by Josh Noble

Before beginning my review of Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen’s The Classroom at PDX Contemporary in earnest, I first need to offer a slight disclaimer: this is the sort of art to which I have deep sympathies and emotions that make me slightly uncomfortable. This neat, clean, clever, non-confrontational conceptual art feels so re-assuring and consoling that in addition to enjoying it, embracing it’s quirky intellectualism, I almost immediately suspect it of some sort of trickery or complicity in my own nostalgia (e.g. listening to NPR strapped into a car seat into a 1972 Volvo station wagon papered with anti-war and environmental bumper stickers for the drive to a Sol Lewitt show). And I bring this up because I rather strongly suspect that I’m not alone in this and that this sentiment is intentional both at the simple level of identifying situations and objects and self-identifying with the artists’ stances towards art practice and learning. If you’re of the short attention span sort, this review can be summed up thusly: this is art about liking art about ideas.

The challenge of assembling a show, particularly to the conceptually-inclined artist, but for all art practices in general, can be summed up in a single Latinate word: coherence. So, then: spread throughout the room are offerings of lessons, the paraphernalia of classroom learning with appropriate slight winking modifications, odd educational slogans, and textual analyses that perhaps masquerade as posters. It coheres without becoming ponderous, leaving gaps into which we can slot our own experiences and small mysteries at the edges of ourselves. We usually don’t remember our first encounters with reading, with learning itself (that amorphous life-encompassing abstraction of an activity) even less. They come too early to us, and by the time we can reflect, where we might recall the strangeness of the shape of a letter, the correlation between sound, shape, and meaning, and ponder it deeply, those moments are often only ghostly traces. But the objects we encounter in those early learning experiences remain in memory perhaps through cultural association (apples, chalkboards, letter blocks) or perhaps as mnemonic devices on which we rely to cement early learning. Those first tentative understandings are almost indivisible from their circumstances, their tools, and their situation. While the exact intention of this epistemologically themed work might be less than transparent, their point of coherence is not, and the effect is, well, effective.

Oftentimes, this sort of art works best with minimally digested cultural artifacts. Chosen appropriately, objects allow our vision of ourselves to creep up on us, surprising us with the materials of our lives. This approach and its resonances in the practices of Mark Dion, Nina Katchadourian, Karsten Bott, Portia Munson, emphasizes thing-ness and the action of collecting, archiving; as Dion once said “I like things — not pictures or facsimiles of things.” And that brings up the problem of representing. Let’s posit for a moment that didactic art doesn’t work quite as well if it says things that could be stated more clearly without the external addition of an aesthetic, and that is why it’s so immensely difficult. Art about didacticism though, gets free from that little tangle and it’s precisely what Grey and Paulsen are doing here. That’s a difference between using a trope as content and using a trope as a means to present content: in the former you’re free of the troubling problem of representation. It has a consequence as well, and in this case it seems to be the aforementioned “art about liking art about ideas”.

…archival art is as much “pre-production” as it is “post-production”: concerned less with absolute origins than with obscure traces…artists are often drawn to unfulfilled beginnings or incomplete projects – in art and history alike – that might offer points of departure once again. – Hal Foster

“Syllabus – Art and Editorship, 16 Week Course,” which is curiously and somewhat provocatively for sale, consists of a syllabus for a course on the topic that the title suggests. Among the works in the syllabus are Walter Benjamins Arcades Project, George Bornsteins Palimpsest, Randall Mcleods Crisis in Identity; not light reading, to be sure. Whether the work is to be understood as a listing of the syllabus or a performance piece to be completed when the course is actually taught is left indeterminate. It prompted me to wonder: when does a course as a work of art cease to be a course and begin to be a work of art? As with Andrea Fraser: when does a lecture series as a work of art cease to be either, and does it transcend? Because these works play out in a time outside of the gallery, beyond, signified in the gallery but not existing solely in them, it leaves an opening to explore and imagine.

While the course of “Syllabus” doesn’t contain Derrida’s Archive Fever it’s excerpted in Michael Merewether’s The Archive, which is included. Derrida’s suggestion that the desire of psychoanalysis to recover moments of inception, beginnings, and origins, stems from our desire to see them as a moment of truth seems to hang in The Classroom. The concept of Archive seems to hover over most 20th century conceptions of learning, learnedness, the institutional structures of learning, their ephemera, and it hangs over this exhibition as well. But, that archiving isn’t simply an abstract concept. For instance “A Limited Anthology of Edits,” a book comprising edits, annotations, marginalia, drawings within other texts, is an archiving of time in the archive, in the act itself. The extra touch of binding the book in what is commonly called “library binding”, that anonymous green vinyl cover (for the curious or bibliophile this is called ‘buckram’), with a tag that reads “REFERENCE” at the bottom of the book signals the archival nature, making an explicit reference to the archive, as if to imply that the book itself is a reference on referring. All these notes, admonitions, blackboards, making an archiving of the objects of learning, of writing, or reading, they aren’t just the archiving of the objects around it, they’re the setting of the stage fo rfurther encounters, engagements.

We don’t claim to explain anything, but we will gladly comment on it. – Anna Grey and Ryan Paulsen (http://ryannaprojects.com/index.php?/publications/a-limited-anthology-of-edits/)

Beyond even this exhibition Gray and Paulsen seem to work with explorations of the beginnings of learning, identifying, acknowledging, and creating. Looking at Gray and Paulsen’s earlier works, there are recreations of performative works by Duchamp, Carl Andre and Ana Mendieta, Tehching Hsieh and Linda Montano, called “Covers” that, while self-reflexive and fictional, don’t lose their earnestness and empathy. This indirect play also takes on learning and reading in a way that somehow manages to avoid comment on either activity in the “Color Plot” series, of which there are three in the current show: “To the Lighthouse,” “The Old Man and The Sea,” and “Moby Dick” visually plot the color palettes of the novels. These read as a game with words-as-objects, divorced from reading, that reminds me of my own early attempts to read and understand how words and ideas were structured, making simple orders of things. Words and language as nothing more than phenomena in the world rather than marks of humanity, what one might call an almost autistic form of processing the world.

Similarly the “Problems of Categorization” pieces, an alphabet with the names of philosophers, the cardinal numbers in famous works of art, present a playful but oddly crippled comprehension. This isn’t to say that these aren’t illuminating glimpses into learning but simply that it presents a strategy and little else. This is a study of how systems appear to us in those moments when we first encounter them, not so much a study of first things as a study of first appearances. As an art practice, it presents ideas about art practices about practices of all sorts, academic, didactic, artistic, and archival. As much as any work I’ve seen by younger artists in Portland, it presents quite complex ideas with remarkably few over-intellectualized obscurities or pretensions, but I have a nagging sense that its clean cleverness limits it in some way, though I doubt this is unintentional. When the artists turn their attention towards loss and place as in their previous installation, “Index of Left Behind,” which cataloged what they lost when their home burned down, or the book “Integrating a Burning House,” which cataloged the surviving artifacts, their self-conscious strategies have taken on a depth and profundity. This isn’t to suggest that The Classroom suffers from any lack; speaking to a cataloging of practices is just as valid as any other object or phenomena or issue. However, I suspect that when they find the same emotional timbre in their work on the archive, system, and indoctrination, their work will become, in a word, powerful and intelligent in all the best ways that we hope art can be.

In anticipation of Donald Judd: Delegated Fabrication, the one-day symposium at U of O on Sunday, April 25, a clutch of Portland artists, including the symposium’s organizer, writer and artist Arcy Douglass, will talk about Judd’s work and their own today at PNCA, Room 201 (1241 NW Johnson) at 3 PM. Storm Tharp, Laura Fritz, Victor Maldonado, and Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen round out the panel. Jeff Jahn of PORT, moderates.

It’s not clear to me that each of these artists’ work, as info for the panel says, “has had a strong relationship to Donald Judd’s.” Storm Tharp, whose work is currently in the Whitney Biennial, and Laura Fritz seem to stretch that premise the most, but given the sharp minds on the panel, it should be an interesting conversation.

Greg Pond. Walking Stick.

I have not read Werner Herzog’s Vom Gehen in Eis (Of Walking in Ice). Perhaps you haven’t either. Published in 1978, it was out of print by 1979. In 2008, Free Association republished the volume. 122 pages, it is $25. By comparison, a copy of the Odyssey (also man journeying to woman, see below) can be had from Powell‘s for $10.95.

As I’ve not read it, I will take the internets’ word for the contents of Of Walking in Ice. Here is the product description:

Of Walking in Ice
Munich – Paris
Paris 23 November – 14 December 1974

In the winter of 1974, filmmaker Werner Herzog made a three week solo journey from Munich to Paris on foot. He believed it was the only way his close friend, film historian Lotte Eisner, would survive a horrible sickness that had overtaken her. During this monumental odyssey through a seemingly endless blizzard, Herzog documented everything he saw and felt with intense sincerity. This diary is dotted with a pastiche of rants about the extreme cold and utter loneliness, notes on Herzog’s films and travels, poetic descriptions of the snowy countryside, and personal philosophizing. What is most remarkable is that the reading of the book is in continuity with the experience of watching his films; it’s as if, through this walk, we witness the process in which images are born. Although he received a literary award for it, this introspective masterpiece has lingered out of print since 1979. Beautifully designed and emotionally impressive, Of Walking in Ice is the first in a color-coded series of remarkable yet long-forgotten titles being republished by Free Association.

You may want to know, as I did, whether Herzog’s trek worked. Did Eisner live? Yes, for another nine years.*

Of quantities and distances.
You may also want to know how far it is exactly from Munich to Paris. 425.74 miles. Herzog walked approximately 851,480 steps. But this is math about writing about a journey about many other things (as journeys often are). Of Walking in Ice, the current exhibition at U of O’s White Box gallery (in the White Stag Building, 24 NW 1st), is art about writing about journey, or more broadly it’s about art in response. Curator, artist, and U of O professor Jack Ryan invited 16 artists to respond to Herzog’s text, to journey, to ice. The exhibition, too, has been a journey, with the idea being initiated in Eugene, first shown in Seattle, and now in Portland. It’s a strong show with a number of surprises riffing on, bouncing off of, and veering wildly from a concept that’s both malleable and leagues deep.

That spyglass is a kaleidoscope.
The works in this exhibition are ostensibly based on a reading, but it’s a reading of a translation, a reading of a reading, a report of a reading (heresay), or a memory of a reading. Always a memory of a reading. And sixteen readings fracture the text like a sunbeam through cut crystal.

Ryan’s curation not only splits the beam, it gently foregrounds the fact that this is all we ever do, poet, artist, novelist: we relax the muscles that keep two eyes pointing toward the seen, letting them go crossways just a little to blur, to see differently what is or isn’t/was or wasn’t there. It’s tuning the radio between channels and transcribing; I call it, “crossing my ears.” A game of telephone distorts the message through mishearings, approximations, wild guesses, the filters of prior knowledge (of syntax, meaning…she would not have been expected to say, for example, “the cow is bucket the bridge”). In the end, the viewer has to realize that this fracture of the original text through reading, interpretation, filtering through preconceptions, and assimilation is also in fact all that she ever does as well. It’s all a game of telephone and objectivity is illusive if not an impossibility.

Laura Vandenburgh. Ground (Five Holes).

Records, fictions, and taking one’s word for it
In an era of Google maps, it’s easy to forget that the veracity of a map can be a matter life or death. Inaccurate map or inaccurate reading rents ship rent on rocks below the water line or grounds it on a shoal to be torn apart by storm waves. Does the topography described by the dashed lines of a folded grid in wine and ochre in Laura Vandenburgh’s “Ground (Five Holes)” correspond to the terrain between Munich and Paris? She has said her wonderfully undulating map drawings are fictions. So map becomes metaphor for the journey, the holes obstacles to be skirted, the “mountains” where the going was slow or difficult. How fitting the map in response to a journey that Herzog believed to be a matter of life or death.

Walking is filtered through a double prism in Anna Gray and Ryan Paulsen’s, “Color index Of Walking in Ice, by Werner Herzog,” a print in which the two artists boil the content of the book down to a single, vertical color bar chart ranging from “transparent, layer of ice 16, moon 4” and “translucent, woods, where icy lichen grows 53” through a full spectrum of vivid color presumably corresponding to sites and objects in the story. It’s as spare and succinct as it is beautiful.

The two charts of hobo signs that make up David Berman’s clever diptych, “Herzog I and Herzog II,” displace Herzog’s story in both place and time. Although I know hobo culture lives on, I think of this vocabulary of signs scrawled on gate or door to warn of a dog or a beating or promise food, as a distributed, site-specific guidebook for fellow travelers specific to Depression era North America. Here their strangeness parallels the strangeness of Herzog’s journey while serving as a metaphor for Herzog’s original account of it in German, as impenetrable no doubt to most of the artist-readers as hobo signs.

left: Anna Gray and Ryan Paulsen. Color index Of Walking in Ice, by Werner Herzog. right: Melody Owen. 8 knot.

How we get there.
Greg Pond’s “Of Walking Stick” rather than offering equilibrium provides a perfect soundtrack for book/journey/exhibition with an abstract, ambient tone, pulse, and occasional rhythm. “Walking Stick” smartly bounces between its title, the function the title implies, the thing—roughly and sensuously carved branch of a cherry tree mounted on an a face-down subwoofer connected to a birch box with another speaker draped with a rabbit fur—and the true function of the thing as both totem and sound delivery device.

Melody Owen’s two works are object poems, comment and conundrum: “Herzog’s Skis” are wooden skis inscribed, “but only now and then do they mingle their shrieking voices with the shrieking rain” while on another wall, “8 knot” is a pair of simple snowshoes that aren’t going anywhere at all, tangled as they are into an approximation of infinity.

And if the ice were to melt?
Whether or not Anna Fidler responded to the text through a prism I don’t understand or bent a metaphor until it snapped, her large multimedia work on paper, “Swamp Band” with its dimensional figures posing with their instruments built of layers of paper, is tremendous. While the figures are built up off the surface like a topographical model, their environment is layers deep with thick white squiggling lines obscuring a colorful bleeding ground.

Perhaps the most evocative piece in the show is its most simple. Dominic DeJoseph’s video, “Untitled,” is an oscillating amorphous white shape on a black ground is essentially the play of light on water, but holds a tension (driven in no small part by its subtle soundtrack by Sean Eden) that Herzog’s mission implies, but is missing in some of the otherwise clever or romantic or analytic pieces in the exhibition.

Translating the translations of the translation/“This is really real.”**
It is Qualia Tinkering Institute’s brilliant “Campfire,” a readymade conglomeration of nightlights, orange adapters, and flickering amber flame-like bulbs that’s the smoldering core of the exhibition. Like Donald Morgan’s plywood and coroplast “logs” in his “Northwest Roads,” “Campfire” is the most overtly fake, most beautiful campfire ever. Curator Ryan says of the exhibition, “Of Walking in Ice is an opportunity to engage a new matrix of interpretation and truth.” These two works answer, the truth is that there is no truth and that the best we can do is embrace our subjective and sometimes tangential approximations thereof.

*source: Wikipedia, in the spirit of taking the internets’ word for things.

**ruth weiss

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.