I have contemplated trash many times before. In fact, it’s been a major sticking point for me since youth… since learning about the mass of it… the danger of it… the bulk. The non-human side of nature treats waste and decay so elegantly compared to clumsy man-made chemicals and plastic detritus that does not break itself down. Nature outside of man’s control reduces, reuses and recycles as a matter of course. Just think of the function of decomposing flies and worms and fungus as they turn dead flesh into vibrantly fertile organic matter.

In light of these tiny, tireless, indispensable workers, I thought it would be satisfying to highlight some human artists who have reused used things in particularly poetic ways, injecting them with new meaning, giving them a fresh life in the arena of the mind. This first article is devoted to artists who have reinvigorated used clothing.

Shannon Eakins cozies up to used sweaters donated by Goodwill Industries for an exhibition at the Tacoma Art Museum.

Robert Fontenot is midway into the project “Recycle LACMA.”   In his words:

On January 14th, 2009 the Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced that it was deaccessioning more than 100 items from its costumes and textiles collection. Once carefully collected, catalogued, and cared for, these items have now been cast back out in to the world. What will happen to them? Like any other useless item, they will need to be recycled or disposed of.

Recycle LACMA is a project of Los Angeles-based artist Robert Fontenot. At three separate auctions he purchased over 50 items deaccessioned by LACMA and is now trying to find new uses for these otherwise unwanted items.

The result of this ambitious project is bittersweet. If the original object was especially beautiful, it seems to demand a respectful reuse. But it was all destined to be disseminated and likely trashed… so isn’t any reuse better than a thoughtless demise?

Korean Coat (2nd reuse) from Recycle LACMA

And then there’s Nick Cave. Ah! Nick Cave. Not the musician, but the sculptor, who makes costume-totem-figures that can be worn by dancers. I like what this blogger has to say:

The Soundsuits are multimedia pieces made from items Cave has scavenged from flea markets, thrift stores, and garage sales over the past two decades [...] One of Cave’s philosophies is that his creations have been works in progress for centuries since all of the materials have been made by other people from other times and other places. He wants to showcase all of the craftsmanship of these unknown people together in a new, artistic, and functional garment. I love that.

Me too.

Nick Cave Soundsuit

Christian Boltanski made used clothes into spirit-holders, while Michelangelo Pistoletto piled them up for a bewildered nude. Shannon Eakins (pictured above) and Marc Dombrosky warmed up a courtyard in Tacoma, Washington.

My final example is from the brutally beautiful painter Anselm Kiefer. “Die Welle (Wave)” hangs at the Seattle Art Museum– a massive painting– earthy, encrusted, with cotton dresses of various sizes hovering over the surface. There are no good images of it online that I can find, and it’s just as well; most art is compromised by reproduction somewhat, but a pixel-made version of a piece with such tactile urgency and indefinable presence is useless. For reasons I may never understand, the painting moved me to tears when I first saw it in person. It makes me wonder at Kiefer’s own description of his goals:

“I don’t consider myself a Platonist but I think that the spirit is contained in the material and it is the artist’s mission to extract it.”

*

Gala Bent is a mother-artist-teacher living in Seattle who enjoys, among other things, this thought: between thesis and antithesis arcs the ever-loving synthesis. www.galabent.com

Danielson Heart (Via)

The scales of contemporary art, in all of their massive tentacled complexity, are not tipped in the direction of sincere pathos. And no wonder… it’s really difficult to make work that is tenderhearted and not cheesy. In honor of Valentine’s Day, a mini-list of artists who have ridden that line gracefully:

Harrell Fletcher: His whole oeuvre can be considered to be a celebration of the peculiarities of being human–individually and in community–but one of my favorites is his video “The Sound We Make Together.”  A description from his website:

I had various groups of people from Houston: a baptist choir, a meditation class, a break dance group, dogs from a dog park, and ten other groups doing what they normally do but in the gallery space. The video projection sort of recreated them being there one after another.

Nola Avienne:  In a recent project, The Donor Wall, Nola gently and expertly drew blood from a long list of artists and made lovely monochromatic paintings out of each sample.  Straight from the heart.

Lee Mingwei:  I appreciate the simple and poetic effect of pieces like The Mending Project, in which gallery guests brought ripped items that the artist mended with brightly colored thread, or The Dining Project, where he made a meal for and dined with one stranger per day.

Lee Mingwei. The Dining Project. 1997. Installation view. Lombard-Freid Fine Arts, New York. Photo: Charly Wittock

You Are Beautiful: I wrote about this collective endeavor here, a little while ago.

Peter Bonde Becker Nelson:  PBBN’s video performances are an exercise in empathy.  Nine Monologues, for example, has him carefully lip-synching the voices of women describing femininity.  If the truest of true love is being other-centered, the proverbial walk in someone else’s shoes is a step in the right direction.

Gala Bent is a mother-artist-teacher living in Seattle who enjoys, among other things, this thought: between thesis and antithesis arcs the ever-loving synthesis. www.galabent.com

^ from Greta Pratt’s  Nineteen Lincolns, 2005 ^

Before the New Weird America was the Old Weird America.

An art show that circulated the U.S. in 2009 (and landed in Seattle at the Frye Art Museum) called The Old, Weird America: Folk Themes in Contemporary Art, takes its primary title from music/culture writer Greil Marcus.  In 1997, Marcus released a book, Invisible Republic, exploring the influence that recordings like Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Music had on Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes; the book was re-released a few years later as The Old, Weird America.  Harry Smith, John Cohen, and Alan Lomax, among others, can be credited with crucial roles in preserving recordings of folk, blues and gospel music before the generation that carried it in their bones passed away.  These compiled tracks, in which atmospheric on-site recordings were sometimes captured in kitchens or on front porches, give us a misted peek into an America that is and was truly weird.

To listen to these tapes is to be transported into an earthy and secret place—to go under the spell of the country’s collective ghosts.  Chairs creak, winds blow, babies whine, as voices wail, bellow and croon songs from older times, mother countries and bloody histories.  The picture of America painted by these voices is much more colorful and eerie than the tidy rendition that one might read in a textbook.

In this age, we are nothing if not skeptics of tidy histories, yet to re-frame the past is difficult.  Any retelling must borrow from standards of storytelling, or riff on the accepted versions of the past that we have in common, especially when the accepted versions have promoted questionable conclusions or notable exclusions.

The artists compiled in The Old, Weird America exhibit do just that.  Pieces like Dario Robleto’s science-classroom classification drawers (Shaker Apothecary [2007] shown below) and Sam Durant’s remixed museum dioramas  (Pilgrims and Indians, Planting and Reaping, Learning and Teaching [2006]) glory in educational reductionism: the desire to distill complex narratives into clean pictures with captions (on plaques for more authoritative effect).

Greta Pratt’s sincere Abraham Lincoln impersonators (one contemplative Lincoln shown above) are moving in their desire to capture a fabled personality on which we hang endless ideals of civic bravery.  Eric Beltz’s both irreverent and astoundingly beautiful graphite drawings of the Founders of America spin off of the same type of clichés with a dour backward glance.  Greil Marcus has also warned that “…it is a sure sign that a culture has reached a dead end when it is no longer intrigued by its myths.”  Looking at the work of these mostly thirty-and forty-somethings, it seems that we are still happy to paddle around in the wily wilderness of our shared and unfathomably complex past.

Listen to bits of old songs:

Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music

There is no Eye (Smithsonian Folkways)

^Dario Robleto, “Shaker Apothecary” (with “A Rosary for Rhythm” and “Salvation Cocktails”), 2007. Pine, hand-ground vinyl 45 rpm dance-craze records, various medicinal botanicals, carved bone calcium, typeset ^

Gala Bent is a mother-artist-teacher living in Seattle who enjoys, among other things, this thought: between thesis and antithesis arcs the ever-loving synthesis. www.galabent.com

(Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Los Angeles, California
Statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe, detail: the only relic from the “Tilma” in the United States: image public domain)

As a hoodoo-voodoo, get-you-back-to-me tool,

this hank’s thankless task is vast…

(From “A Lock of Her Hair” by Robert Wrigley)

Can an inanimate object hold power beyond its own basic material?  Reliquaries that hold the bones or clothing of martyrs are kept because of the humble objects’ passionate history as part of or closely related to the bodies of saints.  The work of Dario Robleto is compelling because it feeds into the same reverence.  In one of Robleto’s pieces, for example (At War With The Entropy Of Nature/Ghosts Don’t Always Want To Come Back, 2002), which looks like an aged audio cassette encrusted with rusty porcelain, he lists the materials like this:

Cassette: carved bone & bone dust from every bone in the body, trinitite (glass produced during the first atomic test explosion at Trinity test site circa 1945, when heat from blast melted surrounding sand), metal screws, rust, letraset; audio tape: an original composition of military drum marches, weapon fire, and soldiers’ voices from battlefields of various wars made from Electronic Voice Phenomena recordings (voices and sounds of the dead or past, detected through magnetic audio tape).

The appearance of the object would not lend itself to the knowledge of its poetic ingredients, but once we know what it contains, we are easily entranced by Robleto’s commitment to the details of significance.  Bone dust from every bone in the body?  Voices from battlefields?  Surely these meaningful choices vibrate through the object and charge it with unusual mojo.  In any case, they capture our imaginations, much as the collections of celebrity-touched objects do (Beatles bedsheets, anyone?).  As a 14-year-old at a Cure concert, a drop of Robert Smith’s sweat fell on my face (I swore), and it buzzed with the power of teenage devotion.

A rare breed of devotees eat the actual pages of sacred texts, in the eventual crossover of desire for proximity; touching an important object is one thing– but what if I can consume it entirely?  Will it not then even become part of my body?  A part of me?  Dali is said to have swallowed a strand of his lover’s hair when he found out about DNA; in effect, he now had all of her inside of him.  Thomas Kinkaide signs the most expensive prints in his idiosyncratic hierarchy of value by including a DNA signature; read: cells of the man’s body.  How much more authentic can you get?

But there are many, many people who count this all as foolishness.  A thing is just a thing, after all, and aside from the oral history assigned to these relics, the material has no special power.  This is what struck me when I saw recent photos from Laura Mackin, who makes much of her work with found images from the internet.

Laura Mackin: 64 Black Heads, 2009, digital image, dimensions variable (image courtesy of Half/Dozen Gallery, Portland, OR)

The image above is collected from women who are selling their wedding dresses online.  The blacked out faces are pragmatic– the identity of the bride is concealed in an effort to remain anonymous, so that the dress stands alone.  But the effect is both eerily sad and unexpectedly funny.  The identity of the bride is clearly the intent of the original photograph. The face cover-up plays against our sense of specialness, asking us to ignore the fact that these dresses were used ceremonially, with, probably, a great deal of hope and earnestness.  And this has everything to do with the bodies and  souls housed inside the lace and bead-work.  Their vibrancy still leaks around the corners of the clumsy black ovals and bars.

*

Gala Bent is a mother-artist-teacher living in Seattle who enjoys, among other things, this thought: between thesis and antithesis arcs the ever-loving synthesis. www.galabent.com

Some years ago, I saw some of Rick Beerhorst’s paintings in person, and I was stopped in my tracks at the mix of stylized folk-art stiffness and graceful, Fra-Angelico-meets-Giotto curves and rhythms and embodied light.  I now keep track of him and his sprawling beautiful family life on flickr, waiting for the moment that another zinger is launched.  And he doesn’t disappoint.  The piece above, Humming Bird Girl, is one of my latest favorites.  It puts into physical form some of the things that I’ve been wanting to think about– a meditation on ways of knowing.  Illustrated here for me is the tension between the satisfaction and frustration of trying to understand the universe by our senses.  The magic of the written word to open new worlds, but also the limitation of it.  The extraordinary grace of physical eyesight, alongside the desire to see what cannot be seen.  But I don’t have words for it all, which is one of the reasons that I am a helpless addict of visual art, as much as I love to verbalize.  There is, of course, much more to say, but instead, here are two more paintings:

Gala Bent is a mother-artist-teacher living in Seattle who enjoys, among other things, this thought: between thesis and antithesis arcs the ever-loving synthesis. www.galabent.com

One day, an enormous Russian lake with an already peculiar history disappeared.  Yes, disappeared.  In the morning, it was there—the lake that had once, they say, swallowed a church from its banks.  The same evening, it was gone.  When artist Amanda Hamilton read the story about White Lake in the Los Angeles Times, it haunted her.  The simplest explanation for the 6×2-mile-wide, 48-foot-deep lake glugging down into the earth in a matter of hours is that an underground cavern had collapsed.  But this, Hamilton explained at a recent artist’s talk in Seattle, doesn’t help quell the effect such a disturbance has to the human psyches and imaginations that are connected to the lake.  It doesn’t draw out the meanings of the event– one of which, for Hamilton, is the distinct sense that human beings are clearly not ultimately in control of the universe in which we live.

When she ran across the article, Amanda Hamilton had been busy constructing scale models of childhood homes– deliberately allowing them to be flawed and fake in reference to the unreliable nature of human memory.  She would then photograph them (which reminded me a little bit of Ross Sawyers, whose work I reviewed here a while ago), or paint or draw them, paying attention, again, to the fabricated details–and the limits of her own capacity to replicate them.  As the lake story tumbled in the back of her mind– with a dark poetry and unavoidable attraction– it occurred to her that she wanted to remake it.

And so she built a miniature White Lake.  A complicated process of trial and error with new materials and technology yielded a final film of an eerie winter landscape– “Beautiful Terrible.”  The piece’s power is as much linked to its soundscape as to its Tarkovsky-slow visual pan of foggy trees and snow… and the ice covered lake.  A soft white noise is punctuated by distant birdsong, which becomes increasingly frantic (birds and other animals have been shown to uncannily perceive a coming disaster) until a frightful crack booms convincingly.  The screen is black at this moment, so that the full measure of the disaster is in our imaginations, where it has the most hold.  In the aftermath of the crack, the camera pans to a starry sky—as if referencing a divine distance.  Is this a picture of indifference?  Or is there hope to be found in the immense and quiet steadfastness that the stars imply?  The film itself leaves this question unanswered.

Listening to Hamilton talk, and experiencing “Beautiful Terrible,” played a surprising note in my consciousness.  I was inexplicably comforted by the directive to surrender to the sublimely frightening and invigorating wildness of the world as it is.  In times like these, when our news-friends have ever more bad news to deliver about our own collapses, art in various forms can ground us (or give us the freedom to be groundless with less fear)—especially work that acknowledges that there are realities unaffected by the catastrophes that confront us as temporal, vulnerable creatures.  It is not a matter of escape, but of facing the void collectively, with our spirits intact.  Human beings have always made incredible music when faced with such a predicament.

Gala Bent is a mother-artist-teacher living in Seattle who enjoys, among other things, this thought: between thesis and antithesis arcs the ever-loving synthesis. www.galabent.com

There’s a Mike Kelley piece from the late 80s called “More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid”—a gaggle of crocheted animals assembled into a wall of homespun cute.  Whether his title is sarcastic or straight-faced, the message transmits—some objects, especially those made by hand, seem to carry a different weight.  My family is a scavenging family, partially for thrift and partially for the joy of exploring the weird histories of objects.  We find ourselves often in places like the Goodwill “bins” where clothing is sold by the pound and piles of plastic toys mingle–their limbs and synthetic hair and wheels creating a gaudy riot of discarded mass production.  When a handmade object is uncovered, it plays a divergent note.  It asks to be investigated and handled with a different level of curiosity—no matter how well- or poorly-crafted.  The particularity of the person on the other end is what is so attractive about these items—a sense that a piece of a unique life has been stamped and preserved there.

Allison Manch’s embroidered handkerchiefs are apologetically particular—autobiographical even—and are made of pieces of popular culture that are part of her personal history.  Like running across a penciled list written in a bygone era, a viewer may not know exactly what the references are.  She or he might not be familiar with the clips of song lyrics that have been carefully and lovingly knotted by Manch, or the names and faces of the record producers reproduced in black and red thread.  The universal part of this work is the sense of “love hours” given over to the subject, while the idiosyncratic phrases and symbols hold the sort of insider mystery that outsider artists* are known for.  You don’t have to know, for instance, that Manch’s family hails from Buffalo in order to appreciate an embroidered Bills helmet, but it does add to your delight.  And seeing the face of someone like Missy “Misdemeanor” Elliott in this medium is a satisfying cultural flip flop akin to the mash-ups taken on by artists like Iona Rozeal Brown.

In a recent group of embroidered pieces, Manch dyed white handkerchiefs black and stitched in light-colored or metallic threads.  The images and phrases all have a sparkling resonance, even while some hint at bittersweet romance and others carry light-hearted pop song references.  These pieces are another step toward an aesthetic that finds itself somewhere between a great-grandmother’s handiwork and droll urban folksiness.

*Outsider Artists: a disparate band of sometimes compulsive makers who have not necessarily gone through the hoops of a systematic art education.

Gala Bent is a mother-artist-teacher living in Seattle who enjoys, among other things, this thought: between thesis and antithesis arcs the ever-loving synthesis. www.galabent.com