IF YA WANNA MAKE AN OMELETTE…
Some arts organizations would be timid about having multiple performance artists in one night. Not the Center for Contemporary Art (1050 Old Pecos Trail, 982-1338) though. They are almost fearless-curatorial pirates running amok in an avant garde ocean. Which, as it turns out is both good and bad and liable to lead to significant property damage.
For starters, there are just certain situations like sex, bathing and, apparently, performance art where nudity is optimal. Not that Erika Osborne really
needed
nudity-her row of tall, topographical maps with several performers standing upright, one to a map, facing away from the audience and toward the represented contours, trails and waterways, with the territory their bodies blocked painted on their naked backs, was visually arresting. Hell, it was medieval cathedral-level beautiful. But when your eyes dropped to waist level only to see a line of
Levi's, the whole thing looked more like an ad campaign than an artistic exploration. That room has seen iffier sights than nudity in the past, believe you me, so why not purify the vision? Osborne's performers proceeded to cut outlines of their own bodies out of the maps on the wall which created a new, equally absorbing visual; huge screeds of metaphorical earth with oddly archetypal negative space carved from their cores. So the beginning, as well as the end result, are comparably extraordinary. What's a little dull is what happens in the middle. The, you know, performance.
The same is true for Tim Jag. His performance happened amidst a full-blown exhibition of his own quasi-static artwork-sort of a pleasant collision between Terry Gilliam and Dr. Seuss-but, again, the residue and visual elements left after his performance are captivating mysteries, all the more so, I suspect, for those who didn't see the performance at all. Which all represents that getting into a performative space is helping these artists generate great non-performative work, but really, what's the point in making us watch the process?
Except in the case of Blake Gibson, where the opposite is true. Both the staging and the aftermath of his efforts are curiously non-plussing and just this side of ugly. But it was exciting and dangerous to see happen.
This, I base on eyewitness accounts, because I didn't have the pleasure personally, but, suffice it to say, he wrecked the joint. Call it post-tsunami angst, call it the thrill of the moment, the performative eye of the tiger, but dude got crazy with heavy construction materials and gravity. Gibson assembled a couple 12-foot-tall towers of cinder blocks, threw a tantrum with several buckets of paint and then withdrew, dispersed and otherwise yanked key bricks from the bottom, all to the scintillation and/or terror of the audience until, yah, the whole thing came tumbling down, all over the floor, which was covered in nothing more than plastic sheeting. Refinishing a floor is one thing, but one has to wonder if he or the CCA staff considered the fact that the floor in question is an almost mind-bogglingly expensive sprung wood floor, custom constructed with stops beneath the wood in order to provide soft, responsive, non-jarring feedback to dancers. But hey, it's one way to get people to take your art seriously. Use it to hurt stuff.
COWBOY KIND O' LOVE
The final cog in the Amarillo trio once known as 2D Cowboy has left a personal imprint on Santa Fe. MD Williams has filled No Man's Land Gallery (4870 Agua Fria Street, 424-9338) with multiple no- (or every-) man's landscapes of his own. Following in the footsteps of his cohorts Larry Bob Phillips and Doug Morris, Williams is reinforcing No Man's Land as
the
place in Santa Fe for art that retains accessibility while asking pointed questions about nature, commodity and art itself. Using Photoshop filters to separate the CMYK colors of scanned Peter Hurd and Tim Cox western landscape paintings, Williams extracts the fuzzy worm-like, pixilated irreality of imitated imagery and replasters it in digitally mutated honesty-the radio noise of the idealized western hombre, the striated bands of color hiding behind the stark myth of the American male.
Meanwhile, the lonesome, throat-clenching howl of Rex Hobart and his git-tar softly caterwauled out into Agua Fria village and everybody present knew they were part of the performance.
OOPS
I'm not saying a team of ninja assassins working for the Railyard Community Corporation rappelled through a skylight and silently stuffed cotton in my ears in the darkest of night just for the sake of embarrassing me, but somehow in the course of my normally diligent note-taking, Railyard leasing director Richard Czoski said "flowers" and I thought he said, uh, "flooring." This led to my bombastic haranguing [Zane's World, Dec. 22, 2004: "Top Task Force Recommendations"] of Railyard Corporation behavior for leasing space to a wholesale flooring company, which I loudly proclaimed to be askance of the publicly created master plan. Soon after, as you might expect, Railyard Corporation executive director Lleta Scoggins called up and asked me, in her ever-polite Southern twang, just what I was smoking.
For the record, I was in error, I am deeply sorry, my personal fact checker has been fired and I, as you see, am being caned with the cruel stick of public humiliation. I still maintain all good citizens should keep a careful eye on the process, but it doesn't help anybody to have a lunatic rambling on about things that simply aren't true. And there's not much I can say against a flower business. Plant killer! Plant killer! Only kidding.
