I had to go back to double check my initial response to In(ter)dependence at PLACE…and first thought, best thought, in spite of the fact that this show of shows was to change over the course of its run, my song remains the same: there is some work so strong that I had to return to write about it, but the premise overall—inviting a number of independent curators and gallery owners to curate an artist or artists or an artist group into the show—makes the whole thing an uncohesive mess; an art fair rather than an exhibition. And really, that’s a good thing: one of my gripes about this gallery-in-a-mall is that the art has never addressed its profoundly weird setting…in a former retail space on the top level of a glizty, glass n’ brass, 80s-esque mall. In(ter)dependence at the very least reflects that jumble of visual experiences that the mall comprises. And Jason Doize’s “Product Placement” actually addressed the window dressing that this art might otherwise represent to the owners of a shopping mall…his “products,” hand folded cootie catchers stacked up on a table beside a pallet of paper to be folded. Doize collapses materials, manufacturing, and display (if not actually sale) into one neat 4×6′ installation.
Ditch Projects’ “Green Chain” takes its cue from one of its components, Rob Smith’s video “Annabelle Introduces Her Black Cat to Its Expanded Reflection” as an expanded reflection of a certain Northwestness. Donald Morgan’s “Green Chain,” a hexagonal, colorblocked “log” having been split by an oversized “axe,” set the stage for Smith’s video…beautifully hypercolored flora + kitty… and another, “Ice Water” by Jared Haug (a montaged layering of green-tinged water, floating ice chunks, ocean), that play on a large monitor.
There are a number of other works that I should probably mention, but I went back again specifically to see the installations by Morgan Ritter and Mack McFarland. Morgan’s “Composite Column” was every bit as riveting the second time I went back and had a look as it was to begin with…although she altered the stack of bricks, slapdash plaster logs, a white box, a television, a painted plinth (embellished with a couple of clay female figures)…for six days, recording process notes (and notes to self like “The White TV is charged with Bergson’s Matter and Memory” or “Don’t breath on it.”) on a pink roll of paper on the wall. When I saw the column, it was stacked on the artist herself, or a video of her doing what she called “wigglie line movement” in a red jumpsuit in profile to a soundtrack that was hummed and whistled. I loved its precariousness, its seemingly improvisatory nature, and its juxtaposition of movement and stasis as well as the fact that the notion of making a column addresses a couple thousand years of art and architecture, but most especially monument making. In a nutshell, and the reason why it works with a capital W is that this column cuts against everything a column’s meant to be and do as a yin take on a yang object.
Finally, McFarland has the audacity to fire a shot over the bow of the bad ship S.S. Racism with “Well there ain’t nobody left to impress/ And everyone’s kissing their own hands (material of things unsaid)” and pulls it off. The installation represents the end of the party, confetti littering the floor under the party flags, the tired canvases sporting party hats painted in what I’m reading as skin tones (of course, I only see their edges and infer that they are monochrome) sit on the floor leaning against the wall while two little canvases, one black and one white, lean against each other as a little A-frame on the “dance floor” in the slowest of dances. What’s going on here? McFarland clues us in the subtlest way: titles are written in pencil on the backs of three of the canvases, “An approximation of Adrian Piper’s skin color created from a photo found on Wikipedia,” “An approximation of Ariana Jacob’s skin color created from memory,” “An approximation of A.J. Kemp’s skin color created from memory.” All three subjects are artists. And the two who are black have made work about race and racism. McFarland’s inclusion of Piper (the largest canvas), a pioneering conceptual artist whose 70s work in particular focused on race head-on, puts this work in that line of fire.
Yes, I’m risking boiling this down too much, but McFarland’s arrangement suggests that the nuance of the actual colors of skin tone which are analogous to the variousness of experience an artist might be able to represent in his/her work regardless of his/her skin color go (willfully) unnoticed, the variousness reduced to the binary of black and white. That in the end whatever lipservice the art world gives to inclusiveness evaporates when nobody’s looking. And yet, the self-congratulatory band plays on (the kissing one’s own hand of the title of the piece). The confrontational tone of the title smartly balances the melancholy, party’s-over tone of the actual installation. I was surprised and pleased to be provoked (in a good way) by a work like this, made by a white dude no less, that covers such well-trodden ground, and that’s why I had to return and see it again. And that’s why I’m not done thinking about it.