This week I’m in Albuquerque installing a Cryptostructure in the University of New Mexico Art Museum for Dispersal/Return, an exhibition that’s part of the LAND/ART symposium.
A little history: back in the Fall of 2004, I participated in Land Arts of the American West, a study-abroad program that (at that time) was between the University of New Mexico and the University of Texas. It was a six-week journey through the Southwest where we investigated the various ways that humans use and respond to the extremes of the landscape and made art that engaged with what we learned. The program continues to create opportunities like this for its alumni. I’ll have some photos to share with y’all when I get back.
The blue tarp interests me as a material and as a symbol. I first began to use it when I went on Land Arts, a study-abroad program between UT and the University of New Mexico where we went on two three-week-long camping trips throughout the Southwest and down into Mexico. Since everything we brought for camping and art-making had to fit into two duffel bags, the tarp had to double as part of my bedding and as an object for performances and sculptures.
This photo isn’t from Land Arts; rather, it’s from Nohegan art camp at McKinney Falls State Park just south of Austin, TX; but I’m wearing my Land Arts clothes and I have my Land Arts tarp. July 2006.
I am intrigued by the idea of making my sculptures into animate beings, because of a fascination with transformative processes: in folklore, clay becoming the golem; in science-fiction, machines and blobs becoming alive; and in the Catholic Church, wine and bread becoming the blood and body of Christ. Therefore, when we went to Utah’s salt flats or were camping near the edge of a mesa, I would set up the tarp with rope or by holding it up myself so that the wind in these environments would make it move and flail about as if alive.
Video still of a tarp dancing in the wind on the Bonneville Salt Flats. Fall 2004.
The reason that I use the tarp in particular rather than any other large of piece of fabric, synthesized or grown, is that it is a pre-packaged commodity, made in China from plastic and already cut to the size that I want, complete with grommets for easy fastening. It is ubiquitous but used for a variety of purposes related to sheltering and protecting things because it is resistant to weather and amorphous in form, foldable into any number of shapes. Its lack of specificity is what makes it useful; but it can also be menacing because one is never sure what is hidden beneath it.
After I returned to Austin from Land Arts, I began to take more advantage of these aspects of the tarp, taking a video where I wave the tarp in the air and animating over the footage so that the tarp seems to transform into different monstrous faces and abstract forms.
Fugue video. Fall 2005.
In my performance for the Grid show, I wanted to tackle the tarp from the opposite end: rather than the tarp becoming alive, I wanted something living to become the tarp. I used call-and-response so that it did not seem like I was a madman in my own world, pretending to be a tarp, rather the audience was with me and assisted me in this process. Also, up until that show I had always used the same tarp that I had taken with me on Land Arts; but because of the size restriction I bought another (the same brand because I prefer that particular shade of blue) and cut it and hand-sewed it with fishing line so that it was four by eight feet and still had its grommets in the right places for me to attach it to myself and the fan. I now plan the creation of a tarp monster, a mechanism that moves in ways unpredictable and independent of myself, a machine with an unknowable interior.
Photos of my “Becoming Tarp” performance at the Grid show at the Creative Research Lab in Austin, TX. Jan 2006.
