PLACE

Written by R.Bitterman

The Settlement had their latest opening on Saturday, which involved  a myriad of art productions: from political fluid expression to ongoing installations morphing into performance aspects  in Place gallery, there were blind transient dough makers autonomously moving to each gallery, as well as Mauveing on Up curated  by Alexander Florence in his inaugural curation at Store.  I found Jason King & Ariana Karp’s performance and installation most intriguing and will be focusing on their ephemeral dough production in the body of this review.

In Guide to Bread Making, Jason King & Ariana Karp constructed a performance where the audience was able to look into one of the four gallery spaces and find a disheveled human in a trance like state performed by Karp or King.  Pawing around the space or slumped on the ground pouring flour and water onto the gallery floor followed by hours of  kneading dough.  The piece was part endurance for our weary artist, kneading out dough on the floor in repetition in multiple hour stints. An intense addition to Karp/King’s  flour and dough soiled clothe and bodies, were the artists being blind to the experience by having their eyes closed to the world. Karp talked of the act of blindness in the gallery setting  being a dialogue she wanted to explore.  This act of blindness also questions the blind efforts that their performance nods to the domesticity as labor through their blind efforts of kneading. By viewing the artists’ process one can see taunt muscles and backs bowed in the act of production accompanied with their looks of resignation of wasted effort; Karp’s theories of what Guide to Bread Making should express becomes accomplished with their production.

A counterpart to Karp and King’s performance is the installation aspect. Unfinished bread loaves  congregate in the places where the performances occurred. The idea of temporality to objects in turn makes a production more valuable due to lack of replication. The non-scripted performance that lives in the moment contains an aura untainted by reproduction. One may see connections to aura in Walter Benjamin’s essay Art into the time of Mechanical reproduction.

The bread objects can be seen as Karp’s metonymic  extension.  With a little mental extension  one can see the performance’s temporal quality, due to it transpiring over a course of time the bread production  becomes the representation of a position.  With multiple points being represented in the space combined with the temporal elements Karp and King’s work moves to exist in the gallery in a ephemeral multi-dimensional platform. Artist Yves Klein’s Suaire de Mondo Cane, can be seen as an object living in both realms of time as space as well, except for using the index over the  metonymy.

With the popular use of “Social Practice” as an art rubric I enjoyed seeing structure going into the performance.  With an in-depth framework, art is able to survive on two planks.  On One side the emotional reflection is the viewer’s first insight to the work.  The second reflective process is a little more lasting where one implements their schemas of process to make sense of the object presented. With the second reflection I feel the labor of insight should be placed onto the artist to construct a frame work of their art that adds an in-depth analyses on the viewers reflection. 

I feel Jason King & Ariana Karp’s performance provides the viewer with quite a stimulating situation for reflection and contains the elements that successful art produces.