JEMA retrospective leaves Bob Rauschenberg Gallery bound for University of Florida (07-26-14)
After 77 days on view at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery,ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective is leaving Fort Myers bound for Gainesville. From September 16, 2014 through January 4, 2015, the exhibition will be on view at the University of Florida’sHarn Museum of Art. The opening represents a homecoming of sorts, since JEMA founder and curator Sean Miller is on the UF art faculty.
Miller founded JEMA eleven years ago today with an “unauthorized” guerilla-style grand opening in the lobby of the Seattle Art Museum. Befitting its diminutive architectural scale (each JEMA gallery is only slightly larger than a shoebox), the entire celebratory event was 
clocked from start to finish at two-minutes in length. Conceived in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp’s “Boite en Valise” (his mini-retrospective in a suitcase) and Robert Filliou’s “Galerie Légitime” (an exhibition space in the artist’s hat), the portable JEMA galleries (most now safely housed in 16”x12”x9” aluminum carrying cases) have played host to site-specific and solo projects by a wide-array of well-established and emerging international artists. Through JEMA, Miller both reinvents the museum as a portable object while affording individual artists with miniature and mobile museums that occupy new realms of critical and literal space for site-specific sculpture, installations and performance pieces.
At the Harn Museum of Art, ELEVEN will present an array of 21 portable JEMA galleries that will each highlight a different artist. Individual JEMA’s have been on display internationally in places such as Miami Beach, Dublin, Germany and Italy. As they did at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery, the museums will come together again in one location for the Harn Museum exhibition.
Dedicated to promoting the power of the arts to inspire and educate people and enrich their lives, the Harn Museum of Art holds more than 8,000 works in its various collections, which include photography and Asian, African, modern and contemporary art. The museum also displays numerous traveling exhibitions throughout the year. As an accredited museum, the Harn has been recognized as a leader in its field by the American Association of Museums.
One of the largest university-affiliated art museums in the United States, the Harn Museum has an 86,800-square-foot facility, which includes 32,800 square feet of exhibition space, a 250-seat auditorium, study center, museum store, café, spacious areas for art storage and staff offices for work and research. In 2012, the museum opened the David A. Cofrin Asian Art Wing, a new 26,000-square-foot addition, which is dedicated to the exhibition, storage and conservation of the museum’s extensive collection of Asian art. The museum is located at 3259 Hull Road in Gainesville, Florida, and is part of the University of Florida Cultural Plaza.
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Sean Miller ‘Art Museum Dust Collection’ reason for seeing ‘ELEVEN’ before exhibit closes July 25 (07-23-14)
The collection includes dust from more than 90 museums from around the planet. JEMA founder and chief curator Sean Miller got the idea for viewing museum dust as an art object while working as an exhibition technician at the Seattle Museum of Art. There, Miller was tasked with removing dust from the art displays. “Performing this tedious, solitary, and meditative task in such an aesthetically charged environment made me consider this material in a special way,” says Miller. “One day when I noticed a minute fiber had fallen from an African mask, I realized the art had dropped into, and joined, the dust.”
Miller pitched the idea to his co-worker at the Seattle Art Museum, Phil Stoiber, and the two of them began contacting museum employees around the U.S. to request dust samples and dusty white gloves for their collection.
In 2002, Miller began to photograph the dust specimens using microscopy. “When I began using 
microscopy as a way to photographically document the dust, I was immediately amazed at the aesthetics of the dust – the fibers, colors, textures and even the creatures that existed in a small pinch of dust,” Miller relates. “The resulting photographic documentation was inspiring to me.
Miller found that imagery shared dialogue with Modernist-style abstraction in many ways. “
Art museum dust is amazing because it is a hybrid of decaying art, the art institution, the art audience, artists themselves, and art administrators,” Sean adds. “Due to this synthesis, it may be the most pure and significant material present in many museums.”
At the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery, viewers will not only find a huge ball of museum dust and the 
white gloves and collecting kits that Miller and Stoiber evolved in order to pursue their craft, but wearable art, multiples, dust sculptures, collages and photographs of dust samples from, inter alia:
- Musee Du Louvre, Paris, France;
- Tate Modern, London, England;
- London National Gallery, London, England;
Barcelona Contemporary Art Museum, Barcelona, Spain;- Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden;
- Nelimarkka Museum, Alajarvi, Finland;
- Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, Berlin, Germany;
- Martin Gropius Museum, Berlin, Germany;
- Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia; and
- Museum of Jurassic Technology, Culver City, California.
Collaborators in the project include Kelly Cobb, Connie Hwang and LuLu LoLo. But the true takeaway from this part of the retrospective is the common thread shared by Miller and gallery namesake Bob Rauschenberg. Just as RR saw art and aesthetics in found objects and junk, Miller sees beauty in art museum dust. Both men delighted in the discovery and display of objects the rest of us seek to discard and destroy. Which is something to ponder the next time you pull an old rag and a can of Pledge.
Chronicling a decade of highly innovative art projects and often unconventional installations by invited artists,ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective will mark its final day at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery (and elucidate the enigmatic/numeric exhibition title) by closing to the public on JEMA’s ELEVENth anniversary on July 25, 2014. For more information, please visit http://www.RauschenbergGallery.com or telephone 239-489-9313.
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JEMA’s Tea Makipaa compresses reality in ‘We Will Win 2014′ (07-14-14)
Chronicling a decade of highly innovative art projects and often unconventional installations by invited artists, ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective will mark its final day at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery (and elucidate the enigmatic/numeric exhibition title) by closing to the public on July 25, JEMA’s ELEVENth anniversary. So it’s not too late to make way to the Lee campus of Florida Southwestern State College to take in the show. One of the exhibitions within the exhibition that warrants closer inspection is Tea Makipaa’s We Will Win 2014.
Finnish-born Makipaa uses art to confront the prospect of impending ecological disaster. Anyone who has seen her large-scale Atlantis installations in Budapest or Reykjavik can attest to her arresting imagery. Created with Halldor Ulfarsson), Atlantis features a precariously-tilted red cabin bobbing in the middle of a river or lake. Soft light emanates from the white-trimmed windows. Sounds of a normal family life are emitted from the home’s occupants, who are seemingly unaware of their fate – an apt simile for those of us who occupy land masses on planet Earth, blissfully unaware that we, too, are about to be swallowed by the waters surrounding us and lapping at our shores.
Asked if anyone has ever become alarmed after seeing one of her pieces out of context, Makipaa tersely replied, “My method is that I try to compress reality, therefore confusion is welcome.”
And compressing reality is precisely what Makipaa does in We Will Win 2014,whichstands at the polar opposite ofAtlantis. Housed in a standard-issue 16”x12”x9” JEMA aluminum carrying case, We Will Win depicts an inundated New Orleans with an Atlantis type house tilted on edge in the upper left corner of the gallery. In spite of climate change naysayers, many climatologists and other scientists view Hurricane Katrina as a wake-up call to the catastrophic repercussions mankind will face in the years and decades ahead as a direct and proximate result of global warming.
“The common defining feature in Mäkipää‘s works is a laconic notion of the physical order of reality, referring to the structural elements that shape our lives,” notes one critic. “They deal with the infrastructure we take for granted, the fabric that makes the world go around – trivia such as buses creeping from one stop to the next, trucks delivering your favourite buns to the bakery around the corner ….” In the vast body of her work, Makipaa reveals an obsession with these all-pervading yet 
strangely invisible structures of everyday life – structures we fail to notice until they become dysfunctional. Structures such as the place where you wake up, eat dinner, make love, and try to get some sleep while counting the pills you swallowed. Structures made of pipes, panels, and metal sheeting. Structures that cater to our needs. But in We Will Win 2014, Tea Mäkipää ups the ante, forcing us to ponder the infrastructure we take for granted on a global plane, saying in essence, that the tides, weather and the very ground we build on may no longer be safe, secure or assured in a changing climatology characterized by brutally hot summers, colder than normal winters, drought, floods, wildfires and superstorms such as Katrina and Sandy. Entire cities or regions of the world could be lost or become dysfunctional in a life-altering manner.
Tea Mäkipää (born 1973) is a Finnish artist known for her installations, architectural works and videos. She earned a BA in Fine Art, from the Academy of Fine Arts (Finland), Helsinki and an MA from the Royal College of Art in London. Her works are in the collections of Helsinki Art Museum, Helsinki; the Collection Pentti Kouri; City of Helsinki, the State of Finland Central Archive of Art, Kiasma; Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart (Germany); Sammlung Federkiel, Leipzig (Germany).
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Making sense of Ben Patterson’s ‘Fluxus in the Swamp’ performance (06-30-14)
To the Fluxus newbie, what transpired in the Rush Auditorium at Florida Southwestern State College last Tuesday evening may have seemed like unadulterated nonsense masquerading as art. Fluxus pioneer Ben Patterson certainly did everything within his power to foster that belief from the outset of his lecture and performances. But Fluxus in the Swampserved as a delectable object lesson in the principles espoused by Patterson and the diverse group of visual artists, musicians, writers and performers who came to be associated with the movement that celebrated its silver anniversary in September of 2011.
It all started with a “simple” opera that contained “no profound messages, no great emotions, no heroes or heroines,” and “intellectually … very little” of anything else. In fact, the musical instruments consisted of little more than rubber alligators struck against crushed aluminum cans. Then after admitting that if you can define it, it’s probably not Fluxus anyway, Patterson shared a number of anecdotes about the points that he and his colleagues were trying to make. But it wasn’t long before Patterson cut to the chase, maintaining that “the best way to learn about Fluxus is to experience it.” With that said, led those assembled in the Rush Auditorium through an illustrative action poem.
“Think of the number 6,” he instructed. “Bark like a dog. Think of the number 6 twice. Stand. Don’t think of the number 6. Sit down. Think of the number 6. Bark again.” And for all intents and purposes, the audience did as told.
Meanwhile, stage left sat four plastic bottles filled with water reprising Yoko Ono’s Invitation to Participate in a Water Event, in which she invited people to bring containers to her 1971 exhibition, filled the vessels with water, and displayed them in the show as collaborative works of art.
Patterson then launched into a brand new Fluxus score, one he prepared especially for Fort Myers. “Cover shapely female with whipped cream. Lick. Nuts and cherries optional,” he said before disappearing behind the movie screen that dominated the center of the stage, leaving the tittering audience to indulge their imaginations about what would happen next.
After several minutes, the house lights dimmed and the screen disappeared, revealing an empty black-bottomed banquet table. Patterson (undoubtedly with tongue planted firmly in cheek) pulled out a bicycle pump, attached it to a plastic alligator and began rhythmically inflating the salamander green blow-up pool toy in tune with excerpts from Tristan and Isolde by Wagner with Karajan and Jessye Norman on Deutsche Gramophone playing on the Rush Auditorium sound system. Once the shapely female (“you can tell from the fingernails”) had 
assumed her full fecundity on the crisp white tablecloth in front of him, Patterson unceremoniously (but with some degree of theatrical flair) covered the gator with three cans of whipped cream, cherries and chopped nuts before inviting the audience on stage to dip a salsa chip into the sumptuous feast he had prepared for the occasion.
Making Sense of It All
Patterson would beam with pride at the allegation that Fluxus in the Swamp was not real art. After all, he and his fellow Fluxus artists characterized what they did as anti-art. They flatly rejected the notion that museums and art institutions should serve as fine art’s gatekeepers, with the correlative authority, whether actual or perceived, to determine what constitutes art and who qualifies for recognition as artists. They did not just dismiss the elitist world of “high art.” They mocked it. And in keeping with the social climate of the 1960s, they sought out ways in which to bring art to the masses just as Patterson brought art to the Rush Auditorium crowd last Tuesday night.
Events, Happenings and Performance Scores Involved Simple Ideas and Objects
Beginning around 1961, Fluxus artists like Patterson, Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik began creating events, happenings and performances in the United States, Europe and Japan. The “scores” for these events, happenings and performances typically involved simple ideas (like “think of the number 6, bark, stand, don’t think of the number 6”) that could be performed by anyone at any time in any place.
As Patterson noted during the lecture portion of the evening, some scores utilized simple objects you could find anywhere. For example, George Brecht’s Water Yam (1972) used printed cards, which were packaged into plastic boxes. For Fluxus in the Swamp, Patterson used a blow up pool toy that he found in a Fort Myers Beach gift shop. Anything at all can be art. Fluxus artists pioneered the concept popularized by Warhol, Pollock and Damien Hirst that art is whatever an artist says it is.
Playfulness and Humor Key Component
Playfulness and humor have always been a key component of a Fluxus score, and Patterson has a long tradition of using musical instruments and toys in his pieces. One of his most visually arresting works is Two for Violins (After One for Violin by Nam June Paik). The work is composed of two shattered violins and a wooden backing, and it balances exacting arrangement with chaotic shattering. “The work refers to Fluxus visionary Nam June Paik, whom many consider the first video artist,” writes art critic Joseph Campana inculturemap Houston. Paik’s 1962 performance One for Violin consisted of a performer smashing a violin on a podium. “Patterson pays homage while sculpting elegance from the violence of Paik’s iconoclasm.”
During the lecture, of course, Patterson referenced the most famous (or perhaps infamous) example of humor and playfulness gone awry, namely the time when he, George Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Wolf Vostell and Emmett Williams dismantled a piano with saws, hammers and sledgehammers while performing Philip Corner’s Piano Activities at Fluxus Internationale Festspiele Neuester Musik in Weisbaden in 1962. (Photograph by Hartmut, right.) “We weren’t very popular in Wiesbaden,” Patterson quipped last Tuesday night, although he noted that the town went overboard in commemorating Fluxus’ 50th anniversary “with every museum and art institution doing something Fluxus related.”
Audience Participation
Fluxus events almost always included audience participation like the Fluxus in the Swamp chips-and-whipped-cream processional. For example, in the 1970 Fluxfest presentation of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Fluxus father George Maciunas made paper masks of John and Yoko for the audience to wear in order to shift the role of the viewer from observer to performer. The use of the audience as the focus of the piece was a logical extension of his idea that, “anything can substitute for art and anyone can do it…the value of art-amusement must be lowered by making it unlimited, mass-produced, obtainable by all and eventually produced by all.”
Rejection of Commodity Status and Monetization of Art
Fluxus artists reacted against the commodity status of art, its commercialization in the gallery system, and its static presentation in traditional institutions. Nevertheless, sometimes a document or artifact from a Fluxus event became a work of art, a material presence that referred to an absent action or previous performance. For example, Alison Knowles’ Journal of the Identical Lunch (1971) documents her ritual noontime performances at a New York diner with various artists and friends, and Dick Higgins’ ongoing series, The Thousand Symphonies, consisted of musical scores he composed with bullet holes and paint on sheet music. Both now have value in the secondary art market. It remains to be seen whether Patterson’s plastic alligator becomes an artifact that takes on a value far beyond the few dollars he paid for the toy because it now relates back to and therefor represents his seminal Fluxus work, Licking Piece.
Intermedia
Just as Patterson performed Fluxus in the Swamp to classical music, other Fluxus performers regularly incorporated musical compositions, concrete poetry, visual art, and writing, thereby embodying Higgins’ idea of “intermedia”- a dialogue between two or more media to create a third, entirely new art form. Fluxus performances also incorporated actions and objects, artists and non-artists, art and everyday life in an attempt to find something “significant in the insignificant.” The influence of this highly experimental, spontaneous, often humorous form of performance art prevailed throughout the 1970s and is being rediscovered by a younger generation of artists working today.
Alternative View of Music and Musicality
Because of his classical music training and experience, Patterson made his most significant contributions to Fluxus by offering alternative views of music and musicality. After a brief encounter with John Cage in 1960, Patterson began experimenting with new musical compositions and instruments. For example, in his iconic Paper Piece (which was barely mentioned during Fluxus in the Swamp), Patterson created a symphony of sounds produced by performers waving, shaking, ripping, wadding and crumpling newspaper and magazine pages. At Fluxus in the Swamp, by contrast, Patterson’s “spectacle of music” was an operetta in which three student volunteer performers created the accompaniment by rhythmically beating and scraping toy rubber alligators on, over and across semi-crushed aluminum cans.
Fluxus and Yoko Ono
During the Q&A, Patterson was asked by Bob Rauschenberg Director Jade Dellinger to discuss Yoko Ono’s contribution to Fluxus. Patterson recalled that Fluxus father George Maciunas often asked her to help him launch various projects. One of those was the first International Festival of New Music which debuted in 1961 at the Staatsmuseum in Wiesbaden, Germany. Widely regarded today as the first official Fluxus event, it featured an all-star cast of Fluxus luminaries including John Cage, Philip Corner, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, George Macuinas, Nam June Paik, David Tudor, Emmett Williams, among others. Patterson not only co-organized the event, he is one of its last surviving participants.
Although Patterson did not specifically address it, Yoko’s Play It By Trust (pictured right from her recent Rauschenberg Gallery solo show Yoko Ono Imagine Peace)has deep Fluxus roots, tracing itself back to Robert Filliou’s Optimistic Box #3, which featured a fold-up chess board and identically-looking pieces distinguishable only by the sounds they made when shaken. Ono employed Play It By Trust to make a political statement, using all-white pieces to illustrate how, in politics and war, absurdity and chance replace strategy and reason thereby echoing the central Fluxus idea that art (or life) is a game in which the artist reconfigures the rules.
Like Patterson’s own scores, Yoko’s Play It By Trust, Wish Tree, Map Piece and other works belie scores that can be carried out and performed by anyone, any time and any place – like perhaps her most famous pre-Lennon score, Breath Piece, in which she printed the word “Breathe” on the wall punctuated with a period to evoke Marcel Duchamp’s claim that he had given up art to become a “respirator” because, as he said, “each breath is a work which is inscribed nowhere.”
Fluxus Died with George Maciunas …. Not
The New York Times maintained on the 50th anniversary of the International Festival of New Music at the Staatsmuseum in Wiesbaden, Germany that “Fluxus arguably came to an end with the death of Maciunas in 1978. A ‘Fluxfuneral’ was held, as had been requested by Maciunas, and put together by Geoffrey Hendricks, where several Fluxus artists performed. Afterwards there was a ‘Fluxfeast and Wake,’ where, in typical Fluxus fashion, all food was black, white or purple. This was the last major Fluxus event, although smaller episodes are occasionally held, even today.”
But as Fluxus in the Swamp demonstrates, the Fluxus message is still alive and well. The influence of Fluxus resonates throughout the arts particularly with present-day incarnations of performance art, land art, and Graffiti/Street art, and those artists, like Banksy, who deliberately work outside established museum systems. And Yoko Ono Imagine Peace continues to set attendance records in each venue the show visits.
Patterson’s Paper Piece and Bollywood: Object of Desire are part of ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective on view now inside Bob Rauschenberg Gallery. Chronicling a decade of highly innovative art projects and often unconventional installations by invited artists, ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective will mark its final day at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery (and elucidate the enigmatic/numeric exhibition title) by closing to the public on JEMA’s ELEVENth anniversary on July 25, 2014. For more information, please visithttp://www.RauschenbergGallery.com or telephone 239-489-9313.
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Bollywood, object of Ben Patterson’s desire or derision? (06-22-14)
On Tuesday, June 24, influential and affable artist Ben Patterson comes to Edison State College to discuss the origin and history of the Fluxus movement, his current work, and his ongoing involvement with Sean Miller and the John Erickson Museum of Art, which is enjoying a 10-year retrospective inside the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery now through JEMA’s 11th anniversary on July 25, 2014. The lecture and special performance begin at 6 p.m.
Among the many exhibitions that JEMA has on display at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery is Ben Patterson’s Bollywood: Object of Desire. He created the travelling non-motion picture installation for JEMA in 2010. The works in the installation were inspired by Patterson’s long interest (since 1954, more or less) in the music and people of India, and informed in particular by his first visit to India in 2008.
Contained within the installation are 12 sequential drawings illustrating how to put on a saree. Beneath each depiction, Patterson has included simple and straightforward instructions, beginning with “Hold inner end of the saree with your left hand. Making sure that the saree [is] at floor level, tuck the top border of the inner end into the petticoat.” and ending with “Drape on your left shoulder allowing the end piece to fall casually.”
Bollywood is the nickname for the Indian film industry located in Bombay (now known as Mumbai, though Mollywood hasn’t quite caught on.) Fourteen million Indians go to the movies on a daily basis (about 1.4% of the population of 1 billion) and pay the equivalent of an entire day’s wages for admission. Bollywood churns out more than 800 films each year, more than double the number of feature films produced in the United States.
Most Bollywood films are formulaic. They adhere to a format called Masala (the Hindi word for a collection of spices). Movies are three to four hours long, have an intermission, and feature a mish-mash of genres such as action, comedy, and melodrama punctuated by approximately six song and dance numbers consisting of as many as a hundred or more choreographed dancers. The plots are typically Cole Porter-esque. Boy meets girl (without any kissing or sexual contact), boy loses girl, and boy gets girl back for a satisfying, happy ending – although greater attention is being paid of late to character development and dramatic tension.
“I want people to forget their misery. I want to take them into a dream world where there is no poverty, where there are no beggars, where fate is kind and god is busy looking after his flock,” says Bollywood director Manmohan Desai, considered by many to be the father of the Masala film. But Masala and Bollywood also have their detractors. The industry has come under fire for its portrayal of women as objects of desire. Be it Sonam Kapoor, Deapika Padukone, Bupasha Basu or even Aishwarya Rai, women are characteristically objectified, and there is a recent YouTube video that excoriates the industry for “indecently influencing” public perception about what is right and wrong when it comes to how Indian men treat women.
Aside perhaps from the exhibition’s title, Patterson does not give any clues about his own views regarding the role of women in Hindi society – although he did say at the time he installed the exhibition that he would learn the Hindi language within three years. But like most artists, Patterson may be content to leave the interpretation of the exhibition to those who visit JEMA to see it.
Ben Patterson is known internationally for his affiliation with Fluxus and his diverse multidisciplinary experimental work in the realms of music, sound poetry, collage, performance and installation. His works ariations for Double Bass and Paper Piece, among others, are strong contributions to the early Fluxus era as well as notable contributions to the dialogue of contemporary multidisciplinary art.
Patterson first became affiliated with the John Erickson Museum of Art in 2010. “I started with Ben Patterson several years ago after being introduced by curator Caterina Gualco,” JEMA founder and curator Sean Miller told Bob Rauschenberg Gallery Director Jade Dellinger in an interview for ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective. “She invited me to Genoa, Italy to do some projects with museums there. Ben helped with some of Fillou’s ‘Galerie Legitime’ performances. Ben has his own ‘Museum of the Subconscious’ which is also an amazing institution. Working and collaborating with Ben has been a pivotal experience for me. Discussions with Ben are always rich, full of laughs, and creative possibilities. I feel in my element with Fluxus or at least it makes sense to me.”
Although Tuesday’s lecture and performance may represent Patterson’s first trip to Southwest Florida, Patterson is otherwise well travelled. Other venues in which he has exhibited and performed include Brisbane, Australia, Argentina, Delhi, India, Prague, Czechoslovakia, Winnipeg, Canada, Tusa, Sicily and Genoa, Italy.
Ben Patterson’s lecture and performance at Edison State College begins at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, June 24. Chronicling a decade of highly innovative art projects and often unconventional installations by invited artists, ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective will mark its final day at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery (and elucidate the enigmatic/numeric exhibition title) by closing to the public on JEMA’s ELEVENth anniversary on July 25, 2014. For more information, please visithttp://www.RauschenbergGallery.com or telephone 239-489-9313.
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Patterson’s ‘Paper Piece’ is part art, part music and totally participatory performance (06-21-14)
On Tuesday, June 24, influential and affable artist Ben Patterson comes to Edison State College to discuss the origin and history of the Fluxus movement, his current work, and his ongoing involvement with Sean Miller and the John Erickson Museum of Art, which is enjoying a 10-year retrospective inside the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery now through JEMA’s 11th anniversary on July 25, 2014. The lecture and special performance begin at 6 p.m.
As a matter of art history, Patterson is commonly grouped with seminal Fluxus artists Dick Higgins, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, George Maciunas and George Brecht. He was not only one of the original core members of Fluxus, but the movement’s sole African American member. But unlike many African American modern artists, Patterson is considered a Fluxus artist first and a black artist second.
But Patterson’s classification as a Fluxus artist is also problematic. While his work clearly conforms to many accepted Fluxus ideologies and practices, it also differs from them in important ways as well. 
Like many other Fluxus artists, Patterson engaged in different types of work which at their core were experimental and performance-based, but he was uniquely multidisciplinary, choosing to operate in the uncharted seam or vacuum that exists between art, music and literature.
Patterson’s most famous and enduring work, Paper Piece, is an object lesson in Patterson’s overlapping, overarching multidisciplinary approach, which reflects his education as a musician at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, from which he matriculated with a Bachelor of Music degree in 1956. After working as a musician with various orchestras in the United States and Canada, Patterson moved to Cologne, Germany in 1960, where he instantly became active in the radical contemporary music scene.
At that time, composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was a leader in avant-garde music and performance. Patterson enrolled in classes with Stockhausen and began creating compositions that he would perform later on at Fluxus festivals. But it was a chance encounter John Cage that led to the creation of Paper Piece.
“This work cut the umbilical cord to all of my previous classical and contemporary musical training and experience,” Patterson relates. “The process had begun during my first encounter with John Cage at Mary Bauermeister’s ‘contre festival’ in Cologne in May of 1960. Three months later, my reaction to the first performance of Stockhausen’s Kontakte made the completion of this process an urgent necessary.”
Patterson debuted Paper Piece at Cologne’s Galerie Lauhus on May 14 , 1961. The “musical” performance began with two performers exiting the wings of the stage and entering the concert hall floor. Holding a long sheet of paper over the very front row, they began shredding and crumpling pieces of paper. Soon after, holes appeared in a large paper screen onstage, after which other performers threw wadded paper balls and confetti into the audience together with printed sheets of letter-sized paper that contained George Maciunas’
Fluxus manifesto, which stated, ““Purge the world of bourgeois sickness, intellectual, professional and commercialized culture, PURGE the world of dead art, imitation and artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art, PURGE THE WORLD OF EUROPEANISM…PROMOTE A REVOLUTIONARY FLOOD AND TIDE IN ART, Promote living art, anti-art, PROMOTE NON-ART REALITY to be grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals…FUSE the cadres of cultural, social & political revolutionaries into united front & action.”
Paper Piece was originally conceived by Patterson to introduce the notion that paper could serve as a musical instrument. Patterson reasoned that paper is cheap, readily available and may be “played” by anyone in a wide variety of ways, with the performance ending when the supply of paper is exhausted.
But what Patterson didn’t anticipate was the way in which Paper Piece directly involved and implicated the audience. It turned passive spectators into co-producers of the work, a result the artist never anticipated. This surprising yet welcome participatory component was integrated into subsequent performances and became a prominent aspect of the Fluxus agenda, causing Patterson himself to later quip that “[d]espite my reasonably precise instructions, beginning with the first Fluxus festival concerts in 1962, Paper Piece grew a life of its own. It literally began enveloping and involving entire audiences in a wonderfully messy happening.”
Paper Piece celebrated its Golden Anniversary on June 4, 2010 as part of the larger JEMA exhibition, Museum All-Over/Museo Ovunque, directly outside and next door to the Raccolte Frugone Museum in Genoa, Italy. The exhibition was curated by Maria Flora Giubilei (Raccolte Frugone Museum), Caterina Gualco, and Sean Miller. For the event, Miller designed a special JEMA gallery with thick walls made of removable sheets of paper. Patterson 
provided a small crane to assist in the renovation, along with the “Golden Paper Shredder,” a paper moon and a copy of Flash Art Magazine. To assist with this important renovation procedure, the JEMA Annex was open and present thanks to the assistance of Alessandra Gagliano Candela, who organized the student performers (Genoa JEMA Annex) from Accademia Ligustica di Belle Arti. [Click here to watch an 8:31 minute video of the Genoa performance.]
The festival he is referring to, of course, was the Fluxus – Internationale Festpiele Neuester Musik (Fluxus – International Festival of the Newest Music held at the Städtischen Museum Wiesbadenin
in September of 1962, which is widely considered the first official Fluxus festival. And after that festival, Patterson participated actively in Fluxus events until the early 1970s, when he decided to retire from art-making. Fortunately for the rest of us, Patterson came out of retirement in 1988 with his exhibition,Ordinary Life, at Emily Harvey Gallery. Since then, Patterson has actively exhibited internationally and additionally continues to exhibit with Fluxus artists.
The JEMA piece was performed a second time on June 9 at Golden Thread Gallery in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The question now is whether Paper Piece will be reprised on June 24 and, if so, what form the performance will take. Of course, “it wouldn’t be make believe if you believed in me.” Patterson’s lecture and performance on the Lee campus of Edison State College (soon to be Florida SouthWestern State College) begin at 6:00 p.m., Tuesday, June 24.
Chronicling a decade of highly innovative art projects and often unconventional installations by invited artists,ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective will mark its final day at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery (and elucidate the enigmatic/numeric exhibition title) by closing to the public on JEMA’s ELEVENth anniversary on July 25, 2014. For more information, please visit http://www.RauschenbergGallery.com or telephone 239-489-9313.
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Ben Patterson to discuss Fluxus movement in Edison State College lecture and performance on June 24 (06-17-14)
Presented in conjunction with ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective (May 9 – July 25, 2014) and represented in the exhibition at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Edison State College (soon to be Florida SouthWestern State College) by his two solo projects, Paper Piece (1960/2014) andBollywood Love: Object of Desire (2010), the influential and affable artist Ben Patterson will discuss the origin and history of the Fluxus movement, his current work, and his ongoing involvement with Sean Miller and the John Erickson Museum of Art in a special lecture and performance at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, June 24.
Patterson is a founding member of Fluxus, the international collective of artists known for infusing avant-garde practices with anarchic spirit and humor. As such, he helped revolutionize the artistic landscape at the advent of the 1960s and was on the forefront of ushering in a new and often controversial era of experimental music and visual art. Now in his eighties and residing in Germany, Mr. Patterson has been the recent subject of a major traveling retrospective organized by the Contemporary Art Museum/Houston, and has had the distinction of having his work acquired by numerous institutions, including the permanent collections of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
A classically-trained musician and composer whose most significant contribution to Fluxus was exploring the connection between action and music, Ben Patterson has spent more than five decades creating compositions for both the body in action (“action as composition”) and the unconventional playing of his instrument, the contra bass, through ordinary gestures. After a brief encounter with John Cage in 1960, Patterson became a fixture in the experimental music scene in Germany, where he co-organized and performed at the first International Festival of New Music with George Maciunas at the Staatsmuseum in Wiesbaden in 1961, which was later recognized as the first official Fluxus event.
In the tradition of Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and Bob Rauschenberg, with tongue-in-cheek, often provocative humor, Ben Patterson’s work is a celebration of “ordinary life.” Employed for some years as a reference librarian, an arts administrator and as an entrepreneur with his own music management company, Patterson took a hiatus and withdrew from his career as an artist for nearly two decades. 
Reemerging in the 1980’s and returning to Europe to live, Ben Patterson has spent the last twenty-five years prolifically creating visual art, scores and performing his work.
Chronicling a decade of highly innovative art projects and often unconventional installations by invited artists,ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective will mark its final day at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery (and elucidate the enigmatic/numeric exhibition title) by closing to the public on JEMA’s ELEVENth anniversary on July 25, 2014. For more information, please visit http://www.RauschenbergGallery.com or telephone 239-489-9313.
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Jack Massing JEMA gallery in a bottle bound for unknown and unknowable maritime destination (05-21-14)
On view now through July 25 at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery is ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective. Most of JEMA’s galleries are housed in a series of sturdy but stylish 16″x12″x9″ aluminum carrying cases. However, there are several innovative “project spaces” that have escaped their crates. Bethany Taylor’s Emissions & Remissions is climbing the walls, heading down the hallway outside the gallery, and making a break for the exterior door. Yoko Ono Imagine Peace has spouted roots and given birth to a bonsai-like Wish Tree whose shipping tag messages bound for the Imagine Peace Tower on Videy Island in Reykjavik, Iceland’s Kollafjörður Bay. And Art Guy Jack Massing intends for his JEMA gallery to be carried by the Gulf Stream across the open seas for a destination unknown and unknowable.
Artists draw inspiration from many sources. During the JEMA Retrospective’s opening on May 9, Massing confessed to being influenced by Friendly Floatees in his decision to put a JEMA gallery inside a seaworthy glass bottle.
In 1992, a shipping crate containing 28,000 plastic bath toys was lost at sea when it fell overboard on its way from Hong Kong to the United States. 
The bright yellow rubber ducks are still turning up on the shores of Hawaii, Alaska, South America, Australia and the Pacific Northwest. Several have been found frozen in Arctic ice. Still others have somehow made their way as far as Newfoundland, Scotland and even the shores of Spain. But more than a thousand have become trapped in the North Pacific Gyre, a vortex of currents that stretches between Japan, southeast Alaska, Kodiak and the Aleutian Islands that the wayward duckies actually helped identify. (The North Pacific Gyre is home to the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch, a massive island of floating debris, mostly plastic, that the gyre stirs like a giant cauldron of flotsam, jetsam and chemical sludge.)
Although plans have yet to be finalized, Massing and JEMA curator Sean Miller are thinking about floating JEMA in a Bottle down the Caloosahatchee on the last day of the exhibition or launching it in the waters lapping the shores of Robert Rauschenberg’s artist compound on Captiva Island. “Who knows where it will turn up,” Massing chuckles. “It could be picked up by the Gulf Stream and wash ashore in Spain or a hurricane could blow it back to Houston,” which is where Massing calls home. Or maybe, like the Friendly Floatees, JEMA in a Bottle will help elucidate the inner workings of one of the other ten gyres known to be operating today in the world’s oceans.
Massing is one-half of the Art Guys, who The New York Times once described as “a cross between Dada and David Letterman, John Cage and the Smothers Brothers.” Massing and partner Michael Galbreth are known worldwide for using humor and everyday materials as a way to demystify art in an attempt to welcome a broad range of audiences into the discourse about contemporary art. In this way their work has been compared to medieval court jesters and fools as well as noted 20th century artists like Marcel Duchamp and Dada, Fluxus artists, Andy Warhol and William Wegman among others.
Sculpture, drawing, performances, installations and video are among the many forms The Art Guys have employed, with food, drugs, pencils, baseball bats, car lot flags, toothbrushes and matches as just a small sampling of the unconventional materials they have utilized. Using an open and offbeat “direct-to-the public” methodology, they have presented their work in grocery stores, movie theaters, airports, restaurants, sports arenas and many other non-traditional venues 
for experiencing art while also exploiting mass media and entertainment to explore contemporary society and issues. They are perhaps most well known for their numerous staged performances, public spectacles, and “behavioral” interventions in a wide array of situations that have blurred the divisions between art and life.
By comparison, JEMA in a Bottle almost seems tame.
“We’re about taking art to people rather than having people come in to see the art,” Massing told the Rush Auditorium audience during the panel discussion that preceded the ELEVEN opening. “When art suddenly shows up unannounced, viewers have no preconceived notions or expectations and can experience the art in a freer way. It circumvents institutional close-mindedness. We’re essentially outsider artist and revel in the idea of doing something unsanctioned.”
Which is a good fit with ELEVEN curator Sean Miller, who just showed up without permission in the lobby of the Seattle Art Museum for his inaugural 2-minute JEMA opening on July 25, 2003. And of course, the philosophy underlying the location variable JEMA carrying case is that it allows Miller and his co-conspirators to take his shows to viewers rather than having to induce them to visit him.
The Art Guys’ work has been included in more than 150 exhibitions in museums, galleries and public spaces throughout the United States and in other parts of the world including Europe and China. Their work has been seen in more than 40 solo exhibitions, including shows at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Tacoma Art Museum, the de Saisset Museum, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art and Seeing Double at the Tampa Museum of Art in 2007. Additionally, The Art Guys have lectured at more than 60 universities and colleges throughout the United States including Harvard, Chicago Art Institute, School of Visual Arts New York, Kansas City Art Institute, UCLA, Vanderbilt and many more.
Articles, reviews and stories about their work have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Wall Street Journal, Art In America, ArtNews, Artforum, Sculpture Magazine, CNN, CBS News Sunday Morning and many more. In addition, they’ve been included in books such as The Art Guys: Think Twice andSUITS: The Clothes Make the Man, published by Harry N. Abrams, as well as the DVD The Art Guys: Home on the Range, a compilation of 25 years of video works published by Microcinema International. For more information, please visit the Art Guys’ website athttp://www.TheArtGuys.com.
Chronicling a decade of highly innovative art projects and often unconventional installations by invited artists, ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective will mark its final day at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery (and elucidate the enigmatic/numeric exhibition title) by closing to the public on JEMA’s ELEVENth anniversary on July 25, 2014. For more information, please visit http://www.RauschenbergGallery.com or telephone 239-489-9313.
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Conceptual artist Yoko Ono enjoys second solo show of 2014 at Bob Rauschenberg Gallery (05-18-14)
On view now through July 25 at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery is ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective. Most of JEMA’s galleries are housed in a series of sturdy but stylish 16″x12″x9″ aluminum carrying cases. However, there are several innovative “project spaces” that have escaped their crates. One is Yoko Ono Imagine Peace, the conceptual artist’s second solo exhibition at the Bob Rauschenberg this year!
Okay, the current iteration of Yoko Ono Imagine Peace takes place concurrently with solo shows by the more than two dozen artists who are taking part in the JEMA retrospective on view through July 25 at the Rauschenberg Gallery. But that’s the beauty of JEMA. 
Because the work of a single artist is exhibited in a JEMA carrying case, each artist taking part in a John Erickson Museum of Art show actually enjoys their own one-person show. Which prompts Rauschenberg Gallery Director Jade Dellinger to observe that “this will be her second second solo here (ironically, with the same title) in a matter of months.” That’s the only time an artist has enjoyed nearly back to back solo shows at the Rauschenberg Gallery, a feat not likely to ever happen again.
The current Ono solo show is drastically cut version of her earlier show, which featured such conceptual works as Imagine Peace Maps, Onochords, Mend Piece and Play It by Trust. JEMA’s Yoko Ono Imagine Peace features just one of Yoko’s works, Wish Tree.
Wish Tree has been a cornerstone in Ono’s exhibitions since her introduction of the concept sometime in the early ’90s. For the JEMA retrospective, a single tree has been installed atop a pedestal inside the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery. From that promontory, the bonsai-like tree serves as a receptacle for wishes that JEMA Retrospective visitors scribble on shipping tags which they then attach to the branches of the tree. As Yoko intended, the process of conceiving, writing and attaching these personal peace prayers is a highly evocative experience that is amplified by the collective effort represented by the growing bloom of tags covering the tree.
“By inviting people to make a wish and to place it on a tree branch, [Ono] compels the viewer/participant to really focus on what’s central to his/her life and determine whether this is as meaningful as it should be,” observes NY Art Examiner Daniel Gauss. “Some people have written frivolous things, some people make political statements (I saw: “Down with the patriarchy!” written on one slip) but many people express thoughts directed to others who are hungry, homeless, impoverished, suffering injustice/cruelty or in need of some type of assistance. Of course, after making the wish, the participant is also tacitly invited to question what exactly is stopping this wish from coming true. Is it political? economic? racial? Each person is invited to reflect on the extent to which he/she can and cannot take action to make this wish a reality. Each person is, in fact, invited to begin to take action again, on whatever level, to spread peace and justice throughout his/her community.”
Yoko herself likens this to a collective prayer.
“As a child in Japan, I used to go to a temple and write out a wish on a piece of thin paper and tie it around the branch of a tree. Trees in temple courtyards were always filled with people’s wish knots, which looked like white flowers blossoming from afar,” she has explained in interviews.
Many cultures have wishing trees, where believers make votive offerings in order to gain fulfillment of their wish. For example, locals and visitors in Hong Kong write wishes on joss paper, tie them to oranges and toss them into two banyan trees known as the Lam Tsuen Wishing Trees. Legend states that if the paper sticks to one of the branches, that wish will come true. In the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park Centre in Scotland, people tie their wishes for the environment to wish trees located there. In Argyll, Scotland there is a hawthorn tree where hundreds of coins have been hammered into the trunk and branches in hopes that wishes for fertility will be granted by the spirits or faeries associated with the tree. The practice of tying pieces of cloth to a wish tree is often directly associated with nearby clootie wells, as they are known in Scotland and Ireland. In a related cultural tradition found in many places, including the United States, supplicants hurl shoes into trees that are locally designated as wellsprings of good fortune.
Not all of Ono’s Wish Trees are associated with larger exhibitions of her work. For example, a Wish Tree has been installed in the sculpture garden at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, with another being placed in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C. And JEMA founder and curator took one to Ireland in 2008.
“Yoko Ono and I were in groups shows with the Indianapolis Museum of Art as well as Deitch Project Art Parade,” Miller recounts. “During some of the organizational emails for those exhibitions, I started imagining that Yoko Ono and I were probably getting the same emails. 
This led me to send a project proposal/invitation to Ms. Ono via the exhibition organizers. Months later, I received a very nice email expressing enthusiasm for the JEMA Show.” Around that time, JEMA was scheduled to open in Belfast, Northern Ireland with Gregory Green’s “New Free State of Caroline” project. “So Yoko Ono’s work was shown in Golden Thread Gallery but we also opened Imagine Peace at Belfast City Hall, the Peace Walls, and various other significant locations in Belfast.”
No matter where or why Wish Tree appears, the wishes that are harvested from their branches are destined for interment inside the base of the Imagine Peace Tower on Videy Island in Kollafjörður Bay near Reykjavík, Iceland.
In the early days, Yoko collected the wishes herself and either took them or sent them on to Reykjavik. “I never read any of them,” she told Hans Ulrich Obrist in a 2002 interview. “I feel it’s not right to read people’s private wishes.” But now, she encourages curators and exhibitors to send their wishes directly to the Tower. In fact, the website she’s created for the tower provides both an email address ([email protected]) and post office box (IMAGINE PEACE TOWER, P.O.Box 1009, 121 Reykjavik, Iceland) for this very purpose.
To date, the wishing-well base of the Imagine Peace Tower holds more than a million wishes from people across the globe, and a representative sample of the wishes collected during Yoko Ono Imagine Peace earlier this year were remanded into the care and custody of three Edison State students, Christopher Lacoste, Leila Mesdaghi and Josue’ Charles, along with their faculty advisor and chaperone, Professor Dana Roes, for delivery to the tower in Reykjavik. The wishes collected this go around will join those from Yoko’s earlier solo show at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery one day in the base of the Imagine Peace Tower.
“I hope the Imagine Peace Tower will give light to the strong wishes of World Peace from all corners of the planet and give encouragement, inspiration and a sense of solidarity in a world now filled with fear and confusion,” Yoko writes on the tower’s website. “Let us come together to realize a peaceful world.”
Chronicling a decade of highly innovative art projects and often unconventional installations by invited artists,ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective will mark its final day at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery (and elucidate the enigmatic/numeric exhibition title) by closing to the public on JEMA’s ELEVENth anniversary on July 25, 2014. For more information, please visithttp://www.RauschenbergGallery.com or telephone 239-489-9313.
For more information about the Yoko Ono Imagine Peaceexhibition that took place at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery from January 24 through March 29, 2014, please visit http://www.artswfl.com/galleries/museums-art-centers/bob-rauchenburg-gallery/yoko-ono-imagine-peace/yoko-ono-imagine-peace-at-the-rauschenberg-gallery.
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Like pollution, JEMA’s ‘Emissions & Remissions’ cannot be contained, confined or controlled (05-17-14)
On view now through July 25 at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery is ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective. Most of JEMA’s galleries are housed in a series of sturdy but stylish 16″x12″x9″ aluminum carrying cases. However, there are several innovative “project spaces” that have escaped their crates. One, in fact, is in attempting to escape the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery as well.
That’s because Bethany Taylor’s Emissions & Remissionscannot be contained. “In Tacoma, the installation went outside and into the streets,” Bethany reports. But in so doing, Taylor is not just enjoining viewers to reconsider their long-held beliefs about the traditional space and mechanisms exhibited by art museums. She is creating a compelling metaphor about the byproducts of human activities, which similarly cannot be contained, confined or controlled.
“Throughout the 20th-21st century, there is increasing evidence of humans altering the earth’s climate and environment through changing agricultural and industrial practices,” Bethany says in her Artist Statement. “Climate changes do occur naturally. 
However, prior to the Industrial Revolution, very few gases were released into the atmosphere due to human activities. The growth in population, the incessant burning of fossil fuels, the production and transport of coal, natural gas and oil, the decomposition of organic wastes in landfills, along with deforestation, and the raising of livestock are seriously increasing the mixture of gases which absorb and trap heat in the atmosphere. As the earth’s temperature increases, contributing greenhouse gas emissions are predicted to have a long-lasting, negative impact on the environment, drastically changing life on earth.”
So Emissions & Remissions may not be Marco Rubio’s cup of tea, but it is a conversation starter, which is, after all, the mission of all good art. “The idea becomes more important than the execution,” Bethany postulates. 
But admittedly, Bethany could not simply emit water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, HFCs, PFCs and SF6 in and around her JEMA box. Nor would she want to, being the environmentally responsible artist that she is. So instead, she releases fleeting images of gradual effect and change. And by using thread and pins, she creates entangled, interconnected, unraveling ephemera that embody the devastating irreversible effect that these greenhouse gases are having on the ecology and the life that it supports.
“I like the idea of ephemeral, of things that change, of making visible that which cannot be seen,” Bethany explained prior to ELEVEN’s opening on May 9. This she does by using thread and string to portray the electromagnetic rays emanating from power lines, a cloud of carbon monoxide trailing a sports car and the carbon imprint engulfing an airliner. Each of these images is connected by string to the living, endangered and dead bio-organisms that are impacted, and the depictions climb the wall, turn the corner and meander down the hall toward the door leading outside into the garden that abuts the gallery and the adjacent Barbara B. Mann Performing Arts Hall.
“I like working with material that falls apart. It allows me to change my mind and permits me to adapt to whatever space I’m given within a museum or gallery,” Bethany adds. “My recent installation work inherently represents things in flux and incorporates string or thread as a material that is expressive, changeable, and adaptable. I think of each work as a fragment of a never finished representation. Ongoing struggles, partial experiences, hybrids, fragmentations and juxtapositions are conditions I find most reflective of my experience.”
Taylor has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally. She lives in Gainesville, where she lectures at the University of Florida and teaches theWorkshop for Art Research and Practice. Recent exhibitions include the aptly titled She’s Come Undone, a 2006 solo exhibition in the Hardman Hall Gallery at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia and the 2005 SOIL 10 Year Anniversary Exhibition at the SOIL gallery in Seattle, Washington. Taylor is a founder of SOIL and the recipient of both Seattle Arts Commission and King County Arts Commission awards and her writing, art and curatorial activities were recently featured in SOIL Artist-Run Gallery 1995-2005.
Chronicling a decade of highly innovative art projects and often unconventional installations by invited artists, 
ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective will mark its final day at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery (and elucidate the enigmatic/numeric exhibition title) by closing to the public on JEMA’s ELEVENth anniversary on July 25, 2014. For more information, please visithttp://www.RauschenbergGallery.com or telephone 239-489-9313.
[Depicted above is curator Sean Miller discussing with his Chief of Security the impending escape of Bethany Taylor’s iconography through the gallery entry and exterior door.]
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Oliver Herring performance piece steals show at John Erickson Museum of Art opening (05-13-14)
Eleven: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective opened last Friday at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery. Among its many highlights was a performance art piece that was orchestrated by artist Oliver Herring via Skype.
As he is en route to China, Herring couldn’t attend the event in person. But via Skype, Herring directed Rauschenberg Gallery Assistant Lindsey England, artist and art student Josue’ Charles and a medley of volunteers to paint, pour and splash paint over Michael Bauman, a University of South Florida grad student who followed JEMA exhibitor and USF Art Instructor 
Gregory Green to Southwest Florida for the opening. As it turned out, Charles morphed from sculptor to sculpture as the evening progressed. But more ironic than that was the fact that the JEMA gallery in which all this frenetic activity occurred was incongruously large in comparison to the sturdy but stylish 16″ x 12″ x 9″ aluminum carrying cases that housed the other exhibitions scattered through the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery.
“It’s Oliver’s smallest but JEMA’s largest project space,” grinned a jumpsuited JEMA founder and curator Sean Miller, as he watched the performance unfold with obvious interest and satisfaction.
At roughly 6 feet wide by 3 feet deep by 2 feet tall, Herring’s “Areas of Action” project space was just large enough to accommodate Bauman’s torso and thighs, but not his lower legs, which dangled intermittently over the open side of the wooden JEMA gallery. He looked uncomfortable as he lay sprawled on his back, arms outstretched, eyes transfixed on a distant point on the ceiling while England and Charles 
sloshed, slathered and dribbled white paint all over Bauman’s suit coat, shirt, tie, slacks and dress shoes. But that’s just as Herring intended. He likes to work his human sculptures to the point of mental fatigue and sheet physical exhaustion. At that point, he painstakingly photographs his models from all possible angles, cutting and pasting the digital images onto the sculptural form of his subject.
Herring has been conducting participatory performances featuring “off the street” strangers, and making stop-motion videos of each them, since 1998. Like last Friday night’s oversized JEMA gallery, 
Herring’s sets are characteristically minimalist, forcing viewers to focus on the participants and the action taking place, which is always open-ended and impromptu, embracing chance and chance encounters that liberate Herring’s random volunteers to explore aspects of their personalities through art in a way that would otherwise prove impossible. In a series of large-scale photographs, Herring documents strangers’ faces after hours of spitting colorful food dye—recording the moment of exhaustion and intensity that doubles as a form of abstract painting.
Born in 1964 in Heidelberg, Germany, Herring lives and works today in Brooklyn, New York. He received a BFA from the University of Oxford, Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, 
Oxford, England, and an MFA from Hunter College, New York. Among Herring’s early works are woven sculptures and performance pieces in which he knitted Mylar, a transparent and reflective material, into human figures, clothing, and furniture. These ethereal sculptures, which evoke introspection, mortality, and memory, are Herring’s homage to Ethyl Eichelberger, a drag performance artist who committed suicide in 1991.
Oliver Herring was featured in the Season 3 (2005) episode “Play” of the nationally broadcast PBS series “Art:21 — Art in the Twenty-First Century.” He has received grants from Artpace, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and has enjoyed solo exhibitions at, inter alia, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Frye Art Museum, Seattle; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland.
In 2009, the Tang Museum at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York featured Me Us Them, a 15-year survey of Herring’s work curated by Ian Berry. His TASK performances and parties have been held at museums, universities, and other spaces all over the world. Oliver uses strangers as his models because he like the resulting unexpected and unpredictable encounters. He never uses a script, but allows his models an impromptu dialogue between the two strangers. He likes to explore their personalities through art and capturing their experience of the moment on film-created fragmented videos.
Chronicling a decade of highly innovative art projects and often unconventional installations by invited artists, ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective will mark its final day at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery (and elucidate the enigmatic/numeric exhibition title) by closing to the public on JEMA’s ELEVENth anniversary on July 25, 2014. For more information, please visit http://www.RauschenbergGallery.com or telephone 239-489-9313.
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Location variable, JEMA frees avant-garde artists to explore and experiment (05-08-14)
Ten years ago, Sean Miller founded the John Erickson Museum of Art. “I needed an older, more venerable name to give my museum stature, so I borrowed my great-grandfather’s name,” Miller quips. But make no mistake. This isn’t your great-grandfather’s museum.
Back in John Erickson’s day, there came into existence a class of nouveau riche who expressed their power and wealth through art collecting and architecture. The Vanderbilts, Morgans, Havemeyers, Fricks, Walters, Rockefellers, Isabella Stewart Gardner, John G. Johnson, P.A.B. Widener, Charles Lang Freer and Andrew Mellon assembled incredible collections and built gilded age mansions and palaces in which to display them. Many went on to become benefactors of exceptional museums housed in massive edifices like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery in Washington. Henry Clay Frick and Isabella Stewart Gardner created house museums in which individual rooms became dedicated museum settings.
But in every instance, viewers had to go there to see the subsumed collections. The John Erickson Museum of Art, hereafter JEMA, represents a departure from this experience in two respects.
First and foremost, its exhibition space is portable. Exhibiting artists display their art in lidded boxes, crates and display cases that can fit in the overhead luggage bin of most airlines. For the first time, the museum can come to viewers, rather than viewers having to come to the museum. Miller calls JEMA “location variable,” and over the years JEMA has varied its location many a time.
Tomorrow night, of course, JEMA comes to the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery. But over the past decade, JEMA has popped up in Weimar, Germany (ACC Galerie), Berlin (Schalter Gallery), Genoa, Italy (UnimediaModern Contemporary Art and Villa Croce Museo d’Arte Contemporanea), Campagna, Italy (Spazio Utopia), Dublin (National Museum of Ireland), Belfast (Catalyst Arts and Golden Thread Gallery), Limerick (Limerick City Gallery), New York (Deitch Projects Art Parade), the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, Miami Beach (Aqua Art Fair), Michigan (UICA), St. Louis (COCA), Los Angeles (Post Gallery), Atlanta (Saltworks), and Seattle (Roq La Rue Gallery, HorseHead Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition and Howard House Gallery).
Second, by working in miniature, JEMA affords artists a cost-effective format for creating and displaying cutting-edge concept work. JEMA’s small-scale frees artists to experiment in ways that are not available to them when they exhibit work in conventional brick-and-mortar galleries. Many avant-garde artists have embraced JEMA for this very reason, including Yoko Ono, Ben Patterson, John Feodorov, Gregory Green, Kristin Lucas, Arnold Mesches, Andrea Robbins and Max Becher, Bethany Taylor, Sean Taylor, Sergio Vega, and Jack Massing. Each has used the location-variable box to create, perform and embody numerous aspects of art and art practice without regard to expense and time constraints, re-inventing the roles of curator, artist, and viewer in the process.
Interestingly, while JEMA has travelled to many venues since its inception, it has never simultaneously presented the sheer number of artists who are participating in the Bob Rauschenberg retrospective. “Our previous biggest show had five artists,” notes Miller. “The retrospective [at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery] will constitute the largest aggregation of this work presented in one place and time.”
As Southwest Florida collectors, art lovers and enthusiasts will discover tomorrow night, Miller’s work explores situations, practices, and information that sustain and define existing power structures in contemporary art and politics. His art employs obsessive activities, absurd scenarios, humor, and extreme aesthetics in order to introduce objects and events that question existing categorical and organizational methods within these hierarchal structures. Miller has produced major works and solo exhibitions utilizing photography, painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and web-based work. He values collaboration, collective action, multi-media art, relational aesthetics, and alternative art venues.
Miller joined the art faculty at the University of Florida in 1999. His work has been reviewed, published, or broadcast in, among others, New Art Examiner, Sculpture Magazine, Art Papers, The New York Times, The Nation, Textile: The Journal of Cloth and Culture, Baltimore Sun, LA Weekly, Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Miami New Times, Daytona Beach News-Journal, The Stranger, Seattle Weekly, ArtStar “Six in the City” Reality Television, Gallery HD, Dish Network(2008), NVTV Interview, “In Conversation With” Katie Larmour, Northern Visions Media Centre, April 21, 2008, and “How to Start Your Own Country” (2009), a documentary by Jodi Shapiro.
Chronicling a decade of highly innovative art projects and often unconventional installations by invited artists, ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective will mark its final day at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery (and elucidate the enigmatic/numeric exhibition title) by closing to the public on JEMA’s ELEVENth anniversary.
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John Erickson Museum of Art 10-year retrospective opens May 9 at Bob Rauschenberg Gallery (05-06-14)
Chronicling a decade of highly innovative art projects and often unconventional installations by invited artists,ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective will mark its final day at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery (and elucidate the enigmatic/numeric exhibition title) by closing to the public on JEMA’s ELEVENth anniversary.
Founded on July 25, 2003 by artist/curator Sean Miller with an “unauthorized” Grand Opening in the lobby of the Seattle Art Museum, The John Erickson Museum of Art was officially inaugurated with a guerilla-style art action. Befitting its diminutive architectural scale (each JEMA gallery is only slightly larger than a shoebox) – the entire celebratory event was clocked from start to finish at two-minutes in length. 
Conceived in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp’s “Boite en Valise” (his mini-retrospective in a suitcase) and Robert Filliou’s “Galerie Légitime” (an exhibition space in the artist’s hat), the portable JEMA galleries (most now safely housed in 16”x12”x9” aluminum carrying cases) have played host to site-specific and solo projects by a wide-array of well-established and emerging international artists.
While ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery will present more than twenty “archived” JEMA galleries – including those by Gregory Green (pictured right during lecture in the Rush Auditorium), Arnold Mesches, Yoko Ono, Bethany Taylor, Sergio Vega and others, it will also premiere new works 
(or some not previously shown in the United States) by Jim Drain, Oliver Herring, Chip Lord, Tea Mäkipää, Andrea Robbins & Max Becher, Fluxus pioneer Ben Patterson and The Art Guys from Houston. This first-ever survey of artworks commissioned by the John Erickson Museum of Art, Eleven will represent the largest gathering to date of artist/curator Sean Miller’s “location variable” JEMA galleries and be accompanied by his Next Chapter Spaces, JEMA Annex, JEMA Video Lounge, the Art Museum Dust Collection and new works from the JEMA Artist Dream Registry.
According to Bob Rauschenberg Gallery Director Jade Dellinger: “We are honored to be collaborating with our friends at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art and to have the opportunity to premiere this ambitious joint-venture in Fort Myers before travelling ELEVEN: The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective to the University of Florida in Gainesville this Fall.”
The founder and director of JEMA, Sean Miller is a Florida-based artist/curator and an Assistant Professor at University of Florida with the School of Art and Art History and views the John Erickson Museum of Art as a generative art work.
As Kerry Oliver-Smith, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art/ University of Florida views it, “Sean Miller’s remarkable JEMA project upends conventional ideas of the museum, artist and curator. He reinvents the museum by creating a series of miniature and mobile museums that occupy new realms of critical and literal space from site-specific sculpture and installation space to performance and web-based project. Each museum features a different artist and from there the project expands.”
Critically-acclaimed, Sean Miller’s work has received international coverage in broadcast, TV, film and print including: The New York Times, CBS News, The Nation,Baltimore Sun, LA Weekly, Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Miami New Times, Irish Times, Sculpture Magazine, Art Papers, New Art Examiner, ArtStar (episode “Six in the City”/Reality Television), Gallery HD, Dish Network (2008), Oddities(Season 2, episode “The Horaffe”)Science Channel,and the documentary film How to Start Your Own Country, directed by Jody Shapiro.
The Bob Rauschenberg Gallery was founded as The Gallery of Fine Art in 1979 on the Lee County campus of Edison State College (then Edison Community College). 
On June 4, 2004 the Gallery of Fine Art was renamed the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery, to honor and commemorate its long association and friendship with the artist. Over more than three decades (until his death), the Gallery worked closely with Rauschenberg to present world premiere exhibitions including multiple installations of the ¼ Mile or Two Furlong Piece. The artist insisted on naming the space the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery (versus the “Robert Rauschenberg Gallery”) as it was consistent with the intimate, informal relationship he maintained with both our local Southwest Florida community and Edison State College.
Gallery exhibitions are sponsored in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, The State of Florida, Department of Cultural Affairs and the Florida Arts Council. Marketing of The John Erickson Museum of Art (JEMA) 10-Year Retrospective is generously underwritten by Southwest Florida Community Foundation.
