Art-o-matic. The idea is for it to create a place for DC artists to converge. What this means, at the all-inclusive exhibition taking up 10 floors of a building that just strays into the NE quarter of town, is that genuinely interesting work sits beside the really awful. And, occasional gems like the classic “don’t touch the button” drawing by an artist whose display provides the information: “Connor is eleven years old,” and whose card advises he is represented by his mother.
I’ve been reading Hoogrrl for a while, as it lets me know about exhibition openings and art events that I wouldn’t otherwise hear about, and so mid-way through last semester I got into the habit of trying to get to one of these events most weeks, and so have seen (and written about) quite a few exhibitions in smaller DC galleries in the past few months, as well as visiting the major collections on the mall, and at the Corcoran and Phillips museums.
With ten floors, there was no way I could take it all in. (Ten floors?) Perhaps if you came each day for ten days, and looked at a floor. I was there for the performance art, music and beautiful people, so I went to the sixth floor, but from what I saw on the ground floor it seemed like the same proportion of good art, derivative art and just plain bad art.
The two performances I stayed for didn’t do a lot for me. The first, by Ding Ren, featured a drummer—not bad, though a little heavy on his use of the cymbals—and a girl picking up two or these pieces of coloured paper at a time, folding them, cutting holes in the middle and then scattering the circular(ish) pieces on the ground as she wore the borders around her wrist (well, apart from the ones that got away.) After a while, she collect some of the circular pieces off the ground then went and taped them to people. Returning to more cutting, she then once again walking into the audience and forced paper-border bracelets on people (one girl refused, shaking her head vigorously, but nonetheless received a bracelet.) Eventually she gathered more of her circular pieces in twos and threes, taped them together, then taped them to the edge of the stage. The denouement? Well, she picked up a pile of what was still on the ground, walked into the audience and then flung them in the air. Now that I've looked her up a bit, I suspect the piece of paper were meant to be "positive clouds." As someone who once uttered the words "I don't like fun" (meaning, really, that I make my own fun, and don't necessarily find other people's idea of "fun" to be my own) the idea of these positive clouds seems platitudinous and flimsy. I had trouble taking this all seriously. I found myself wondering if the poor girl’s hand was getting sore from the cutting. Also, her pile of coloured paper was enormous, and I wondered if was going to—dreaded that she might—“perform” for as long as it took her to get through the whole pile. (She didn’t. About a quarter of it.) And finally, I found myself fretting about the waste of paper for an exercise so completely un-transcendental. Looking at her website, though - the source of the positive clouds above - I suspect she has better things happening.
The second scheduled artist, we were told, was sick, so a replacement in the form of Anthony Willis was provided. This was better—in that there was a point (or there seemed to be at the time. I’m a little hazy on it now). Anthony danced and sang and blew a whistle and told himself to STOP. But the dancing was not great—and while it was meant to be parodic, it was mediocre enough to not work as parody—the singing was okay, but a little (in the words of the American Idol judges) “pitchy”, and the acting was a little overwrought. It made me wonder if he’d called it performance art because none of the elements quite came together enough to be anything else. I also thought that if he did it in drag, and camped it up a notch, it would have made a decent drag act.
I don’t want to come off as a grump. Especially since Art-o-matic seems to be a place for people to try things out, in the early stages of taking wing. And that is a wonderful thing. But I didn’t stick around after these two acts to watch for the next performer in half an hour. Instead, I went home, crawled into bed and read a book.
