I love the idea of tapping into what's happening in the middle—for there surely must be art happening in places between the coasts—but isn't it interesting that from the get-go we're seeing from the outside in? I mean, only an outsider would consider the length of the Mississippi a region to itself. An American looking at the map instinctively knows Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, that's the South. Culture doesn't really follow the river, but the flow of history.
The midwest map of the US Census Bureau shows the demarcation lines fall more horizontally: the heartland is wide. The South is the nether land, and it ain't Dutch.
Am I quibbiling? Just a little. It seems good though to remember the framework a story is told through. Let's not forget the impact the Dutch had in helping define the mercantile character of this country.
But hey, speaking of the story, one of the projects presented fits right in on the trip down the mighty Mississippi. Miss Rockaway Armada is an ongoing collaborative art project involving handmade rafts and boats carrying artists and performers from Minneapolis to New Orleans.
Floating down the Mississippi River on a boat we built from trash.
It's sort of Black Rock City on water, bringing utopian wackiness to the staid residents of the midwest. Sort of like feeding the masses... The missionary aspect of the project disturbs me a little, but the boats are so wonderful. And everybody seems to be having a right good time.
On the other end of the spectrum, Heartlands introduced me to the work of Scott Hocking— incredible photos of the decay of Detroit and beautiful installations, a ziggurat of bricks in an abandoned factory, a midden of rusty trash. This is melancholic work, dealing with cultural and material detritus, echoing the scale and weight of Anselm Keifer.
Also new to me is Dutch-American video artist Julika Rudelius. Her staged short films have people from various socio-economic strata talking, musing on values and mores. This still is from Forever, 16 minutes, a 2 track film of upscale women talking about happiness. Priceless. In other films, ordinary people talk about wealth (and poverty), race, relationship—all the essential things.
Deb Sokolow, an artist from Chicago, likewise does wry portrayals of people and their wiley ways. She portrays them in drawings with narrative text, drawings that are sometimes installations lining the walls (or drawn on the walls) of a space. The reader follows the story around the room, labyrinth-like, sometimes following a dotted line down one way or another. In Eindhoven, her installation, Dear Trusted Associate, is nearly 50 feet long. She says, "Generally speaking, the piece involves a story about the CIA, petroleum, an email spammer from Nigeria, and the Chicago 'organization'."
Jaimie Warren, from Kansas City, is a young photographer of the docu-everything-especially-the-mundane-and-personal variety. I'm not complaining. There's just so many parties you can go to, that's all. But still, there is a necessary and valuable place for her kind of documentation of the everyday, especially the everyday of a place I may not ever go to but where people live and breed and vote.
So I go all the (virtual) way to the Netherlands to get a glimpse of the mid-lands. And this is one of the things I see there.
Miss Rockaway Armada pics courtesy of their blog. Many more pictures on their Flicker album.
