The Space Between Edges
Peep show
expands our notions of art.
by Lois
Wadsworth
Imagine yourself an ordinary traveler, heading
for your room at a motel downtown, just across the street from the bus
station. But when you arrive, you discover that eight avant-garde artists
got there first, and they are taking up seven rooms in a row filled with
strange but wonderful art installations and performance.
What an opportunity for the whole family to
imagine a night at the Timbers Motel in downtown Eugene. For one night
only, the show starts at 7 pm Saturday, Nov. 23 and runs as long as people
are willing to look. Because this is an audience-participation art event,
you have to walk into, wander through or stop at the door of each room and
peek inside. The rooms are easily accessible. This show is free and open
to the public. Join the crowd for "Motelhaus #3: If on a winter's night a
traveler ..."
 |
| Detail of Colin Ives'
Beholder. |
The artists who have created work for this show
are interested in exploring ideas and issues such as liminal space,
psychogeography, gender, dimensionality, permeability, transciency,
security, surveillance, anonymity, sex, power, money, endurance,
spectacle, technology and the sonic environment. Now if you're thinking
you can't imagine how some of these concepts translate into art, don't
worry. You don't have to literally understand the ideas. Just bring an
open mind to experience and enjoy the art.
Leon Johnson initiated the project in his
capacity as designer and producer of media events. He is joined by seven
other artists: Mary Flanagan, Pipo Nguyen-duy, Joey Bargsten, Justin
Novak, Colin Ives, Megan O'Connell and John Schmor. All of these people
have done fascinating things, so if you can't wait, just skip over to the
accompanying "Meet the Artists" to read more about the adventurous spirits
in the vanguard of this art enterprise.
Johnson spoke on June 7 of this year to the
City Club about the future of art, and his remarks are relevant to
appreciating this unusual performance art and installation project. He
asked that we, the audience, "commit to participating in the rich
unfolding of emerging creative processes." He urged us to expand our
notion of what art is, "to listen with greater care to a greater expanse
of stories and experiences." He also encouraged people to look for
opportunities to make art in "the space between edges." He called
this between-the-edges space "an ecotone: the fluid, liminal space
between, for example, city and wilderness or the tide pool found between
ocean and shore." What we can discover there, he said, "is
tantalizing."
 |
| Detail from Mary Flanagan's art installation,
[Double]. |
Liminal space begins at the door (limen means
threshold) of the motel room. A common experience of many travelers is
that a motel room is a place between home and destination, neither exactly
public nor precisely private, but some mysterious, not entirely
comfortable place between. Johnson talked about the interim identity you
assume when you check in that you keep until you check out as a kind of
covert, anonymous identity.
The artists present at a planning session in
early October spoke about their own motel experiences, and those who
worked on earlier Motelhaus projects in Portland and Eugene described what
they found in the rooms — needles, chicken bones — and the technical
problems they encountered. Everyone talked about pop culture, shared
images of motel rooms from movies, television and paperback novels.
Johnson described an installation by Martin Caulley in the last Motelhaus:
"The room was filled with red shoes, in all sizes, child to adult. There
was a little stage with a video camera set up, where people could try on
the shoes." While not all the thoughts and ideas tossed around in October
resulted in images and performances that you will see and hear on Saturday
night, some did.
Leon Johnson and John Schmor's work (shown on
EW's cover) will be installed in Room #104. The Fit/the fitting: Mr.
Fact and Mr. Fiction is a conceit originated by Johnson and performed
live by Schmor, with audio (multiple voices) by Johnson. Schmor's
character is like the 1950s creations of French movie actor Jacques Tati
(Mr. Hulot's Holiday). Presented in one long performance that
begins at 7 pm and ends at 8:30 pm, The Fit is performed by one
character accompanied by audio of several "patriarchal" voices that at
first are amicable but gradually change to become threatening. The entire
script is very simply this:
"A man arrives at a motel and checks into his
room. He waits, he sits. He asks: "In a place that is not home, where am
I?" A voice answers: "Is it tight? Back here? Is it tight?" The man asks:
"In a body that is not mine who am I?" A voice answers: "Get into the
dress."
 |
| Untitled ceramic object by Justin
Novak. |
Mary Flanagan said she was interested in
notions of transiency, security and permeability. She looks at drains,
windows and doors as permeable spaces that she first thought she might
"collect" through directing conduit and sending video through it. Or she
might do a surveillance kind of a thing to show how many people a day
enter the room. Or, she said, she might create a virtual presence you
would see in the room to create a sense of displaced reality. And this
last sense of displaced reality is what Flanagan has chosen to install in
Room 101. Her installation is called [double] , and its aim is to
create "a surreal double of yourself in the room."
Joey Bargsten originally considered setting up
an interactive tableaux, so that the audience coming into the room would
activate different live actors by pressing different keys on some kind of
screen-based mediator. Or maybe the room would look like an independent
film company had set up cameras and lights, leaving them in place while
everyone's gone to lunch. The bed's a mess. Objects around the room
provide clues to the circumstance. Maybe you'd hear some kind of
soundtrack of two people coming from the bathroom.
Bargsten incorporated some of these ideas into
Anatomy of Melancholy I, which he describes as "a layering of
visual, sonic and physical evidence of pleasure, pain and cinema." (See
Calendar Intro page.) A WWII 35mm camera observes the scene in the room,
and Bargsten, wrapped in a cloak, accompanies on an "amplified violin with
digital effects processing." What's observed includes a televised program
of a masked figure, who "continually hurls himself toward a concrete
wall." Undefinable sounds that could indicate "love or violence in
progress" come from the bathroom A masked figure lies on the bed and
recalls a passage from Robert Burton's 1632 work, The Anatomy of
Melancholy.
Pipo Nguyen-duy proposed setting up a ping-pong
table in the room, where he would compete against a robot. As an athlete
he said he thinks about performance, competition, endurance and spectacle.
But he also thinks about gender issues, he wrote. He may have changed his
ideas by Saturday night, and the only way to know for sure is to be
present for the show.
Megan O'Connell referred to a room she created
for a previous Motelhaus that generated "empty symbols associated with
certain behaviors." She said Surrealist Andre Breton's notion of a room's
property of emptying itself inspired her. O'Connell has decided to use
this text on the bed, with a vertical line dividing each pair of words:
lay/lie; laying/lying; laid/lied. Additionally, a voice on the video will
comment on "encounters, losses and admissions," for example: "Hollowness.
Pure madness. Although he knew he was responsible, he quickly realized
that he had to keep quiet." Although the voice and words will change, the
video will run continually. O'Connell will have "take away" cards to give
to viewers.
Colin Ives talked about motel rooms across the
country created by chains as identical spaces, "a space you wouldn't care
to remember." He originally thought he might let people come just to the
threshold of the room, the better to define it as liminal, do-not-enter
space. His thoughts about motel rooms include these:
 |
| Take away card by Megan O'Connell |
"The motel room is a strange mixture of public
and private. We enter a space shared by many, yet expect our privacy. We
expect that the cleaning staff has cleaned for us, and there are new
nicely wrapped soaps and little shampoos waiting, The soap and other
courtesy items are both a boundary of what is appropriately shared and
symbols of the cleansing that has taken place. These cleansing symbols are
particularly important in the bathroom, the most private space in the
public space."
In Ives's installation, Beholder, guests
enter directly into "a compromising place: the bath." An oversized bar of
soap in the bathtub contains a small screen that invites guests "to bend
down and look inside," he said. "The screen plays a microscopic skin
flick, some sort of visual cleaning, a search for corporeal detritus."
This installation breaches the boundary between public and private as each
new guest "sees the residue left by seen (and unseen) others," he wrote,
asking 'Who is the beholder? And who is beheld?"
Justin Novak's installation will involve
"ceramic objects that suggest a narrative of gamesmanship and power, with
imagery that bridges the sacred and the profane. The motel room here is a
context for transgression."
The artists' previewed the rooms assigned to
them in early October, before they began planning, building or assembling
their installation. But they are not allowed to start work in the room
itself until noon Saturday, the day of the show. Johnson told the artists
to "keep it fluid," because "lots of things must be tweaked, lots
re-thought that day." No doubt about it, the whole experience will be
challenging, but it will also be a lot of fun. By 7 pm the rooms will be
ready, plastic runners will be in place to save the motel's carpets, and
artful signage will lead the audience on this eclectic, visual
adventure.
 |
| Megan O'Connell in her Lawrence Hall
Studio. |
Meet the Artists
Joey Bargsten,
composer and interactive media and video artist, is currently teaching at
the UO's Multimedia Design Program. He has previously taught at University
of Iowa, University of Wisconsin, Georgia Tech and the Atlanta College of
Art. Bargsten's web art site (www.badmindtime.com) is currently one of 54
digital works from 14 countries in the Fluxus International Film Festival
on the Internet (www.fluxusonline.com). His music has been featured on
NPR's International Concert Hall.
Mary Flanagan is an
award-winning media developer and artist, whose work has exhibited at the
Whitney Biennial 2002 (New York), the Central Fine Arts Gallery (New
York), The Physics Room (New Zealand) and the Technology Gallery (New York
Hall of Science). She uses virtual technologies, physical spaces/objects
and artifacts of popular culture to explore the boundary zones between
art, technology and gender. She is the creator of "The Adventures of Josie
True," the first web-based adventure game for girls.
Colin Ives is a new
member of the UO Multimedia Design Program, whose digital installations
and web projects have appeared at the Smithsonian National Building Museum
and The Digital Salon (NYC). Ives raises questions about interface design,
approaching the digital arts through installation and events arts. His
work ranges from sculpture and installation to CD-ROM and Internet
projects.
Leon Johnson is an
associate professor in the UO Art Department, a performer who also designs
and produces media communications and events, the proprietor of The Long
Bell Press and a founding member of Creative Material Group. He performed
in the UK summer 2002 in a new work, "reMembering Wilde," with John
Schmor. He performed "Faust/Faustus: A Duet for Devils" in Eugene,
Portland and the UK during summer 2000. He's a recipient of a Jackson
Pollock/Lee Krasner Foundation Grant for Painting, a Yaddo Residency
Fellowship and a Ruth Chenven Foundation Grant.
Justin Novak studied
illustration at the Pratt Institute, was widely published as a freelance
illustrator in New York, received his masters in ceramics and taught at
various New York area colleges before joining the UO faculty. His
sculptural work is represented by John Elder Gallery (New York) and is
held in collections in the Mint Museum (Charlotte, North Carolina) and the
Everson Museum (Syracuse, New York). He received a Visual Arts Fellowship
from the Oregon Arts Commission in 2001 and recently lectured and
exhibited his work in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Pipo Nguyen-duy
earned his MA and MFA in photography at the University of New Mexico. He
was an American photography Institute fellow at the Tisch School of the
Arts at New York University. He's received awards from the Ohio Art
Council, the Oregon Arts Commission, the National Endowment for the Arts
and the Getty Foundation. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions in
South Carolina, Wisconsin, Oregon and Ohio. He is currently an associate
professor of art at Oberlin College.
Megan O'Connell is
the founder of Dead Skin Press, through which she has produced,
distributed and exhibited work in Denmark, Portugal, Belgium as well as
Canada and the U.S. Her books can be found in the collection of the Museum
of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Banff Centre of the Arts, and the
Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry. She's been represented by
the Workplace Gallery, PICA and Elizabeth Leech Gallery, and her work has
been exhibited at Quartersaw Gallery in Portland and the Jacobs Gallery in
Eugene. She is a founding member of the Creative Material Group and has
contributed to the journal, Two Girls Review.
John Schmor received
his Ph.D. from the UO in 1991, taught at Truman State College for eight
years, and has now returned to UO's Department of Theater Arts. He teaches
and writes about performance theory and recently completed training in new
European clown, mask and improvisation traditions. He toured the UK in
2000 with "Faust Faustus," and he co-produced "reMembering Wilde" at the
Kings Lynn Arts Festival in Norfolk, England, summer 2002. He's currently
preparing to direct Romeo and Juliet for the Lord Leebrick
Theater.
—Lois Wadsworth