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TAKING PART IN OUR BANAL EXISTENCE
"Taking Part," the current exhibit at ATHICA, consists of six
collaborative projects in which six artists engage participants
in different ways to produce the content. Curated by Brigette
Thomas with assistance from Sheena Varghese, the exhibit
represents a departure from ATHICA's recent topically centered
shows, avoiding the heavy-handedness that can sometimes
overwhelm art that is gathered around social issues.
Director Lizzie Zucker Saltz deemed the exhibit "a lighter
show over all, [although] the participatory nature of the
project didn't prescribe that. I think it's really fun for
family and groups and people to explore these projects.
Coincident to the nature of them being participatory,
there is a very playful aspect to all of them."
Playful is an appropriate term to describe pieces such
as Hope Hilton's "Walk with Me: Athens," an actual
walking experience, and Lori Hepneris "Status Symbols,"
in which the blinking pattern of LED lights on a spinning
blade can be controlled through posts to a Twitter feed.
Overall, the participatory aspects of the projects vary in
their richness and outcomes, tending towards either par
ticipation with contributors or with viewers.
While the exhibit catalog cites artistic forebears
such as the Dadaists, John Cage, Yoko Ono and Marina
Abromovic. the projects on display occur within the
context of our social media revolution. The original
participatory artists created meaning by subverting the
expectation that the artist was the sole agent of the art.
Today, the role of the artist as a meaning-maker has been
eclipsed by our participatory culture: How can an artist's
concept prevail amid the thousands of ideas and images
that we consume daily? Visit any college and you'll see
dozens of students sitting side-by-side in front of com- .
puter terminals, reading their Facebook pages, posting
notes and photos, playing games, working on group
projects: highly participative activities in close proximity
to but complete isolation from the company alongside.
We live in a lonely world where our closest friends are
digital confections and collaborative strangers, in which
we freely re-mix, share and respond to videos, music, posts and
tweets with unschooled bravado, layering visual vocabulary and
cultural references faster than you can say "Marshall McLuhan."
Visit any art gallery or museum and you'll struggle to overcome
the habits shaped by these experiences and may find the work
displayed to be static, remote and over-annotated.
While the projects on display at ATHICA mix media and
time-based components to overcome the distance between cre
ation and experience, they are not uniformly participative. The
projects "Send Me the Pillow That You Dream On" by Michael
Lease and "Where Are You From?" by Rosemary Jesionowski
are the culmination of participatory processes in which friends
and families provide personal photographs (Lease) and return
postcards (Jesionowski) in response to conditions established
by the artists. Lease, the featured artist in the exhibit, is
trained as a photographer, but chooses to work with found and
recruited imagery.
In a recent email Lease elaborated: "As an artist who
solicits images from others, I'm an organizer, collector and a
creator more of situations than anything else. I think there's
something a little transgressive about highlighting images that
are so workaday, so banal, and I like to push that. With that
said, I'm more interested in being a person who brings images,
people and ideas together than I am in being a hermetic, mis
understood genius-artist toiling alone in a studio."
For h ? s project, he asked the participants to submit photo
graphs of themselves from high school, from today, of their pil
low and of the view out a window in their home. And indeed,
banality prevails in these images that are grouped by topic for
cross-referencing by the viewer; the process of solicitation,
submission and accumulation is the strongest aspect of the
project. An intriguing but minor aspect is the duplication of
pillow scenes; many of the participants share a bed. Perhaps
more could have been made of such clues to further engage
the viewer.
Jesionowski's project has a refreshing retro feel. For those
of us old-timers who remember the pre-email era when mail
art was a common social practice among young people and
creative types, Jesionowski's use of postcards to capture
geographically dispersed responses to stipulated questions
is familiar, tactile and representative of real-time postal pro
cesses. But beyond that, the concept and visual presentation
seem pallid in comparison to the work of someone line mail
art progenitor Ray Johnson (see the 2003 documentary Ho\y
to Draw a Bunny), and the questions posed of the participants
invite little introspection or elaboration.
The mixed-media pieces in Heather Freeman's project,
"Personal Demons," are highly manipulated and compiled in
response to ^er Facebook request that her participants share a
description of their "personal demon." The fabric-based hang
ings incorporate video, animation, photography, printing and
digital manipulation of imagery around the language describ
ing the demon. Freeman's competence as a maker stands out
in the exhibit. However, the elaborate imagery belies the (you
guessed it) banality of the demons. Insomnia, fatherhood,
social anxiety—these are the prosaic problems of an affluent
culture and have a constraining effect on the imagery. Her
pieces might have provided more room for the viewer to partic
ipate in making meaning of the other ingredients if the actual
words had been omitted.
Similar to "Personal Demons" in the limits of its par
ticipation, "Psalm" by Brian Hitselberger is conceptu
ally pure and enigmatic; there is an obliqueness to the
interaction surrounding the phrase "Everything I've ever
done has been for you," which is reproduced on both
sides of blue paper in the almost-identical handwriting of
the artist and his father. Although personal and dialeti-
cal, Hitselberger's piece is less about participation per se
and more in the tradition of Barbara Kruger's and Jenny
Holzer's epigrammatic word art.
For those of us who love collaboration and participa
tion in art, "Taking Part" is a welcome event highlighting
artists both new and familiar, in which most flaws are
only missed opportunities to push, shape or increase the
role of participation. The ongoing events that are sched
uled around the exhibit are intended to further build on
the participatory elements, and Athenians are urged to
do their part for art and "take part."
Upcoming affiliated events include "Walk & Talk,"
a discussion with Athica Educational Coordinator Sage
Rogers and Assistant Exhibit Curator Sheena Varghese
on Thursday, Feb. 17, 7-8 p.m. (free); "Open Lines: A
VOX Reading Series Event," featuring Patrick Denker,
Sara Dever, Sara Henning and others (suggested dona
tion); "Kids Take Part" on Saturday, Feb. 19, featuring
local artist Gretchen Eisner's "The House of John King,"
an interactive life-size board game worn by the art
ist as participants explore a house of riddles, 3 p.m.:
8-12-year-olds and 4 p.m.: teens (suggested donation);
and the closing events on Sunday, Mar. 6, from 3:30-6 p.m.,
including a curator and artist panel discussion and the local
ized "Noise-Induced Transitions: The Athens Survey: A Found
Sound and Image Report" by visiting artists from Minneapolis,
MN.
Side Note: Poet Eileen Myles will read from her work Monday,
Feb. 21 at 7 p.m. at ATHICA. Myles has published poetry, fic
tion, essays, feminist anthologies, plays, performance pieces
and libretti. Myles' reviews and essays on art and poetry have
appeared in magazines such as Artforum, Art in America and
The Believer, and in 2009 were collected in On the Importance
of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art. Her recently published
novel, Inferno, "chronicles the adventures of a female writer in
hell very much like Eileen Myles."
Lauren Fancher
One image from Heather Freeman’s series ‘‘Personal Demons," on display at ATHICA
through Mar. 6.
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