What follows is an interview with three voices. I only started asking questions at the end; the conversation — and introduction, for that matter —  began with Angelo Spoto at &Now Books.  The interview takes place with Gretchen E. Henderson, a writer (now based out of Boston) who published two books with different presses, almost concurrently. Both of Henderson’s books ask and explore artistic questions. Her first book, Galerie de Difformité (&Now Books/Lake Forest College Press), operates like a  kind of text-based exhibition space with pages. Her second book, On Marvellous Things Heard, was published by my press, The Green Lantern, and examines the relationship between language and music.  

Deforming Forms with Gretchen E. Henderson (an interview)

When I first read Gretchen E. Henderson’s Galerie de Difformité, I approached it like I’ve always approached novels; start on page one, continue to page two, then page three, etc. But even before page sixteen, the book called me out on my traditional approach. “Do not read straight through this catalogue from start to finish!” it said or, it seemed, yelled at me. At this point, I realized Galerie de Difformité is nothing like any novel I’ve ever read. It’s a chose your own adventure story meets poetry meets the essay meets art catalog, all mixed up behind the cover of what appears to be a novel. Galerie is comprised of “Exhibits” created by “Subscribers” (who, on the Galerie website, posted deformed versions of Henderson’s writing) as well as Henderson’s own poetry, prose, and essays. Galerie focuses on deformity, and a deformed version of Dante’s Beatrice is the readers’ guide. (OR, ask “Tell me about Galerie de Difformité”)

Angela Spoto: What was the genesis of Galerie de Difformité? Why did you want to write the novel in such an unusual way?

Gretchen Henderson: The novel began as an essay, which did not want to be an essay.(1)

AS: What is an exhibit?

GH: An “Exhibit” is a prose poem, more or less, narrated by one of my main characters: a deformed reincarnation of Dante’s Beatrice.(2)

AS: Why did you choose to write about deformity? Usually, beauty is a more common theme.

GH: Exactly. (3)

AS: Beatrice is a reoccurring character/guide in the novel. She is typically associated with beauty, but you chose to focus on her deformity. Do you think Galerie challenges the reader to question traditional concepts of beauty?

GH: If we look at representations of Beatrice across art history (see “Exhibit A“), they appear wildly different in a way that makes me wonder: Are these differences beauty or deformity in action?(4)

AS: How do you go about writing a novel so unlike traditional novels? Was it difficult?

GH: In some ways, it was strangely easy—not to say it didn’t involve logistical acrobatics, extreme labor and patience over time, while the “baggy monster” of the novel slowly (re)generated its form.(5)

AS: You have a blog that is a virtual extension of the novel. Why did you create this website and what can readers find there?

GH: The website isn’t a blog, per se—more a virtual gallery that documents and suggests how the book grows in and out of itself through collaborative (aesthetic, cultural, social) deformation.(6)

AS: You invite everyone and anyone to create their own exhibits on your site and some of those creations (or deformations) have been included in the published book. Why did you decide to open up the novel to outside “Subscribers?”

GH: By opening up the project, I as so-called Author(ity) of my book don’t know how it ends, either in form and content—among other elements, even that expected teleology has the capacity to change.(7)

AS: What emotions do you hope Galerie evokes in its readers?

GH: Readers will get out of the Galerie as much as they put in. (8)

AS: Is there any author that inspired you to create Galerie?

GH: Many more than those indicated by the 28 printable pages of single-spaced, electronic endnotes.(9)

AS: Why do you write?

GH: I never intended to be a writer and fell into it as a high school teacher, now thinking that it’s my attempt—in some small way—to invite (re)perception of our vulnerable, culpable, and capable place in this world.(10)

AS: How has writing Galerie de Difformité changed you as a writer?

GH: I gave up trying to fit a book inside its inherited box, or body, to let the novel (and other projects) be what each wants to be, engaged and engaging with this moment in time.(11)

AS: There seem to be two Gretchen Hendersons. Gretchen Henderson the writer (whose name appears on the cover of the novel) and Gretchen Henderson the character/narrator/Undertaker. Why two Gretchens, and are they really different at all?

GH: Yes, they are different: among other aspects, I never was struck by lightning, neither of my grandfathers had a secret family, nor was either a medieval scholar (rather, a mailman and a chemist), and I confess to being an academic (of sorts).(12)

AS: The novel is almost like a game, but it has a serious side, too, touching on real-life issues of deformity and self-understanding. How do you want your readers to approach the Galerie, and what do you hope they take away from the experience?

GH: Notions of self and authority are constructs as much as the BOOK—all of which have changed across history and will continue to change within and through their (our) deforming bodies.(13)

AS: You wrote, “By the time this book is printed, it already will be outdated.” What do you think (or hope) lies in store for the future deformation of the Galerie?

GH: As more sensibilities and perspectives and media come to bear on “deformity” (and “book,” for that matter), I hope the more static definition starts to vibrate and take on a kind of reanimated life. (14)

Caroline Picard: You have another book, On Marvellous Things Heard, that we recently released through my publishing house, The Green Lantern Press. This essay, which you write is a “deformation and reformation” on the traditional, explores the relationship between literature/writing/language and music/silence. Was this essay at all influenced by your work with Galerie de Difformité?

GH: The two projects were written more or less simultaneously, albeit separately, so there may be loose links threading in and out of one another, through echo effect.(15)

CP: In On Marvellous Things Heard, you again return to the classics, playing off of Aristotle’s book of the same title. Can you talk a little bit about the work you do using old works and characters, and recombining them into new compositions?

GH: It’s being done all the time—I’m just making visible (or asking readers to make visible) otherwise invisible traces.(16)

CP: OMTH seems to study and expound upon music’s resistance to language. What was your process like, writing this book, when the tools you had to address your subject were admittedly inadequate from the start?

GH: Therein lies a timeworn question—to arrive back where we started, changed—not unlike sonata structure: exposition, development, recapitulation.(17)

CP: Or too, what would music’s ideal description look like? Do you feel like musical notation is more successful than grammatical text?

GH: It depends on the form for the content—there are different literacies involved with reading language versus music, and it takes time to learn and notate (to write into, to write against) those literacies—to then suggest the right notation for any given project (disclaimer: I don’t believe in a singular ideal).(18)

CP: How would you describe the relationship between poetics and music and sound? Do these facets of expression belong in a family?

GH:  Listen:(19)

CP: What are you working on now?

GH: Ugliness: A Cultural History.(20)

 

Notes

(1)  Galerie de Difformité, began as a critical essay exploring aesthetics of deformity in eighteenth-century British visual culture. This was back in Fall 2004. As I wrote and organized my arguments around particular works of art—engaging an era dense with nationalistic enterprises, archaeological excavations of fragments, seeking and fashioning Ur-origins, outgrowths of private into public museums, varied notions of exhibition—the essay itself began to fragment into a kind of pseudo-exhibition. The final version retained the rhetoric of scholarship, if structured as a collection of curated micro-essays, each of which was prefaced by an image and captioned as it might appear in a museum or catalogue. Entitled Galerie de Difformité, that scholarly essay barely resembles the novel that came to be. That said, traces of the original remain in occasional sections titled “Deformity as…” (Curiosity, Misrepresentation, Caricature, Sa(l)vage(d), Sublime, etc.), heavily treated through constraints. Once the initial essay was completed, deformed aesthetics kept appearing in other material that I was reading—across literature, art, music, the gamut of disciplines—and the essay’s intermediate white spaces begged to be expanded through and into fiction and poetry, a kind of chorus, lulling and leading me to c(u)r(e)ate “Exhibits.” The novel just grew from there: suggesting missing parts, characters, narrative strategies, echoes, seams to stitch and loosen and tether together into this “baggy monster” (to borrow Henry James’ characterization of the Novel).

 

 

(2) “Exhibits” are so-named because they inhabit the larger Galerie de Difformité (as in a museum) and also suggest a kind of evidence (as with exhibits in a legal trial). Adopting alphabetic identities and allegiances, they are labeled “A” through “Z,” also archived thematically. (For instance, “Exhibit C” treads around color and chronology, and also might be classified as contortion or corporeal or _______ [fill in the blank]). A reader can bring their own sensibilities to bear on varied possibilities. As prose poems, “Exhibits” resist neat summarization. In the book they don’t appear alphabetically sequenced, nor do they congregate together, rather alternate with other genre elements (epistles, definitions, faux scholarship, images, etc.). Some even appear outside the body of the book—like “Exhibit Q,” which exists only in an endnote, and “Exhibit E,” which translates as a QR code on page 250 (the final page, where the colophon should be) and remains to be written (as a kind of End).

(3) Apart from beauty’s overriding positive connotations that often get attention, history has witnessed many cults of beauty where the nature of beauty (footbinding, corsets, etc.) changes. Beauty can be skin-deep, deceptive, even dangerous. Kathleen Marie Higgins writes: “[W]e cannot see beauty as innocent when the sublime splendor of the mushroom cloud accompanies moral evil, that aesthetic appeals congealed Hitler’s rallies, that beautifully embellished clothes and jewelry currently motivate teenagers to murder.” There are many examples that stretch this question into different periods and fields. (For instance, in 2005, it was estimated that Americans spent at least $12.4 billion on cosmetic surgery, which was more than the total gross domestic product for over 100 nations, including Albania and Zimbabwe, totaling over 1 billion people!) Beyond the usual binary that pits deformity against beauty, I am interested in muddying both waters. Deformity is fraught with historical baggage (see footnote 4 below) but also takes on positive connotations in different sociocultural contexts (like the Japanese concept of “wabi-sabi,” or as Kakuzo Okakura describes in The Book of Tea a “worship of the Imperfect,” or as occurs in certain traditions of rug and other weaving, where a pattern is deformed deliberately at a certain point, to allow the soul to move in and out, to leave something unfinished for the imagination to complete, or so the weaver does not compete with a larger creator, or for other reasons). I am interested in deformity as a kind of investigation of these practices and priorities, not to mention the litany of terms that have kept company with deformity across history: grotesque, monstrous, ugly, asymmetric, crippled, handicapped, disabled, etc. Like Umberto Eco claims, “Beauty is, in some ways, boring. Even if its concept changes through the ages, nevertheless a beautiful object must always follow certain rules… Ugliness is unpredictable and offers an infinite range of possibilities. Beauty is finite. Ugliness is infinite, like God.”

(4) Deformity carries historical baggage, seemingly negative and static, but full of kinetic potential: deforming. In process. Within the word itself literally lies form—de(form)ity, dif(form)ite—evolving. Everything deforms around us: seasonal cycles, aging bodies, changes of all types. Beyond that, “deformity” becomes an aesthetic backdoor to the politically fraught term “disabled” and many types of “otherness”—like Aristotle’s claim that “the female as it were a deformed male” (or, in other translations, “a mutilated male”). Galerie de Difformité is packed with as many historical notions of deformity as possible, within a choose-your-own-adventure structure where a reader has agency to follow or break rules, calling attention to how we read books, bodies, and our perceptions.

 

 

(5) As mentioned in Footnote 1, Galerie de Difformité began as a very different project and for many years was a side-side-side project. It took time, too, to grope my way into my own redefinition of the Novel, first studying the long and rich history of that genre, then writing a first novel, wanting to offer homage and invitation through my reinterpretations. Rather than write into the too-strict triumvirate of fiction/poetry/nonfiction, I found that source material from different periods (alongside changing notions of genres and of deformity, mixed up by my background in music) encouraged a multifarious and malleable sense of form(s). Major life changes coincided and intervened along the way, some of which could easily have curtailed this project and more. I realized that, like life and all else, my novel had the potential to deform—physically, psychically, and otherwise—even to perform its deformity and be co-created as an aesthetic and sociocultural entity. This has encouraged me to chase down various paths, intellectually and technologically. The project tries to provide multiple access points, so any number of different readers can meet the chimeric creature on their own terms. Over a decade of teaching at different levels and in different environments indirectly influenced the interactive nature of Galerie de Difformité, and I’ve enjoyed working with the book in different classes to consider its pedagogical dimensions. Future documentation of the project will take on its own life, as the book will retreat into the background, as the larger collaborative deformation will swarm around it: slowly. Galerie de Difformité is like a creature that needs to be tended. I am constantly learning from it, as Subscribers’ contributions give me cues about how to tend the project’s future. (By way of example of a collaborative influence: An early Subscriber added his own constraint to the project’s constraint, choosing to submit four deformations in order to spell out a word (TOMB: see visualized alphabet below). Since his submission was early enough to be considered to illustrate the book, I chose two of his deformations to spell an embedded word back in the published book (OM). His dedicated involvement also encouraged me to go ahead with my plan to build an electronic library of deformity-related collaborative chapbooks, and he became the first guest editor.) Other future stages are planned, but along the way, plans will evolve based on collaborative interactions.

(6) The online Galerie de Difformité (sharing the novel’s title, since they grow in and out of one another) is a growing installation dedicated to deformity. It includes instructions about how to collaboratively participate. The site hosts “Exhibits” as downloaded documents (which were first mounted after they appeared in literary journals, to interface with contemporary print culture): materials that visitors can deform through whatever medium and concept. Deformants have chosen a range of approaches: from erasure and cut-up, to treating “Exhibits” as a canvas or freezing text in ice, carved in beeswax and soap, to more conceptual installations and videos, even floated away by balloons. The book is laced with QR (Quick Response) codes that can be scanned with mobile devices like iPhones to link to various parts of the online gallery and offshoots (a short film, an e-volume of archival papers of Ye Ugly Face Club, and other paraphernalia) that will change as more people participate in the communal deformation and bring their own sensibilities to bear on its constraints. Also online is the growing electronic library of collaborative chapbooks, broadly engaging deformity, both in content and form. The book is slowly being unbound, growing in and out of itself, bridging material and virtual realms, calling itself a book, functioning as a book, engaging the vocabulary of the book (i.e., What is a page?): to make visible that this technology-that-is-the-book has a long and rich history and is not at its apocalyptic end.

 (7) I am only one person, and to engage the questions that I wanted to ask, I needed to appeal to and consult many voices, bodies, sensibilities, perspectives, and approaches. Writers, artists, musicians, and other creators never work in a vacuum. Galerie de Difformité makes that process visible to work against the notion of Romantic genius, against Author-ity, even as it plays up and into the notion of Authorship. I call myself the author while also postmodernly twisting my authority (including a Gretchen Henderson who is not me), undercutting and duplicating and triplicating questions about my authority, culling sources and source material from across centuries, putting these in conversation with one another, threading my voice through different genres and appropriations, so the narrative(s) occur between genres, between the lines, into margins, beyond the book—tracing and illuminating reading strategies where the reader is invested with agency and co-creates meaning with the presumed, authoritative “original.”

(8) Whatever a reader wants or needs, I hope they find. Galerie de Difformité is many books in one: a book that can be read quickly and superficially, or slowly and deliberately, even over the course of years (given the choose-your-own-adventure and growing paraphernalia that is tethered to the project). Each reading experience should be different, both because the book and the reader are changing.

(9) Where to begin? Where to end?

(10) As John Cage described his motivation for composition: not for self-expression but for self-alteration. “How do we change with the ever-changing world in a compassionate and graceful way? How do engage with a kind of impermanence?”

 

 

(11) How does a writer adequately thank those who help to wing her words into the world? I’m ever grateful to &NOW and the Madeleine P. Plonsker Prize for supporting this process. To receive logistical and financial support to publish such an interdisciplinary, intergenre, intermedia project is a gift of immeasurable worth. I am especially grateful to Davis Schneiderman at &NOW and Caroline Picard at Green Lantern for advocating for my inclinations, when other editors might have tried to box up and down the work, to make it conform rather than deform, which would’ve worked against its organic intent.

(12) In the novel, Gretchen is a construct as much as Bea as much as Gloria: the last of whose name doesn’t double in the book (though admittedly, her surname isn’t entirely unrelated to that of William Hay, an eighteenth-century hunchbacked member of British Parliament, who wrote an essay on Deformity in 1754). The narrators of the GdD exist as a sequence of diminishing mirrors, also reflecting and refracting readers as they get more involved in the labyrinth. But to return to your question: there’s also a triplicating of Gretchen Henderson, since both the fictional and real author, and Gloria, all share the same initials—G.H.—quadrupled with Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to GH, as quoted at the end of the introduction (page 8): “This is a book just like any other book. But I would be happy if it were read only by people … who know that an approach—to anything whatsoever—must … traverse even the very opposite of what is being approached … Over time, the character G.H. came to give me, for example, a very difficult pleasure; but it is called pleasure.” By including multiplied Gretchens, I’m not only appropriating a common postmodern construct (see Footnote 7), but also trying to give readers spaces and license to multiply their identities, their selves, and resist whatever classifications they may be hemmed into at this moment in time. (See “Application to be a Subscriber,” page 12). Essentially, the novel is about adaptation and change, whether engaging with the history of the novel, talking back to the identity movements of the last half century, taking a kind of Buddhist journey, or _______ [fill-in-the-blank].

(13) See Footnotes 8, 9, 10, and 19.

(14) “Deformity” has a number of sub-definitions, as I have tried to unpack throughout the novel (see Footnotes 3 and 4, or page 237 of the book, for starters). Because the Galerie de Difformité is a perpetual work in progress, partly based in new and evolving technologies, some parts of the story may become formally defunct along the way, unless translated into readable media. Additionally, the collaborative aspect multiples the potential ways this might evolve. What components ultimately remain, what parts mutate, and what else falls by the wayside will be part of the project’s larger documentation. To speak about one technology: QR codes were barely used when the book was planned, but now you see them on bus advertisements, in libraries, on real estate signs, almost everywhere. I am interested in textual and visual literacies, and how these combine, how technology is shaping our strategies for reading both old and new texts, where and how and why we create, classify, archive, and access literature.

(15) Each developing book suggests multiple possibilities, and my projects constantly cross-fertilize. I can’t work on a single project alone. Many lead to dead ends, but the processes invariably influence varied products. I finished OMTH before GdD, but all of my work has taken a long time to find homes (i.e., publishers). More than the GdD, OMTH has more of a relationship with my musically-structured first novel, The House Enters the Street, which is coming out third in the line-up (in Fall 2012, thanks to Starcherone Books). If it hadn’t been runner-up for the 2005 AWP Award Series in the Novel and received other nods, I might have chalked up that project as part of my learning process and shelved it away in a box. The suspension of a project across years lends an interesting sense of time—particularly if the book works against chronology—like a sign I once read in a subway (also quoted in The House Enters the Street): “Sometimes you have to go backward in order to go forward.”

(16) Older works, characters, and motifs always lie at our threshold, at edges, beckoning to converse with the present moment, not to be forgotten, providing fodder to dream of alternative futures. In a project like OMTH, there are a number of recombinations of old and new. Aristotle’s essay of the same title refers to “marvels” more in the vein of Herodotus, so my appropriation of “marvellous things heard” makes a sensory shift into the context of music, sound and silence—an appropriation also indebted to translations of various types (across languages, eras, cultures, disciplines), needling what gets lost and found in translation. By way of another example: my replacement of “she” for “he” in Aristotle’s essay becomes a process of imagined restitution, as a way of talking back to the author who described “the female as it were a deformed male” (see Footnote 4), shifting the peripheral “other” into the role of protagonist, to ask “what if?”—in the way that Karen Armstrong describes myth: “Mythology is not an early attempt at history, and does not claim that its tales are objective fact. Like a novel, an opera or a ballet, myth is make-believe; it is a game that transfigures our fragmented, tragic world, and helps us to glimpse new possibilities by asking ‘what if?’—a question which has also provoked some of our most important discoveries in philosophy, science and technology.” Across time, how many stories share the same plot, retold afresh for each new generation, wolves in sheep’s clothing, or sheep masquerading as wolves? Beyond the story or poem or essay, or intermediate genre, are its building blocks—our living language—comprised of many languages, changing as we speak and write, malleable, deforming and interacting with other languages within our changing world. Etymological evolution is at work all the time. We live in a moment that’s rummaging through the scrapheap of history amid unprecedented change, trying to imagine possible futures, trying to figure out how to build into that process meaningful reflection, the art of listening, attention to conscience, and conscientiousness.

(17) Like the Galerie de Difformité, whose content took awhile to find its interrelated form, the material within On Marvellous Things Heard went through varied incarnations: from faux to scholarly essays to a pedagogical collection of music-inspired writing exercises, etc. (The poems that ended up in my cartographic-based chapbook, Wreckage: By Land & By Sea, also went through varied incarnations.) My first attempt to harness the musical material was a faux opera lodged inside my first novel, The House Enters the Street. The more that I tried to reduce something three-dimensional to two dimensions, it resisted that attempt, needed to breathe, needed white space, interaction, call and response, counterpoint of voices, where my voice became only one in a larger chorus (cacophonic as that chorus may be).

(18) The content of each project searches for its own form. Notation follows accordingly. Just because I read modern English doesn’t mean I understand Old English, just as someone who can sing from the modern five-staff system doesn’t mean they can make music from medieval neumatic notation (before block notes, essentially appearing as squiggles and dots above and below lines of text, denoting relative pitch and duration: monophonic, not polyphonic). Regardless of what gets lost in translation, traces remain, trails of breadcrumbs to follow, ways to educate ourselves to read backwards (so to speak). There are so many different kinds of literacies across disciplines, languages, historical periods, cultures. What feels generative to me is putting these different literacies in conversation with one another somehow, if only through sensibility, appealing to sounds and senses that shift us both outside and back into our skins.

As aside: I’ve been thinking for a while about a musical notational analogue for On Marvellous Things Heard. If any composer might be interested in collaborating, please contact me.

(19)

 

 

 

 

(20)  More important to me than creative writing is the enterprise of creative living: always a process in progress. I’m excited about the creative writing courses that I’m teaching at MIT, engaging interdisciplinary fields like book history and museum studies. But to return to Ugliness: A Cultural History, this might be considered another deformation of the Galerie de Difformité, growing out of a subplot involving Ye Ugly Face Club. (My faux introduction for the e-volume of this facetious society’s archival papers deformed into a scholarly essay delivered at the annual conference for the Association of Art Historians, forthcoming in an art history anthology, now deforming further into a cultural history of Ugliness for Reaktion Books.) While exploring ugliness, I will continue tending to the communal deformation of the Galerie de Difformité. If you’re interested in participating, please visit: http://difformite.wordpress.com. Thank you for reading. In the meantime, please listen to Footnote 19.

 

 

 

 

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Often art spaces emerge in response to rumbling (and specific) undercurrents in a given community. In the Artists Run Chicago Digest — a book I put together with threewalls that examines artist-run art spaces in Chicag0 between 1999 and 2009— almost every interview conducted with gallery founders talk about how they opened a space because of some recognized lack. Miguel Cortez, for instance, when asked about why he started Antenna Gallery said, “Chicago has long had a history of ‘do-it-yourself’ art spaces and I felt that the Pilsen neighborhood was lacking in contemporary art spaces. I have seen alt. spaces come and go in the Pilsen neighborhood over the years. So I reopened a space on my own after Polvo closed.” In almost every case, founders feels something noticeably underrepresented — nine times out of ten it’s “good art” — and suddenly they takes it upon themselves to fill the niche. In this way, artist-run spaces create corner stones in an ongoing (and usually undocumented) conversation. Very often, whether as an unintended biproduct or a focused agenda, they reflect back on aesthetic, political and economic issues of a geographical local. Providence of course is no different. In the following interview I talk with co-founder and organizer of RK Projects, Tabitha Piseno. RK Projects is a nomadic, contemporary, non-commercial gallery. Each curated exhibit creates a dynamic and reciprocal interrogation between contemporary art work by local artists and the (often unused) architectural site it inhabits. At the moment, RK Projects has a show, “ATLAS” with work by X.V. installed at the Granoff Center in Brown University. You can download the digital album the artist made to be released in conjunction with the exhibition here.

Caroline Picard: What is your background and how did RK Projects start?

Tabitha Piseno: My partner, Sam Keller, and I started RK Projects in October 2010, a few months after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design. While living in Providence, we had always been intrigued by the architecture of the city, the sense of its history, and how the urban layout of the city represented, or informed rather, the presiding social dynamics and economic development.

After making the decision to remain in Providence after graduation, we were immediately interested in engaging Providence outside of its academic environment; we wanted to create a socially engaged project that could speak to our interests in the city, be instrumental in responding to the lack of venues where young local artists could exhibit, while also retaining the ability to think and act critically. This was a very exciting venture for us, not only because of how stimulating we knew it would for own intellectual interests, but more so because of how it would fill a void of exhibition venues. There is a vibrant, and incredibly active, community of artists and musicians that truly thrives in Providence.(1)

We began with the intention of opening a gallery in a fixed location, but it was quickly brought to out attention that the cost of running a full-time space that would be solely dependent on sales, was not a financially viable for us. It was, in fact, discouraged by many people. From brokers of store-front commercial properties that had previously rented to galleries, to local curators who had previously run full-time galleries, to staff members of the Rhode Island State Council of the Arts and the Department of Art, Culture, and Tourism — many people made it clear how difficult it is to keep a gallery in Providence afloat due to the lack of collectors and connections to out-of-town buyers. It was clearly expressed that Providence had a track record of failed galleries, despite the profusion of local artists making work. With that in mind, the formulation of RK Projects really began; we were persistent in our interest in creating a new exhibition platform.

The first thing that came to form was our name for the project: “R.K.” which stands for Richard Keller who was my partner’s uncle. He was an outsider artist who expatriated to France in the 60s. He was a sort-of Francophile and was obsessed with the language; he taught Linguistics at the Sorbonne. While he was teaching, he continued making art prolifically. The work he made ranged from collages, drawings, and prints to bizarre Dadaist assemblage sculptures that he compiled entirely from trash he would find by dumpster-diving in the streets of Paris. After 30 years of moving to France, he became very ill and passed away from HIV in the mid-90s. He never exhibited his work. We felt naming the project in his memory was very important to us, and exemplified the purity of pursuing something you love doing no matter the means.

During our search for a fixed space we realized the extent of the economic deprivation that Providence has suffered from for many years. The abundance of vacant commercial and industrial spaces throughout the entire city sparked our strategy.

Ultimately, it was a solution and a proposal. It was our solution for creating a new exhibition platform that could invest itself in showing experimental work by local artists without having a tremendous overhead that a fixed location would have (most properties have been donated to us, or rented out to us at an extremely reduced rate). It became a curatorial proposal embedded around the idea of site-specificity –  How could we utilize each property in a way that could inform the work within the exhibition? How does the geographical location of each property speak to the work and to what we do as RK Projects? How does the presence of each exhibition affect its surrounding social and public space? In what way does the project speak to the economy of Providence, real estate or otherwise? These are questions that we take into account as we organize each exhibition, and exploring/experimenting with those answers is one of the most rewarding and satisfying aspects of what we do.

CP: As a nomadic exhibition project, how do you feel the unique architecture of Providence complements the specificity of individual projects?

TP: It’s different for each project, because the existing architecture (in a physical/historical/economic  sense) in each location we’ve conducted our project \ is so very different and unique to the particular section of town where it resides.  We organized our very first exhibition, Nostalgia for Simpler Times, in the Upper South district of Providence in a double-wide trailer located on the historic ‘Providence Piers’ waterfront. The Upper South side of Providence is a section of Providence that was the last to undergo development with the rise of industrialization in the 19^th century, and currently has the highest unemployment rate in the city. The trailer on the Piers was formerly a ticket office for a, now defunct, ferry route. It is currently managed by the adjacent “Conley’s Wharf” building which houses studios and offices for creative businesses. The exhibition was a solo-show of my partner’s work; at the time, he was using courageously silly methodologies for making sculptures, paintings, and installation work that bordered on being iconoclastic. The double-wide trailer, in the desolate context it was in, informed the work in an interesting way. Throughout the exhibition he had a 3-tiered chocolate fondue fountain on a white pedestal that was constantly pumping nacho cheese. Every morning while the exhibition was up, we had to boil over 6 pounds of cheese and transport it to the site. It was absurd – carrying these massive containers into a double-wide trailer in a parking lot while fisherman were going about their daily business along the pier. It definitely brought in an interesting crowd that we didn’t expect – people were coming in that had little or no experience with that kind of art and really appreciated. It seemed like the broadness (in a metaphorical sense) of the site kept the interpretation of the work very open. At one point we had a homeland security officer come to the exhibition because the particular area the trailer was in also housed a massive salt pile for winterizing all of Providence’s roads; there were also shipping crates directly adjacent to the trailer with storage for some equipment that belonged to the police department. He loved it; he took a good amount of time exploring the work in the show. The exhibition really exemplified the general feeling of that particular district.

The subsequent projects went from the Industrial Valley district, where we conducted a 3-day music festival and a huge exhibition that spanned 20,000 sq. ft. of a historical industrial building that was being renovated, to Downtown Providence, to the West End, to Olneyville, and then we eventually made our way to the East Side of Providence in the Mount Hope district and College Hill where our current exhibition is on display in the new Granoff Center at Brown University. We tried to allow our exhibitions to speak to each district’s existing physical architecture and social space; we traversed a lot of territory and made a lot of noise in the broader area of Providence before making our way back to the academic bubble that is College Hill. I think that itinerary speaks well to how the unique architecture of Providence complimented individual projects.

TP: Absolutely, every property we’ve chosen to work in has presented itself as a space that could be activated by the presence of an exhibition — or vice versa – the space would activate the artwork that inhabited it. What has been really interesting, and surprising, for us is how each exhibition has sort of exhumed the past history of the property it resides in. For example, the third exhibition we hosted with “Art Is Shit Editions” – Frolic, Frolic, Irresistible – was organized around the premise of consumerism and art as commodity. The property we chose for it was a downtown property on Westminster St – known as the “Heart of Providence” – it’s primarily a restaurant and shopping district.  As we were working on preparations for the show, we discovered that the property was formerly an illegal brothel. It ran in an Asian massage parlor where women were kept sequestered in the basement and attic. During the installation process, we came across remnants of this history and ended up utilizing leftover equipment and rooms, such as shower stalls, a sauna, and a massage table for installations as a way of engaging that history. For the audience that experienced the exhibition, it brought up the issue of Providence’s history of sex-trafficking and how long indoor prostitution remained decriminalized in Rhode Island (it was  made illegal in 2009).  It turned out to be a fitting context for the exhibition, not as the mainstay, but as a representation of how the exhibition had the ability to activate a particular history and bring a localized issue to light.

In terms of borrowing real estate, we choose properties that we notice have remained vacant for several years and are under-recognized. We always try to reach out to a very broad audience with the hopes that someone will see the space and be interested in purchasing or renting it. In priming the space for our exhibitions, we also make it a point to leave the space in better condition than we found it. This allows us to also maintain wonderful relationships with property brokers and real estate companies that we work with. It also helps them see the worth in what we’re trying to do with the project.

CP: How have your curatorial strategies developed over time?

TP:  The curatorial strategy for the project has always been the same: to address site-specificity via a nomadic, DIY exhibition platform, and offer an alternative way for contextualizing the work of local artists.  Throughout the project I’ve been particularly fond of two books, one written by Rosalyn Deutsche called Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics, and the other by Miwon Kwon titled One Place After Another: Site-specific Art and Locational Identity. The ways in which site-specificity is framed and iterated in each of those books have resounded with me greatly, and deeply affected me as I’ve conducted the curatorial strategies for the project.  Kwon puts it perfectly when she identifies the purpose of her book as  “to reframe site specificity as the cultural mediation of broader social, economic, and political processes that organize urban life and urban space.”

That approach to site-specificity is something I find incredibly important.

What is different for each project, and continues to develop, is how the premise for each exhibition, and the work within it, is successfully supported by the context of the project. That’s an overriding programmatic strategy as opposed to curatorial, but I would like to think that creating boundaries for the two is something for conceptual fodder that fuels the project and makes it better with each exhibition.

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NOTE

(1) In a city that was literally branded as the “Creative Capital,” it was surprising to see that there were no exhibition venues that could support young, contemporary, experimental work. There were a few galleries, but they were geared towards “tourist commodities:” New England kitsch-art that proliferates because of its accessibility. We were concerned about what work was actually defining our “Creative Capital.” The goal of re-branding this city was what ex-Mayor David Ciccilline called: “[In order to build] on one of [Providence's] finest assets — its large number of artists, designers, student and faculty innovators at such schools like Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design — the city recently re-branded itself as Providence: The Creative Capital.” Yet there was no bearing as to how this new identity was intended to build the city’s economy. At the same time the campaign disregarded the nature of arts activities initiated by RI residents who actually existed in the public community.

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1. Pamela Fraser at Golden Gallery

Golden Gallery, generally a crowd pleaser, is putting up another strong show. This round it consists of works on paper by artist Pamela Fraser. The works (from what I could find and discern) are all abstract, hyper-color pieces. Is “eye candy” a bad word in the art world?

Golden Gallery is located at 816 W. Newport Ave. Opening reception is Friday from 6-9pm.

2. Alumni at David Weinberg Gallery

I went to SAIC for grad school, but I don’t believe that gives me a complete bias for SAIC grad work. However, when I see good work from my fellow alums, I got to give it a shout.  David Weinburg is putting on an exhibition of “recent” SAIC grad work, including that of Amy Mayfiled, Noelle Allen, Helen Maurene Cooper, & Michael Ratulowski. If you haven’t seen their work yet (which, if you’ve been in Chicago a while, is unlikely) make sure you stop by. If you already know their work, head over for a refresher on why they’re awesome.

David Weinberg Gallery  is located at 300 W. Superior St. Opening reception is Friday from 5-8pm. Read more

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Bad at Sports’ own Literary Correspondent Terri Griffith has published her first book “So Much Better” and is on sale now through Green Lantern Press & Amazon.com

“So Much Better” is a debut novel about a self-sabotaging Credit Union employee, a cold woman at odds with and alone in the world. In the absence of her lover, she seduces her lover s sister, wades through old storage units and wonders after her own absent family. Printed in an edition of 500 w/ silkscreen covers by Nick Butcher of Sonnenzimmer.

Terri Griffith’s writing has appeared in Bloom, Suspect Thoughts, Bust and in the anthologies Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class and Are We Feeling Better Yet? Women Speak about Health Care in America. Along with Nicholas Alexander Hayes, she is co-authoring a transgressive retelling of the Greek Myths. Terri is the literary correspondent for the popular contemporary art podcast Bad at Sports and she also co-hosts the online reading series The Parlor.

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Guest Post by Caroline Picard

This essay was first published in the Artists Run Chicago Digest published jointly by threewalls and Green Lantern Press in 2009.

On the matter of public (1) space : or my apartment gallery is an arctic explorer

“‘Oh, you have a roommate?’

“ ‘Yeah, she’s actually here right now, but she’s sick….Don’t do that—she’s trying to sleep.’

“I heard them but pretended to remain asleep by keeping my eyes closed; [closing your eyes] is what passed for privacy then. My ‘room’ was in a corner of the kitchen on the other side of a folding screen. If you were tall enough, you could see me from either side at any time. The above exchange took place during the installation of a show when I happened to have a cold. I lived at the Green Lantern from 9/06 to 8/07. Recently out of college, I moved to Chicago to get my bearings. I had just spent two years living in the French countryside with no heat, no car, no Internet, no noise, no zines, no sushi, no shows, no jargon. When I moved in, I had never owned a computer. Suddenly I was in the middle of an art scene. Read more

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