RePurPose: a work in material gestures
Gretchen Holmes
The sweaters are thrift store refugees; the costumes are reconstructed business suit fragments; the sprouting seeds will be replanted in the MCA's lawn. Between these eco-sensitive overtones and the installation's tactile splendor, viewers will find multiple points of entry; but where to go once inside?
This week's installment of Here/Not There at MCA features Amber Ginsburg, Carla Duarte, and Lia Rousset (collectively known as Work In Progress) in RePurPose: a work in material gestures. The process-oriented, richly tactile piece exists as a--literally--living installation: three lengths of scaffolding house 600 planters created from repurposed thrift store sweater fragments coiled around sprouting seeds then bound to bricks. RePurPose, with its strong sculptural presence, appealing materiality, and evolving nature, expresses succinctly (perhaps very overtly) curators Tricia Van Eck and Michael Green's goal of showcasing multidisciplinary works by Chicago artists that begin with performative impulses and expand yet to shifting visual landscapes. When Duarte, Ginsburg, and Rousset met as graduate students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, each came from a different department: Duarte from Fiber and Material Studies, Ginsburg from Ceramics, and Rousset from Sculpture. Both RePurPose and Work In Progress's past collaborations gravitate directly towards an intersection of these traditions.
At Tuesday night's opening, the artists began the performance by scattering seeds across a patchwork of deconstructed sweaters, rolling the pieces into bundles, and binding them to bricks stacked neatly in the middle of the gallery. The newly assembled planters were then soaked briefly in water troughs and moved to the scaffolding alongside several hundred other planters that had been assembled before the show. Through the duration of the weeklong installation, the artists will continue to tend to these sculptures, transporting them to locations in and around the MCA where the sprouts might receive light and water, thereby converting the museum's surplus natural resources into nutrients for the growing plants. The piece presents process as performance, demonstrating for viewers the labor required to cultivate each miniature sculpture; however, the objects themselves make this labor apparent, rendering the performers and their live bodies redundant--even irrelevant.
As an installation and performative gesture, RePurPose is clear in...purpose: the materials signify basic human needs (food, shelter, comfort), and, by tending to the living sculptures' basic needs, the artists translate their creative process into a labor system and suggest commonality between work space and cultural space, rural space and urban space, historical space and geographic space. While viewers passing through the gallery to enjoy the project's sculptural elements might appreciate this proposition, RePurPose lacks the kind of rigorous attention to audience experience required of work that attempts to expand from sculpture to performance. Where the artists' intentions are so topical and so transparent, the viewer's experience seemed passive and frustratingly open-ended. Tuesday night's opening performance pushed an over capacity audience to the perimeter of the "12x12 Emerging Artist" space, while the artists worked silently in the center of the room. Not only did this short-circuit audience engagement with the quiet, intimate nature of the piece, it weakened the museum's credibility as a "social space." In last week's Here/Not There project, Patrick Lichty's Summer of Love 2.0, for example, Lichty transformed the gallery into an living extension of his virtual social network, creating an environment that reinforced the project's concept and enhanced his audience's relationship with the work; were RePurPose more conscious of these dynamics, its performative aspects would be more successful. However, Here/Not There intends to balance the tangible with the ephemeral, or objectmaking with performance. This balance--it's becoming obvious--will vary from week to week, but, as each piece and the series itself unfolds, viewers will surely witness moments of creative transition and share a piece of the process.
Note:This is Gretchen Holmes' second installment of the Here/Not There series. You can also read her review of Summer of Love 2.0.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Tags: amberginsburg, carladuarte, liarousset, mca, performanceart, repurpose
Phone conversation pre-post:
Me: So the performance is all about re-using stuff... was it cool stuff like turning sweaters into parachutes and jumping off the roof?
Gretchen : No, it was like they wrapped a sweater into a brick and put it on a shelf
Me: Oh. That's a drag. What makes that good performance art?
It really surprised me to see the word drag as the first comment about this piece! Did you get to see it Gretchen? It was really quite moving. For me, at first it did drag, maybe a bit. But it forced you to quiet yourself and relax into the work. It was the initial discomfort with quieting my mind and giving myself up to the the moment the artists were creating that was so powerful. I felt really grateful for the reminder that each moment is special and sacred (if we care to slower our minds down to notice), and that the material we surround ourselves with is also deserving of renewed attention and awareness.
Beyond this train of thinking, I found myself really happy to be listening to the drippings from the bricks, feeling the humidity of the space, and realizing that there were actually things GROWING in the sweaters! I loved seeing the roots dig into the bricks.
Thanks for letting us know about this show...
When I talked with the artists, they described that sense of quiet and the invitation to slow down as main focuses for the piece
To clarify, I was the one who said "drag" in reference to what I thought they were going to do ... it sounded like they were going to make random inventions out of pre-extisting objects. When I found out it was just turning sweaters into planters, I called it a drag because I was hoping for some Macguiver thing.
I mean, I dig boring performance art as much as the next person. Seriously. And God knows I've been in some boring performance art pieces. For some reason, boring is often par for the course. I've sat through a whole lotta Butoh theatre and ... holy crap... I had to "change my expectations as an audinece member about what it means to be an audience member."
But good lord, we have to be allowed to put "boring" or "slow" or "dragged on" into our vocabulary of performance art criticism if we're going to do honest reviews.
It's taken me 15 years to use the word boring again. When my husband used that word, my hand covered my mouth in horror. He called it boring. How.. how could he??? You can't use that word! You can say "unfocused", or "arid", but to use the word "boring", ... well... you might as well march into a gallery and loudly declare that your 5 year old could paint better than that.
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