Art

“Domestic Culture: home in visual culture” is at the Institute of Contemporary Arts at the Maine College of Art from March 10 - May 2; the Victoria Mansion’s Carriage House exhibition runs from May 1 - June 17; Donald Talbot’s “The Tomb of the Warrior Housewives” is at Elements Gallery from March 16 - April 7; Judith Allen and Amy Ray show at the Hay Gallery from April 4.

This Friday night’s opening of the ICA’s “Domestic Culture: Home in Visual Culture” begins a series of exhibitions and events throughout Portland that address contemporary artists’ approaches to the complex and contentious realm we all know as “home.” Elements Gallery proprietor Bill Robertson sees in this collaborative venture “a good sign that people are thinking together about these issues and about how to approach them together.”

On March 16, Donald Talbot’s multi-media installation “The Tomb of the Warrior Housewives” opens at Elements Gallery with a performance reconstructing a 1950s kitchen. Talbot’s installation, which draws from a range of 1940s apparel, plays with notions of how clothing constructs our gender, sexual, and cultural identities. It’s the first installation at Elements Gallery, which quite fittingly for the show is the converted ground floor of owner Bill Robertson’s home.

He first saw “Domestic Culture” mentioned in a Maine College of Art course booklet, and though Talbot’s show was already in the making, Robertson thought it would work perfectly with the domestic culture theme. Aucocisco’s Andy Versoza suggested that he contact ICA director Mark Bessire to map out Elements’ possible involvement in the project.

In April, the Hay Gallery will get involved as well, with a show of the recent collages of Judith Allen, which bring together elements from her family’s diaries, photo albums, quilts, and letters over five generations. Her work will be accompanied by Amy Ray’s polaroids of stills from old family home videos.

The Victoria Mansion had already expressed an interest, too. Its director, Robert Wolterstorff, said that for some time he has hoped to bring young artists into the mansion and encourage them to find new ways of looking at it; the chance to work with the ICA and other Portland galleries on this particular theme seemed the ideal occasion. To date about seventy students from Maine’s college art departments have responded to the Mansion’s open invitation to student artists to come and scour the Mansion for ideas that they’ll turn into proposals for site-specific artworks. Those selected will be exhibited in May at the Victoria Mansion’s Carriage House.

When Tanja Hollander, one of the participants in the ICA’s show, heard that artists were being permitted to work inside the Mansion, she jumped at the chance. She was struck by the opportunities that the Victoria Mansion — once a private home, and now public, full of haunted places and ornate and sometimes decaying textures — gave for investigating these relationships visually. Her work consists primarily of photographs, looking both at and through windows. She focuses our gaze upon the materiality of the window, and upon the way that this thin plane and its play of light mediates between inside and outside, public and private. What we hope to see when we turn our gaze suddenly to the window, what we actually see, how it contrasts with the interior that frames it, the memories conjured by this experience — all of these are held together by that glass membrane where we become suspended.

Visible through the ICA’s window onto Congress Street is what’s sure to be a visitor favorite: a toy house, the result of artist Laurie Simmons’ and architect Peter Wheelwright’s partnership, called “The Kaleidoscope House,” produced by Bozart (pronounced Beaux-Arts) Toys. The house comes with four figurines, Mom in the image of Simmons, outfitted in Donna Karan; Dad in the likeness of Wheelwright in Land’s End or J. Crew; and two kids dressed by Gap. It also comes with movable walls and colorful windows, miniature designer furniture (like a Dakota Jackson dining-room set), and, the icing on this neo-modernist wonder, miniature art (photos by Cindy Sherman and Simmons, a Mel Kendrick sculpture) that aspiring young curators can move around according to their fancy. At Hollander’s suggestion, “Domestic Culture” artists have been invited to make miniatures of their own works in the show, which will supplement the Simmons-Wheelwright collection. So far eight artists have done so. Each day as visitors play with the house they’ll create a miniature exhibition within an exhibition, a maquette of their own picture of what domestic culture should look like.

The works by the thirty-one artists in the ICA’s show ought to be a wake-up call for anyone who has been asleep since the 1950s and hasn’t noticed that there is a battle going on for what “domestic culture” is, who and what should be included in it, and who should be able to define it. In recent years, this battle has fed the practice of a number of visual artists who have sought to address the web of questions and assumptions about identity, gender, sexuality, race, and class that come together under the umbrella of “home”. These issues are so tangled up with one another that any examination of them can’t help but add to the kinds of conflicts, as well as pleasures, that are increasingly blurring the lines between what is public and what is private.

It is only relatively recently that these kinds of questions and preoccupations have been seen to be valid by art historians and critics. For most of the history of what we call Modernism, the “domestic experience,” and details like homemaking and parenting, were things that could only interfere with the struggle to make heroic larger-than-life canvases or to create grand works of Land Art out of vast acres of New Mexico desert. Menial tasks like having to clean your house or feed your kids could only hinder the expressive fulfillment of (virtually exclusively male) genius. The art and thought produced by the period that we call Postmodern has seen a slow but steady shift towards issues, materials, and ways of using them that had previously been, with very few exceptions, outside (beneath) the purview of an Art by and for white Western men.

Indeed, as much as patriarchal culture and its domestic regimes have been deconstructed by critics and TV characters, it still lives on in our workplaces, our homes and our heads. Anyone who has had the audacity to try to raise a family and have a career could confirm this.

Some of the artists in the show use their experience of these struggles to look at “home” from the inside out, by combining art-making and parenting into a single activity. The work of show participant Margo Halverson consists of a series of diagrams made to chart her infant son’s daily development, using a range of invented symbols to represent his actions. Michelle Grabner, another of the show’s artists, explains quite clearly how such concerns are inseparable from her painting and the history into which it fits: “I don’t attempt to challenge the authority of painting because I don’t believe it has any. It’s a hybrid — a combination of eight years of art school, the realities of motherhood and the issues of decoration, abstraction and activity that come from both.”

Other artists, like Ellen Lesperance and Carl Scholz, look at “home” from the outside in. For their collaborative project “Internalized” (pictured), they took a station wagon and, leaving its dilapidated exterior untouched, transformed its interior into a miniaturized luxury apartment; replete with kitchen tile straight out of Martha Stewart. Along with the actual car, the artists wrote up an advertisement to accompany the car, parked by the East River in Queens: “Just eight blocks from the subway,” it reads, “the sunset views of Manhattan will enchant you. So will the price.” The work pinpoints the common and often painful discrepancy that characterizes our culture: the distance between our wish for a comforting environment and the possibility of actually achieving it.

It’s been eleven years since Martha Stewart Living went live. Those years have seen a growing tension between the ever-more-matronly Martha with her trademark “It’s a good thing,” who cajoles us into inviting her into the intimate space of our homes and the Martha who threatens would-be gawkers who have the gall to get a little to close to her own posh Downeast domestic digs. This tension is enhanced by the fact that we spend more time “housed” now than ever: a recent study found that the average American spends ninety-eight percent of her or his time under the cover of some kind of public or private abode — office, shopping mall, car, apartment. But we are force-fed an increasing number of techniques and technologies for leading us to believe that a failure to feel at home everywhere is a form of pathology curable only through better products and/or instant medication.

The philosopher and cultural critic Theodor Adorno once wrote that “it is immoral to feel at home in one’s home.” That is, the unsettling conflicts and pleasures that characterize contemporary culture cannot be escaped just by shutting the door to the outside. They infiltrate our experiences of “home,” just as we take those experiences with us wherever we go. And for the artists involved in “Domestic Culture” there is the sense that these tensions and delights ought to be embraced, and that the images and artifacts of domesticity provide the perfect tools with which to think about what it means, today, to be “at home.”

Chris Thompson teaches at the Maine College of Art. He can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com

Domus Operandi

Portland’s domestic culture: home is where the art is