Underground Art Featured in Providence
Wednesday, October 18, 2006Anne Jordan pulled on ropes that were hanging inside a 26-foot-tall tower covered with psychedelic swirls and grids. Pots and pans clashed with each other to produce a clanging noise.
Moments later, she emerged from a doorway draped with heavy, dark pink curtains to admire other exhibits of “Wunderground,” a contemporary art exhibit at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum.
“It’s pretty cool you can touch the stuff and it’s not on a pedestal,” said Jordan, a senior at RISD majoring in graphic design.
“Wunderground” features eight artists whose work epitomizes an underground subculture of art, comic book, film and the local music scene. The group came to the attention of mainstream critics and curators in 2002, when three of them were selected for the Whitney Museum’s Biennial exhibition in New York, one of the most highly regarded surveys of contemporary art in America.
Their display of psychedelic video, sound, knit-costumed sculptures, lights and wallpaper caused quite a stir at the biennial, said Lawrence Rinder, chief curator for the 2002 Whitney biennial, now dean of the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
“People were amazed by it,” Rinder said. “A lot of artists were inspired.”
Now, the artists have combined their efforts in Wunderground.
Rinder considered their print work among the most amazing artwork done in the last 10 years. Their unfettered creativity allowed them to ignore convention and “experiment in the most outlandish way,” he said.
Visitors to Wunderground will find a gallery room transformed into a virtual reality filled with interactive life-size and larger-than-life installations. The artists have called this portion of the exhibition “Shangri-la-la-land.” They view it as a utopia based loosely on the concept of a village where diversity and individuality can flourish in harmony.
Just as a village might have a church, a temple or some kind of religious centerpiece, artist Xander Marro said her tower functions vaguely as a religious building. It has steeplelike structures on top. A peacock and serpent attached to two corners of her tower are symbolic animals in alchemy.
“I thought of it as being like the spiritual space of the village in some way and what, for our culture, that might mean,” Marro said. “Or ... what that would look like.”
A behemoth monster that moves periodically and an American Indian totem pole structure stand beside the tower, near to the exhibit’s entrance. Further in, visitors will encounter a volcano with scaly roots, a giant Asian-looking lantern made out of plastic bags sewn together and a cryogenic figure that watches psychedelic projections on a screen.
The installation also tells the story of an artists’ community in the west side neighborhood of Providence called Olneyville, when an abundance of old abandoned mills there provided the artists with space and cheap rent.
To make things even more affordable, many of the artists lived together in industrial mills that became known as art collectives, which also functioned for concerts for “noise music” rock bands. Some of the artists also played in these bands, which have toured in Japan and Europe.
As real estate prices rose on Providence’s West Side and developers started to eye the mills as profitable ventures, the artists were forced out or priced out from their space. The fight to save one of the collectives, called Fort Thunder, became an important art movement, said Nato Thompson, curator of contemporary art at the Massachusetts Museum of Modern Art. In 2002, the mill buildings that Fort Thunder occupied were razed to make way for a strip mall.
Brian Chippendale, one of the artists who founded Fort Thunder, laments the loss in his art piece, a wooden house called “Home on the Run.” He has plastered the inside with comic strips, drawings, sketches, newspaper cuttings and writings that deride how condominium developments are driving artists out of their home and tearing apart communities.
Some of the 2,000 posters displayed wall-to-wall in the other half of the Wunderground exhibition also advertised rallies and protests against the demolition of Fort Thunder and mills like it.
Most of the posters advertised for rock band concerts, some of which were held in the mill buildings or other places that weren’t legally zoned for such events, said Judith Tannenbaum, RISD Museum’s Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art. The designs had to be cryptic so that their message was hidden from authorities but known to people involved in its subculture, she said.
“This show is built on how we’ve lived with each other, how we relate to each other through community,” Chippendale said.
