Fake Your Own Death

In 2005, Nathan McKee launched collaborative magazine project, Fake Your Own Death, initially to introduce his artist friends to one another. The second issue is finished and now you can meet McKee friends, too, including Jessie Rose Vala, Rita Badalamenti, Josh Sachs, Liz Harris, NRob Doran, Tim Root, Tamar Monhait, and Fremont Slim. Their work is up at Stumptown downtown throughout the month of July, and you can get the mag at the opening reception and magazine release party First Thursday from 6-8 PM at Stumptown Coffee Roasters (128 SW 3rd).

Bookish is a Compliment

Bookish is a Compliment is the current exhibition of work by Portland-based artists Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen’s at PDX Contemporary Art Across the Hall. In this shared space, it’s interesting to note that a piece that is of scale—”Dear Author”—tilts the gravity of the space toward their work.

Along the left wall, there are three “Index” pieces dealing with W.F. Herman’s Beyond Sleep. “Beyond Sleep Index I – Subject” reads like a traditional text index. There is an object index, “Beyond Sleep Index II – Object,” a photo presumably of imagined possessions of the book’s ill-equipped, adventuring protagonist laid out neatly on a white ground. And “Beyond Sleep Index III – Color” is a color bar chart as index which is most wonderful because it’s most difficult to read. Is that grey, for example, the color of an overcast Norwegian sky? The index pieces provide the delicious paradox of both bringing words to life in unusual ways and separating us further from their meanings by isolating them from context in index form. This produces just the right amount of healthy ambiguity in work that is also formally beautiful.

These Indexes are the closest of readings, demonstrating a process that indicates a deep relationship to text,thrilling in its Thirteen-Ways-of-Looking-at-a-Blackbird meets the Periodic Table way. Taking the content, turning it over and over, analyzing, organizing, making work in response

In their “Literary Ikebana” series of four photos the artists consider two sides of a coin: anxiety of influence and the construction of a root system that feeds into the Gray/Paulsen tree of work. Included in the four groupings are books or catalogs that Gray and Paulsen lay out as a breadcrumb trail for the active viewer to follow to the center of what concerns these thinking artists. Emma Kay’s Worldviewory of the world told through her own memories, the catalog from an ICA show on the void, The Big Nothing. As well there are clever inclusions like David Owen’s Copies in Seconds, a history of the Xerox machine, in the composition subtitled “Conceptual Art, How To.”

I could look at these pieces all day. But in their tightly-cropped way, they pretty much ignore formal hallmarks of ikebana: its use of assymetry and negative space. And of course, the word literary must be taken loosely. But the choice of the word “ikebana” cannot be accidental. Is the materiality of the book being referenced? Wood pulp and ink as analog to the stick, leaf, flower, stone of ikebana? Should I consider the act of composing these as an analog to the practice of ikebana?

Other works are book-related but self contained. The book with black pages, “Grandma’s Autobiography,” is a fine little knot, the object a platter on which the knot is delivered. Is the author, Ruby Randall, grandma, making her third person reference oddball or is she not grandma, making the word “autobiography” a mistake. Should I dig further to find out that the pages are carbon paper so that I can appreciate every aspect of this work. Or should I let it lie like the “The Book in the Stump” (just what it sounds like a paperback embedded in a stump…ashes-to-ashes), the artists’ little secret?

The Wittgensteinian undertow here is heavy, from the fact that Hermans was enough of a fan to translate the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus into Dutch to the fact of the pair’s “Wittgenstein’s Pencil,” an actual No.2 pencil inscribed, “What can be shown cannot be said,” which takes on a pleasantly uncomplicated meaning in this context of a visual art gallery, as opposed to an invitation to dig into Wittgenstein’s notion of the picture (with a little “show-don’t-tell” admonition of the fiction professor thrown in for fun).

The oversized “Dear Author” letter illuminates a different aspect of these readers’ relationship with the book. It reads, “Dear Author, Do you think that one day you might include us in one of your books? We are already half-fictionalized.” Here the reader wants in to the book, implying with the word “fictionalized” that the desire is to one day be the subject of a fiction (possibly leading to a work of art made by a sensitive reader who will analyze one’s actions, speech, thoughts, belongings…round and round).

Of course, it’s also critique, perhaps of self (making half of it up, rewriting the story, a healthy imagination), perhaps of a society in which everyone from your neighbor to the anchor on the celebrity “news” show actively nudges the fact, molds it, torques it for motives both innocent and not. But the critique doesn’t mask the alternate reading of the piece that in this context is impossible to avoid: the desire to have one’s name recorded on the page in the history of art.

Gray and Paulsen can bury that thought in a stump and get on with it. Smart work like this will out. Give me arresting image/object with subterranean layers of content that invite both multiple readings and the digging through right to the bedrock of the artists’ concerns (and as to those concerns, good to find that yes, Gertrude, there is a there there). As the pair shake off the anxiety of their influences, I’m going to keep an eye on Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen.

Store Talk

This Thursday, June 18 from 6-7 PM, John Brodie, proprietor of Store for a Month, gives a presentation/talk about Store for a Month and Claes Oldenburg’s “The Store” at the Artemis Cafe across the street with a field trip to the Store following the presentation.

Poem for Store

On June 3, 2009 John Brodie opened Store for a Month at the SE corner of SE Division and 12th in Portland, Oregon and stocked it with art by Portland artists. On December 1, 1961 Claes Oldenburg opened The Store in cooperation with Green Gallery at 107 East 2nd Street in New York City.

The phone number of The Store was ORegon 4-0380.

“The original idea of The Store was a simple one—to fill a space with objects such as those in any kind of store, but this was not satisfactory as I proceeded. The problem became how to individualize the simple subjects, how to surprise them—fragmentation, gigantism, obsession. My piece is called a store because like a store it is a collection of objects randomly placed in space.” Claes Oldenburg’s Store Days, Something Else Press, 1967.

This morning I found two of Oldenburg’s poems in Richard Kostelanetz’ Text-Sound Texts. Surprise. But of course, “I am for an art…” is poem as artist statement, isn’t it?

“I am for the art of things lost or thrown away, coming home from school. I am for the art of cock-and-call trees and flying cows and the noise of rectangles and squares. I am for the art of crayons and weak grey pencil-lead, and grainy wash and sticky oil paint, and the art of windshield wipers and the art of the finger ona cold window, on dusty steel or in the bubbles on the sides of a bathtub.”

it ends:

“I am for U.S. Government Inspected Art, Grade A art, Regular Price art, Yellow Ripe art, Extra Fancy art, Ready-to-eat art, Best-for-less art, Ready-to-cook art, Fully cleaned art, Spend Less art, Eat Better art, Ham art, pork art, chicken art, tomato art, banana art, apple art, turkey art, cake art, cookie art.”

For fun, you could download Injun & Other Histories, a Great Bear Pamphlet from Something Else Press from ubuweb.com.

Store For A Month

With a concept borrowed from Claes Oldenburg’s 1961 project “The Store”, Store for a Month (1216 SE Division) is John Brodie’s temporary art object and “product” store. Like Oldenburg, Brodie will work in his studio in the Store and sell it, like Oldenburg, Brodie will have baked goods, only his will be real and not plaster.

Unlike Oldenburg, Brodie’s store features work by more than 60 Portland-based artists (like Blair Saxon-Hill, above).

Artists (like Jenene Nagy, above) have made work for the Store, having been encouraged by Brodie to make work they might not usually make, and price it for a store environment. Others like Stephen Hayes will come in and work in the studio. The store will be restocked throughout the month with work by artists like Holly Andres, Josh Arseneau, James Boulton, Ellen George, Damien Gilley, Harvest Henderson, Scott Wayne Indiana, Philip Iosca, Kristan Kennedy, Cynthia Lahti, Rhoda London, Victor Maldonado, Pete McCracken, Cris Moss, Jenene Nagy, TJ Norris, Melody Owen, Paige Saez (below), Josh Smith, Storm Tharp, and Brodie himself.

Here Brodie talking with Eva Lake on her KBOO show, Art Focus.

Store for a Month will be open from June 3-28, Wednesdays through Sundays from 12-7 PM. This Friday, June 5 (that’s First Friday to you) is the opening party 6-10 PM.