Various Artists
Green Lantern, March 27th – April 25th, 2009

In the recent edition of local Marxist pamphlet, “The Platypus Review”, David Harvey writes portentously of the dire consequences of ignoring his repeated insistence on “the geographical dynamics of capitalism” and “the production of spaces, places, and environments.” He goes on to present a believable, albeit not terribly radical, lay analysis of contracting global markets, but the zeitgeisty Situationist spatial motifs of the defanged aesthetic left seemed to be what he wanted to leave behind for his reader to mull over. It seems these days that the specter of the map is inescapable in the attempt to reclaim utopia, with the universal inhabiting the particular even more vividly in the cozy social microcosm than in Harvey’s attempt at a grand picture.

Such pantheistic euphoria suffuses a visually dense exhibit of delicate interactive pieces in Green Lantern’s, “Without You I Am Nothing,” a group show of printmakers from Chicago and Providence, curated by Anne Elizabeth Moore. The show’s visionary energy is at its most cartographic in the striking piece, “And We Built A City Together,” a participatory wall map by Meg Turner and Andrew Oesch. At the opening, viewers were given a paper bag printed with superimposed line drawings of building exteriors, in a variety of colors. Similar prints were found within the bag on numerous stickers, and participants were provided scissors and markers galore to augment buildings, which could then be affixed to the diagonal street grid that took up all three sides of a niche by the door. Meg and Andrew, also known as “How To,” would take an informational card filled out by the “architect,” shoot a picture of her pointing at her creation, and stamp her instruction card, to certify the building’s legitimacy on behalf of this imaginary community in this momentary encounter. The result is at least a moving illustration of a de-centered totality, a cohesive diagram of an impossible place, a simple scheme implying a grand gesture of incidental accidents– everything that this show, at its best, strove to convey.

Continuing around the gallery clockwise, Heather Ault’s untitled wall piece featured a number of astonishing facts in the history of sexuality printed on sheets of colored paper, taxonomically color-coded and rolled up with clothespins; some were strung in rows, and a number lay on the ground, inviting sorting and clipping on to the lines suspended from the wall. Next, Dewayne Slightweight hung some ornate prints from his 2007 recreation of his 2005 performance and publication, “Your Burrow Runs Deeper Than Your Blade;” Slightweight who performed his new “opera” “The Kinship Structure of Ferns” in the evening, in which, calling to mind Yoko Ono, he made ecstatic declarations on love, sensuality, and death, with his filigreed drawings projected on him as he performed.

A far less visionary game-allegory followed in Jason Tranchida’s and Matthew Lawrence’s video tour of Providence, in which static-adhesive hats were to be moved about on the monitor while, for whatever reason, shouting the title, “Who’s Wearing The Hat Now?” Angee Lennard’s beautiful “Mossdale Afternoon” had movable pieces as well, and invited viewers to write on it, while Karin Patzke’s attractively printed paper dolls unfortunately made use of the animal-headed people that I’d rather not bring into the next art decade.

Rob Ray, who ran Chicago’s amazing tech-art space, Deadtech, for about ten years, created a stunningly crafted 3-D paper piece extolling viewers to start their own DIY art and performance spaces. Agata Michalowska’s untitled piece offered silvery blob-shaped pieces of cut out prints to be taken with viewers and photographed in locations of their choice. Dan Wang, Kevin Haywood, and Myriel Milicivic created a scrap-lumber “Learning Tree,” surrounded by flyers that encouraged teach-ins; this somewhat failed to work for me, though I also felt that I might have been missing something. Sadly, despite the commendable thought and craft displayed throughout the show, an esoteric fog of insularity did threaten to smother many of these undoubtedly sincere gestures at engagement.

The boutique technology of screen-printed and sculpted paper may seem an even more unlikely vessel for the widespread proselytizing of social and political democracy than a free flyer of limited appeal, such as Platypus, or PR.  Tom McDonough could have been speaking of this show when he writes in the April Artforum that “new modes of art practice that propose different models of relationality between subject and world” are often “transformed into the site of a reassuring encounter with the self.”   But, along with exploiting the power of pretty fetish objects, which always counts for something, the gesture of attaching grandiose ideas to ingenious handicraft can do something more quiet and subtle than the populism it half-heartedly purports to promote.. Like the Arts and Crafts movement of the nineteenth century, these printmakers can prod gently but firmly at the boundaries of good and bad taste, and announce their own freedom in the fabrication, presentation, and reception of artifacts that, while not freeing art participants from the obligations and privileges of their relatively homogenous economic and social positions, can permit a certain tiny sacred spot to persist in the flat, gridded-out soul of the cosmopolitan urbanite.

By Albert Stabler