31 Days
Oliver Herring: 31 Days
Emmanuel Gallery, University of Colorado Denver
1205 10th Street Plaza, Denver, CO 80204
September 19-December 14, 2019
Admission: Free
Review by Neely Patton
Oliver Herring’s 31 Days, exhibited at the Auraria campus Emmanuel Gallery, presents residual artworks from the artist’s month-long residency at the University of Colorado Denver. Diagonally bifurcating the gallery’s hall, two immense, back-to-back “deconstructed quilts” display Herring’s alluring silk- and cotton-printed photographs interspersed with selected international newspaper headlines. Several mannequins stand in front of each side of the quilt, showcasing Herring’s “photogarments”—costumes of transferred photographs whose images distort as they conform to the mannequin armatures.
The main floor installation of Oliver Herring’s 31 Days exhibition. Image by Neely Patton.
The installation calls forward questions of politics, place, gender norms, and sexuality. Herring’s subjects—primarily young, white, and able-bodied—display the notion of identity as a construct through the metaphor of the quilt, the collaged and painted alterations of their photo images, and the physical garments, which emphasize the literal wearing of the political on individual bodies.
The second floor loft installation of Oliver Herring’s 31 Days exhibition. Image by Neely Patton.
Accessible only by a stairway, the gallery’s loft presents one photogarment robe facing a floor-set, flat-screen television displaying a video of the residency performances. Through an extended invitation, 31 Days engaged 20 art student volunteers posing in self-directed, choreographed movements. Loosely following Herring’s conceived “TASK curriculum,” these performances require a designated area, props and materials, participants, and a set of tasks put forward for each actor to interpret for themselves. TASK’s goal sets forth an open-ended, participatory structure that aims to generate unlimited opportunities where anything becomes possible, free from notions of both failure and success.[1] While Herring declares that his performances occur “on the fly, with no preconceived plan,” his seductive photographs exhibit his technical talent, particular vision, and a call towards intertextual exchanges with a familiar art historical past.
Declaring that “art should be accessible,” Herring emphasizes that art “should not be defined by education or by access to an institution.”[2] These statements recall Joseph Beuys’ investigations into democratic aesthetic approaches and, more recently, Thomas Hirschhorn’s explorations of sharing as a continuous invitation for creative production and a reconceptualization of aesthetic education. However, without the assistance of the gallery’s educational materials, Herring’s emphasis on accessibility falls short in its recorded translation, for the video seemingly highlights the authorial position of the artist in relation to his student performers. Rather than considering this a failure, this contradictory nature underscores the tensions between intent, collaboration, and the enduring images.
Detail of a photo from the main floor installation of Oliver Herring’s 31 Days exhibition, including the newspaper headline “Study Finds Not one ‘Gay Gene,’ but an Array Of Genetic and Environmental Influences.” Image by DARIA.
Thematically, 31 Days continually reasserts tensions between the polarity and discord of present-day society with our quests for both cultural and individual identity. The metaphor of the quilt, while perhaps a little obvious, serves to illustrate this contention and its negotiation.
The newspaper headlines and the artist’s large photographs, printed on silk and cotton, loosely affix to the large muslin panels through plain, visible stitching. Juxtaposed with local, student bodies, the international headlines from September—when Herring was in residence on campus—such as “Countless Flies Torment Population of 15 Million” and “Turkey’s Radical Plan: Send Million Refugees Back to Syria” or “Study Finds Not one ‘Gay Gene,’ but an Array Of Genetic and Environmental Influences,” and “Fewer Are Insured Amid Administration’s Attacks on the Health Act” take on new meaning.
Herring’s emphasis on the “deconstructed quilt,” formally composed of a bare white ground, conceivably alludes to notions of wholeness where the local and the global as well as the political and individual merge into one. This complexity between objects, bodies, and processes lingers even after the visitor leaves the intimacy of the gallery.
Neely Patton serves as the Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs at Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design. Patton is an art historian, philosopher, writer, and museologist, and a Ph.D. candidate (ABD) in Art Theory and Philosophy at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA).
[1] Herring divides TASK into three categories. First, there are “TASK Events” which occur in a planned and “more formal set-up with an application process and pre-determined number of selected participants.” Second, “TASK Parties” that include a “more open structure with few limitations of size or divisions between viewers and participants.” And third, “TASK Workshops” which are “tailored for use in classrooms.” “What is TASK?” TASK. July 2008, https://oliverherringtask.wordpress.com/ and Herring, Oliver. “Oliver Herring TASK,” Illinois State University, https://oliverherringstudio.com/section/363344-TASK.html.
[2] Emmanuel Art Gallery. Oliver Herring 31 Days, Museum wall text for “Oliver Herring: From MOMA, the Guggenheim and the Hirshhorn to … Auraria?”
