The Rake Magazine

In an effort to seek out and engage multiple voices and viewpoints from the local arts community, we occasionally will present on The Thousandth Word postings by "Vicious Guests" -- that is, writings by various artists, curators, guest critics, journalists, art experts, art lovers, and other essential members of the arts community who have a story to tell. Michael Fallon presented the first "Vicious Guest" piece, by Gabriel Combs, last month.

Brennan Vance is an artist that lives and works in Minneapolis.

-- Andy Sturdevant

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"Where there is the stink of shit, there is a smell of being." -Antonin Artaud

Part One

IN THE LATE 1950's, the Educational Testing Service (ETS) achieved rapid success when its brainchild, the Standardized Aptitude Test (SAT), was suddenly demanded by more than 25 percent of America's high schools. This success forced the ETS to move its main offices from a cramped but lovely brownstone in downtown Princeton, New Jersey to a gaudy corporate office park in one of the town's surrounding suburbs. My grandfather was one of the few dozen employees who had to pack up his office downtown and move outward over the sprawl of '50s suburbia, watching his colleagues mutate from a handful of familiar faces into a few hundred nameless strangers. Regardless, the expanded ETS established itself as the nation's premier institution in the effort to "standardize" America's youth.

Not long after the migration to the new building, the first of the Nests appeared in the third-floor men's bathroom. My grandfather, sitting at his desk just down the hall from the lavatory in question, recalled the befuddled expression upon a male colleague's face when returning from there. The colleague, nearly inarticulate, struggled to describe his sighting of a structure built of toilet paper inside the bowl of the bathroom's only stall, atop of which someone had shat. My grandfather and his coworker shared a look of curious disgust, but both quickly returned to their paperwork and dismissed the incident as a one-off prank.

But a few days later, the same structure reappeared. Then again, a week later. And again, ten days thereafter. At report of the fourth and fifth sightings, enough gossip had spread throughout the third floor that curiosity in the male employees finally peaked. By the time my grandfather could make it to the bathroom to behold this mysterious and perverse object, a small crowd had already gathered. Men had convened by the sinks, stifling giggles about the smell, attempting to maintain their professional demeanor while making playful accusations as to who had committed the act. Being a man of discretion, my grandfather decided he wanted no part in this puerile spectacle and turned to leave. But someone at the door clutched his elbow, whispering, "No, you need to see this."

Pushing back the aluminum stall door, my grandfather peered towards the head, cautious. The bowl was full, nearly to the seat, with toilet paper that had absorbed the bowl's water, forming a thick, pack-like papier-mâché. The sheets had been laid one-by-one in a concentric pattern, spiraling endlessly around the interior of the porcelain oval and thrusting upward into a mountainous structure. At the formation's peak was a perfectly circular impression, not carved from the structure as an afterthought, but masterfully assembled as part of the intended design. In this hollowed-out crown, a pristine heap of human shit rested, deposited precisely as not to smudge any of the structure's snow-white surface. The shit coiled into a serpentine conical shape, as though dispensed from a soft-serve ice cream machine. Under the glow of the ceiling spotlight, it glistened.

My grandfather shuddered with a mixture of awe and abhorrence, as if he had happened upon the work of an ingenious serial killer who precisely and beautifully arranged the carved bodies of his victims. But he couldn't turn away, standing there fixated by the object's gruesome beauty and absurd lunacy. Morbid curiosity having been satisfied, the other men finally returned to their offices, but not before giving the indescribable objects a name, Nests, and the supposed madman a clever moniker, the Nester. My grandfather was the last one out, disturbed both by what he had seen, and perhaps more so by the empathy he felt.

Over the following weeks, as the third-floor offices continued to achieve skyrocketing SAT sales, so too continued the anonymous work of the Nester. Sensing the situation was rapidly escalating out of their control, the professionals of the third floor at first hoped that their passive resolve would lead to the problem finding its own solution. They decided against defecting from their native bathroom -- escaping to the second floor merely to piss would be letting this terrorist succeed in his quest for chaos. But after nearly three months of random yet persistent Nester strikes, the tension between coworkers finally snapped. Paranoia flooded the third-floor offices like an oil tanker spill. Harsh glances shot through doorways, accusatory mutterings bounced off cubicle walls, condemnatory thoughts stewed everywhere. Men were hesitant even to be seen near the Nester's bathroom, so as to avoid the suspicions of their colleagues.

At last, nearly at wit's end, they finally took their concerns to the top: Human Resources. The case was heard, a resolution was made: an investigation was to be conducted. During open building hours, a security officer was to be vigilant in the bathroom at all times. A logbook was to be kept. Individuals would be summoned for questioning. The maintenance staff (those unfortunate souls who had to shovel out each Nest and repair any damage to the plumbing system) gave a collective sigh of relief. Everyone was eager to aid in the capture of this shit-mongering anarchist.

My grandfather, again refusing to partake in this juvenile spectacle, curiously observed what insecurity the Nester had inspired in the otherwise conservative, confident and civil professionals of the ETS. Only hours after the resolution was announced building-wide, my grandfather entered alone into the third-floor bathroom and found what was to be the last Nest ever built. He gasped as he strode into the stall, and stared once again into the strangely illuminated porcelain bowl. Looking over his shoulder, he took a few curious steps closer.

Hovering there over the bowl, my grandfather felt an insatiable curiosity seize him like an obsessive-compulsive tic. Succumbing to the urge, my grandfather extended his hand in the direction of the black, horseshoe-shaped seat. He just had to know. Quivering, he pressed his palm softly on the plastic.

It was still warm.

Above: ETS's corporate campus in Princeton, New Jersey. Photo by Mike Skliar.

Part Two

THE NESTER'S TRUE IDENTITY was never discovered. The risk of public reproach and humiliation likely became too strong. The investigation ended as soon as it began and life amongst the flummoxed professionals returned to normal. The situation was soon reconstituted as office lore that could, without fail, conjure a hearty laugh. The Nester quickly became Princeton, New Jersey's best party joke.

But now, fifty years later, I share this story out of love, not irony, judgment or for the purposes of a good chuckle. I share my grandfather's forbidden curiosity. If it had been myself in that just vacated bathroom, poring over that final mound of paper and shit, I would have touched that seat as well. We have the unfortunate tendency to chalk up the uncouth behavior of lunatics as inhuman, beyond our moral sympathies. Rarely do we take the opportunity to express empathy and explore the motivations that lead to their extreme actions-motivations that tend, alas, to be lacking in more conventional artistic endeavors.

For me, an artist who struggles to find sincerity in what I feel is an egregiously masturbatory arts community, the Nester's tale affords an unexpected source of inspiration. In contrast to the excessively self-conscious, contrived, Jerome hero-pimping, gallery culture-obsessed status quo that plagues the Minneapolis art scene, the Nester's habits provide a guide for a more authentic approach towards creativity. If we allow ourselves to see them as creative gestures, these Nests are a shining example of how we can cure ourselves of the disease of "artiness" and the thumb-up-each-other's-asses culture that seems to follow art everywhere it goes. If the inhibiting quality of art is the curse, then I feel the Nester's disturbed yet earnest approach towards creative statement is the spell-breaker.

Though the Nests successfully transcend normative art practice, they also fit tidily into our prevailing definition of art: (1) They had a clear aesthetic--- note the precise and painstaking effort in their construction; close attention is paid to concerns of composition, color, form, craft. (2) They constituted a performance---a routine was repeated ritualistically; the relentless disruptive nature of this ritual made clear that these Nests were meant to say something. (3) They were constructed for a desired audience---the Nester most likely imagined his colleagues needed a wake-up call of sorts; he chose to rattle his audience through a mix of dismay and perplexing beauty, forcing issues of anal-fecal psychology and paranoia that corporate office environments rarely encounter. (4) The Nests made a social statement--presenting his shit in a regal, pristine manner, the Nester possibly intended to subvert the pompous attitudes present in his office culture by forcing his viewers to confront a human reality that somehow causes us so much shame and embarrassment.

Artists have done themselves a great disservice in needlessly construing creative expression into the larger-than-life mythologies, brainwashing doctrines and pseudo-political advertisements that comprise the clusterfuck that art is today. We've created a framework for art that warps our hearts and minds into believing that art requires authority (galleries, museums, academia); precepts (formal aesthetics, airtight intellectualism); and high culture (icons, award ceremonies, magazines). We've convinced ourselves that art is an austere discipline and not the boundless, soul-searching siphon that can dredge out our deepest and most authentic creative desires. Unfortunately, art is just as much about popularity, ego, money, class, idolatry and condescending intellectualism as it is about using modes of creativity to purely and earnestly explore ourselves and our relationship to the universe. In fact, I feel art is rarely used at all for the latter.

Ideological powerhouses such as Dada or Fluxus (to name only a few of many counter-cultural, "anti-artiness" movements) have attempted to counteract problems of bourgeois convention and sterile traditionalism in art. But these types of ideologies simply aim to redefine the culture, the space and the vocabulary of art practice/critique and not to radically subvert these inherent problems by stepping outside of the larger art context; this is merely rearranging chairs at the same table. We've trapped ourselves in a box that may allow mobility within its walls, but makes it damn near impossible to share our creative impulses outside the heartbreaking realities of a terribly defective art world.

The Nester succeeded in truly subverting the accepted contexts of artistic creation by refusing to acknowledge or engage such contexts. Sure, he showed some recognizable aesthetic concerns in creating his Nests, but never did he try to peddle them as art, nor did he invite consideration of them as works of art. In fact, the opposite occurred; most viewers thought that they'd stumbled upon the irrational dealings of a perverted lunatic. The Nester used creative means to construct something poignant and oddly beautiful outside accepted artistic boundaries. The bathroom was not a gallery, the viewers were not critics; there was no didactic above the toilet explaining in plain language what the artist intended. There were no critical blog posts written about it (until this one, half a century later). Photographic documentation was not preserved in hopes of revisiting these Nests in a retrospective exhibit in the Walker's Target Gallery.

Undoubtedly, these Nests satisfied a neurotic urge as much as a creative one. But the Nester did succeed in engaging the problems of his community and letting loose some wild irrationality within himself. What is more pure, more human than that? Let us take that sort of model as a springboard for our own creative practice, while removing ourselves from that crippling context of art which, in all honesty, has very little do with creativity.

Please don't get me wrong: I'm not suggesting that people go clog some toilets to proclaim their creativity. Rather, I am suggesting that we draw from the Nester's example the conviction that we can and must treat our own creativity with the dignity it deserves. We need to stop making art that relies upon a toxic art world, to stop making art that tries to find a way into Artforum, and instead finds a way into the deeply transformative creative passion that burns in each of us.

Being artists in Minneapolis, and not New York, Los Angeles or Berlin, we have an especially unique opportunity. Few artists I know actually profit from their creative endeavors, in fact most of them even stretch themselves thin financially just to be able to create and share their work. There's little money for artists here. Barely any. So few of us actually rely on our personal art endeavors as a form of income that commercial viability should seem inconsequential to this community. If this is the case, if we have no financial obligations for tolerating this quasi-bourgeois scene we've created for ourselves, why do we all strive so hard to conform to it? Since most of us are losing money on this deal anyway, why do we not reevaluate our artistic motivations and radically transform how we approach creativity.

I suggest we ask ourselves some new questions. What do we want to get out of life, out of art? How can I use the latter as a means to achieve the former? We should attempt to create from a place where these types of question guide us, while refusing to indulge an arts scene that is, for lack of better term, shit to begin with.

To Frank.

“Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, ‘Because it is there.’ Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.”

-John F. Kennedy, Rice University, Sept. 12, 1962

 

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ONE INTRIGUING OCCASIONAL AFTER-EFFECT OF ART is that it can, when conditions are right, be a means to break through the time-space continuum. Case in point: I was recently, upon seeing a recent work of local public art, transported back in time to the year 1962.

1962, at its lowest, was tense, tumultuous, and treacherous. It was, of course, a year of near nuclear oblivion, but it was also a year of massive military movements across the globe in places like Burma, the Dominican Republic, the Congo, and Indonesia; military buildups in East Germany and Vietnam; a military conflict between China and India; and violent civil conflicts in the South.

Despite this atmosphere of warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, or perhaps because of it, 1962 was also a year of great cultural highs. The Beatles released their first single in 1962. Andy Warhol painted his first Marilyn Monroes, Elvises, Campbell soup cans, and Coca Cola bottles, and the Sidney Janis Gallery mounted the first group exhibition of Pop artists (“The New Realists”). The Rolling Stones, James Bond, Andrei Tarkovsky (perhaps the best filmmaker no one’s ever heard of) all made their first appearance in 1962, and Lawrence of Arabia, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Manchurian Candidate became instant film classics — notable each for the innovative story-telling risks they took. And among the great and innovative books published in 1962 were A Clockwork Orange, The Man in the High Castle, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, A Wrinkle in Time, The Golden Notebook, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Pale Fire, Silent Spring, and Travels with Charley.

 

 

Two events in particular in 1962 had arguably the deepest, most lasting impact on the culture — at least for the decade or two that followed. This was when John Glenn and Scott Carpenter risked all to be the first Americans to orbit the earth. A resulting national frenzy for all things space culminated in September of 1962, when the president uttered his immortal pledge — “We choose to go to the Moon” — in a speech in Houston. Suddenly, kids of all ages were learning how to make junior cadet space helmets, buying Marx mystery space ships and toy rocket launchers, and, if they lived anywhere near Brackett Park in Minneapolis, climbing up a newly installed 30-foot rocket to take imaginary trips to the stars.

 

Thanks to art, the Brackett Rocket survives to this day — nearly a half-century later — reminding us of what 1962 was about. Though I’d seen last summer’s reports about the installation of the above work of public sculpture, called “Return Journey” and fabricated in 2007 by Randy Walker, it wasn’t until I saw it recently — passing by on my way to lunch at the Birchwood Café — that I realized the old rocket that once stood in Brackett Park, and that now survived thanks to Forecast Public Art, was similar to the one I had climbed on in the 1960s and 70s as a kid growing up in California. Originally installed in 1962, according to the Minneapolis Parks website, the Brackett Rocket was “a children’s climbing structure symbolic of the entrance of the United States into the ‘space race.’” The rocket was basically a semi-enclosed, upwardly built clubhouse-like structure, with a exterior comprised of a series of metal slats that bowed out gracefully with a kind of classic raygun-like convexity. This allowed children to frolic inside the rocket while still remaining visible to parents. Entry to the rocket was gained by climbing a ladder through a hole cut into a bottom circle of rigidized (RSS.3) sheet-metal. Once inside, a child could decide how much further to climb: into a second, even larger, stage; then into a third stage, wherein lay the rocket’s steering apparatus; and finally into the final stage, the rocket’s claustrophobic, but lofty, nose cone.

The joy of this particular piece of playground equipment — as I remember it from my own childhood playing at Victory Park in Pasadena, California — came not only because it allowed for imaginary star roaming, but because entering, and climbing, the rocket was, at least superficially, a risky act — much like the ones embraced by people like Glenn, Carpenter, Mallory, and Kennedy. You wanted to climb the rocket, because it was there, and it was the tallest thing you’d ever seen on any playground. There was particularly something frightening, exhilarating, perhaps even breathtaking, about attempting to visit the nose cone, mostly because of the height of the ascent, but also because of the likelihood that you’d bump into a kid much bigger and meaner than yourself who wanted the highest spot for himself. And there was also the fact that the thing was damn rickety. The see-through walls, the narrow ladders, the rough metal, the vertigo-inducing open walls — all implied an enter-at-your-own-risk kind of ethos that was a larger part of American life in the 1960s and 1970s.

 

 

–Words spoken by Alan Shepard just before launch of the world’s second manned spaceflight mission; this has become known among aviators as “Shepard's Prayer”

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OVER TIME, THE EUPHORIC FRENZY of the 1962 American race-to-space subsided. Some space missions succeeded, and other space missions failed (some spectacularly), as did other missions. Perhaps affected by these failures, the culture grew, over time, subtly more risk-averse. In the late 1990s, safety concerns shuttered, at least partially, the rocket in Brackett Park. Stories circulated at the time that an influential local parent watched in terror as her daughter lodged her head in the rocket’s slat sidewalls. “I cringe when she goes in it,” another parent was quoted in 2004, regarding her own two-year-old daughter. “Aesthetically, it’s nice, but it’s not a safe piece of equipment.” Still, kids have a natural curiosity about danger that will ever go against parental risk-aversion — perhaps, in a vicious cycle, leading to ever more parental protectionism. As this story described, local kids loved the Brackett rocket up until the end despite parental fears: “Even on a chilly afternoon, it was worth the trip. From [a local boy's] perch high above the park, the 10-year-old could grab a makeshift steering wheel and imagine soaring above the clouds… he had few complaints about the 42-year-old rocket.” But no matter; in 2004, the Brackett rocket was completely removed as part of park renovation efforts.

The Brackett rocket, having been built before an age of seatbelts, bike helmets, child safety seats, anti-bacterial soap, children-at-play signs, toy recalls, and anything else we can think to do to protect our children (short of locking them in a padded room), was doomed. Its age was one of risk-taking of the sort that won us the space race but that took a toll on the physical body. Back then, playgrounds looked like they’d been fabricated out of the spare parts of WW II battle cruisers, and they were nearly as dangerous to youthful fingers, knees, elbows, and wrists. The Brackett rocket eventually became victim to changing cultural values that worked to remove the danger, and fun, from the nation's playgrounds.

The downward slide in playground design, which began in the 1980s, came about specifically from concerns about child fragility that had begun to affect trends in parenting and education. According to a 1989 story in the New York Times, parents were fixated that year on Consumer Safety Commission stats citing 15 deaths and 185,000 serious injuries on playgrounds across the U.S. With such parental watchdogs on the prowl, not only were Brackett-style rockets being examined as unsafe by well-meaning local park boards, but so were old-style jungle gyms and other climbing equipment, traditional monkey bar arrangements, swings, playground surfaces, merry-go-rounds, and any number of playground toys that had served several generations of happily banged-up kids. (Victory Park removed its rocket some time in the 1990s, while parks in other towns, such as Scott Carpenter's home town of Boulder and the rough western outpost of Dallas, have been taking down their rockets in more recent years). Compounding the situation, playground equipment designers, concerned about increasing ligitiousness in the late 1980s, grew increasingly wary of innovating and exploring new ideas about play. Parents, perhaps due to overstressed, overscheduled lives — and worry about losing control over their children’s safety — began taking kids less often to playgrounds (even as they worked to diminish creative design of playgrounds), and schools began limiting playground time, even to the extreme of canceling recess altogether in some areas.

What’s most ironic, of course — and somewhat depressing — about this playgound protectionism and irrational fear is it occurred just as child-development experts were becoming, according the Times article, “increasingly vocal about the importance of imaginative outdoor play for children.” The playground, explained the experts, was an “arena for physical, mental and social challenge,” a place vital to children's development. And, according to experts, the new safe and “uninspiring” play spaces were exactly what kids needed least. “Playgrounds,” said David Belfield, a playground design expert, “by their very nature need to be challenging and risky in order to attract children to go back again and keep trying. It is fine for kids to fall over! Government intervention and our nanny state is damaging our children’s development. This will have a lasting impact as they go through life. If we are not careful, we will become a completely risk averse country to the detriment of our growth and prosperity.”

Danger and risk-taking — especially in the relatively controlled, but unsupervised, atmosphere of the playground — is a crucial teacher of children. Putting oneself in (reasonable) harm’s way imparts to a child the importance of approaching risky problems with creativity and chutzpah and style. Again, according to the experts, “… today’s children are missing out on unsupervised play, a critical part of their mental and physical development. Incorporating risk is an important aspect of growing up. We develop from learning by our mistakes and pushing our boundaries and this has to start in childhood.” The fact is a few banged knees, twisted ankles, and split nails or jammed fingers may be among the best teachers we can have in life.

It is all too telling — and in many ways tragic — that, today, playgrounds look less like dangerous, war-surplus scrap metal than something from the back warehouses of IKEA: all designer polyvinyl and off-centric, trapezoidal, globalist shapes meant to nestle perfectly atop a polyfill, low-impact, modern play surfaces. These plastic pre-fab products of the Euro-designer’s imagination offer about as much opportunity for real imaginative play — and real danger — as, well, spending an afternoon stuck in IKEA.

 

Certainly, the Brackett rocket offered an important object-lesson to any kid who managed to mount the exalted, rarified nose cone: If you overcame your fears and dared to make the climb, then you were rewarded — especially if you lived to tell the tale without too much personal damage. I wonder if the same could be said today about a country too long pampered and protected, about privileged citizens living ever-cushier lifestyles, about politicians who fear administering any sort of necessary, but vote-draining, pills — have we simply grown afraid to face the numerous challenges of the future? Does anyone other than me wonder how John F. Kennedy might have suggested we deal with any of our sundry contemporary dilemmas: Unaffordable housing and health-care, a devaluing currency and ever-ballooning trade deficit, a looming energy crisis, rising ocean levels and increasing environmental stress, loss of industry and job, growing inflation, a widening divide between haves and have-nots, and on and on?

What’s great about this new incarnation of the Brackett rocket is that the sculpture has the power to evoke the spirit of a bygone era and point out every important difference between then and now. It hints at a better version of ourselves — the nation of risk-takers and achievers who made, despite the great dangers surrounding the country, “know how” and “can do” everyday expressions, and an everyday approach to living life.

Still, at the same time, “Return Journey” only hints at the former glory of the year it was erected. Mounted on a pole now, removed from its launch position on the ground, it does not allow us truly to go back to that time, just as it blocks any curious child from entering it. Today, outlined against the sky, frozen in mid-act of an impossible lift off, tethered with dozens of guy-wires — the sculpture is a tribute to a million risks taken by a hundred million kids through the years (who once climbed the rocket), but it’s also a mockery of our raging cultural trepidation and mutual risk-avoidance. Thanks to artist's anchoring of the structure — whether intentional or not — the Brackett rocket has become nothing more than an outdoor museum piece, removed from its past energy and potential and a sad commentary on our own contemporary cultural ineffectuality.

In the end, we can only marvel that in the much more dangerous year of 1962 the country’s citizens became united in ways that seem impossible now — its creativity focused on one project, its inspiration whetted by one young president enough to make the sacrifices (to the tune of between $20 and $25.4 billion in 1969 dollars in sum for the Apollo project, which amounts to approximately $135 billion in 2005 dollars) necessary to get the job done.

If only we could choose to go to the moon all over again…

 

Sometimes it is better to show up late.

I walked into the third annual Headphone Festival at the Rochester Art Center after it had begun and was immediately aware of the strange social space this event creates. The first floor atrium was divided in two, columns in the middle of the space wrapped in chic black plastic, separating the performance space from the galleries. On the other side of the plastic the room was dim and silent as dozens of people arrayed in chairs and couches, their headphones all plugged into jacks at their tables, their gaze transfixed by images on a video screen behind the tables where the performers were set up. The silence led me to think, momentarily, that I wasn't late at all, and that the performances had yet to begin. Of course, it didn't take long to remember that the event was only happening for those who were plugged in. Despite this realization, the silence itself was somehow more tangible than the experience in the audience's headphones, leading non-participants and latecomers to behave as though entering a library, tiptoeing through the room as quietly as possible, whispering, as though the smallest sound might interrupt someone's headphone experience. I found a seat at a table near the front, noisily.

As I rummaged through my bag to find my headphones, I continued feeling compelled to be as quiet as possible, though I was surely the only person in the room who could hear. Finally I plugged myself in and could join the event. Oddly, to participate I had to leave a social space and enter a private space. With my headphones on I was in my own bubble. The sound quality was clear, with some interesting things happening in the stereo field. The music itself, however, seemed somewhat run of the mill: ambient electronic chill-out music. Pleasant enough, but I was somehow expecting something that would demand more of the listener, or engage more thoroughly with the strange situation the headphones created. It was unclear why music like this couldn't simply come out of the PA speakers sitting at the front of the room, waiting for the late night dance party to begin.

As I waited for something more interesting to happen, I realized that the headphones exerted a certain kind of pressure. I was getting antsy. I felt tethered to my table. My ears were too warm. I wanted to get a beer. I felt like wandering through the galleries. Of course, if I got up to do any of those things I would no longer be listening, even casually. Worse yet, as I walked through the silent room I would somehow be signaling to the audience and performer alike that I was not interested. I decided to get a beer and wait until the end of the performance to visit the upstairs galleries.

In the galleries was an exhibition entitled Roman Signer: Works, described as "one of the largest and most comprehensive exhibitions" of the Swiss artist's work to date in the United States. Signer's work is deceptively simple, consisting of everyday objects arranged in unusual ways, with poetic, humorous and thought-provoking results. Bicycles and bicycle parts abound, perhaps a nod to Marcel Duchamp and Signer's dada lineage. As I made my first pass through the galleries, I was reminded of Arthur Danto's phrase "transfiguring the commonplace." Every work here could be described this way. The first work to stop me in my tracks and make clear that these were no mere one-liners was Bar, an installation featuring six large fans lying on their backs on the floor, suspended above which were six whiskey bottles lazily rotating in the breeze. The effect was beautiful, dreamlike, evocative of nothing so much as the tipsy euphoria that suspends reality, if only temporarily. I could have looked at it for hours. However, at this point I realized another strange artifact of the Headphone Festival; there was no way for me to know if the next performance had started. So, I headed back down to plug back in.

Back in my audio bubble I found my mind wandering, considering the untapped potential of this strange social situation. Once again, the music was clear and played with some mild stereo effects, but nothing seemed to exploit the social space the event created. I found myself wondering what the real advantage of the headphones was, other than giving each audience member a private experience, ensuring the clarity of the audio and forcing audience members to pay attention. I wondered if it might be more interesting if this solitary experience was exaggerated. Perhaps we should all be sitting in cubicles, perhaps the event should happen online. I thought, too, that if this experience was inherently personal perhaps I should have more agency and involvement. Why could I not mix and pan the sounds myself? What if my movements through the architecture changed my auditory experience? What if the other audience members somehow changed my experience? What if this apparently personal space in the public sphere was shattered somehow? When were the artists going to do something that pushed at the limitations they had been given?

After the next two performers had finished there was a brief panel discussion with the curator and performers, and I hoped that this might help answer some of my questions. Curator Scott Stulen discussed the genesis of Headphone Festivals, which developed in Europe as a response to noise ordinances. A clever and creative response, I thought, but that didn't quite explain why one would exist where noise ordinances were not a problem. Most of the questions from the audience seemed to address technical issues, equipment, software, and the musical sounds themselves. This forced me into the uncomfortable position of having to ask a question. This is unlike me. Still, I wanted to know what the artists thought: Outside of the audio clarity, and especially given the social situation created, what is the advantage of a headphone festival when there are no noise ordinances to get around? Scott was the first to respond to my question, honestly and somewhat bravely admitting that, as a curator, one is always seeking novel ideas, and that this was an appeal. I was more disappointed by the artists' responses, which all seemed to be about the audio experience, and that the headphones ensured the audience heard the music as they intended. One performer mentioned the greater possibility of playing with stereo effects, though I think these must have been lost on the many couples sharing a pair of iPod buds between them. Several mentioned the more private, contemplative space the headphones create. The devil's advocate in me wondered, again, why that would not be true if this even streamed online, or for that matter, if I had a CD of the music presented? It seemed ironic, too, that they were simultaneously excited about complete artistic control, while suggesting there was something empowering for the audience here. I felt that the performers were somehow missing some of the potential of the situation.

With a break in the music I headed back to the galleries, and became acutely aware of how many of Signer's pieces seemed to be about potential, with sculptures that either embodied a frozen potential for action, or worked somehow as an index of an action that had already taken place. In Bulletproof Umbrella a red balloon is protected by the titular umbrella, leaving the viewer anxiously awaiting the shot; in Tunnel a gun lies on the ground, pointing through a tunnel created in a rug, with a target on the wall, again pregnant with anticipation. Two of the bicycle works suggest actions that have already taken place. In Bicycle and Wooden Beams the front wheel of a bicycle is lodged in a pile of 2"x2"s, displacing the center beams by a few inches, a futile and pathetic battering ram. Bicycle with Yellow Ribbon consists of a wooden shipping crate (the perfect size for a bicycle), wrapped in a yellow ribbon, which connects to a spool attached to the rear of a bicycle leaning on its kickstand nearby. This immediately brings to mind the image of Signer riding his bicycle around its crate, somehow capturing its captor, as well as the effort and costs of the journey the bike took from Switzerland. In the two pieces each entitled Wheel, potential is frozen in place. In the earlier iteration a bicycle wheel is lodged in cement, absurd and useless. In the more recent version, a wheel is lodged in a brick of ice, kept inside a freezer. The wheel is locked in place, its potential for movement stalled, but only temporarily, as the ice may melt leaving the wheel free to fall or roll.

Another theme throughout Signer's work was energy, specifically the transformation of energy into action, and how much energy it takes to make a small change occur. This was clear in Bicycle with Wooden Beams, as well as the huge freezer preserving the second Wheel, but clearer still in the video pieces Office Chair and Dot. In Dot the artist sits before a blank canvas at a plein air easel, paint brush in hand, while a fuse behind him burns. Eventually a firework explodes, startling the artist, who lurches forwards, leaving a dot on the canvas, the indexical remnant of the performance. In Office Chair Signer sits in a typical swiveling office chair, a firework in each hand. As the fireworks go off, spewing sparks and smoke, the chair spins several times and then comes to a standstill, a pathetic seeming reaction to a huge investment of energy. Outside of the wit present here, there is also a timely political reminder of how much energy we use for the most mundane activities. This was most evident in Solar Suitcase. In this work a suitcase covered with solar cells sat on the floor, illuminated by a large photographic lamp. A wire led from the suitcase to a tiny flashlight bulb, whose dim light was the apparent end result of this energy transfer. This work was simple, humorous and thought provoking all at once.

Back at the headphone festival the final performer of the evening finally did something with the potential of the public/private space the event set up. Bryce Beverlin II was the first non-electronic performer of the evening, and I was initially skeptical about how a closely miked acoustic performance would translate to the headphone experience. Beverlin sat on the floor, surrounded by cymbals, cups, and a handful of other quotidian objects. To begin, he crumpled a piece of plastic wrap in front of the microphones, moving it left to right, playing with the strong stereo field of the headphones. Unlike the previous electronic panning, however, this had an element of strangeness; we could see that he was moving the plastic no more than 6 inches left and right, yet the sound moved from one stereo extreme to another in the headphones. The sound, too, was surprising, louder, more complicated and frankly more irritating than standard crinkling. As Beverlin began playing the objects on the floor with drumsticks their sounds, too, were transfigured by the close miking. Finally, the audience's private audio space was invaded, as Beverlin began letting loose vocal murmurs, grunts, moans, gulps, slurps and breaths. At full volume in the headphones, seemingly happening in the center of one's head, this was deeply disquieting and served to make the confluence of private and public space much more strange than the previous performers had. With this taste of the possible potential of the Headphone Festival I found myself looking forward to next year, and hoping more artists will rise to its challenge and push at its boundaries.

AMONG THE GREAT unanswerable questions that haunt our city is this one: Why is there a giant, crappy K-Mart superstore sitting in the middle of Nicollet Avenue?

For a city that is second-to-none in making catastrophic urban planning blunders, surely the decision in the late-‘70s to plop down a strip mall in the middle of one of the city's most-used thoroughfares ranks as one of the most nearsighted. It has essentially created two different Nicollet Avenues in south Minneapolis: the fun Nicollet Avenue north of Lake Street that is full of bubble tea, brownstones, MCAD students and Asian fusion restaurants; and the crappy Nicollet Avenue south of Lake Street, where you go to drop off U-Haul trucks and test drive your new car tires to find out how well they deal with potholes.

It's on the latter Nicollet Avenue that Art Of This Gallery is located. While I shouldn't write the neighborhood off as completely charmless - the Mexican place across the street isn't bad, and there's a great little vintage shop next door - the stretch of Nicollet Avenue the gallery is located on at 35^th Street is pretty featureless. It's a lot of vacant lots and generic mid-century beige boxes. Of course, it's these sorts of unremarkable neighborhoods that afford the best opportunities for imaginative use of space - before the 1970s and 1980s, the Warehouse District was a gritty, post-industrial nowhere, and before the 1990s, Northeast Minneapolis was a sleepy, vaguely ethnic enclave with some terrifying corner bars and some very charming churches. Both these areas were full of pretty cheap, open, modest spaces that gave young emerging artists and curators room to try anything they could think of. Perhaps this slice of the southside, choked off from the cosmopolitan delights of Eat Street by bad urban planning, will spur similar practices in this decade. That's how these things work. The practice of making contemporary art is so informed by real estate that they probably ought to teach land-use regulation in art school right between color theory and Joseph Beuys appreciation seminar.

Art Of This, a sort of odd name choice I always assumed must be a tribute to Peggy Guggenheim's Art Of This Century, was started a few years ago near Powderhorn Park by a few local artists, and recently relocated to its present Kingfield location. Art Of This is, like the neighborhood in which it sits, modest - a storefront, a few hundred square-feet of open space, a basement with a bar and a small movie screen. But it's hard for me to think of any gallery space in the Twin Cities that has so consistently in recent years devoted itself so wholeheartedly to recklessly passionate all-over-the-map programming. Perhaps the word "reckless" gives short shrift to the obvious planning that goes into each show, but every show I've seen there since the beginning of the year has been at the very least thought-provoking, and at best totally thrilling and strange and confounding in a way that makes me feel like I'm not quite living my life to it's full potential, if that's not, um, overstating the case too terribly.

Even the shows that don't completely work (I wasn't a big fan of the Jo Jackson/Chris Johansen exhibition, for example) aren't for lack of trying. Art Of This succeeds largely, I think, because whatever is happening in the space is always about the artist - the gallery is very neutral and unadorned, completely blank and with no architectural or design-related distractions, but it's small enough to impose potentially-interesting logistical restrictions. Some contemporary art spaces, especially located in reclaimed buildings, can either give the artist a lot of leeway in providing interesting distractions to play off of, like odd fixtures or textures. Others are large enough in scale to impart a kind of monumental quality to work that may not totally deserve it. Art Of This provides neither of these qualities, physically. It's the classic "clean, well-lighted place," as the art critic Dave Hickey memorably named his 1960s-era Texas gallery.

This summer, the gallery has been using the space to positive effect to forgo standard multi-week programming in a series of what they're calling One Nighters, a series of one-night-only openings that blend visual art, performance, video and anything else the artist brings to the table. There's something appealingly ephemeral about this sort of undertaking, and maybe even a wry little dig at gallery-going conventions - who goes to shows after the opening night anyway? Like the Ramones used to say about their setlist, if you don't like one song, you just have to wait around for two minutes and there'll be a new one. You don't like a One Nighter, there'll be a completely new one soon enough. And regardless of whether or not you like it, you'll certainly be moved to consider your values as they relate to art, which is something a worthwhile exhibition, large or small, will always do.

Case in point: I wandered into Golden Energy, Heartland/Hardland's recent One Nighter performance-cum-thrift-shop-freakout, and after ten minutes felt half like a confounded old man (I believe my esteemed Vicious Circle colleague Michael Fallon had a similar reaction to their work recently), and half like it was time for me to strip down to caveman underwear and go running through Kingfield yelling lines from Wild in the Streets at the top of my lungs. How many recent art openings can you say that for? We can debate in the comments below whether inducing complete sensory overload is a valid aesthetic technique or not, but that night at least, I was sold.

There's several more planned for the rest of the summer and fall, including this upcoming Saturday night, August 16. A small group of Minneapolitans and Madisonians calling themselves the Rotarians Society, who seem to position themselves somewhere on the ideological spectrum between Mad Men and the International Order of Friendly Raccoons on The Honeymooners, will be making a presentation about a project they've been working on called "Tate Fabrication." It begins promptly at 7:30pm, and seating is limited.

Summer and travel. For those of us fortunate enough to be able to afford to get out of the Cities, to the cabin or "up north," summer and travel make an unbeatable combination. Of course, camera phones and digital cameras come along for the ride. Looking at the Museum of Russian Art's current show of Sergei M. Prokudin-Gorskii's work, it seems that photography and travel, too, make a hard-to-resist combination. This essay roams from photography to ideology and traveling: from Prokudin-Gorskii, who was "photographer to the Tsar" and a pinoeer of color photography (his Harvesting Tea in Georgia is the title image above); to the U.S. Works Progress Administration's photography program in the 1930s and 1940s; to Alec Soth's 2004 Sleeping by the Mississippi. Take a stroll through a century of photography.

But first, a note on traveling: Paul Bowles, in his novel The Sheltering Sky, notes that the important difference between tourists and travelers is that the former accept their own civilization without question; not so travelers, who compare it with the others, and reject those elements they find not to their liking. Tourists, in other words, are not looking to have their world changed. They want a story to tell, a quick souvenir, a snapshot. Travelers, on the other hand, want their minds blown wide open and to see in ways they have never seen before. Upon returning, the traveler will see with different eyes, will question what, before, has seemed a matter of course--and will select, reject, and embrace with a critical heart and mind. That is one of the lingering pleasures of traveling.

Photographers--those who "hunt" their images in the world at large rather than "farm" them in their studios--have long tended toward mobility. As early as 1909, Sergei M. Prokudin-Gorskii roamed through the Russian empire to document the vastness of the Tsar's power, and the diversity of peoples having become, peacefully or not, part of this empire. Was Prokudin-Gorskii a tourist or a traveler? Can we tell from looking at his images--displayed, ingeniously, in custom-built light boxes at the Museum of Russian Art (TMORA)?

As a court photographer, dependent on the Tsar's good will and financial support, Prokudin-Gorskii was in no position to question his own civilization too much. His photographs of landscapes, emerging industry, architecture, and people were conceived as photographic surveys, while also serving as entertainment at the court, and, ultimately, as a tool to aggrandize his sponsor, Nicholas II: There are coal miners from the Ural mountains, tea harvesters from the shores of the Black Sea, the Emir of Bukhara in today's Uzbekistan; cathedrals, cloisters--some of them destroyed during the Soviet period--and mosques along with the hovel of a Siberian settler; there are images of budding cities, rivers that show the signs of early industrial development, and a traditional nomadic household, with a family gathered in a yurt (see image below). The range of subject matter, of distinct cultures under the tsarist empire, is amazing--as is the technical process Prokudin-Gorskii developed to produce these early color images.

 

 

Sergei M. Prokudin-Gorskii, Family in Yurt. Digichromatography.

 

Each image was taken three times, in quick succession, using a red, green, and blue filter (not unlike today's RGB filters in various software applications). The images were stored on glass plates, and displayed by a special projector with three lenses. Prokudin-Gorskii's camera was of his own design and, while TMORA's curator clearly went to great lengths to explain the technical details, the mystery remains of how exactly the apparatus looked and worked. Equally hard to imagine is how exactly Prokudin-Gorskii managed to leave the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 with so many glass plates in tow, since nothing of artistic value was officially allowed to leave the country (unless it directly benefited Stalin's industrialization plans of the 1920s). Only recently, the images that are now stored at the Library of Congress have become more accessible through a process called digichromatography. But enough said already about the technicalities involved.

Prokudin-Gorskii seems to have considered himself a scientist, as his quasi-anthropological approach to conducting photographic surveys of specific geographic regions suggests. Today, he appears as an artist--a chemist, originally--who made a living by dazzling the Tsar with his images in order to practice his art. (Although in those days, photography's status as art was still contested.) Nicholas II not only provided him with access to restricted regions of his empire, but paid for a specially equipped railway car for Prokudin-Gorskii's travels between 1909 and 1912, and again in 1915. The photographer's journeys, then, were official business of the Russian empire. But, troubling as that may seem, for centuries that is precisely how artists earned a living: namely, funded by a wealthy sponsor whose politics they were expected to support in their work. But there is another layer of ideology at work here that resides in the very genre of documentary photography: Are these images true? And if so, in what sense?

The seriousness of Prokudin-Gorskii's subjects leaves no doubt about the fact that they knew they were being photographed. After all, they had to hold very, very still while the three different exposures were happening...and whatever or whoever was not absolutely still, now appears discolored or blobby--the smoke from a factory chimney, cows off in a field, a girl among the tea harvesters who could not keep her head still (see image above). At the very least, the act of photography interrupted whatever was going on before the photographer arrived and before he inspired the subjects to strike poses they might never have adopted had it not been for the photographer's authority and insistence. We simply cannot know. But given the authority that comes from authenticity, this is not an irrelevant question.

Roughly two decades after Prokudin-Gorskii's far-reaching travels, the U.S. government hired hundreds of photographers to roam the countryside and urban areas alike to document American culture and American lives at this historic juncture. The photographers hired by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) included such (now famous) figures as Berenice Abbot, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Arthur Rothstein. The point of the program was ostensibly twofold: to provide a means of earning a living for artists suffering from the economic effects of the Great Depression and, secondly, to foster the creation of a national culture. The photographers, in other words, were driven by the need to earn a living and find a means to practice their art--not unlike Prokudin-Gorskii, whose ambitious surveys were made possible only by the Tsar's support--and engage in what amounts to a curiously self-conscious construction of national culture. The images they set out to capture had to serve a specific, WPA-approved purpose: namely, to allow people to see themselves in them, to identify with the subjects in the photos, and to imagine a national community...hardly an ideologically innocent task.

 

 

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California,1936.

Technically, all the photographs taken for the WPA were government property, official documents, not, strictly speaking, art. Their point was to create an "accurate and faithful chronicle in photographs of America." When Dorothea Lange re-worked the now iconic image of the migrant mother, eliminating some intruding fingers on a tent pole, she was, as Sally Stein writes, fired from the program for tampering with government property. The program administrators' priorities did not lie with artistic or aesthetic value; what they did care about were truth and authenticity. This line proved difficult to walk, though. As Susan Sontag observes in On Photography, photographers "would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film--the precise expression on the subject's face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry." Of course, photography always involves selection and thus subjectivity--but the appeal of the documentary and hence putatively truthful quality of the medium has proven highly resilient to such insight. In the case of the WPA photographers, not only their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, geometry--and race--entered into the images, but the production of a national culture was at stake. Ideology loomed large.

Do these roaming artists qualify as travelers in Paul Bowles' sense? Individually, they may have tried to question their own civilization and cultural comfort zone as they encountered differences within the American experience, such as the rampant poverty resulting from the early days of capitalism. As a program, though, the WPA sponsored photographer-tourists, whose efforts to create a national consciousness through their lenses did not easily lend themselves to critical questions.

Then what happened? Simplistically put, in Russia, the ethnic variety Prokudin-Gorskii had photographed was suppressed in favor of the proletariat. Only after the fall of the Soviet Union were people allowed to return to ethnically distinctive cultural practices. In the United States, on the other hand, the rise of the middle class led to the American Dream's putatively classless society, where each individual is free to pursue his or her dream. No one, it seemed, wanted to identify as working class anymore in a meritocratic society, and only euphemisms of white and blue collars (along with rednecks) persisted, in a slightly off-key version of red, white, and blue. Now, in 2008, statistics tell us the U.S. American middle class is shrinking and the economy troubled. In fact, comparisons to the Great Depression creep up with disturbing regularity in news reports.

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts chose this summer to exhibit Alec Soth's Sleeping by the Mississippi, a body of work first shown in 2004 and comprised of 46 prints. Twenty-three of the prints were on display at the MIA, which acquired a complete set in December of 2007. (The show closed on August tenth but the images can still be seen on Soth's website.) To access the work aurally, I highly recommend listening to Paul Robeson's 1936 recording of "Old Man River," unconcerned with petty human worries--growing food, avoiding pain and dodging prison, dealing with daily toil and racial inequalities--the river just keeps rolling along. While the singer dreams of leaving the river and all it stands for, including his "white man boss," in favor of the River Jordan, the mighty Mississippi flows untroubled, dreamless, with an inevitable force greater than all human aspirations. It does not promise deliverance or redemption, just impassivity in the face of human yearnings, religiosity, and dreams. The themes of the song still resonate, as the river continues to serve as a powerful trope in the cultural imagination of this country, and one by one, they make their appearance in Alec Soth's Sleeping by the Mississippi.

In a digital era, an age of seemingly limitless reproducibility, Soth's purposefully labor-intensive and slow process may seem like an anachronism. But the work thrives on such practical, conceptual, and visual contrasts: the frozen, white stillness of a Minnesota lake with a houseboat is offset by the bright red of laundry hung out to dry. (Evocative, even suggestive colors-yet from a practical point of view: who hangs laundry out to dry in freezing temperatures? It does not dry; it freezes.) The landscapes--riverbanks, big skies, prison farms--dwarf the people in them and collide with the unguarded intimacy of the portraits hung next to them. In Lenny, Minneapolis, Minnesota, the bulky physiques of the subject and his Rottweiler are juxtaposed with kitschy decorative plates mounted on the wall behind them. The brightly lit gas station in the foreground almost renders the dark cemetery behind it invisible in Cemetery, Fountain City, Wisconsin, 2002. The orange overalls of a prison work crew brighten the pale patriotism of the Memorial Cross at Fort Jefferson, complete with flag, grey sky, and an almost invisible river. Conceptually, the suggestions of mobility--the waterway, the railroad, the transformations of the ordinary into the quasi-iconic worked by dreams and the creative process, Soth's own travels up and down the mighty river--collide with images of immobility and stuck-ness: in prison, in prostitution, even in the Black character fixed in wax.

 

 

Alec Soth. Fort Jefferson Memorial Cross, Wickliffe, Kentucky, 2002.

 

The river, though metaphorically big enough to contain all of these contrasts, appears only on the periphery, if at all. From its snowy beginnings, it meanders through the photographs into the muggy expanse of its delta in the deep South. The water's grey fades imperceptibly into the sky, suggesting a vastness that visually echoes the profound indifference of old man river. The subjects of Soth's photographs seem to have absorbed some of that indifference. They pose with a fatalist air that suggests, at times melancholic acceptance, at times weary defiance of judgmental eyes. Most of all, these mid-American dreamers look resigned to their fate. What could be more at odds with the mystique of the American Dream--which is, after all, a dream of mobility, whether social or geographical--than this melancholic fatalism?

The only person enjoying the privilege of mobility in Sleeping by the Mississippi is the photographer himself. His role, vis-à-vis Bowles' distinction between traveler and tourist remains unclear, mostly because of the question of ownership: How far exactly do we have to travel in order to become tourists? Where does our own civilization or culture end? When do we begin to count as strangers? In one, slightly heavy-handed print--Dallas City, Illinois, 2002--Soth shows us a novel, entitled Vaganbond Path, placed on a windowsill--the classically liminal space between the inside and outside, positively pregnant with meaning, suggesting perhaps, that he is neither traveler nor tourist but a romantic vagabond instead.

 

 

Soth is said to be working in the tradition of documentary photography (which once again does not fail to occupy that troubling space between "the facts" of reality, the selective eye of the photographer, the poses--not spontaneous snapshots--of the subjects, and the rigorous editing of the images). Unlike the work of Prokudin-Gorskii and the WPA photographers, his work is not overtly and explicitly ideological. It is also much more focused geographically. But like his WPA predecessors, his images run the risk of becoming iconic--which is an ambivalent compliment, at best: "Whatever reality its subject first possessed has been drained away and the image become an icon," laments Paula Rabinowitz in They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary. But perhaps it is precisely this draining of reality that makes the images so appealing to us--and so successful in the marketplace that is contemporary art.

It is at this juncture that ideology, travel, and photography intersect once more. Soth may pay attention to the conventionally shunned--prisoners, prostitutes, and proselytizers--but he renders them so beautifully that even the most troubling appear transformed, iconic in their own right, not so much drained of reality as represented in a different kind of reality where we can see--and imagine--them anew. A seductive proposition, no doubt. And yet, there is something troubling here, a potential for misunderstanding: This transformation of reality also seems to entail a transformation of the strictly documentary into something else--a fiction posing as a truth.

What does his work tell us about the time and place where Soth, as an artist without a government paycheck, becomes wildly successful based on this body of work? If Sleeping by the Mississippi reveals anything it is that, at a time when the American Dream fades into grey disenchantment for a disappointed middle class, people still hunger for the kinds of images that give meaning to their experiences. But the point is no longer identification and shared misery to be overcome through collective or communal struggle. This body of work is no record of the people for the people, but a rare collection of expensive prints, to be shown in the quiet exclusivity of an art museum, where, apparently, we want our truths to look like fiction and our fictions like truth.

Acknowledgment: ARP! (Art Preview and Review) has kindly granted me permission to use my review of Alec Soth's Sleeping by the Mississippi, scheduled to appear in ARP's fall issue, as material for this longer essay.