CULTUREPHILE: PORTLAND ARTS

phile under: TBA 2010

TBA 2010: Five Questions
with Ronnie Bass

It’s not too late to catch The Astronomer.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Oct 11, 2010 at 12:00AM 0 Comments

Almost a month ago, Rufus Wainwright strode onto the Schnitz stage, kicking off the TBA in a candy-striped velvet coat he’d borrowed from Gus Van Sant. Two weeks later, Blackfish let strains of slide guitar lapse into the Imago silence, to close the festival’s final live performance. But if you thought TBA 2010 was over —au contraire.

Several gallery exhibits at The Works have been open ever since, and will remain through next Sunday, October 17. This means there’s still time to take in The People’s Biennial, and maybe even get answers for the questions it raises in Kristan Kennedy’s special Sunday presentation and walk-through with Harrell Fletcher, David Rosenak and other contributors. You can still behold the bold sapphic futurism of Yemenwed, stroll through Storm Tharp’s High House —or enclose yourself, as I did twice, in the quiet dark confines of Ronnie Bass’s inner-space odysseys The Astronomer and 2012.

As minimal music tensely ticks along at less than one beat per second, Bass holds a conversation with a blanketed form, drills holes in moon-rock, and stargazes at the vast universe from a closet-sized room with a cot in the corner. After enjoying these video visions and his live performance at Drum Machine, I bumped into Bass by The Works’ beer-garden honeybucket. “It’s kind of peaceful in there,” he observed. “I don’t think anyone’s used it.”

Your songs contain a dialogue between a hesitant voice and a reassuring one—but both voices are your own. Do you think of these as a father and son? Or as one person, parenting an inner child? Any general thoughts on parenting or self-parenting?

I think of the dialogues as being between people, or the ones that I have created. It may be father and son, astronomer and nervous friend or any other variation. The dynamic is always similar: one person has a special knowledge and is ­consoling someone in need of guidance.

I’m currently working on a project with Tommy Hartung. We’ve been talking about using a disembodied voice via a shortwave radio. One issue that we’ve had is in how to keep the read of the voice as predominantly human without limiting other possibilities.

I didn’t originally think of the dialogue as as a self-parenting situation, but that read makes sense because of how minimally my characters are developed and how one-tracked/minded they may seem. They are almost the simplified representations of internal phases, but that’s also similar to the way that I make my stories, my sets and my scores. I always prefer the essential idea of something over its complex form.

The numbers you cite in your work, fall somewhere around your age—late 20’s to early 40’s. At one point you say, “I’m almost 35 now,” and at another you say, “The moon now hangs at 42. If we leave now, we might break through.” I’m reminded of Pink Floyd’s “No one told you when to run; you’ve missed the starting gun.” Am I right in guessing that your work depicts progress in relation to age?

I have never thought of it in relation to my work, but there absolutely is a thematic connection. You often hear a similar theme in hip-hop, and in social utopian philosophy, especially in that of Charles Fourier. As different as these forms may be, they all discuss a very similar thing: an escape from our current existence of oppression into a new world. Within hip-hop, it’s a world of lawlessness and extravagance. Fourier sees a refined way of labor and life. Waters and Gilmour don’t really depict a result, only the idea of leaving.

I did try to keep the numbers near the 30s to imply planetary alignment; a sign for the right time to act, but it is a coincidence that it corresponded to my age or ages. Beyond my age of 35, which will happen in the year 2012, the rest of the numbers were chosen because they rhymed with the words that I was using: 29 with time, 42 with through…
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It seems like the title Leaving The Shed could indicate agoraphobia, shyness, alienation, and/or creative Insecurity. Do you personally struggle with any or all of these?

I have been accused of agoraphobia because I like to work in small spaces. For me, a small space holds the most potential for work and privacy. I think of the time that I’m making art as a hiding-out or as a retreat. My characters have a similar cocooning phase before their great idea or action. Also, within film, a small space (for me) alludes to the optimistic potential of a vast external space elsewhere.

I do have issues with alienation and creative insecurity. It’s part of being an artist.

Do you think you would enjoy actual space travel? Are you fascinated with the real thing, or just the metaphor?

I would not at all want to space travel. I have to make artwork. I am interested in science and technological advancements and space travel fits into that. In The Astronomer, I never thought of their destination as outer space, it is only that a cosmological sign prompted their journey. For me, their destination was an area that they could carve out within a space that has already been scripted with its own order. The optimistic aspect is that they would be able to live independently from, and simultaneously within, this scripted order.

Do you think the world is going to end in 2012?

Two big events are supposed to happen around that time: a giant solar flare and the flipping of the Earth’s magnetic poles. Scientists say that it could be devastating; but my answer is no, I do not think that the world is going to end. The sense of foreboding in my work is coming from my own observations of our current economic and social conditions. Within this nation, I predict a future of class division that will be several times more severe than what is currently occurring. It’s the nature of late capitalism emmeshed with corporatism. I’m not here to fight it or to change it. As an artist, I can only present it and propose questions. Any answers are fantastic renditions.

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Tags: Art, outer space, modern, The Works, TBA 2010, TBA, five questions, 5 questions, Film, music, Ronnie Bass

phile under: TBA 2010

TBA 2010: The People’s Biennial

Ten Questions inspired by the most questionable exhibit in The Works.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Sep 29, 2010 at 04:20PM 2 Comments

As you may or may not know, TBA isn’t quite over. For the first half of October, the gallery installations at Washington High School (aka The Works) will remain open for viewing.

The biggest single attraction is actually an extremely diverse gallery show called The People’s Biennial, featuring works from Pennsylvania, North Carolina, South Dakota, Arizona—and the quaint and quirky state of Oregon. A multimedia hodgepodge featuring everything from children’s drawings to hoarders’ collections to “outsider” works to documentary film footage about bees, not everybody knows what to make of the collection, but everybody wants to talk about it. It’s a showcase so varied that it seems—for lack of a subtler term—random, and curators Harrell Fletcher and Jens Hoffmann seem to have crafted a mission statement that simultaneously dismisses the arts establishment, and exalts the unknown, perhaps on merit of that status alone.

“There’s good crazy and there’s bad crazy,” says a hotdog vendor whose favorite TBA vis-artist is Storm Tharp. “Some of the ‘outsider’ stuff, if it’s just unusual, but it’s not really inspiring or interesting…then I don’t see why they picked it. Just because someone is emotionally disturbed, doesn’t make them an artist.”

“[My grandson] draws just like that,” said another visitor to one of the displays. “We should get his work in a gallery.”

Indeed, in an exhibit that strives for inclusion, one wonders what the criteria for EXclusion must be. That’s the first of many questions that the Biennial raised over here at Culturephile. We thought we might as well share our musings with you, The People:

1. In such an inclusive exhibit, what pieces were EXcluded, and on what grounds?

2. Does this exhibit contend that “art is everywhere?”

3. Pantheists have been reported to say, “God is in everything—so why go to a church?” By the same logic: If art is everywhere, why go to a gallery?

4. If someone has acquired a well-preserved collection of artifacts, does that person become that collection’s “artist?” Or, to put it another way, where does “found art” end and “collection” begin?

5. There is undoubtedly an an art to educational filmmaking. But there is also an art to baking a pie. Fixing a car engine. Cutting hair. Should everything that can be done artfully, be displayed as “art?”
If so, is there enough gallery space and curatorial initiative in the world to sustain all the world’s “art?” And if not, where do we draw the line between vocation and inspiration?

6. Haven’t modern gallery-goers ever seen things like historical artifacts, amateur paintings, hoarders’ collections, or ethnic subject matter?
If not, do they lack families and friends, neighborhoods and yard sales, where they would naturally encounter such things? And what does that say about the segregation of society?

7. Will everyone who makes Lego spaceships, be thrilled that a gallery features a Lego exhibit, or be miffed that their work hasn’t been “discovered?” Or to put it another way, where does hobby-crafting end, and art begin?

8. Should every kid be proud that kids’ artwork is represented, or should every parent feel insulted that the display in the gallery so closely resembles the display on their home fridge—but offers no forum to their kids? Aren’t all kids special?

9. How did the masterful, precise black-and-white paintings get in this mix? Aren’t they too classically artistic?

10. Is the Biennial’s ultimate intention to set an example to galleries to host more off-the-wall work, or is the point to get arts appreciators to look outside the proverbial box more often?

Please feel free to supply your own answers, or add more questions to the pile. Or, if you have yet to visit the exhibit, get over there. There’s a lot to see.

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Tags: Art, Galleries, galleries, folk art, TBA, TBA 2010, The Works, social practice art

phile under: TBA 2010

TBA 2010: AndrewAndrew
and Wonderlust

How’d you like The Works last night?
Choose your own review.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Sep 19, 2010 at 10:00PM 0 Comments

Last night’s show at The Works, featuring Eastern-bloc marshmallow peeps Wonderlust and iPad-wielding Poindexters AndrewAndrew, may or may not have given you what you needed. Culturephile can review these two acts for you, but first you must choose your own adventure:

I EXPECTED A DANCE PARTY
Wow, that dance party was some mad crazy good times. Those DJ’s were almost like…performance artists! The girls wore these matching outfits with head-scarves, and they had these cute little dance moves they would do together, and they even sang for a minute, and it sounded pretty good. Their stuff was really wild—it was like Klezmer, and Bollywood—there were tubas and clarinets and most of it was pretty danceable, but it definitely also had its own flav-ah. And they had projections of slavic scarf-patterns, and like, snapshots of Russian or Polish families sitting around their living room. It was a pretty cool little setup, I must say!

AndrewAndrew wore matching clothes, too, and they were a riot! They played a game of musical chairs, and they spun all these total pop-chart classics, like Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson, which were pretty fun—and I think a couple newer things, too, like some Lady Gaga. They were using iPads instead of usual turntable/DJ type gear, so they could walk around in the crowd. At one point they went on the top balcony, and cued some music from there, which was pretty neat.

One problem, though: the auditorium it was in, had all these rows of seats, and the aisles were sloped, so it was kind of hard to dance in there. It would have been good to have more of a dance floor. But that didn’t stop me!

Choose an ending:
-I danced frantically and maniacally!
-I danced delightedly and dramatically!
-I am still dancing!


I EXPECTED PERFORMANCE ART
Hm. Next to last weekend’s Ten Tiny Dances and yesterday’s Drum Machine, this Works bill underwhelmed. Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t last night’s artists basically just DJ’s? And not even with turntables or instruments. Just pushing “play.” Sure, they had matching costumes, but Wonderlust didn’t engage the space or acknowledge their audience, and beyond using iPads (a toy Tender Forever just elevated to a whole new level), AndrewAndrew didn’t show us anything new. And all those people trying to dance in the aisles, obscured our view.

Maybe if Wonderlust had played into the oompa-pa cheesiness of some of their numbers with big manic grins, or if they had maintained a disciplined deadpan, that could have given their very basic clogging steps some meaning and tone. Instead, they kept half-smirking, and glancing sidelong at one another to coordinate clunky dance transitions. It felt a little too “school talent show,” and not in a planned or purposeful way.

To their credit, AndrewAndrew worked the crowd—albeit by pressing some pretty failsafe buttons. “Who likes Michael Jackson? Who likes prizes?” We all like prizes, sirs; but some of us also like SURprises.

Choose an ending:
-I retreated to the bar.
-I went home.

“Wonderlust” with an “o,” is a Finland-based duo, NOT to be confused with “Wanderlust” with an “a,” a Portland circus collective fronted by Fall Arts Issue honoree, Noah Mickens. For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

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Tags: performance, music, Live, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010, The Works

phile under: TBA 2010

TBA 2010: The Extreme Animals Sit Down

Music Is A Question With No Answer,
delivered content with no context.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Sep 16, 2010 at 01:00PM 2 Comments

It’s been almost a week since this show and there’s a reason that I haven’t already posted: I hate panning shows—but The Extreme Animals sat down on the job.

“It’s amateur hour in there,” said one loyal passholder who’d escaped to the beer garden after watching the Animals cue, crash, and reboot Youtube videos, floundering through a half-baked introduction about pop culture. “Everybody wants to ‘go green,’” said Jacob Ciocci, “but my new thing is I wanna go ‘dark green’—it’s like the goth version of going green.” Polite laughter. “There’s a thing in life right now where, everything’s very intense. I call it the ‘new intensity.’” Pause. (Quick—someone dub this guy a “creative” and give him an Eyebeam fellowship!)

Now, I don’t mind “pop,” and I don’t mind Youtube. And I’m pretty fond of wild sociological theories. But in this case, rather than using these tools to build a unique experience, the Extreme Animals repeatedly juggled and dropped them. I blame creatives like Michael Rioux, the man who made #8 of Ten Tiny Dances, for making it look too easy to pop off with the perfect irreverent comment and engage a whole audience. It’s easy for creatives like Rioux, but that’s a function of studied mental agility and years of experience. Their genius enables their spontaneity—not vice versa. It seems like Ciocci got this twisted.

Eventually, the Animals got around to the musical performance, a manic mishmash of samples upstaged by a screaming screen of pop-culture collage and Atari pixel-porn. I know the Beastie Boys were sped up to sound like chipmunks. I know one guitar was played. I know a drum machine was manipulated—but the audience, by and large, was not. One welcome lull, underpinned by a hard-hitting triphop beat, fixated on footage of step dancers wearing white gloves that left glowing trails. This didn’t necessarily make a point, but served as some sort of comedown drug with a slightly more tolerable trip.

When it was David Wightman’s turn to shine with his shredding guitar project Fortress Of Amplitude, he showed considerable chops, looping tricky metal riffs and then harmonizing over them. But Wightman’s mad skillz could not redeem the overambitious presentation, which failed to finish the promised narrative about youth- and celebrity-worship and left plenty of Portland hipsters convinced that they could BS as well or better. Like the falling blocks in a tetris game, the barrage of stimuli kept evening out to null, and eventually piled up to a clunky “game over.”

For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

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Tags: performance, Live, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010, The Works

phile under: TBA 2010

TBA 2010: Nature Theater of Oklahoma, Re-Viewed

Romeo and Juliet … take two

Posted by: Claudia La Rocco on Sep 16, 2010 at 10:00AM 0 Comments

My first day in Portland, I wrote about my interest in seeing Nature Theater’s Romeo and Juliet again, an opportunity for reassessment that doesn’t come around as often as you might think.

Well, I saw it again last night.

And…I still don’t entirely know what I think of this R and J, which features a long series of dueling monologues, delivered by two actors, in which the play’s details are badly remembered. So much for clarity through repetition. I should see it a third time, I probably won’t understand a single line; I’ll be too busy battling my memories and expectations.

Several of my original complaints remain—mainly, as my friend and colleague Alexis put it with wrinkled nose last night at dinner (Olympic Provisions, yay!), that the show is “Technically impressive. And light.” And I still found Robert Johanson’s stage presence more convincing and expansive than Anne Gridley’s (who I’ve liked very much in other works), though both are terrifically funny in their absurd—and, at moments, absurdly touching—send ups of bad Elizabethan actors and the half-baked but deeply felt ramblings of various people trying to remember just what the hell happens in the iconic play.

But I was more moved this time by the work’s heart, a bumbling meditation on vulnerability and desire which the actors argue their way through when they finally find themselves facing the audience at the same time. This is the piece, I thought last night. The rest is a laborious framework, one I’m not convinced is necessary.

But. I’m not unconvinced, either. What can I say, I’ve seen about 15 works and written almost 20 posts this past week; the circuitry is beginning to unravel. Long live art (even if badly remembered). And critical confusion.

For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

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Tags: Theater, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010, The Works,

phile under: TBA 2010

TBA 2010: Jessica Jackson Hutchins and Storm Tharp

Children of the Sunshine and High House

Posted by: Claudia La Rocco on Sep 15, 2010 at 03:34PM 0 Comments

You could say that all art is time-based. And attention-based. That’s all you ever need to really see something. Simple, but often difficult.

Yesterday afternoon I got a little bit of a breather from TBA’s performance schedule, so I walked across the Hawthorne Bridge and made my way to Washington High School, where I spent some time with installations by Jessica Jackson Hutchins (Children of the Sunshine) and Storm Tharp (High House). Their rooms are side by side on the second floor, and share a certain energy, with their mix of everyday and art objects and their emphasis on the domestic and the private.

But Children of the Sunshine, a sparer, darker (literally) space, resonates a sadness and earthy nostalgia in its (ceramic, video and print) ruminations on a battered old piano, a homely repository for the imagination, and the past. I recognized something in there, and didn’t want to stay too long in that empty classroom, on a late-late summer afternoon, with thoughts of loss already all-too-present.

“When work has a critical distance it’s safer .. it’s a lot easier to write about,” Hutchins said today, at a noontime chat with Tharp. “It doesn’t interest me, it’s too explainable .. it avoids an ineluctable mystery about the self.”

High House, true to its name, feels like a room set high atop the hills. Tharp has filled (but not overcrowded) the pristine white space with meticulously placed collections of paint jars (with names like “Chinese red”), succulent plants, books on Alaska and David Hockney’s drawings, delicate furniture and handwritten notes. His paintings and drawings adorn the walls. It’s easy to be fully present in a high house; you feel something good will happen if you wait for it. And then you realize the good thing is already happening.

“I’m fascinated by the idea of anything becoming what it wants to become,” Tharp said, describing “the way ink bleeds in water and goes in a wild rush from black to clear.”

It wasn’t until the room was assembled, he said, that he realized what it was about: gratitude.

For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

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Tags: Art, TBA, TBA 2010, The Works

phile under: TBA 2010

TBA 2010: Atlas/Basinski
vs Reeves/Sverrisson

Culturephile compare-contrasts
two non-narrative film-music collabs.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Sep 14, 2010 at 06:00PM 0 Comments

They say lighting doesn’t strike in the same place twice. But on Friday, and again on Monday, two layered, strobing, hyperstimulating art films lit up The Works–and resonated with stirring soundscapes by modern maestros.

Friday’s film, an untitled live video mix by venerated filmmaker Charles Atlas, was accompanied by experimental-trance demigod William Basinski. Monday’s epic,When It Was Blue, was created collaboratively between director Jennifer Reeves (Sundance, Princeton, MOMA) and Skuli Sverrisson (Lou Reed, Blonde Redhead).

Palette
Both pieces layered textural stills, over clips of live footage—and in both, the overlaying textures were so fast-changing, they created a film-strip-style flickering effect. In A/B, many of these foreground textures were speckles, and some were digitized fractal patterns (think screensaver). In R/S, however, the textural elements had a more naturalist feel. Many featured multicolor plashes of watercolor paint, some, the parched craquelure of dry soil. To say that one was naturalist, and the other modern, would be broadly appropos.

Both pieces interspersed black-and-white footage, with color, though Blue seemed to cover more of the spectrum, with some sections as resplendent with rainbow hue, as the paintings of Pavel Tchelitchew.

Themes
Several seeming themes emerged in A/B: Beauty. Alienation. Torture. Control. Impending doom. Manifested doom. An interlude of brotherhood, the self, humanistic triumph—followed by more doom. Black-and-white film heriones with electrodes hooked to their heads, the iris of an enormous eye, and much later, the mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb—each took center-screen. The sheer volume and intensity of images, stimulated this watcher to the point of universal numbness. Buddhist enlightenment, or sociopathic detachment? Hard to say. But that mushroom cloud seemed light-years away.

In contrast, by the end of R/S, I was irrepressibly weeping. Maybe after all the footage of brooks and rivers and oceans, my ducts simply succumbed to suggestion. But I remember being gripped by an inarticulate, sentimental, transcendent sort of grief. “Ocean big,” I thought. “Green and deep and sad.”
“Seals swim so smooth, make me cry,” thought eye.

Musical Maneuvers (In The Dark)
Both musicians tethered their explorations to long, low, ambient synth strains, and both scores wafted ephemerally alongside their respective films. But in A/B, Basinski’s musical compositions seemed strictly ex machina—-emanating from a laptop he’d brought on stage. Meanwhile in R/S, Sverrisson played live guitar as the rest of the prearranged score piped in via the PA.

Please Note: If I got this wrong, I’m not surprised. Both musicians sat in dim light, while the audience squinted and strained to see what gear they were using. Sverrisson had a dappled lighting effect, so it seemed like he was amidst trees.

While Basinski kept his music—albeit varied—flowing throughout, an uncanny twist to Sverrisson’s performance, was that he (and all music) sometimes stopped as the footage continued to play, with its own ambient bird-calls and water-whooshes. Conversely, there was a long period when the film went black and silent, and Sverrisson continued to play in darkness ’til it resumed. The remarkable thing was—it took a while to notice these changes. Like a master magician, Sverrisson marshalled audience attention wherever he wanted it to go.

Sense of Humor
A/B: A reclining Daffy Duck, and later a rotating Mariah Carey, could not possibly be taken without a chuckle.
R/S: None. Inasmuch as it’s possible, this film was a totally introverted, asocial experience. The closest the piece came, to a joke, was a brief flash of educational animation, with expanding concentric circles referencing an earthquake’s epicenter. But humor would have seemed particularly pointless, in such a stunning profusion of nature. Jackdaws don’t need jokes, to cackle.

Readers, did you watch these two perfect storms? What did you take away?

For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

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Tags: performance, Film, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010, The Works

phile under: TBA 2010

TBA 2010: tiny tba
w/ Greasy Kid Stuff

Last night, The Works hosted Tiny Dances.
This morning, tiny dancers!

Posted by: Anne Adams on Sep 12, 2010 at 01:00PM 0 Comments

Those kids and their hiphop. Today at the Greasy Kid Stuff-hosted kids’ disco, while Bhangra rhythms got the party started, it was Secret Agent 23 Skidoo’s I Gotta Be Me, complete with a call-response chorus, that really got ’em grooving. “I gotta be me!” the kids yelled. And their enlightened parents smiled approvingly.

Meanwhile, in the next classroom, selections from The Young People’s Film & Video Festival held kids’ and parents’ attention, with, among other works, a super-cute child-crafted-and-narrated series of claymation shorts, illustrating concepts like the seasons and the water cycle. (Kudos, Liz Randall, Davis Elementary’s filmmaker-In-residence.)

Back on the dance floor, Ribbit Ribbit coaxed parents and toddlers to hop around like frogs (and sounded much more “street” with the recording’s hiphop beat).

But a quick “time out”: While kids don’t require much in the way of ambience, parents who were promised a space “transformed into an all-ages lounge” may have been dismayed to find an ordinary, brightly-lit classroom as the de facto discotheque.

Meanwhile, the “soft room”—with walls thickly lined with shaggy strips of repurposed fabric, set in a rainbow spectrum—looked pretty splendid, and big pillows on the floor offered a promising flop-space. But what should have been a stimulating kid-friendly environment, stimulated one of the wrong senses: it smelled. A picky parent would have to wonder whether the used fabrics had been laundered—which might explain why no kids were kickin’ it in the soft room when Culturephile stopped by.

For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

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Tags: performance, Family Fun, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010, The Works, children

phile under: TBA 2010

TBA 2010: Ten Tiny Dances

Introspection, iconoclasm, erotic exploration—and, fruition!

Posted by: Anne Adams on Sep 12, 2010 at 01:00AM 2 Comments

The phrase, “in case you missed it,” feels particularly apt for Ten Tiny Dances, which, due to its popularity and rarity, is always packed. Last night was no exception, with one of the three lines extending all the way along The Works’ north face. It’s entirely possible that some of that line got turned away. So. In case you missed it:

1. Sink started with swimming, and ended with trampoline-jumping, but Anne Furfey’s tone was less recreational, than introspective. Some movements even seemed to imply a struggle with body and health. Shadowy shapes ushered us in and out of a personal process.

2. A Version Mike Barber and Cydney Wilkes played a sophisticated 1960’s couple trying to dance together on a trophy-lined stage, as schmaltzy lounge music gradually warped and slipped out of key. They began to imitate the poses of the little golden figures, and tried to ballroom-dance while clutching them. Humorous? Definitely. But also a provocative commentary on how public accomplishments and personas, awkwardly encroach on private affairs.

3. City With a futuristic, aquatic costume and swimming, striving movements, Katherine Longstreth established a tone of mystery and confusion. Cue Copland’s Fanfare To The Common Man, and Longstreth donned a pair of pinstripe pants, as if to say, “Enough with all the wishwash; I’m now resolute.”

4. Dayna Hanson A slow, slightly rock-and-roll rendition of the American National Anthem (a la Jimi Hendrix) introduced nine dancers, semi-clad in colonial garb. An amusing solo impersonation of an animatronic theme-park George Washington gave way to “the robot,” leading into a regimented-yet-thumping Daft-Punk-style ensemble number (think Michel Gondry’s dancing mummies in Around The World). Culturephile guest blogger Claudia La Rocco was less-than-impressed with Hanson’s longer work, but for 5-odd minutes on the Tiny stage, Hanson entertained.

5. Nigh Linda Austin’s tentative exploration of white paper layers, gradually evolved into complete absorption in the material, complete with rhythmic rocking, a shuddering buildup, and finally, thrashing orgasmic climax. A soundscape which started out literally “pedestrian,” (with sounds of human milling-about) here and there revealed labored breathing. Gradually, more sounds emerged: cars and trains. Possibly helicopters. Embodying that universal erotic feeling of being simultaneously transported—and run over—by a train, Austin brought a resonant take to a common theme.

6. La Chaim Crimes & Punishment This piece began sort of like an updated Swan Lake, with Wooly Mammoth Comes To Dinner using repetitive, flappy gestures, including some odd animal kinks. (Brisk, deep butt-scratching, for example—very common in animal grooming, relatively rare on stage). Two pretty brunettes in black seemed to move together, while a third dancer in a yellow ski mask seemed to flounder. The tone changed when the birds bared their breasts, then huddled on the floor moaning, “Why’d you leave?” putting the prior preening, into the context of courtship. “Hold on,” exclaimed one, “There’s something in my pants!” The hypnotic flapping moved below the waterline, and three desperate ducklings emerged as self-satisfying swans.

7. Clearly Another World First fetal, then seemingly free-falling, Eric Skinner, like the night’s other soloists, gave us a window into a personal struggle and transformation. Like Nigh, this piece began with ambient city noise, and crescendoed. However, here the crescendo came midway through, and the implication was anxiety. Skinner stared into all four corners of darkness, as if desperate for escape. Enter the soothing resolve of Antony & The Johnsons’ Another World: “I need another place…I’m gonna miss the scene….” More statuesque poses that seemed to depict slo-mo falling, showed graceful resignation to a stress-lessening life change.

8. Dance #1 Michael Rioux is a self-described “creative,” with an affable bravado and a cunning ability to tap a crowd’s pulse. “Hi, everybody, we’re gonna have a real good time together, but FIRST—two things.” Rioux announced, into a room that had seen so much wordless dance, that speech seemed shocking. “Art is important.” Pause. “But ARTIST STATEMENTS, 70% of the time, are total bullsh-t, in my opinion.” At that point, Monica Gilliam began a graceful but seemingly unchoreographed dance, while Rioux led the crowd in a chanted mass mission statement: “I want to make the world a beautiful place to live,” followed by a brief crowd-participatory bootyshake. “If you’re not here to shake it,” he exclaimed, “you might as well take your dead ass home.” Some people can get away with spontaneity and irreverence. Michael Rioux is one of those few.

9. Culture Machine: Sattelite No. 6 With the ice broken by Rioux, Tahni Holt’s dance troupe emerged in bright leotards and wavy blonde wigs to—um, finish the job. The microphone-wielding group immediately launched an overlapping, overwhelming torrent of showbiz-interview patter. “Hi, I’m Stanley Kubrick” said one. “Laurie Anderson, Jim Henson, Kurt Loder.” the others chimed. Then all four talked in tandem, introducing themselves by various names, and pedantically droning about their projects and philosophies as they rocked back and forth in a constant rhythm of unimpassioned coital reception—a theatrical manifestation of “media whores.” The subversive troupe even name-checked Linda Austin, to the crowd’s contained delight.

10. Mike Daisey The popular spoken-word performer closed Ten Tiny Dances with a characteristic call to action. Daisey entered the space with his nose buried deep in a TBA program, while an un-credited female performer seductively proffered an orange. Abandoning the program and fixating on the prize as it moved ever-closer to the woman’s pelvis, Daisey eventually plunged in for a bite. The message: Don’t analyze, criticize and categorize. Just partake in the delicious freak-fruit.

For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

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Tags: Dance, performance, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010, The Works

phile under: TBA 2010

TBA 2010: Digging Their Own Graves

Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger answer five questions about their groundbreaking performance art piece.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Sep 11, 2010 at 01:30PM 2 Comments

Of course today would have to be sunny. After a week of overcast weather, the sun sprang out just in time to enliven your weekend—and make a grave digger’s job harder. Dutes Miller and Stan Shellabarger—whose performance-art piece requires them to dig their own graves and then lie in them—have broken a serious sweat as they wedge their way into the dirt on the perimeter of The Works. “We didn’t realize the soil would be this compacted,” comments Miller. “It’s all rock and clay.” But he and his partner are taking it in stride. They’re very patient men.

Both wear long beards, white tee-shirts, and blue jeans. Both wield standard shovels. At high noon, each has excavated about a foot’s depth, and stands chipping away at a rectangular hole. At first, I didn’t know a) if they were the artists, or if the artists had hired some help, and b) if they’d want to talk. But it’s seeming okay. And since “Shellanbarger” is a hell of a handle, Culturephile will henceforth refer to these guys by first name. Meet Dutes and Stan.

I know I can read my program…but I’d like to just ask, what’s this work about? Is it a meditation on mortality? Or does it have something to do with the figure of speech, “you’re digging your own grave?”

The two seem surprised. “We haven’t been asked that question before,” says Stan. “What do you mean?” asks Dutes, leading me to flounder for an explanation. “Well, digging your own grave, typically meaning error, right? Like doing the wrong thing, then doing more wrong things—expending more effort to worsen your results. Or futility.”

“Hm,” they both respond. “No, it’s not really about that,” says Stan. “I guess no one’s asked that because we’ve only done this piece in Switzerland, so maybe there was enough of a language barrier, that they weren’t thinking about the English figure of speech. Maybe more people will ask that here. But—no. It’s really about me and him and our partnership. I was really inspired by two books by Jacques Derrida: The Gift of Death, and The Work of Mourning. In them, he talks about the responsibility and the rules of friendship, how as soon as you meet a new friend, there’s an understanding between you that one of you is going to die first. And it’s at that point, that you begin the mourning.”

I understand you two are romantic partners as well as art partners. Has doing this piece, and contemplating your and your partner’s mortality, changed your relationship?

Both respond in the affirmative. One says “Definitely,” and one says “Certainly.”
“Well, when we get about five feet down, we’re going to dig a small tunnel just here, and then as we each lie in our graves we’ll reach through and hold hands,” says Dutes. “While it’s a very sweet idea that we could hold hands in the grave, underground, of course it’s an impossibility.”

“Yes, it’s changed our relationship and how we think about each other,” says Stan, “but we’ve also been working together for a long time. Many of our pieces are autobiographical; still, we hope there’s enough there that an audience can connect to their own experience. We were part of an exhibit in Maine called Mindbending With The Mundane , about marriage equality, where we had images of ourselves with our beards tied together. And there’s one piece we do called Pink Tube, in which we’ve crocheted a pink tube of yarn, and when we exhibit the piece, we crochet on opposite ends of the tube. We only work on it in public—we don’t sit around at home crocheting it—but it’s now about 60 feet long. Of course the longer it gets—the longer we work together on it—the further apart we can get from one another. Sometimes when we exhibit it, we’re placed in different rooms. There’s generally a bittersweet aspect to our work.”

So several of your pieces have a long duration then. How do you handle that—do you go into a sort of meditative state? Do you get impatient, or fatigued?

Both laugh a little. “All sorts of things happen,” says Stan. “Sometimes it can get meditative, but then when people engage and ask questions, then it’s not meditative at that point. And of course there is fatigue. With the Pink Tube piece, we pretty much made a pact that we’ll work on it until one of us physically can’t anymore, due to—well, arthritis, or—”

“loss of limb,” Dutes interjects, laughing. “You know, not nice things to think about, but possible.”

“Sure. And when one of us dies, the other one will unravel the tube,” Stan finishes.

Along with the repetitive nature of the work, there must be a lot of repeat questions. What do you guys get asked all the time?

“‘What are you doing?’ is the biggest one,” says Dutes. “And then sometimes they’ll think they’re being a smartass and say, ‘Digging a grave?’ and when we say ‘yes,’ they have nothing else to say. Some people will tell us their own stories, too. Like with Pink Tube, people will tell us about their grandmother who crochets, or with this, people will tell us their own stories about death and graves. We welcome engagement with the public. There’s not the idea that it’s theatrical. There is no ‘fourth wall.’ Our work is concept-driven. We’re not presenting a story, per se, so there’s no feeling that the audience is disrupting anything.”

You mentioned marriage equality. Could the struggle represented in your work, along with the intimacy—be read as a statement on the struggle for marriage equality?

“We always feel unfortunate that our work is political. It’s just because we’re two men, that it’s political,” says Stan.
I say, “Sorry, I won’t frame it that way.”
“No,” says Dutes, “It doesn’t matter; because people will frame it that way. As soon as people read that it’s two men doing this, it becomes symbolic of something political as well.”
“Maybe not so much here in Portland,” I offer.
“Maybe not,” says Dutes. “That’d be great. This town does seem to have a lot of unisex bathrooms; that’s always a good sign.”

I thank Stan and Dutes for their time, and tell them I might be back later to snap a picture. “That’s fine,” they say. “We’ll be here all day.”

For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

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Tags: Art, Interview, performance art, Queer-Friendly, 5 questions, five questions, TBA, TBA 2010, The Works

phile under: TBA 2010

TBA 2010: Mike Daisey

The Agony And The Ecstasy Of Steve Jobs

Posted by: Anne Adams on Sep 10, 2010 at 10:00PM 0 Comments

Furnished with nothing but a glass of water, a table and chair, and a passionate, well-informed message, Mike Daisey held the crowd’s rapt attention for two hours, and earned a standing ovation. A facile narrator, Daisey wove together two parallel stories: the info-taining tale of the rise, fall, and resurrection of Steve Jobs’ career; and a moving memoir about how his own love affair with technology, led him to a shocking truth. Daisey traced his treasured Apple products to their manufacturing base in Shenzhen, China—a city “that you never knew existed, where all of your stuff is made,” and now makes it his mission to educate the West about Chinese mega-factories and their deplorable worker abuses.

But Daisey’s no placard-waving, boycott-pushing luddite. “What are we going to do?” he quips, “Give up all our devices and live in yurts? These devices are magical, and they are tools. The companies that make them are always evolving, and they can—and must—be moved.”

Daisey has been touted by the New York Times as “one of the finest solo performers of his generation” and indeed, his work is as descriptive as Spalding Gray, as passionate and irreverent as Henry Rollins, and as enlightening and thorough as the best TED talks.

In contrast to last night’s devil-may-care Japanther antics, and Rufus Wainwright’s cavalier charm, Daisey coaxed us to stand up for a message that will continue to matter after curtain-call.

Daisey has several more scheduled performances at TBA 2010. For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

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Tags: Theater, performance, performance art, TBA, TBA 2010, The Works, mike daisey

phile under: TBA 2010

TBA 2010:
Making the rounds at The Works

Here’s a sweeping overview of some of The Works’ gallery shows.

Posted by: Anne Adams on Sep 10, 2010 at 02:00PM 0 Comments

The People’s Biennial

A diverse and vibrant collection of works from not-necessarily-established artists, this jam-packed exhibit features everything from bizarre felt piñatas and wooden walking sticks, to large hand-and-footprint paintings created through the act of breakdancing. Video installations, photo exhibits, found art, kids’ art, and even ice cream signage, represent for their respective regions. Technicians, collectors, craftspeople and eccentric recluses, are all brought to light.

Storm Tharp
High House

Leisure, jade plants, and jaded ladies are some of the themes explored in Tharp’s multimedia exhibit.
Challenge: Spattered mirror flanked by a white and black flag, which say respectively, “Not the first time; not the last time.” Text piece that scathingly states, “ONVACATIONATWAR.”
Reward: A beautiful full-wall mural with pastel portraits of famous actresses—Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Goldie Hawn—diverse in era and craft, but united by a certain worldliness.

Ruby Sky Stiler
Inherited And Borrowed Types

Ruby Sky Stiler will give you classic Greco-Roman nudes, but she makes you work for them. Slabby statuary reveals the forms in cubist 2-D pieces, rather than as a whole. Meanwhile, the wall is hung with collage pieces which basket-weave a page of text with a page of black-and-white image. Every now and again, a figure emerges. Often, the pictures are obscured by the words.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins
Children Of The Sunshine

Ever look at a grand piano and think, “wow, the top of that would make an excellent etching plate?” No? Then you’re not Jessica Jackson Hutchins, who apparently thought exactly that. Giant piano prints, along with the paint-ravaged objet, are put on display, and accompanied by a video installation which documents a long, exuberant multi-instrument livingroom jam session. “We are children of the sunshine,” the musicians sing. And children of the sunshine get to paint and print their pianos.

Charles Atlas
Tornado Warning

When something’s in the air, our machines are the first to know—launching into staticy, snowy, flickering freak-outs. In Tornado Warning, a big screen forebodes meteorological doom.

Christopher Miner
The Safest Place

The impact of the lone rotating astronaut at the center of this piece, is immeasurably enhanced by an endlessly echoing vocal soundscape. The mechanical regularity of the echoes supports the scientific side of space travel, even as the reedy human tones bespeak the loneliness of a displaced soul.

Ronnie Bass
2012 and The Astronomer, Part 1: Departure From Shed

Ronnie Bass’s pieces are hypnotic, sparse—and simultaneously lulling and uneasy. Bass seems to cast himself as both father and son in his stark, laconic video pieces. Over a slow electronica soundscape, Bass The Father attempts to sooth the anxiety of Bass The Son. Yet it’s unclear whether the challenge is overcoming agoraphobia, or undertaking space-travel.

For more information on TBA events, visit PICA. A more comprehensive list of upcoming events can be found at our Arts & Entertainment Calendar.

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Tags: TBA, TBA 2010, The Works, Storm Tharp, Ronnie Bass, life drawing