kerry Ratza, Erin Seaman, and Jesicca Burton with cardboard box blockheads and tough-guy arms ending in fists flat-footedly trudged through a mechanical choreography that was more winning than that description suggests.

The award for best use of a stage hand for PICA’s TBA Festival 2008 goes to Reggie Watts who employed a ski-masked stage hand in numerous clever and deadpan tasks.

Seattle performer Reggie Watt’s Transformation (playing again today and tomorrow) was essentially a smart musical variety show, funny/entertaining, not unlike Sonny & Cher (skits, stories, sketches, songs…you know the drill) except with much better music: Reggie Watts is an incredible musical performer, creating layered R&B vocals with witty, self-effacing lyrics on the fly over his own beatboxing with his little looping box.

When we were sitting in the boxy Winningstad before the show began, we were thinking it felt a bit like the Globe Theater, with two tiers of wrap-around balconies. So it was great that the show started off with fake high theater: Watts doing “An Soliloquoy” as the projection noted was brilliant, musing on love with pompous tone and liberal misuse of language. The show hit sex, drugs, rock n roll, as well as racism and guns, had a good supporting cast, but was ultimately uneven. Video, it should be noted, was used to great effect a couple of times, particularly in a bit about the socially net(over)worked.

Extra points to Watts for use of the word “zenith,” a favorite.

In the ladies’ room afterward a sexegenarian was overheard saying that she thought she was too old to appreciate the show, “It was meant for a 23 year old,” she said. A septuagenarian disagreed as do we. It’s numerous pop-cultural references including a story Watts told about an incident involving fire extinguishers, Robitussin®, and a borrowed car clearly put the target audience closer to latter tricenarian/early quadragenarian.

Also: one of the Watts’ company was a Sam Adams doppleganger. Yes?