¡Intermediary Fluctuations of a Post-Fluxus World!
Holly Lay, One Day at a Time, acrylic yarn on burlap. Image courtesy Winchester Dondero Cultural Center,
¡Intermediary Fluctuations of a Post-Fluxus World! at the Winchester Dondero Cultural Center, Las Vegas
by D.K. Sole
The works were selected by the artist Yasmina Chavez, instructor of an Intermedia class at UNLV. For years her students have been making Fluxus-inspired videos for a regular piece of programming called Just Fluxing With You. Scott Dickensheets has already highlighted the importance of “interness” to Chavez’s thoughts about Fluxus in his review of Itermediary for Double Scoop, so I won’t go over that in too much detail, but my own attraction to this show—the reason I wanted to write this—beyond one obvious thing that I’ll go into at the end—stems from a moment of inter-ness or not-quite-that-ness which was not in any of the artworks but in the installation, or rather in the interaction between the two.
Typically the works in these Winchester-Dondero group shows are numerous and packed fairly close. This time the installers—Geovany Uranda, Stephanie Sumler, and Gina Parham—have arranged a gathering of relatively few artworks into areas of sparseness and density. The room felt different. I went in past a cluster of pieces. This fore-part of the small room was kept full by the sagging weight of Thomas Bumblauskas’ big ceramic trough along with a mass of lighter things: Eva J. Scoville’s wispy picture of a dog in a bath by a cow, Michael Cassera’s guiro-machine (which reminded me that Fluxus liked you to touch, to manipulate), Jeff Grindley’s mostly-black picture representing a distorted cat, and Narciso Dela Rosa’s nod to Fluxus’ habit of bringing things to your attention by placing them in boxes and suitcases, in Fluxkits and elsewhere.
Once past them I came to the back of the space, where I found a gleaming white ceramic fish by Heather Lang-Cassera near the edge of a very low white pedestal in a white corner, making it look as if there was almost nothing there at first, so that even when I went closer this fish felt as if it was surrounded by a mystery or that I was somehow not seeing it fully, even though it was a totally firm chunk of matter, solid as a garden ornament. Unable to settle on what I was looking at even though I was looking at it, I had a sensation that was like the double-sightedness Robert Watts suggests to me when I read this Fluxus event-score of his from the 1960s: “a dress / consisting mainly of / feathers; / each feather / may be seen / individually.” Lang-Cassera had given the fish a pair of human arms and an expression that might have been angry, irritable, or determined. It strove toward the steep drop at the edge of the pedestal. I saw another one of her pieces among the trees at the Wetlands Park as part of their outdoor Rooted exhibition a few weeks ago, but there the work was muddled among the trees, the grasses, the weather, the foliage in general—all of them more complicated and intriguing than the object. It had broken, but I could see it had been pole-shaped. This new one was compact, not an upstanding pole but a suggestive growth that turned the whiteness of the corner into an area of focus. “Anything can be art,” wrote one of Fluxus’ founders, George Maciunas, in 1965. I understood that the colour of the corner was art, and the electric outlet cover shooting in from the left was a vital part of it.
The corner that was both inhabited and not-inhabited made me pay attention to the other corner, where a series of Holly Lay’s textile words lay on the floor spelling out the phrase “One Day At A Time,” an event-score of its own. “EVENT FOR A WHOLE YEAR / one year”—Watts again. “Where can we live but days?” Philip Larkin asks. “Ah, solving that question / Brings the priest and the doctor …” The almost-empty Lay corner with its vertical slot windows became a guide: look here at this important incompleteness. And the awareness that the letters could be rearranged into another message made it seem a little precarious.
I need to end by saying that I have a piece in this show, so understand that I probably paid more attention to the installation that I would have done otherwise. If I had appeared in the Modern Romanticism exhibition over at Charleston Heights instead (it’s still running as I write this but I think it ends on January 13th) then would I be singling out something in that show instead? Maybe I’d be talking about Trevor Ganske’s translucent cactus. Maybe nobody else will be struck by the back corners as I was. Maybe it just looks sparse. “I wish the gallery was fuller,” writes Dickensheets, “in part to better trace the various denominations of Fluxus influence at work locally.” I’d like to see this too, but I would like to keep my corners.
¡Intermediary Fluctuations of a Post-Fluxus World!
Winchester Dondero Cultural Center
3130 McLeod Dr, Las Vegas, NV 89121
December 12, 2023 – January 25, 2024
Australian artist D.K. SOLE lives in Las Vegas, Nevada, and works at the UNLV Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art where she is the Director of Research and Educational Engagement. She has exhibited in Las Vegas and Denver, Colorado.
Posted and published by Wendy Kveck on January 28, 2024.