The Kenmore is Emily Sloan's micro-artspace--a tiny dorm refrigerator which has, by now, hosted any number of art projects in various media. But none of the artists have transformed the fridge as much as David McClain. For his untitled video installation, he drilled a hole in the front of the the refrigerator and painted the exterior matt black. The intent was to make it look a little like a peep show. (But just a little--the velvet ropes add a different dimension to it). To see the video, the viewer had to walk up, bend over, and peer through the hole.
David McClain, untitled, refrigerator, paint, video, velvet ropes, 2012
The piece was set up at Skydive for their latest opening. It was tough to see the video inside, which amusingly shared space with typical refrigerator items, like a can of beer. The video itself consisted of three pieces--apparently real vintage porn starring Sylvester Stallone and (allegedly) Marilyn Monroe, and a recreation of the infamous video of ESPN sportscaster Erin Andrews naked in her hotel room. (Andrews was videotaped through a hotel peephole by stalker Michael David Barrett in 2008. The video was posted online and went viral. I suppose I could look online and find a copy of this video, but, y'know, yuck.) The recreation of the Andrews video was performed by an acquaintance of McClain's. It's not actually all that erotic--10 minutes of "Andrews" checking out her butt. I'm told it is an accurate recreation of the actual video. One could conclude from it that Andrews, a preternaturally beautiful woman like so many women newscasters, is extremely concerned about locating any possible flaw to her looks, which could be key to her success on television. It's unlike the other videos in the sense that whatever eroticism it comes from its perverse origin. But the recreated video is not like that--as a recreation, it has a deliberate erotic intent.
My problem with this is that I didn't recognize any of the videos being shown. They seemed like generic (if old) porno. So the issues of celebrity and voyeurism were lost on me. Instead, I saw it as an amusing combining of two animal instincts--food (the refrigerator and its contents) and sex. On that level, it was quite interesting.
Also interesting was the way it transformed a private, possibly shameful act--watching pornography--into a public act. In order to view the art, the viewer had to walk between two velvet ropes and bend down in front of the TV. There was no hiding what you were doing. You yourself became the object of other people's looks. You viewed the video and became the spectacle. In this way, it is a bit like Emily Moran Barwick's piece, Philanthropic Performance, which I wrote about last year.
I don't know when or where this piece will be set up again. Maybe it was a one-night only event. But it was so amusing that I hope it gets a second life.
I write posts, Dean Liscum writes posts, but we never have any idea in advance whether they will catch on with readers. You people are ciphers! Anyway, here are the most popular 2011 posts based on page views:
1) A Matter of Wit at Fotofest. Readers came for the nudity but I hope they left delighted with these wacky, surreal photos.
2) A Letter from Sol Lewitt to Eva Hesse. I can take no credit whatsoever for this animated version of a well-known encouraging letter from the famous conceptual artist to the famous post-minimal artist. It was animated by Levni Yilmaz, and it really caught on with readers, probably because of its good humor and optimism.
still from Waste Land
3) Vik Muñiz's Waste Land. This was a review of the Oscar-nominated documentary. Read the review then watch it on Netflix!
4) Mysterious North Houston Art Colony Discovered. This was my first (of three) post about Itchy Acres up in Independence Heights. It got a link from Swamplot, the ever-popular real-estate blog, whose readers (including me) delight in finding new and unusual things in out-of-the-way Houston neighborhoods.
5) The LapDance Scholarship (NSFW). This one, about and artist/stripper who funds other artists through her erotic dancing, caught on partly because of those four magic letters NSFW, but also because I posted links on various Iowa and University of Iowa Reddits. I hope some readers got the message about how Emily Moran Barwick grants challenged the very idea of grants--it forced grant recipients to know exactly how their grants were being paid for (which is not the usual case).
7) Urban Animals by Merrie Wright. There's a great Shonen Knife album called "Rock Animals" which has a song on it ironically about animals made of concrete in a local playground. Maybe people had the same cognitive dissonance here--Wright's art had nothing to do with the beloved 1980s roller-skating gang in Houston, but was actually about animals in urban environments, evolving new strategies of camouflage.
Francis Giampietro, "Thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissolvable by the annihilation of one of us!", reconstituted refrigerator, pressure treated wood, furniture leather, ice and pvc, 2011
9) Every Year More MFAs Are Loosed On Houston. This was my review of the 2011 University of Houston MFA class, but it also was a think piece on what happened to previous year's MFAs.
10) Diana Al-Hadid, Cordy Ryman and Jennifer Riley at Peel. Three out-of-town artists showed at Peel (which primarily shows out-of-towners). Al-Hadid and Ryman in particular are up-and-comers. This review is not too different from my other reviews, so I have no idea why it was so popular.
All I can judge by this is that readers like the following--nudity, sex workers, videos, and artists who aren't from Houston. So for 2012, expect a lot more posts featuring videos of international art stars cavorting with naked prostitutes. That should push my page views high enough to start running ads!
Now one final "most popular" post. It's from 2010, but it was the most popular post in 2011 and is my all-time most popular post: Age of Consent. It's a discussion of the movie Age of Consent, about an Australian artist who moves out to a remote beach to try to get new inspiration. It's based on a novel of the same name by an extremely interesting Australian artist/writer named Norman Lindsay. So why is this old post so popular? Imagine the following words in a Google search: "Helen Mirren" and "naked".
I recently got a copy of Phonebook 3, a guide to artist-run spaces in the U.S. (Phonebook 3 deserves it's own post, really--it's literally a printed phonebook with listings for spaces, residencies, and resources published by Chicago art space threewalls. I like the idea, but what's weird is that it's a book. When the internet age came on us, the first type of book to be made obsolete was the telephone directory. The problem with directories is that they are databases that go out-of-date almost instantly. Databases can be easily hosted online, and updated in real time. Phonebook 3 was just published, and already I know at least one entry is out-of-date. Still, it's nice, it's a useful resource, and as an official old, guy, I still like books.)
Under the resources category, they have a subcategory of "Support," which includes small and/or community-based grant-making organizations. And one of these is the LapDance Scholarship in Iowa City. When I saw that listing, I assumed the title was a bit of irony. But apparently not. Here is the listing:
The LapDance Scholarship was founded in December 2010 by Hailey Jude Minder, a self-proclaimed vaginally-funded experience artist. As an artist, Hailey has always been interested in, and often troubled by, the sources of fine arts funding. Having become somewhat disenchanted with the whole search for funding and the sources of such funds, Hailey set out to make her own. Moonlighting as a stripper twice a week, Hailey is bringing funding for the arts into the trenches. She has funded her own art in this manner and now wishes to help her fellow artists achieve their goals.
Obviously this demanded further exploration. Three people/institutions have received grants. The grants are determined by how much money Minder made dancing during that month. The grants tend to range between $350 and $400. The scholarship has been mentioned in the local media. Still, it was hard to know whether this was just a clever art project/ruse by Emily Moran Barwick, the administrator of the scholarship and an MFA candidate at the University of Iowa.
So given my curiosity, I called Barwick up. First of all, Barwick is Minder. Hailey Jude Minder is an alter-ego that grew out of a semi-autobiographical short story by Barwick. She studies in the sculpture department at the University of Iowa. At first, she was having to work four jobs to keep body and soul together. Then she decided to try stripping. The Minder persona is the one who is more physical, who is willing to dance naked for strangers.
OK, one can see this as an option if you are a student and you need cash. But Barwick went further. She did some research and looked at the amount of revenue that the sex industry generates in a year and compared it to the annual federal expenditure for art. Then she divided the latter by the former to get a rough ratio of spending for art/spending for sex.
Then she started applying that ratio to her earnings at the strip club. And she decided to devote that percentage of her earnings to other artists in the form of grants. Aside from wanting to do a good thing for artists, she wanted to create a grant where the source of the money is transparent. To get this grant, you have to be willing to acknowledge that it was paid for by a young woman's nude dancing. Whereas, if you get a grant from a foundation, you don't really know what kinds of activities paid for it.
Barwick is personally interested in sex, money, etc. An earlier project involved a John Holmes dildo. She was slightly freaked out that someone had licensed the use of a dead porn star's member. So she took one of the John Holmes dildos and cast it in plaster--and made copies (unauthorized, presumably). Thinking about the kitschy "Cow Parade" painted sculptures (and the many similar follow-ons that appeared like a plague all over the U.S.), she handed out copies of Holmes' plaster penis to artist friends with instructions to decorate it. The John Holmes Prick Parade was shown in a gallery on campus--but the gallery doors were kept shut (not the usual practice), and there was a big warning on the door.
And stripping is not her first foray into the sex business. She worked at a sex shop first, then as a phone sex operator, before becoming a stripper. I remarked that in each case, her level of contact with the customer was getting more intimate. Did she have a stopping point? She said that she wouldn't do actual prostitution. (Whew).
She works at a club called Woody's where her managers and fellow dancers know her as Hailey. (Stop by and support the arts if you're ever in Cedar Rapids!) The dances are all nude, and while there is a private VIP room, it's not really private. It has a video camera pointed at the dancer and her customer. This video was the basis for one of Barwick's most intriguing artworks, Philanthropic Performace. It's about the LapDance Scholarship itself. She went into Woody's and copied all the video that featured her dancing in the VIP room. Then she laboriously blanked out each customer's face. Then in a booth built to show the video, she has twelve channels running simultaneously at different speeds. In addition, she has a closed circuit television where the camera is aimed at the face of the person sitting in the booth and the monitor showing his or her face is on the outside of the booth.
Obviously this work is about voyeurism, about looking and being seen, surveillance, the male gaze, sex, money and a lot more. Artists whose work influenced Barwick include Vito Acconci (especially Command Performance, but one has to imagine Seedbed was also in the back of Barwick's mind) and more important, Eleanor Antin's Carving: A Traditional Sculpture.
One problem Barwick has had is getting enough proposals. She guesses that artists are perhaps embarrassed or offended by the LapDance Scholarship. It's a local grant, so I encourage any Cedar Rapids-area artists to apply. I mean, you could get a grant from some foundation whose endowment has stock in Bank of America and Goldman Sacks or you could get a grant from a woman who dances naked. The choice is yours.
