The best thing about Mary Bennett's two projects at Evo Gallery (725 Canyon Road, 982-4610) is the way they give quiet hope to a resurgence of intimate meaning in contemporary art. Upstairs, in the main gallery space confronting Canyon Road's endless deluge of inquisitive strollers, is a display of work called
leftovers
. Under ordinary circumstances an audience, even a strolling one, might be forgiven for being a bit non-plussed when asked to care about what an artist has cleaned out of her studio. But Bennett's plumbing of her studio depths has a range that both looky-loos and connoisseurs may find challenging but the open-minded and adventurous will find delightful. One piece,
A Little Light Reading
, is eight panels of altered books, each text splayed out into a cylinder, and grouped together as a single massive wall arrangement, a dream of Borges, a codebreaker's extruded thought process in its unanticipated flutter of letters,
an homage to the physical structure of language and books. Another,
Road Trip
, is comprised of rows of vintage
slides from the last mid-century vacation documentation addiction. Loupes are provided and viewers are encouraged to handle and examine the slides. Re-arrange the order even. Lick one if you like. Steal one.
This playful sense of putting people on rocky ground in terms of how they're expected to interact with art leads into the real thick of Bennett's storm, the locus of meaning, the hidden treasure-
The Dialogue Project
. The artist selected 180 addresses at random from the phone book and sent hand-made postcards to each address with an innocuous note like "Do you think we'll get more rain this year?" She followed up each card at three week intervals, always including her return (and street) address. More than 40 percent of the recipients responded to Bennett in some way and most of them were agitated. Many visited in person. A police officer paid her a visit on behalf of a fearful recipient. A corrections officer, himself one of Bennett's mail victims, came by flashing his badge and gun. Someone else returned a card in an envelope, torn apart and burned. Evo's basement workshop/skunkworks space is filled with the tracings of these communications, Bennett's hand-made, innocent intrusions and the responses, ranging from sweet to alarmingly confrontational. Each card was documented before being mailed, so Bennett has provided replicas of her original mailings, displayed in order with any posted reactions.
The curious and terrible irony of course is that Americans, even Santa Feans, are routinely bombarded with unwanted mail-endless credit card solicitations, that nasty little faux-newspaper coupon booklet sent out by The New Mexican, faith-based propaganda and America Online installation CDs-and we simply accept it (except for Bennet, who shreds it, stuffs it into clear plastic balls and hangs it from the gallery ceiling). But a handmade, handwritten human voice not only provokes a reaction, it can provoke something approaching rage, not to mention weapons and postal arson. Is it an alienation bred from too much television, too much fear? Does an anonymous note with some collage now count as an anthrax scare in color-coded America? Is human contact beyond our immediate ability to mitigate it with laws and technology too abominable to bear, too likely to come from someone trying to harm us, even emotionally?-another response to
The Dialogue Project
was "Are you having an affair with my husband?"
The answers aren't so immediately important as the fact that such questions are raised through art. Certainly there are always artists making provocative, relevant, engaging artwork that exists on many layers, but for years now the art world has been tacking toward a glossy air of sensationalism, big events and rock star artists who believe in their own mythology. What was Tom Sachs' menagerie of sexy fashion nurses, flashed a few years back at SITE Santa Fe, if not a self-indulgent entourage of hot chicks dressed up as art? Jeff Koons, Mathew Barney and Damien Hirst have been given easy rides by the art world equivalent of major Hollywood studios, their work required only to resonate with a snap sense of fashion, a style-conscious academia and a marketing circle jerk rather than to evoke introspective and gut level response from people across a broad spectrum.
Bennett's work recalls and re-justifies an earlier age of absurdist activism, the Situationist and Fluxus movements, spurred by groups of artists who, 40 years ago, couldn't imagine the world ever becoming a more uptight, money-obsessed, war-mongering place. So they confronted people with silly street theater, mail art, fake money, random phone calls, aggressive acts of poetry, juxtaposed realities, forged documents whenever possible. Fluxus, at least in the '60s and '70s, was an era of engineered social activism and a time of profound and prolific international collaboration among artists fervently arguing with anyone who would listen and, more to the point, anyone who wouldn't, to please please please consider taking life a wee bit less seriously.
But as we rolled into the Reagan years and the era of art celebrity, Fluxus faded, content losing purchase to form, meaning taking a back seat to investment and status. Confrontational activism got edgier, with Greenpeace launches, Earth First assaults, spiked trees and people chained to bulldozers. Convincing governments and fellow citizens to try on a new paradigm for size became more a battle, less of a game and, now, it's big business government and apathy dancing around the ring while activism takes a ten-count. It's not that activism is gone-it's bigger than ever, but now that Greenpeace members are dubbed eco-terrorists and even liberals want people to stop spray-painting their Rangerovers in the middle of the night and the mainstream media yawns at the largest protests the world has ever seen, well, it's disenfranchising to put your heart and soul into changing a world that screams for change but won't get up off the couch for it.
So it's nice to know that someone is once again reaching out with art. Bennett isn't really a prankster, she's an investigator-she wanted to know what would happen and, if you ask me, it was something weird and wonderful. Her neo-Fluxivism did get people up off their couches, at least to their telephones or their mailboxes and often to their cars, maybe across town to knock on a stranger's door and say, "What do you want from me? What are you doing?" And she said, "Funny you should ask. I'd like to invite you to an art show."
