“I have nothing to say / and I am saying it / and that is poetry / as I needed it” — John Cage
I Have Nothing To Say To You
Michael Reinsch
FalseFront
For I Have Nothing To Say To You at FalseFront, Michael Reinsch borrows the marketing tactic of the hopeful small-biz enterprise—the sidewalk sandwich-board decorated with a clutch of helium balloons—and strips it of content, presenting it as a silent gesture. A handful of these readymade sculptures in a spectrum of decidedly non-celebratory, non-commercial colors ranging from tarnished gold to brown and black are placed randomly around the room. I like how the shiny balloons perform their look-at-me job while the blank signs offer up no reward for that attention. I have nothing to say to you but please pay attention to me anyway. It’s like the test pattern (the poster image for the show) that offers up some minimal visual reward for looking so you won’t just turn off the television and get on with things.
This may be an aside, but doesn’t that hollow promise, that minimal reward for our attention to the shiny, feel awfully familiar? I Have Nothing To Say To You could be speaking not only for the shallow rewards of the acquisition of material goods found within the shops just beyond signs like these but for those of mass cultural offerings in general.
It’s more likely though that that emptiness behind the shiny is of a more individual nature. I had wondered about the placement of the signs, about why they’re essentially scattered around the room, further distancing them from their natural environment on the linear “sidewalk.” As the opening of the exhibition became more crowded, these signs stood in for any individuals in a social setting, advertising something, but holding back on the details.
It’s also tempting to read this as a self-reflexive questioning of the content (or perhaps the reach and relevance of that content) of this (or any) work. Am I getting through? Or are you just here for the balloons?
Any way you slice it, although the things in themselves are so banal as to make one’s eyes glaze over, there’s a whole lot of something in the nothing they’re saying that rings out loud and clear. And it’s some kind of alchemy that makes these commonplace commercial props look almost elegant.
I have nothing to say to you but please pay attention to me anyway. This brings to mind another recent exhibition of Reinsch’s at Worksound. For Maybe Not, Reinsch installed small oddly-framed, ill-lit photos of the interiors of ordinary homes. It dawns on the viewer that she’s looking at screengrabs from idle webcams, and indeed these are grabs from dormant video chat sessions. The cameras are on, but nobody’s home. Reinsch, like no other artist in Portland, has a bead on contemporary melancholy, on human connection and disconnection, and addresses it in a way that exposes vulnerability without, thankfully, drifting into the maudlin.
Witness his performance piece, “Present Tense,” at gallery HOMELAND this past Friday for The World Is Not Ending…Your World Is Ending. Reinsch set himself the task of opening more than a hundred what looked like gifts of all sizes wrapped in black shiny paper with black ribbon but were actually empty boxes. Bent to the task of opening, he delivered a sometimes-hard-to-hear monologue: “not much of a husband, not much of a father…” while a tape player blasted chaotic kid sounds, laughing and yelling and completely distorted for having the volume maxed out. The monologue ended before Reinsch finished his task…he ended up sitting wearily on the floor, facing away from us, opening the remaining boxes—empty as the signs in I Have Nothing…—in silence.