Go To Portland! New York is Dead
Andrea Liu
I return from Portland, Oregon and the Portland Institute for Contemporary?s Art?s Time Based Art Festival, a geographical-cultural missionary of sorts. I feel like Malcolm X, ossified and stalwart in my political beliefs, before being thrust into Mecca and realizing that my entire paradigm for understanding the world was unjustly skewed by my poisonous environment. I left a smog-filled super-commodity art world Babylon, the Isle of Manhattan, complete with its relentlessly Armani Exchange and Kenneth Cole-clad Vidal Sasson-gelled fashionistas lining the streets in "NY Fashion week" gallery openings, to be plopped into a radically organic, vibrant and effortlessly anti-commercial fulcrum of experimental creativity and art: Portland, Oregon.
The Portland Institute of Contemporary Art (PICA), a 10 year-old gender-bending matriarchy of all-female cultural leaders, curators and art administrators, held its third annual Time Based Art festival in Portland, Oregon from September 8-18, 2005. Sprawling, heterogeneous, and all-encompassing in media, TBA included modern dance, performance art, film, music, theater art and mixed-media. Not a festival for the faint-hearted nor the dilettante, it was a hardcore 10 day delirium of sensory overload. Though vastly diverse, the one commonality between the performances was their flouting of mainstream or otherwise facile and mass media-inculcated artistic forms, conventions or tropes, both in form and content.
Breakfast of Champions
Topping off the festival was a homegrown Portland theater troupe, Breakfast of Champions, inflicting a riotously hilarious and trenchant satire of the show-biz industry and its preoccupation with "fame." If you took the uncompromising moral disgust of Jonathan Swift, combined with the anarchic devil-may-care hooplah of the Merry Pranksters, and the acutely precise satiric aim of Mel Brooks, you might get something approaching the satisfyingness of Breakfast of Champions. They barraged the audience on the big screen with cartoons from Adult Swim, stridently obtrusive 80s TV ads, as well as the I-Ching of pop culture satire, Bugs Bunny. These marathons of culturally subterranean and pointedly selected cartoon snippets and ads left no vice, vanity, clich� or cultural folly unturned.
An Adult Swim cartoon about Dr. Quinn lampoons bourgeois white stereotypes of the Angry Black Male. The Bugs Bunny cartoon lampoons the clich� of the artist who does not fit into society but later homogenizes into a formulaic pandering entertainer. The panoply of 80s TV ads of everything from Barbie, Sergeant Slaughter, Michael Jackson paraphernalia, to astonishingly jingoistic and militarized water gun ads for children, put on full display the black hole of naively garish 80s TV advertising, complete with vapid 80s synth-pop muzak commercial jingles blaring. Intriguingly, this cavalcade of TV ads formed anthropological statements, cultural artifacts and satires just by themselves, needing no performance juxtaposed beside them to underscore their vacuous and philistine extremity.
Meanwhile a troupe of 15 actors, the Breakfast of Champions players, act out a skit of a na?ve idiot savant neanderthal man who is brought to modern day society and manipulated by the show-biz system. They perform these interspersed skits with effortless comedic gusto, ridiculing every clich� from sexual exploitation of the aspiring star, to the artist?s move from the low-brow to high-brow niche. All the while they randomly flash placards across the stage proclaiming "Art is Dumb." A sublimely low-brow counterpoint to the sometimes stultifying self-importance of the contemporary art world, Breakfast of Champions was chock-full-of-nuts satire shot to us in a dizzying rapid-fire progression stream of consciousness. Gleefully oblivious to the tacit stigmatization of outright comedy (as opposed to comedy suggested within the context of a "serious" work) lowering the prestige or currency of one?s genre or work within the contemporary art world, Breakfast of Champions pulled out all the stops.
Wally Cardona Quartet with Ethel
An opus of beguiling and decidedly uncomfortable beauty, Wally Cardona juxtaposed a full hour modern dance piece in the context of a stage of almost 100 three feet tall black wooden pillars placed in a rectangular grid on the stage. At any given moment, at least one of the six dancers is preoccupied with the careful placing of these pillars in their designated position on the stage.
The grid of wooden pillars becomes a presence, a character, a quasi-dancer-equivalent and not just a background prop. They emanate an uncanny presence on stage, as if the human elements of the piece?the dancers?are only working in the service of this microcosmic calculus of wooden pillars. The dancers seem beholden to some unspoken labor allotment scheme that binds them to the placing or displacing of these pillars into their designated positions. There is even a Sisyphus-like futility, a droning unendingness, to the act of the dancers putting up the pillars. The wooden pillars? earthy mundaneness and pronounced function as inducements to pedestrian labor, as opposed to ornamental or prop decoration, are interestingly juxtaposed beside the sight of supermodel-like porcelain-skinned sculpturally immaculate dancers. Left by themselves, the dancers might have been culturally located as shallow Beautiful People, dressed right out of a chic Soho boutique?were it not for the intriguing subtext of this unyielding superstructure of wooden pillars and the work of erecting them, that they seem resigned to being beholden to, almost subservient. The entire task is evocative of some primordial tribal allegory or moral lesson about community, individuality and vulnerability.
The music, by avant-garde composer Phil Kline, swells into a poignant climax, providing a suggestion of a narrative arc and a muted sense of tragedy, or recovered tragedy, that might otherwise have eluded the piece. What that tragedy might be is tantalizingly left just out of reach and only suggested, most memorably by the closing moment of the piece, as one dancer climbs atop a mountain of pillars and sits down, seemingly moved and overwhelmed.
Locust
On a very different note was Locust, an exuberant and sardonic Seattle-based five-person collaboration of video artist, actor, modern dancers, musician and visual artist, founded by Amy O?Neale. Their piece, entitled "Convenience," jostled dance, music and video in a highly kinetic, exciting and rough-cut manner. Their dance eschewed the plodding didacticism or classical modern formalism that often predominates East Coast modern dance, and was startlingly fresh and pungent. Their performance was most memorable not for its forms, but its feverish and highly charismatic ability to impart their persona and their boundary-pushing, risk-taking kinetic energy?an uncommon synergy between artists of eclectic fields?and an anti-establishment underground youthful sensibility. They were almost akin to a graffiti equivalent of modern dance. With dance juxtaposed to video work about fake products designed to make life easier wrapped in a pop culture-savvy commercial-derisive tone, Locust is refreshingly one of the few modern dance groups situated to make direct social commentary with their art.
Nina Yuen and Sung Hwan Kim
On the big screen were the enigmatic, evocative but never wholly vulnerable, short films, both individual and collaborative, of Nina Yuen and Sung Hwa Kim. In a film centered around her relationship with her mother, Yuen uses a flat toneless monologue, holds her first-person narration from a distance, with an almost obsessive compulsive attachment to both visual and verbal repetition and re-arrangement. Using her actual mother in the film, her mother is seen or heard uttering maddeningly mundane and suburban motherly platitudes ranging from admonitions of her daughter for being selfish and only "taking and not giving," to nagging Nina to take out the garbage and do domestic chores. In response to her mother?s admonition to clean the kitchen, Nina shows a geometrically-stylized and primary-colored sequence of vegetables and food arranged in different patterns amidst colorful kitchen tiles. She does not give herself away and does not wear her heart on her sleeve, only hinting at a passive aggressive rebellion or a gaping perceptual chasm between her mother and her view of their relation. A psychological circularity and repetitiousness perhaps guards against a more painful truth. Her aesthetics, rather than being a window to her vulnerability, seem almost akin to a defense, or at least a distraction from her vulnerabilities, the vehicle of a youthful narcissism or faintly glum resignation to the veiling of a raw psychological or emotional core.
THE WORKS and the Dada Ball
Taking an abandoned warehouse and transforming it with crude-chic orange plastic construction fencing, hiply designed scaffolding, plus an array of MoMA Design Store-like mod hanging lamps, THE WORKS was the site of nightly avant-garde music and cabaret performances, as well as "Dance Churches," or intense DJ dance parties.
The epic culmination of the festival at THE WORKS was the outrageous costume and dance party, the Dada Ball, which could be likened to the Renaissance Festival on acid. Here outerspace roller skaters jostled with Day-Glo electric Da Vinci costumers. No post-1845 modern art reference was left untouched, as Magritte?s light bulbs even made it into costumes. In what was usually the cafeteria, a Comme Des Garcon-like dressed butoh group performed to three men hooking up an amp to dismantled bicycle parts and playing the wheel spokes as instruments, to a delightfully jarring and atonal result.
Perhaps one of the strongest assets of PICA?s TBA festival is its location. Portland is a city that is a veritably surreal oasis of artists, environmentalists, non-conformists and intellectuals; there is a breadth and depth of creativity here unsullied by commodification, product homogeneity and cosmopolitan ego that one would not have imagined possible. Its cultural-artistic-social categories don?t even correspond to anything in New York. Nowhere in sight is the Williamsburg fascist-hipster dress code trucker hat trustfundarian gloating self-importance, the territorial guardedness and cliquey niche-jockeying of different artistic "scenes," the soul-choking patina of unchecked commercialism seeping into every nook and cranny of our physical space, the obnoxious Whole Foods yuppie-can-afford-to-buy-organic-food bobo perversion of environmentalism. What would be the cultural margin or avant-garde in New York seems mainstream here (anti-corporatism, hippie-dom, bi or homosexuality, etc.). Portland is a town inhabited by people as diverse as punk rock Raggedy Ann Goths, pedestrian activists, Burning Man die-hards, former Arcosanti inhabitants, worm compost owners, exquisite drag queens, do-it-yourself garage rock DJs. This is a town where Walmart was banned. It can be likened to Provincetown in the 80s before it became a mini-mall. In Portland, someone told me "New York is dead"?and if I stayed in this cornucopia of unjaded iconoclasm, creativity and openness, I could believe it.
