The
Space Between Edges
Peep
show expands our notions of art.
by
Lois Wadsworth
Imagine yourself an ordinary traveler,
heading for your room at a motel downtown, just across the street
from the bus station. But when you arrive, you discover that eight
avant-garde artists got there first, and they are taking up seven
rooms in a row filled with strange but wonderful art installations
and performance.
What an opportunity for the whole family
to imagine a night at the Timbers Motel in downtown Eugene. For
one night only, the show starts at 7 pm Saturday, Nov. 23 and runs
as long as people are willing to look. Because this is an audience-participation
art event, you have to walk into, wander through or stop at the
door of each room and peek inside. The rooms are easily accessible.
This show is free and open to the public. Join the crowd for "Motelhaus
#3: If on a winter's night a traveler ..."
 |
| Detail
of Colin Ives' Beholder. |
The artists who have created work for
this show are interested in exploring ideas and issues such as liminal
space, psychogeography, gender, dimensionality, permeability, transciency,
security, surveillance, anonymity, sex, power, money, endurance,
spectacle, technology and the sonic environment. Now if you're thinking
you can't imagine how some of these concepts translate into art,
don't worry. You don't have to literally understand the ideas. Just
bring an open mind to experience and enjoy the art.
Leon Johnson initiated the project
in his capacity as designer and producer of media events. He is
joined by seven other artists: Mary Flanagan, Pipo Nguyen-duy, Joey
Bargsten, Justin Novak, Colin Ives, Megan O'Connell and John Schmor.
All of these people have done fascinating things, so if you can't
wait, just skip over to the accompanying "Meet the Artists" to read
more about the adventurous spirits in the vanguard of this art enterprise.
Johnson spoke on June 7 of this year
to the City Club about the future of art, and his remarks are relevant
to appreciating this unusual performance art and installation project.
He asked that we, the audience, "commit to participating in the
rich unfolding of emerging creative processes." He urged us to expand
our notion of what art is, "to listen with greater care to a greater
expanse of stories and experiences." He also encouraged people to
look for opportunities to make art in "the space between
edges." He called this between-the-edges space "an ecotone: the
fluid, liminal space between, for example, city and wilderness or
the tide pool found between ocean and shore." What we can discover
there, he said, "is tantalizing."
 |
| Detail
from Mary Flanagan's art installation, [Double]. |
Liminal space begins at the door (limen
means threshold) of the motel room. A common experience of many
travelers is that a motel room is a place between home and destination,
neither exactly public nor precisely private, but some mysterious,
not entirely comfortable place between. Johnson talked about the
interim identity you assume when you check in that you keep until
you check out as a kind of covert, anonymous identity.
The artists present at a planning session
in early October spoke about their own motel experiences, and those
who worked on earlier Motelhaus projects in Portland and Eugene
described what they found in the rooms — needles, chicken
bones — and the technical problems they encountered. Everyone
talked about pop culture, shared images of motel rooms from movies,
television and paperback novels. Johnson described an installation
by Martin Caulley in the last Motelhaus: "The room was filled with
red shoes, in all sizes, child to adult. There was a little stage
with a video camera set up, where people could try on the shoes."
While not all the thoughts and ideas tossed around in October resulted
in images and performances that you will see and hear on Saturday
night, some did.
Leon Johnson and John Schmor's work
(shown on EW's cover) will be installed in Room #104. The Fit/the
fitting: Mr. Fact and Mr. Fiction is a conceit originated by
Johnson and performed live by Schmor, with audio (multiple voices)
by Johnson. Schmor's character is like the 1950s creations of French
movie actor Jacques Tati (Mr. Hulot's Holiday). Presented
in one long performance that begins at 7 pm and ends at 8:30 pm,
The Fit is performed by one character accompanied by audio
of several "patriarchal" voices that at first are amicable but gradually
change to become threatening. The entire script is very simply this:
"A man arrives at a motel and checks
into his room. He waits, he sits. He asks: "In a place that is not
home, where am I?" A voice answers: "Is it tight? Back here? Is
it tight?" The man asks: "In a body that is not mine who am I?"
A voice answers: "Get into the dress."
 |
| Untitled
ceramic object by Justin Novak. |
Mary Flanagan said she was interested
in notions of transiency, security and permeability. She looks at
drains, windows and doors as permeable spaces that she first thought
she might "collect" through directing conduit and sending video
through it. Or she might do a surveillance kind of a thing to show
how many people a day enter the room. Or, she said, she might create
a virtual presence you would see in the room to create a sense of
displaced reality. And this last sense of displaced reality is what
Flanagan has chosen to install in Room 101. Her installation is
called [double] , and its aim is to create "a surreal double
of yourself in the room."
Joey Bargsten originally considered
setting up an interactive tableaux, so that the audience coming
into the room would activate different live actors by pressing different
keys on some kind of screen-based mediator. Or maybe the room would
look like an independent film company had set up cameras and lights,
leaving them in place while everyone's gone to lunch. The bed's
a mess. Objects around the room provide clues to the circumstance.
Maybe you'd hear some kind of soundtrack of two people coming from
the bathroom.
Bargsten incorporated some of these
ideas into Anatomy of Melancholy I, which he describes as
"a layering of visual, sonic and physical evidence of pleasure,
pain and cinema." (See Calendar Intro page.) A WWII 35mm camera
observes the scene in the room, and Bargsten, wrapped in a cloak,
accompanies on an "amplified violin with digital effects processing."
What's observed includes a televised program of a masked figure,
who "continually hurls himself toward a concrete wall." Undefinable
sounds that could indicate "love or violence in progress" come from
the bathroom A masked figure lies on the bed and recalls a passage
from Robert Burton's 1632 work, The Anatomy of Melancholy.
Pipo Nguyen-duy proposed setting up
a ping-pong table in the room, where he would compete against a
robot. As an athlete he said he thinks about performance, competition,
endurance and spectacle. But he also thinks about gender issues,
he wrote. He may have changed his ideas by Saturday night, and the
only way to know for sure is to be present for the show.
Megan O'Connell referred to a room
she created for a previous Motelhaus that generated "empty symbols
associated with certain behaviors." She said Surrealist Andre Breton's
notion of a room's property of emptying itself inspired her. O'Connell
has decided to use this text on the bed, with a vertical line dividing
each pair of words: lay/lie; laying/lying; laid/lied. Additionally,
a voice on the video will comment on "encounters, losses and admissions,"
for example: "Hollowness. Pure madness. Although he knew he was
responsible, he quickly realized that he had to keep quiet." Although
the voice and words will change, the video will run continually.
O'Connell will have "take away" cards to give to viewers.
Colin Ives talked about motel rooms
across the country created by chains as identical spaces, "a space
you wouldn't care to remember." He originally thought he might let
people come just to the threshold of the room, the better to define
it as liminal, do-not-enter space. His thoughts about motel rooms
include these:
 |
| Take
away card by Megan O'Connell |
"The motel room is a strange mixture
of public and private. We enter a space shared by many, yet expect
our privacy. We expect that the cleaning staff has cleaned for us,
and there are new nicely wrapped soaps and little shampoos waiting,
The soap and other courtesy items are both a boundary of what is
appropriately shared and symbols of the cleansing that has taken
place. These cleansing symbols are particularly important in the
bathroom, the most private space in the public space."
In Ives's installation, Beholder,
guests enter directly into "a compromising place: the bath." An
oversized bar of soap in the bathtub contains a small screen that
invites guests "to bend down and look inside," he said. "The screen
plays a microscopic skin flick, some sort of visual cleaning, a
search for corporeal detritus." This installation breaches the boundary
between public and private as each new guest "sees the residue left
by seen (and unseen) others," he wrote, asking 'Who is the beholder?
And who is beheld?"
Justin Novak's installation will involve
"ceramic objects that suggest a narrative of gamesmanship and power,
with imagery that bridges the sacred and the profane. The motel
room here is a context for transgression."
The artists' previewed the rooms assigned
to them in early October, before they began planning, building or
assembling their installation. But they are not allowed to start
work in the room itself until noon Saturday, the day of the show.
Johnson told the artists to "keep it fluid," because "lots of things
must be tweaked, lots re-thought that day." No doubt about it, the
whole experience will be challenging, but it will also be a lot
of fun. By 7 pm the rooms will be ready, plastic runners will be
in place to save the motel's carpets, and artful signage will lead
the audience on this eclectic, visual adventure.
 |
| Megan
O'Connell in her Lawrence Hall Studio. |
Meet
the Artists
Joey Bargsten,
composer and interactive media and video artist, is currently teaching
at the UO's Multimedia Design Program. He has previously taught
at University of Iowa, University of Wisconsin, Georgia Tech and
the Atlanta College of Art. Bargsten's web art site (www.badmindtime.com)
is currently one of 54 digital works from 14 countries in the Fluxus
International Film Festival on the Internet (www.fluxusonline.com).
His music has been featured on NPR's International Concert Hall.
Mary Flanagan
is an award-winning media developer and artist, whose work has exhibited
at the Whitney Biennial 2002 (New York), the Central Fine Arts Gallery
(New York), The Physics Room (New Zealand) and the Technology Gallery
(New York Hall of Science). She uses virtual technologies, physical
spaces/objects and artifacts of popular culture to explore the boundary
zones between art, technology and gender. She is the creator of
"The Adventures of Josie True," the first web-based adventure game
for girls.
Colin Ives
is a new member of the UO Multimedia Design Program, whose digital
installations and web projects have appeared at the Smithsonian
National Building Museum and The Digital Salon (NYC). Ives raises
questions about interface design, approaching the digital arts through
installation and events arts. His work ranges from sculpture and
installation to CD-ROM and Internet projects.
Leon Johnson
is an associate professor in the UO Art Department, a performer
who also designs and produces media communications and events, the
proprietor of The Long Bell Press and a founding member of Creative
Material Group. He performed in the UK summer 2002 in a new work,
"reMembering Wilde," with John Schmor. He performed "Faust/Faustus:
A Duet for Devils" in Eugene, Portland and the UK during summer
2000. He's a recipient of a Jackson Pollock/Lee Krasner Foundation
Grant for Painting, a Yaddo Residency Fellowship and a Ruth Chenven
Foundation Grant.
Justin Novak
studied illustration at the Pratt Institute, was widely published
as a freelance illustrator in New York, received his masters in
ceramics and taught at various New York area colleges before joining
the UO faculty. His sculptural work is represented by John Elder
Gallery (New York) and is held in collections in the Mint Museum
(Charlotte, North Carolina) and the Everson Museum (Syracuse, New
York). He received a Visual Arts Fellowship from the Oregon Arts
Commission in 2001 and recently lectured and exhibited his work
in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Pipo Nguyen-duy
earned his MA and MFA in photography at the University of New Mexico.
He was an American photography Institute fellow at the Tisch School
of the Arts at New York University. He's received awards from the
Ohio Art Council, the Oregon Arts Commission, the National Endowment
for the Arts and the Getty Foundation. His work has been shown in
solo exhibitions in South Carolina, Wisconsin, Oregon and Ohio.
He is currently an associate professor of art at Oberlin College.
Megan O'Connell
is the founder of Dead Skin Press, through which she has produced,
distributed and exhibited work in Denmark, Portugal, Belgium as
well as Canada and the U.S. Her books can be found in the collection
of the Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, Banff Centre of
the Arts, and the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry.
She's been represented by the Workplace Gallery, PICA and Elizabeth
Leech Gallery, and her work has been exhibited at Quartersaw Gallery
in Portland and the Jacobs Gallery in Eugene. She is a founding
member of the Creative Material Group and has contributed to the
journal, Two Girls Review.
John Schmor
received his Ph.D. from the UO in 1991, taught at Truman State College
for eight years, and has now returned to UO's Department of Theater
Arts. He teaches and writes about performance theory and recently
completed training in new European clown, mask and improvisation
traditions. He toured the UK in 2000 with "Faust Faustus," and he
co-produced "reMembering Wilde" at the Kings Lynn Arts Festival
in Norfolk, England, summer 2002. He's currently preparing to direct
Romeo and Juliet for the Lord Leebrick Theater.
—Lois Wadsworth