We at
Slab are busy preparing for our inaugural exhibition,
Night Light. I am reminded that so many variables exist in the process of conceptualizing an exhibition - decisions regarding artworks, transporting the works to the site, conversations about installation, advertising and promotion, and finally the public experience of the exhibition itself. It is quite an exciting process, each time offering new challenges and possibilities.
New challenges and possibilities abound personally as well. Recently I moved from San Francisco to Houston. The two cities are drastically different in their attitude, consideration, and support of artists. In Houston audiences of all ages indulge in the performing arts. Since I now work for a visual and performing arts center my employer asked me to attend the Time Based Art festival (TBA) at the
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) in mid September. TBA has now completed its fifth festival year.
Though seemingly unrelated these two short diatribes are intertwined. During TBA I saw the New York-based theater group
Elevator Repair Service perform
Gatz, a 6- hour performance/reading of the literary classic
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Growing up I had never read Fitzgerald’s text. Instead I watched the motion picture, starring Robert Redford, during a time when my parents’ cable company played it repeatedly, back-to-back it seemed with
Out of Africa, starring Glen Close. I have vague flashing memories of Mr. Redford and a fair blond woman…a flowing yellow silk dress…and mint juleps on a white porch, heavy with the summer heat. I knew nothing of the story. I did not know Gatsby.
Similarly, after a year of living in the Bay Area I knew very little about San Francisco; I knew very little of Houston before moving here; and this was my first visit to Portland. So here I sat during TBA in a small theater…watching. The set was an office made from props that looked as though they had been taken from the trash heap – an rickety table poised as an office desk, an old typewriter, a dusty computer, tall metal shelves filled with file boxes, a secretary’s workspace behind panes of glass, two grimy entrance/exit doors, a large window which looked out onto a narrow hallway, and smaller details such as a coat rack and some odd chairs. Ironically, to stage right sat a crisp looking young man who flawlessly executed the technical controls for light and sound.
As the lead actor (Scott Shepherd) read from
The Great Gatsby, word for word and chapter by chapter, as the other actors seamlessly shifted their roles from office coworkers to Fitzgerald’s characters, I was glad to have never read the book. I was swept up in the romantic notions as this meager stage was magically transformed into Gatsby’s magnificent house. I say magically because not once did stagehands change out the props. Even the sound and light technician incorporated himself into the dialogue. I felt lucky to be hearing Fitzgerald’s words for the first time in Shepherd’s voice. When he spoke to me about Gatsby, his words were soft and kind, yet cool and reserved with ill words of others; he recounted the green light tragedy that became of Gatsby’s life and love. I was thankful to be introduced to Fitzgerald, to Gatsby, to Elevator Repair Service, by a stranger. I was grateful for these hours to sit and be read to. We were all getting to know each other.
In a ‘round about way, Elevator Repair Service helped me to appreciate several things through the eyes and experiences of others. Similarly I now primarily appreciate San Francisco through stories from the friends I left behind; I am learning of Houston from the new people I am meeting; I was introduced to Portland through the artworks of new (and old) artists at TBA; and now Slab is venturing forward into new and variable territories.
As Wendy and I ready ourselves for our first event as
Slab, I will once again be guided along by others. The artists in
Night Light will reintroduce me to Chicago and Los Angeles and they will welcome me for the first time to new artworks - to the thoughts, struggles, contradictions, elations, and curiosities that they bring with them.
Slab is a new artistic and curatorial entity formed for the purpose of experimenting, generated out of another of our exhibition concept projects in Chicago called
Mule. Could
Slab mean a 6 hour performance of our own someday? I don’t see why not. Could it mean exhibitions in cities all over the world? I’d like to think so. Because "...tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther..." (1) But for now, for the first time, we will proudly host several artworks outside on a slab of concrete in Glendale, California.
1.) Fitzgerald, F. Scott. "The Great Gatsby." New York: Scribner, 1925, pg. 180
