The painting is not actually shaped like that.
This month’s exhibition “Maybe Not” at Worksound is described in the promotional materials as, “a show about transgression, catastrophe and failure.” It’s certainly about one of those – ZING! No, but seriously, how the nipplefuck I ended up down there a couple of Fridays ago is beyond me.
Yum.
You see, last summer at the Portland Art Critics annual dinner at Red Robin on MLK, the rest of this city’s tastemakers and I unanimously decided that we would henceforth eschew any type of acknowledgement of Worksound as a legitimate arts institution. In attendance were DK Row, Jeff Jahn, Chas Bowie, Richard Speer, Patrick Collier and a woman named Lisa Radon. Each of us swore a blood oath, rendered official and binding as our self-inflicted wounds gushed steaming red fluid from clenched fists onto a basket of bottomless fries. It was our intention, as phrased so eloquently by Mr. Row, to “burn that motherfucker to the ground.”
DK Row = JK Rowling???
And to be quite frank, I had been doing a damned fine job of avoiding Modou Dieng’s night club/gallery ever since. But on Friday, February 11th in the year of our Lord 2011, I fucked up. BIG TIME.
THE SLAMMER.
Any of you familiar with the way that a Friday night begins generally taking shape at 2:00pm will understand the foggy condition in which I found myself early on in the evening. While I’ll admit to being in Southeast Portland on purpose that afternoon, it was absolutely not my intention to set foot anywhere near 820 SE Alder Street. But after a few hours at the Slammer Tavern and drinking three consecutive Creamy Mexicans, I lost complete control of my person. A Creamy Mexican is a beer bong filled with a half gallon of Vitamin D whole milk and eight shots of Cuervo. Try one on for size… unless you’re a racist.
At approximately 7:15pm, my good friend and writing colleague Kilgore Trout arrived after having been called by no less than two employees of the Slammer, demanding that I be removed from the premises. It wasn’t so much that I made a scene; they were, in my opinion, reacting a little severely to my beating the shit out of a woman wearing a John Lennon t-shirt ON JEB BUSH’S BIRTHDAY. Give peace a chance? Give my fists performing a clitoral circumcision all over your pussy a chance, you Marxist cum dumpster. If there’s one thing that I hate more than the Nation of Islam, it’s John Fucking Lennon (not that the two are mutually exclusive).
VROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!
Trout dragged me out just in time to dodge the boys in blue, who came lapping and snarling in their Ford Crown Vics and motor bikes, hungry for the blood of the Dobson. We ducked quickly into Beaker & Flask, which was so crowded I got my first period. Bleeding obscenely from between my thighs, I coughed in a fit of desperation and Trout carried me fireman-style through the Beavertonians and Greshamites that infest this fine city on weekends. When we were finally back outside, we noticed that police were in the process of shutting down a three-block radius around the Slammer in hopes of catching the Leonardo DiCaprio of art criticism. Reaching into my boot, I drew out my handgun and mentally prepared myself to go out in a blaze of glory. Christ and I made peace and I was ready to die.
But it would not be my day to be martyred, as Trout once again grabbed me over his shoulders and ran with the grace of a lemur across SE 7th Ave towards the industrial district. The crackling of gun fire pierced the cold winter air and I felt bullets whizzing past my body. I was utterly confused as to why the Portland Police Bureau would open fire on me – I am white and I live in a house. One might assume at this point that I would have experienced a kind of empathy for the brothers on the streets, but I didn’t.
With the police hot on our trail, Trout nimbly maneuvered around corners until we found ourselves staring face-to-face with the front door of Worksound.
“We’ll hide in here,” Trout said, gasping for breath.
“Fat fucking chance,” I shot back. “I have a pact with DK Row!”
“Tanner, I recognize and respect the brotherhood of art criticism and the seriousness with which you all handle your values – especially in a city where art criticism is widely recognized as one of the most serious engagements with culture one can undertake. However, in light of the current situation that we are facing that involves possibly being shot to death, I propose that we hide the one place that a police officer would never look if he thought he was chasing a black man.”
It was as clear as day. “An art gallery!” I squealed.
Is that stenciled?
He set me back upon my feet and we dashed like lesbian lizards towards the doors. Reaching the sidewalk in front of the gallery, I went into a perfect front handspring and tumbled through the open doorway, coming back to a standing position directly in front of one of the artists in the show: Ralph Pugay.
(L-R) Ralph "Wiggum" Pugay and Dana "Carvey" Franklin
The main room of Worksound was devoted to a collection of recent works by Pugay; paintings of silly and nasty things that can either give you a boner or make sure that you never get one again. He is terribly underrated in this city and for that I blame, oh, let’s say Storm Tharp. Much of Ralph’s work interests me a great deal, and much of it makes me want to punch his stupid face into his stupid brain.
*Interests me...
*Makes me want to punch Ralph...
What really jiggles my Uncle Tom though about his work is that it somehow simultaneously looks like complete genius, and like the work of a four year-old with prostate cancer. What sets Pugay apart though from the rest of the idiots all over this half of the country making naïve pieces is the fact that he can actually paint. The depiction of human bodies in his work is often crude, but the little bastard knows how to paint inside the lines. I’m looking at you, Chris Johanson.
At one point in the evening, Pugay asked me directly if his face was getting red. This was an attempt to bait me into making a derogatory comment about how Asians look ridiculous when drunk. So I made one.
I have tried like fifty times to figure out what the fuck is happening in this picture and I still have no fucking clue.
If you haven’t been paying attention to Pugay’s work over the last couple of years, then it means that you suck dick. I’m not going to fully endorse this little fucker because part of me thinks that sometimes he might be making fun of Christianity in his work. But until I can specifically point out an instance in the work where that is happening, I’ll continually describe him to friends around town as at least a 5.5/10.
I didn't even do that sick edge-burn in a digital program. It just happened.
Around the bend was a suite of new work by everyone’s favorite Camus-drunk self-flagellator Michael Reinsch. Naturally, I was expecting to walk into the room and be assaulted by a visual overload of streamers, balloons and him awkwardly marching around in his underpants. What I witnessed though was a pleasant surprise to say the least. Reinsch had hung a series of small, intimate photographs around the room and he was wearing adult clothes!
Would you let this man watch your kids? I would... if they were your kids.
We spoke for a bit about this new project, part of an ongoing series he has loosely titled LURK. The images were all slightly blurry or pixilated, and Reinsch explained that each is a screen grab from his own computer of the interior of a stranger’s home via their own webcam. What a fucking creep. Regardless of how much Reinsch masturbates privately to images of other people’s computer chairs and Wilco posters is less important to me than the overall relevance of this project in contemporary culture. We’re talking about individuals who are voluntarily setting themselves up for surveillance. Orwell can eat my fuck. Reinsch’s new body of work reminds me of something that my father, Theodore Dobson, told me at a very young age:
SURVEILLANCE IS FREEDOM.
That’s the entire notion behind the Patriot Act, people. Finally, an artist around town is learning to embrace the need our country has to keep tabs on its citizens and its visitors. We absolutely have to watch everybody, all the time.
I am opposed to Big Government.
As I walked out of Reinsch’s area, I ran into Trout again as he was chatting with a buxom young blonde with whom he had absolutely no chance. Nonetheless, I admired his audacity and praised his unwillingness to waiver from the task at hand. She introduced herself as Hester Prynne, which sounded oddly familiar. I think we may have swapped cum at the Phoenix Biltmore in 2004 after McCain bowed down to the Obama Machine on national television.
(L-R) Kilgore Trout and Hester Prynne.
Once Trout had finally taken the hint, we wandered to the final room to take a gander at Lori Gilbert’s body of work. While certainly all over the place in terms of media, somehow it kind of worked. On the far wall was a drawing of Melissa Joan Hart (schwing!) that prompted much debate amongst the attendees. Near that was a wall-based text piece that was vinyl or paint or something else that people put on walls. It consisted of a list of names of hoes who married dudes in prison for murder and shit like that. This was tight, because marriage is a hot issue these days.
I don't know what the fuck to type about this.
The space featured a few other works including a jar with a bunch of lint in it that is supposedly from philosophy books, indicating that Gilbert seldom reads. My favorite piece of all though was another text piece that was positioned against the wall on the floor that read simply, “Cute shoes.” Fuck yeah. I love shoes.
META.
Gilbert’s a woman, but you wouldn’t know it just by looking at her work. This is a major step for a female artist. Where I see her going next is dropping the last letter in her first name to make her even more androgynous on exhibition announcements. Plus, it sounds like a cool male movie start from the old days: Lor Gilbert. Right?
It’s paining me to say this, but I didn’t hate the show at Worksound. I feel like kind of a bitch even typing that, but I’m a straight-shooter (and lover) and I call ‘em like I see ‘em. If DK Row wants to climb up on my dick about breaking our little pact, I’ll put him in Mayor Sam Adams’ dickhole for a week. The rest of the gang present at Red Robin so long ago will have to just deal. Before any of you go firing off an angry e-mail to me calling me a sell-out, get your ass down to Worksound and see what all the fuss is about.
As I left the gallery, I kept looking over my shoulder for police but it seemed the coast was clear. Trout sure was right about one thing, cops don’t think black people look at art.
Not a black person.
