About Flagpole. (Athens, Ga.) 1987-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 16, 2011)
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. TMIMTMPOUTAN I I4C t. (IflVION iTHEET • DOWIiTOWH DIJIEHi • 70Q-C13-Q772 I ECO OOIETIIOAK flVEHUE • WE5I1IM • 70C-E4Q-EI12 Visit the Westside Location to try our NEW SPECIALTY PIES plus WHOLE WHEAT CRUST HAPPY HOUR! Oglethorpe Ave. Mon-Wed • 4:30-7:30pm *1 OFF Select Beer Bottles & Pitchers, Wine Specials '"'Downtown All Week • Noon-7pm AAA Airport Express, Inc. 800.354.7874 • 404.767.2000 Call for reservations www.aaaairportexpress.com *5 Off Athens/UGA Schedule 12 Round Trips Daily Per ticket with coupon. Expires 2/28/11. $45 pe: person, one way Children Under 10 Ride Free PER Paying Adult ‘You should arrive at the airport 90 minutes before your flight allow more time for holidays FEBRUARY 16, 2011- FLAGPOLE.COM 9
