Note from Chicago: Heartland and Everybody

I got back last night from a few days in Chicago around the opening of the Smart Museum's exhibition Heartland. The Compass Group, a collective of 11 people of which my baby daddy and I are a part, had a new project in the show, and I represented the group on a panel at Thursday's opening. Now no longer a fourth trimester blob of sleep, Baby Genesee made it hard to get to everything I had hoped to see, and I had to skip Michael Rakowitz's talk at the Accidental Publics symposium at Northwestern on Friday. However, I did manage to make it to Every Body! at I space. Here's a quick and dirty review.

Heartland is a big project that unfolded over several years. The curators (Charles Esche, Stephanie Smith and Kristen Niemann) conducted a series of research road trips in an area shaped literally as a heart, centered on the Mississippi and extending from New Orleans to Minneapolis, the Delta to to Detroit. The trips served three functions: first, an attempt to reconceptualize a word that typically refers only to a handful of Midwestern states and their amorphous traditional values; second, an inquiry into cultural production as a regional expression; and third, part a new method of finding emerging artists that relied on local networks and word of mouth, rather than the gallery system. Unfortunately, the Smart Museum's temporary exhibition galleries are so small that this interesting curatorial premise was only apparent from the wall text and a small display of binders and photos from the trips. The show, which has a lot of really interesting work, feels a little like a very compressed survey, with radically different ways of working put in exciting, if somewhat disorienting, proximity. Only about half of the work was really about place or the region, which disappointed me as one of the exhibiting artists whose work deals with those themes and who might have liked a more focused curatorial agenda. But the show presents an engaging mix of work being made in/about the center of the nation and a good combination of emerging and established, regional and international artists. I really enjoyed work by Jeremiah Day, Deb Sokolow, Detroit Tree of Heaven Woodshop, and Julika Rudelius. I haven't had a chance to spend much time with the catalog yet, but it looks like it will more than make up for what wasn't possible in the tight space of the show.

The following day, I headed over to I space for "Every Body!" Visual Resistance in Feminist Health Movements, 1969-2009," curated by my friend and collaborator, Bonnie Fortune. In contrast to "Heartland," the show had a very tight agenda and a strongly historical feel, with visual and textual works spanning four decades of activism and education concerning women's health. In light of recent exhibitions that treat the 1960s as style, Every Body! reminds you that there was--and still is--a lot at stake. I particularly enjoyed the trio of works by University of Iowa alumna Faith Wilding, including a minimal and sensitive "central core" drawing from the 70s that is amazingly beautiful and a series of watercolors from the late 1990s based on female circumcision and vaginal reconstruction techniques. When these works are seen in person, the oft-repeated dismissal of these kinds of works as being hopelessly essentialist comes off like a desperate attempt to avoid dealing with the complex feelings of attraction and revulsion such images evoke. The show, which includes drawings, performance work, painting, blogs, zines, video, and posters documenting work by artists and non-artists alike, reminded me how much unfinished business remains in achieving physical health and bodily integrity for women around the world. At the very least, it was the most appropriate exhibition for public breastfeeding that I've ever seen.

The other exhibition at I space was "Glue Factory," a project on aging by the Museum of Contemporary Phenomena. This was a nice little show documenting a series of community- and discussion-based projects in which participants shared their thoughts and fears about growing older. Although I wished to see it in a more public place (like a school or a mall), I really enjoyed the textual and visual components. In addition, the two shows played off each other nicely, which doesn't always happen at I space due to the rotating curation the space uses.

October Artforum

This month's Artforum looks pretty good. The major article is a dialogue between Okwui Enwezor, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri around Hardt & Negri's new book Commonwealth. Their previous two books, Empire and Multitude were hotly debated and enormously influential in politics and culture earlier in this decade.

A Dog's Life

OK, so I didn’t want to have to write about a piece of theatre, but I have so little free time these days that I really had no choice.

Last week I got a chance to see a performance of a “new-ish” musical at Riverside Theatre directed by a colleague of mine, John Kaufmann. A Dog’s Life, which was first produced by the American Heartland Theatre in Kansas City, is a family-oriented piece by Sean Grennan and Leah Okimoto. It’s a pretty small play with only four actors – three of which play dogs. The intent of the play seems to be focused on the celebration of the relationship everyone enjoys with a dog. With Brechtian quotes about dogs from famous people like Groucho Marx framing each scene, the play’s over-riding “message” is that people are able to enjoy an unconditional and uncomplicated love with dogs. Unlike the relationship one has with a friend, parent, significant other, etc, a friendship between a person and a pet is pure and unfettered.

I love dogs. I love most animals. I have two pet bunnies that I’m crazy about. But I left this performance feeling pretty hollow and, in a way, manipulated. It seems that this was an honest attempt at creating family entertainment, but the absence of any real action or dramatic conflict makes this play not much more than a musical revue featuring singing dogs. A better way of describing it might be to liken it to a series of mildly humorous anecdotes about pets. While I have a soft spot for the little critters, I found myself wanting to see actual animals onstage than humans portraying them.

Essentially, the play seems to have no idea what it is. On the one hand, it’s about the lives of three dogs. The authors paint very articulate pictures of the characters of these dogs which led me to believe that we will follow their emotional journeys throughout the piece. Instead, just when I started to become invested in a character, the play would come to a grinding halt for mind-boggling numbers like Three Dog Night that did little to advance the action. Since the performance was really just 2 ½ hours of pure fluff, about 80-90 minutes of this work could be excised. Furthermore, handling a subject as timid as dogs really suggests that this is family entertainment. So when mild swear words get dropped during the piece, I was left wondering exactly who this play was for.

The play’s faults lay mostly with the authors of the piece. Director John Kaufmann did all that he could with the work. His decision to treat the play as a kind of vaudevillian act was an extremely effective one – allowing the audience to better relate to the show. David Tull, a recent graduate of the MFA Acting program at the University of Iowa, did his best as the top dog of the show. His charm was infectious and his sincere depiction of a hapless canine instantly brought to mind the image of every silly dog or bunny I’ve ever known.

Regardless of the play’s many flaws, a genuine sincerity and potent love for the subject matter is ever-present in this musical. The audience is helpless to not love each of these “dogs” and furthermore identify with the dog owner (a charismatic Jim Van Valen). The play’s ending brings to mind the best parts of the disgustingly schmaltzy film Marley & Me – a film I watched almost against my will this summer. The penultimate number “I Have to Go” is, you guessed it, about the end of the dog’s life and his passing. Of course, regardless of the quality of the script, there was not a dry eye in the house (myself included). It was clear that everyone in the theatre was immediately recalling the loss of a pet that happened to them at one point in their life. Only those with a heart of stone could have resisted such heartstring tugging. In this regard, I guess, the play is a success. But I couldn’t help but feel that this was a kind of emotional cheap shot akin to a cheap laugh. Of course the passing of a pet is painful. Who doesn’t get upset when thinking about the loss of their dog, cat, horse, etc? Setting this heartbreak to music was powerful and effective, but it didn’t make up for the previous two hours.

I suppose family entertainment is a tricky affair. When Pixar tackles it with films like WALL-E and Toy Story, we see not only a crowd-pleasing blockbuster but an innovative piece of cinema endeavoring to take the form to new heights. In theatre, however, family entertainment can often miss. Most family shows, or children’s theatre as it is often called, caters to the lowest common denominator. I don’t believe A Dog’s Life does this, but I do think it suffers from a lack of creativity and attention to detail. Their heart is the right place, but their wits need to go along for the ride.

Tiny Bubbles

Oof, had some issues in the studio tonight. First of all, I was still only rockin' one deck tonight, so I wasn't able to cue the records like I really would like to. Secondly, the deck that was working wasn't grounded, so there was a pretty mean buzzing sound all throughout the show. These records may not all necessarily be VG+, but hot damn, they should be sounding better than they were. I saved some records I'd planned on featuring for next week, when the turntables will surely be all better.

I found some excellent records at the local thrift store, got some on eBay, and found quite a few at the fleamarket in What Cheer this weekend! Will definitely be playing some good stuff this upcoming Sunday. The show before VeeGeePlus, Our Majesty's Hour, will be on vacation this week, so you can look forward to a two-hour version of the show Sunday! That means I'll have to bring double the records to the studio, but I could use the workout anyways. Here's the playlist from tonight.

Tiny Bubbles (The Bigger Sound) - Jan and Bill Bigger
Mr. Lucky (Best of Henry Mancini) - Henry Mancini
Three Cool Chicks (Bomb the Twist) - The 5,6,7,8's
Daddy (In Person at the Americana) - Julie London
As Time Goes By (Miss Ponytail) - Pat Suzuki
Quiet Nights (Something Special for Young Lovers) - The Ray Charles Singers
Look Around (Look Around) - Sergio Mendes and Brasil '66
Ricordate Marcellino (Confetti) - Les Baxter
Peter Gunn (Boogie Woogie + Bongos) - Hugo Montenegro
Bittersweet Samba (Whipped Cream and Other Delights) - Herb Albert
La Mer (The Rivieras) - 101 Strings
If We Put Our Heads Together (If We Put Our Heads Together) - Ernest Tubb and Loretta Lynn
Don't Worry 'Bout Me (Organ Moods at Midnight) - Merlin
Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor (The Moog Strikes Bach) - Hans Wurman
Jailbreak (Jailbreak) - Thin Lizzy

You're Tearing Me Apart, Lisa

The Room, Tommy Wieseau said, is the place where you make the rules and where everything is what you want it to be. Unfortunately, The Room is also a film by Wieseau, and it exists in the real world, where one is not so omnipotent.

For those not familiar with Wieseau's film, which he directed, starred in, prodcued, and executive produced, The Room is probably the greatest piece of camp cinema in the past decade and is now viewed at late night screenings, joining the prestigious pantheon of midnight movies with The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Pink Flamingos, and Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. Much like RHPS, fans of the film endure repeated viewings, made easier and more fun by yelling out jokes and throwing things at the screen. Unlike RHPS, however, Wiseau's claims that the film is intentional camp, which in most minds would be mutually exclusive), are quite hard to swallow. While RHPS is obviously an homage/pastiche/parody of b-movies and horror cinema, and builds an aesthetic around such a proposition, The Room just seems to be poorly made. However, it is the degree to which it is poorly made that makes it truly a thing of beauty.

The plot is nearly non-existant, featuring a love triangle between Jonny (Wieseau), his "future wife" (for some reason, mostly likely an issue with Wiseau's unattributed and mysterious accent, the word "fiancee" is never used) Lisa (who is beautiful and looks good in a red dress, at least according to every male in the film), and Mark, Jonny's best friend (a fact that Mark mentions ad nauseum, with the highest frequency before his multiple sex scenes with Lisa). Side plots, such as Jonny's young neighbor Denny nearly being killed by a drug dealer and Lisa's mom finding out that she has breast cancer are dropped as quickly and abruptly as they are brought up.

Anyway, as Wiseau would say, I rest my case. I am not merely writing a movie review here. You see, Tommy Wieseau himself was in town on Thursday night to screen his film and to do some question and answer with the audience. Before the film, one of the audience members actually brought up the question of intent that is so often asked in connection with The Room. Had Wiseau actually intended for it to be a black comedy, as he now says, or had he set out to make a dramatic film, as it seems, and merely failed in his honest effort? It is perfectly understandable that Wiseau would take this defensive position when he film became the laughing stock and drunk destination for film buffs in California, and eventually the rest of the world, but his behavior and demeanor make it very hard to believe what he says. Avoiding most questions and answering every other one with non-sequiters (his response to one question about whether he prefers shooting on video or 35MM included "I heard you guys had a flood here before, never mind about that, ok, I rest my case, next one"), and generally acting, as one of the people I have discussed the event with described as, schizophrenic.

I went into the screening holding the firm belief, as many others do, that Wiseau is merely a bad filmmaker trying to be in on the joke, instead of being the butt of it. However, having seen him in person, and having interacted personally with him, I now wonder if maybe the joke isn't on us. There is a nagging suspicion in the back of my mind that we are seeing a character being performed for us, both on the screen and in person. His odd behavior and unwillingness to give simple details about himself (questions about where he and his accent are from are met with an answer of "see, that is a question which one must not ask"), seem less and less like the product of a troubled personality and more, perhaps due to recent works by people like Sacha Baron Cohen, like a put-on.

When asked what the room is referring to, Wiseau always gives the explanation that The Room is where one makes their own rules. I began this writing by saying that Wieseau's film did not exist in the room. He could not make it something that he didn't intend it to be, but if Wiseau is more than he appears, a genius performance artist as opposed to a failed filmmaker, perhaps this really is The Room.

WiP - Thursday

I went to the opening night party for WiPFest 2009 at the Senior Center. It was an entertaining evening, with two choreographed dances: a modern piece based on the poetry cycle Zimmerman performed by The Traveler's Dance Group, a senior dance group; and another modern (but more classical style based) piece performed by young teenage ballerinas.

Also, Craig was in an orange box making orange juice with episodes from his and Florina's web series, Daidaiiao, watchable at www.vimeo.com/4606073. It's well worth your time.

Laura had the following to say about Craig and Florina's instillation:

Florina and Craig's 'Daidairo' orange juice installation was so incredible today! I received orange juice in half an orange with a heart drawn on the bottom, and a small cup of orange juice with pseudo Japanese writing. Craig didn't speak for about 4 hours, during which he took on the persona of one of his many alter egos, "Yoo." He also sat inside a large orange box that seemed to control his every emotion, thought, and ability to access the outside world.

It was pretty amazing.

Open House Proposal Deadline

Hello everyone!

As you know, Open House is quickly approaching. The date has remained, as originally decided, Friday October 23rd (from 8-10 PM).

I will be coordinating the event and helping to make sure everyone has what they need to make Open House successful. In order to do this, I need to set a deadline for proposals for Friday Oct. 9th (One week from tomorrow.) Essentially, what I need to know from everyone is what you are planning to do for the event and what your needs will be as far as space and equipment. We should have the Intermedia classroom spaces, Porch gallery, Grad studios, hallways, and most likely the large open space in the entrance to Studio Arts. Figuring out what everyone has in mind will help determine our need for space, and I can help to arrange what is needed.

I wanted to post this on the blog so that everyone can use this forum to discuss potential works, performances etc. that may possibly interact with each other or involve collaboration (if desired). Feel free to discuss ideas here so that others can respond, or ask questions of the group in general (ex. "does anyone want to help me make this..") or any other general concerns.

For your specific proposals and space/equipment needs, please e-mail me directly at derek.m.andes@gmail.com by the end of the day on Oct. 9th

Among other things, we may have a video reel that could include video work from all that want to submit, that will loop throughout the event. So keep this in mind incase you have work you would like to include on the reel.

We will also need someone (or more than one somebody) to volunteer to design a poster for the event. Let me know if you would like to do this as soon as possible.

Thanks!

Derek