Light show for UNESCO
A special project for the Howard House Project Room
by Matthew Offenbacher
November 6, 2008 - January 3, 2009
Light Show for UNESCO illuminates the project room at Howard House with care and attention usually accorded important architectural landmarks (exemplified by UNESCO World Heritage Cultural Sites such as the Giza pyramid complex in Egypt). The grotto-like room at the far back of Howard Howard is a powerful manifestation of the fragility of the artist-dealer-collector complex, the opportunity and risk inherent in operating a small family business, and the delicate margins of marginal activities. Light Show tries to evoke wonder that such a place exists at all.
Since the 1960s, artists such as Marcel Broodthers, Michael Asher, and Andrea Fraser have turned the methods and systems of art institutions back on themselves to reveal hidden power structures. This important work of “institutional critique” has identified many of the fundamental contradictions and hypocrisies of sites which present and distribute art. Light Show asks: what if this dialectical practice was inverted? The opposite of critique is not sincerity (as many seem to think) but praise. This exhibition proposes UNESCO's rhetoric of securing unique and special places is a model that can be applied to the small and transitory just as well as to the mighty and permanent.
The artist-curated table-top exhibition which accompanies Light Show furthers this theme, focusing on the site of production. It applies the broad goals of the UNESCO mandate (1. to promote diversity, 2. to mobilize active forces, and 3. to fertilize) to a small slice of the local artist community: Gretchen Bennett, Claudia Fitch, Jenny Heishman, Heide Hinrichs, Jeffry Mitchell and Matthew Offenbacher.
December 2, 2008
THE BACK ROOM
Past the nice big galleries with high ceilings at Howard House is a crowded area with rows of plastic-wrapped paintings leaning on each other and a few unwrapped artworks sitting or hanging, attempting to exhibit themselves despite their surroundings.
Leading away from that area is a low tunnel-like corridor and a doorway to the back room, where past visitors have stumbled upon and squeezed around a lawn chair held aloft by balloons, and videos of real chained-up motorcycles going crazy trying to escape, and paper sculptures of birds in snow. This room is ugly, claustrophobic, and has a bumpy floor. But art people are in the business of transubstantiation. So this ugly, claustrophobic, bumpy room is called Project Space, which makes it sound like it could one day become a very important place.
Today is actually sort of that day. Seattle artist Matthew Offenbacher has transformed the back room into Light Show for UNESCO.
The light show is on the walls, where the whiteness is deeply dyed by a ceiling track of lights in the colors of a tropical sunset. The walls look so good, so soft and concentrated and glowing, that hanging anything on them would be wrong. The gallery director compared the project to the transformation of a regular old place (unlit) into a UNESCO World Heritage Site (rapturously well-lit!).
In the middle of the room, with a single neutral light falling on it, is a hollow plywood box. The box's top surface is a platform for a miniature art show of miniature artworks, each one strange and lovable and slightly unsightly in its own way, presented like a collection of trophies and plaques for the misunderstood.
The objects include a painted ceramic elephant and circus ringmaster the size of salt and pepper shakers (by Jeffry Mitchell); a thin white thread with three pearl balls on it (Heide Hinrichs); a dried dahlia and books on various subjects (Egyptian wall paintings, rocks and minerals); a lumpy clay ashtray that appears to depict coitus but does not (Offenbacher; it's Narcissus and his reflection); a foamy spray-Styrofoam lion (Jenny Heishman); a totemic figure wearing a staircase dress (Claudia Fitch); two flat, screaming, eyeless faces (Gretchen Bennett, adapting designs from stickers).
On the back of the box, hung low, Bennett has glued a bad print of a blurry drawing she made of a disco ball. The difference between the degraded print and a real, glinting ball aches. The whole room aches. A handout says that Offenbacher used the three-part UNESCO mandate to create the show: "1. to promote diversity, 2. to mobilise active forces, and 3. to fertilise."
—Jen Graves
The Stranger Suggests for Tuesday, December 9
LIGHT SHOW FOR UNESCO
Never has so much looked so good in such a tiny, ugly room. This is a group show of some of Seattle's greats (Gretchen Bennett, Jeffry Mitchell) in modest miniature, organized by artist Matthew Offenbacher, who basically turned the back room at Howard House into a rapturously lit UNESCO World Heritage Site. The bits are like fragements from a lost civilization: Jenny Heishman's foamy lion, Offenbacher's coituslike Narcissus ashtray, Bennett's achingly degraded drawing of a disco ball. (Howard House, 604 Second Ave, 256-6399. 10:30am-5pm, free.) JEN GRAVES