900 NE 81st Ave Portland OR 97213 503.729.3223
Room 119
manor experience
Room 119 was an open-ended, self-reflexive installation - about- by- and of- The Manor of Art. MOA. Process of art = process of documentation. We were a museum of dust — a breath away from non-existence the whole time. On 8.24.09 we ended. At the same time, we're not quite done.
Just scroll down. There is a lot of information, links, and imagery here. And quite a few small words come next.
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timeline
8.01 to 8.14: before: build TWTTR & FB lists, preview exhibit, document exhibit, promote artists & sponsors, collect debris for physical installation. Install.
8.14 to 8.23: during: Friday to Thursday, slowly add to & document RM 119 install, continue documenting whole exhibition & featuring artists, sponsors, events, etc. Themes change: social network interactions become more charged after the Calvin Ross Carl thread. RM 119 adds more US Magazine to the tone, including a critical & biased narration of Ben Pink's leaving the 7 Minutes in Heaven prefrmance room (and Ben's response) and of sponsors who get sponsor credit for Manor of Art but did not wind up providing sponsorship. (redacted at site owner's request). On Thursday (8.19 to 8.20) night, the RM 119 physical installation is wrecked, trashed, and the wreckage is documented. Friday morning, the wreckage is boxed up and a 3-piece band is installed. Friday night (8.20) the room is sealed shut with a handwritten 'closed' sign. Saturday through the end of the exhibit, the sealed door is decorated with a stereoscopic viewer that shows a 3D image of the "destroyed installation" from Thursday.
8.24: after. RM 119 greys out its FB & TWTTR pages and says goodbye. After 3 days, it posts another photo gallery & announces future plans on its pages. Since then, it has donated much of its archives, photos, TWTTRviews, etc. to Milepost 5. The physical installation remains sealed. The remainder of the project will be announced through social media sites when it is closer to completion / release. (10.06.09)
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Approx 11' x 16' physical installation: made from found materials at The Manor of Art including: existing shelves, the original Baptist Manor sign, faded architectural renderings from Milepost 5, The Lofts, development, scraps from The New Depression (Room 305) among other Manor rooms, [go ahead and skip forward to the links &c. This materials list goes on for a while.] about 450 photos taken during the event set-up, beer bottles painted orange, a piece of cheese with thumbtacks in it, an orange electrical cord, (note: if you recognize this electrical cord as "pivotal to composition" you've gone down the rabbit hole of contemporary art. We love you & goodbye forever!) show cards that participating artists have at the front desk at The Manor, all the objects that were in the room when we moved in, a big piece of a pipe that was cut off from above the front entrance of the show to hang the event banners (it is in the sink), a blessed few visitor interactions (line drawing on mirror, a few creatively cut up photos, a "ghost" doll, several pages of notes / drawings from an open invitation to "write or draw something" in a notebook in Room 118, and lots of stuff that Chris Haberman has dropped off - that's the spirit, Chris! Thanks!) and a floor that has been anti-swept (nearby halls & rooms swept into Room 119). Room materials are rearranged and altered regularly during the exhibit at a rate that becomes less subtle as the event ends, culminating with "Strike Day" 8.24.09 when Room 119 is de-installed.
- "Last night we made edits to #119 - re-composed it with more of an "Imaginary Post-Modern Rock Stars Have Trashed Their Room In the Ghost Hotel" motif. We used to paint on canvas with a brush. Now we throw debris around late at night in an abandoned old folks home then Twitter about it. We're trying very hard to satisfy everyone's desire for Fewer Pictures More Esoteric BS. Oh, and it is just going to get esotericer & more High Art today when we bring our drum kit & sawzall & REALLY make some changes." 8.21.09
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Micro-interviews with Manor artists
TWTTRviews* 4-Tweets in length (560 characters max inc. links, tags, intro, and twitter-in-reverse** numbering, and spaces). Twittered "in reverse" for your reading convenience.
05: Luci, working with Rebecca Sharpiro #350
09: Jason Squamata of HYPNOKOMIX #302
11: Rebecca Davison working with Rebecca Shapiro #350
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Micro-reviews culled from local media (one so far).
TWTTReviews*** 6-Tweets in length (840 characters max inc. links, tags, intro, and twitter-in-reverse numbering - and spaces). Twittered "in reverse" for your reading convenience.*
01: Lisa Radon, Portland Monthly Magazine
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The Museum 1.0
Room 119, Manor Experience (you are here)
Rooms 217 & 218, Marian Spadone "A Fine Farewell"
Room 222, TJ Norris
Room 322, Stephen Plount
Room 338, Gabe Flores "Greener Than You"
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Original Exhibits:
- Photo gallery 01: meta
- Photo gallery 02: documentation 01
- Photo gallery 03: contact (sheets) 02
- Photo gallery 04: contact (sheets) 03 - opening night
More ephemera
An argumentative debate about the merits (or lack-there-of) of The Manor of Art erupted in the comments following Lisa Radon's Portland Monthly Magazine review of Manor. [Our capture + link to the original - "The Calvin Ross Carl thread"] Our great thanks to Calvin Ross Carl for stirring the (expletive deleted) pot, inspiring lively debate, and giving Room 119 the chance to publicly accuse an "important Portland curator" of "talking out of his ass." We're not your grandma's conceptual art room. We're going to be uppity during our brief tenure of existence.****
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Are you among The Manor artists? Have you taken photos, video, or made other documentation of The Manor? Help us make The Museum! Email room119@milepostfive.com. Send us links when possible.
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Original Statements:
The Room 119 framework is open within parameters
MOA participating artists are invited to be "featured" by Room 119 throughout the event.
Room 119 will doccument MOA and catalog the event as it occurs, preserve, document, and disseminate the experience as 'art.
Are you participating in The Manor? We'd love it if you'd contribute any of these to Room 119:
- Pictures of your room in progress
- Artifacts of your room's creation (sketches, left over materials, notes, used-up brushes, etc.)
- Your ideas for Room 119. It is for- and by- all of us. We have posted a couple general concepts - but want to bring in other people's creativity as much as possible.
We've been broadcasting Twitter interviews, room features, sponsor features, press complations, and more. If you are interested in being interviewed, please email room119@milepostfive.com (See http://www.milepostfive.com/room_119/TWTTRview for details. Email with links if you have anything you want featured by Room 119.
twitter twitter.com/Room_119
Please "fan" our page! Facebook.com/Room119.PDX
We will be using FB as a primary part of the "Manor Experience" through the preparations & duration of The Manor of Art.
CRAIGSLIST
We have been communicating with the Portland arts community through postings on the CL community boards.
We're a poem written in ashes.
"Now we're a museum.
Soon we'll be a mausoleum."
*TWTTRview, **Twitter-in-Reverse, and ***TWTTReview are all +/- the inventions of Room_119's "author" to facilitate Room 119's communication. They are the opposite of copyrighted - if you Tweet, we hope you will find these concepts useful and employ them better than we have.
TWTTRview = 4-tweet micro interview "Twitter Interview"
TWTTReview = 6-tweet micro review "Twitter Review"
Twitter-in-Reverse = composing multi-Tweet, single content text - 4-Tweet and 6-Tweet for the above TWTTRview/Review - tagging them as "1 of 4" "2 of 4" etc. at the ends of each line - 1/4, 2/4, 3/4, and 4/4 in the above - and releasing them into the Tweet stream in "reverse" order (starting with 4/4, 6/6, etc.) so the Twitter page when viewed, or the Tweet stream when read, shows the set starting with the last Tweet sent (the first of the series - 1/4 or 1/6 in the above). See Image 1 "TWTTRview, Twittered-in-Reverse"
Image 1 "TWTTRview, Twittered-in-Reverse"
Here at Room 119 we love Twitter because it is the wild-west of social media communication. It is rapidly, constantly re-inventing itself as 3rd party applications, like special lenses, allow users to interface more robustly with an immense, immensely energetic, and incredibly potent potential resource. Twitter can certainly be off-putting on first blush due to the weird hypercondensed, hyperactive textual chatter of a 16-million user open social network. In the course of this project we've found ourselves becoming Twitter Evangelists - and if that is our role, then so be it. Process leads where it does. We hope - as part of The Museum - to include a Room 119 overview of Twitter for all the non-users 1) who would either like to know more or 2) think they hate it but would be great Tweeps and get a lot out of it (Norris, Schemmerer - we're looking @ you). But The Museum has a long way to go and we're going to die any day now... 8.24.09, Strike Day. That is the end of us. The short story is that Twitter makes a lot of sense once you wrap your head around it - and you can move information with incredible facility to huge amounts of users. We just joined this year and with our postmodern-analytical-textual-mathematical style of "understanding" we see something surprisingly awesome in Twitter - a service we joined expecting disappointment at best. Now we aspire to "become a whale." We hope you've enjoyed this footnote! We'll come back and remove it later. Sincerely, your unreliable narrators @Room_119
****At least we didn't bust Calvin Ross Carl on defending himself thusly "I am completely aware of my snobbery, but I just love this town to [sic] damn much!" That would just be snarky. ("Too much" eh?) And plus the spell check on this awful Drupal site is broken again so we're surely misspelling left and right - but then we're not some erudite voice of cultural importance - like Calvin Ross Carl - we're just a Museum of Dust, Debris, and Possibly Shit, here to twitter compulsively for 3 weeks then die.
