PLACE

We welcome Alexander Florence as our new Store curator/director. Alexander will be curating/directing during our 4 month relationship with PSU. He was very recently in Remember that Night curated by Austin Turley and below is his reflection about his experience as an artist in the Store show. 


Night Of the Eunuchs 
Now that the show has been torn down and the gallery is being repaved for new traffic, I’d like to do a few lines on my experience. I think my, and Ross’s, involvement came out of a random discussion one day, when Austin Turley was in Place Gallery at the same time that I happened to be. He wondered if I had some other friends at Portland State that would be interested in doing a collaborative art show for Store Gallery’s last show with PNCA. I’m always interested in showing my work, and of course always flattered when someone wants me in any way, so I gave them my acquiescence and told them that I had a couple of friends that would probably like to show work as well. I was alerted to the title a healthily vague “Remember that Night,” and remember thinking, “wow, I could probably get away with something real weird.” Of course that’s not what happened (my pride is too great to let me make something obviously uncomfortable) and my pieces, more or less, ended up being a sort of homage to a sort of estranged masturbation. Almost like auto-erotic fantasies as imagined by eunuchs and somehow abstract enough not to raise any burning and overt questions. Ross however didn’t fare so well. I suggested Ross to Austin immediately along with another cohort who got fed up with waiting on the collaborative part and decided to “pull out,” and told Austin that he had this great series of paintings of transvestites that would fit in really well with the vague title and probably play off the more “masculine” pieces he had been telling me about. I described them too him and he laughed and told me to bring whatever.
            I was not able to attend the setting up of the show, but David Eastwood set up my little corner as well as I would have and I was generally impressed at the opening by the placement of all the pieces. The show looked great. Ross’s work was relatively missing but the few pieces that were there created a much needed counterbalance to the overriding machismo that ran most of rest of the work which was very aggressively “masculine” (and I use this term in the most common way denoting anything rooted in ‘manliness’ or ‘patriarchy’ in general, still prevailing [if slightly] diminished attitudes on what being a ‘man” is) and actually made my little station a sort of respite from the hostility. I was also flattered that Jason King’s performers chose my little area to stage the Store section of his performance piece “pride.” (He liked the verticality of the pillars supporting my plaster casts).
            Over the following weeks there was much discussion about the “boys club” nature of the show, and I’ll be honest at a few points I became embarrassed to be lumped into this as I usually try to be as gender neutral as possible and work with an egalitarian mindset (at least I think so). But then again, lesson Number One, which every young artist should learn before attempting an education, is: your intent is less important than the work itself. By this I mean that regardless of what you wanted to say when you made this thing or that thing, the reception by the public is far more important to the historical interpretation of your work. I do think that every artist should at least attempt to assess as many possible meanings while their working, but this, of course isn’t foolproof and you can never anticipate all reactions to your work. I would also assume that this would mean that an artist should be open to many different lines of discussion and willing to adapt to someone’s far out interpretation.
            This last Saturday, as we ticked down the minutes to stripping the gallery of its occupying artworks and left the show to the extremely picky finger of art history, Gabe Flores had orchestrated an artist talk that he was to moderate. Since there had been all this discussion floating around, and slight controversy surrounding the imagery, I thought it was going to be good and juicy: a real hot time. So I got into my artists uniform and mentally prepared myself to field questions relating to my involvement with the project, my work, their work, ideas of masculinity and whatever else might come up. The panel consisted of myself, David Eastwood, and Craig Williams (who stood in for the curator, Austin, who was unable to attend), it was sparsely attended and lasted about a half hour. This, being, my first artist talk, had me a little nervous, and the temperature of Store with closed doors didn’t help my armpits, but it really wasn’t so bad. And this, I think, is where it failed. Gabe did a wonderful job asking probing questions and opening up discussion topics, but the crowd (which I know included intellectuals, philosophers, and feminists, as well as art history students and a writer) for the most part didn’t take the bait. I think this was entirely the fault of all involved. The panel for not addressing the audience directly, the audience for not taking initiative and grabbing on to hot topics that got brought up, and Gabe for not involving the audience from the start. I spent a lot of time trying to tactfully remove Ross and myself from being lumped in with the boys club, while also trying to talk objectively about the interactions between artworks and artists. I mean it was good, and was headed in the right direction, it just didn’t quite make it to the destination: it didn’t run out of gas, but just got nervous and turned the car around.
            For a first time it wasn’t too bad. I was spared the awkwardness of fumbling around in the dark for the right thing to insert here or there, and generally felt afterward that it was something I could enjoy doing again… and again, but I also knew it could be more. I didn’t quite feel like we were a bunch of eunuchs (to bring us back) fantasizing about fantasies; it was more like we were just a bunch of inexperienced teenagers probing about, determining if here felt better than there, or this than that. I definitely look forward to the next because “the second time is usually better than the first.”