Notes on: As Long As It Doesn't Spread by Taryn Tomasello
By: John Knight
SE Cooper Contemporary
December 18th – January 22nd, 2022
PDX 2002
Conflicting Ideas
When the scientists find our remnants, what will they say?1
Ask a punk. Stapled and wheatpasted posters are a sort of nostalgic communicative effort that unintentionally marks time and collective memory. Without cellphones and the internet, communication between neighbors, friends, and family was less immediate and subject to geographic distance. Neighborhoods were once tight-knit communities. Now, wheatpaste posters can be found advertising secretive locations of underground happenings; the posters themselves are viewable as gestures of resistance. In 2020, artist Taryn Tomasello shared a project2 via a series of texts. For years, an abandoned section-8 apartment complex in the heart of the King Neighborhood of northeast Portland stood empty. This site, situated a block from the Tomasellos’ house became a space of situational trespass early in the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak. Tomasello, who maintains a practice of photographing flowering weeds and various plants emerging out of concrete sidewalks and crumbling architecture, wheatpasted these onto the exterior of the abandoned apartments. The resulting intervention exhibited enlarged images made public–outside of an aestheticized art gallery–the tension and aesthetic possibilities found in sites of ruin.
The King neighborhood was historically home to the one of the largest populations of non-white residents of the city.3 Gentrified by artists and white families, the community is a popular area for wealthy out-of-state buyers looking to capitalize on the hot housing market of Portland’s remaining affordable neighborhoods.
1 In 2002, the Portland punk band Tragedy released their second full length album, Vengeance. The first track, titled: Conflicting Ideas, proposed a future where scientists look back at human remains from the late 20th and early 21st century. In the song, scientists are confused as to why humans have consumed unhealthy foods and chemicals. They study the rot of bodies and ruins of architecture left behind. Tragedy asks in a chorus-scream: “will we remain a mystery?”, pondering if our history will be eventually lost to future generations. Vengeance was prophetic as a heavy-handed warning that considered concepts of architectural ruination, martial law, and the (eventual) fall of capitalism. Twenty years later, it is easy to conceptualize the collapse of fragile western republics. The banners of autocrats, housing developers and fascists flap eagerly, and the wealthy profit off of the lives of the poor.2 Taryn Tomasello, the Pain and Suffering of Others Cannot Be Bought or Sold, 2020. Site Specific Installation, dimensions variable, poetry, digital print, wheat paste, sharpie, community engagement. This piece by Tomasello occurred on the site of an abandoned section 8 housing complex with 6 units that has been unoccupied for 15 years. Made up of a series of wheat pasted images of weeds and invasive plants, Tomasello engaged in a series of situational trespasses onto the property to put up her works. As the project unfolded, Tomasello began to work with members of the community to care for an unhoused neighbor living in an RV outside of the perimeter of the complex. Relationships with community members started. The caretaker of theabandoned apartment complex insisted on keeping the pieces up. The resulting care taken to support Tomasello's project became a community effort. Care for neighbors struggling drew attention towards the abandoned apartments. Neighbors enjoyed images of plants pasted on the exterior walls, engaging in conversation with each other about their meaning–graffiti artists responded in kind with a collaborative spirit by reacting visually with Tomasello’s images.3 “KING, PORTLAND, OREGON, A Neighborhood in Transition”, Edward J. SanFilippo, December 7, 2011, University of Pittsburgh. http://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/King-Neighborhood- Edward-J.-SanFilippo.pdf
Newly built condos and houses stand on properties that once housed working-class families. Old houses burn easily after valuable materials are stripped for resale.4
The appearance of an afterimage.
In 1967, the Governor of California, Ronald Reagen, signed the Lanterman-Petris-Short Act, effectively deinstitutionalizing mental health care on the west coast of the United States with no plan to care for patients. Those in need of mental health care instead cycled through the California prison system.5 The effect of deinstitutionalization of mental health care in favor of the privatization of healthcare, in general, created a houseless class of citizens who were unable to find work, medical care, or housing. Certainly the rising cost of healthcare, lack of housing stock, opioid pandemics, and the rise of for-profit prisons along with the militarization of the police have to be considered as having a significant contribution to pushing the working poor to the margins of society. In January of 2020, the United States had a houseless population of 580,466 citizens.6 This number has only increased in the past two years.7 Data iscontinuously extracted and analyzed by government agencies.8
Bodies are washed away and parcels of land divided for the highest bidder. Property Not For Sale, 2020, is a textile piece by Tomasello, which contains soiled and ripped towels taken from a local Portland hospital. This work is made of white cloth that holds blue text and red stains. Built out of white washed rags that once cleaned bodies and soaked up fluid, the work notes the attempt to clean cleaning towels–the rags let go of time and memory with each wash cycle. Property Not For Sale is a fragmentary object that marks the peripheral traces of life. Its use as a cleaning device is suspended intime and the work inturn is (re)presented as an aesthetic object. At surface, it is a simple gesture meant to reframe the context in which an audience views everyday materials, however, this gesture is seeped in personal and political context for Tomasello.
4 On January 7, 2022, Tomasello sent me a video text of the house that I, and various artists once occupied, burning down. The house had sat abandoned for the past 3 years, with squatters frequently using the space as housing. It is plausible to think that the property management company responsible regarded the parcel of land more valuable than that of the house sitting on the property. How easy is it to collect insurance? Surely high end condos will be built on the property by spring!
5 “Hard truths about deinstitutionalization, then and now”, CAL Matters, March 10, 2019, https://calmatters.org/commentary/2019/03/hard-truths-about-deinstitutionalization-then-and-now/.
6 “State of Homelessness: 2021 Edition”, National Alliance to End Homelessness, https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness-2021/.
7 “New Report Shows Rise in Homelessness in Advance of COVID-19 Crisis”, National Alliance to End Homelessness, March 18, 2021, https://endhomelessness.org/new-report-shows-rise-in-homelessness-in- advance-of-covid-19-crisis/.
8 In December 2021, the Missoula County Commissioners in Missoula, Montana, where I currently live, met to discuss the feasibility of turning a county owned golf course into a housing subdivision that would include permanently affordable housing units. The commissioners decided against the opportunity and instead stated that they would look at data to understand the national housing crisis, and how it affects Missoula county. To many who watched the Zoom conversation between commissioners and sat through the public comment portion, this was a missed opportunity that exemplified how local government agencies perform the performance of care for citizens, without committing to real change. How common this sort of performance is by local, state and federal government agencies? Do they care for working class families and our houseless neighbors? https://www.kpax.com/news/missoula-county/missoulas-larchmont-gold-course-hosuing-proposal- put-on-hold
In late December 2021, a Zoom call was held between Tomasello and Portland childcare provider/ musician/ artist Joseph Bryan, where they spoke in length about the houseless population of Portland. Both artists cited stories of working to feed and shelter neighbors, only to discover tent cities and alternative communities surviving outside of capital and polite society. A question emerged from the conversation: how does one prepare for the apocalypse? Perhaps it is time to consider that the middle- and working-class have much more in common with houseless neighbors, who have already experienced personal apocalypse. Certainly these individuals have survived the end times before.
As a teenager, Tomasello was homeless and did not graduate highschool. A child of working class Dorchester in south Boston, Massachusetts, Tomasello was raised between worlds, slipping between middle class, white-spaces where she had familial access, and non-white communities where her white parents lived and worked. Tomasello grew up in the borderlands. As such, slippage, memory and the recognition of one’s own power to traverse different socio-economic realities plays out as situationist-inspired walks in which Tomasello documents the objects, architecture and nature of her street. Walks are about the neighborhood. They provide a method to collect material that will be considered from within the studio.
Remnants, layers, and histories.
In the back of the gallery sits a carefully arranged stack of weathered styrofoam, a material that could easily be fashioned to insulate a shelter. However, dirt, mold and moss have grown atop the exterior of the material, giving the appearance that it has been worked over by the artist. Taken from near the Willamette river, the styrofoam is organized in the exhibition space as a monument—if only because of scale. Absent in the arrangement is smell. Instead, decomposition, ruin and growth serve a primary visual on the styrofoam. Imagined images of concrete brutalist architecture and modernist sculpture framed by the context of the 21st century provide conceptual examples of monumental ruin. Situated on top of the styrofoam are what appear to be geological bore-holes. Here, Tomesello has collected the detritus of domestic life and presented it as a gesture of archeology. Enclosed in these glass canisters are dust, dirt, and domestic trash. One question remains: What will the scientists say? The styrofoam will be returned after exhibition to the banks of Willamette River for whoever finds it next.
In the late 1980s, the artist Laurie Parsons became moderately known for her in-gallery interventions with found street objects.9 A Parsons sculpture might consist of found wood pallets, dirt, rope, and scraps of trash, piled together in no particular order.10 One could theoretically stumble upon a pile of junk in New Jersey, where Parsons lives and works as a social worker. Leaving the aesthetic realm, her labor is now dedicated to the care of her community. For Parsons, object-making (reorientation) no longer lent itself to socio-economic change. As such, she moved past aesthetic concerns and towards community care. Tomasello, who is ever-more invested in her labor as an artist, differs from Parsons in this aspect. She would rather build relationships,
9 Whatever Happened to: Laurie Parsons. Nikas, Bob. ArtForum, April 2003. 10 Laurie Parsons, Troubled, 1989.
care for community, and reference her labor as a means to continue producing art. The finished and/or found object can then be utilized for political, aesthetic, and social means.
Tomasello has also stated that memory is material in her aesthetic practice.11 Part of her daily routine is to clean her house and care for her two children. This is a redundant and unpaid sort of labor that repeats every day. It stands in contrast to the labor of being an artist or an industrial worker.12 In the act of caregiving, Tomasello has conjured a mode of production as an artist by spending years collecting the detritus of her daily domestic life. This material, taken back to the studio and archived, provides raw resources for making. In her house chores are completed and the remnants of life are collected. Memory as a material is contained as layers of life lived and labored for. As a result, a work such as February 2021 Through March 16th 2021 is produced.
As a final gesture, Tomasello handed out pink carnations to her audience on the day of her exhibition opening. Symbolizing gratitude, the act of giving pink carnations was inspired by social activist Anna Maria Jarvis (1864 – 1948) who founded Mother’s Day. Tomasello shared during the exhibition that she has gravitated towards the idea that everyone is potentially a mother when it comes to accountability and caring for their community.13 The gesture reminds audiences that the objecthood of art can fade to dust. However, meaning continues on and memory changes. Aesthetics in fact are slippery; objects are subject to interpretation depending on the user. As Long As It Doesn't Spread by Tomasello, considers memory, care, and potential use as possible materials. The resulting effort is a painstakingly gentle gesture of consideration for throw-away objects. Tomasello asks her audience to consider the framework of aesthetics and objecthood outside of the gallery, in the 21st century.
-John Knight
11 Following a series of text messages, Tomasello explained to me that she felt that memory is a material in her work. For her, poetics and aesthetics are related to memory. It is an important material that shifts meaning over time, and is subject to reinterpretation by future generations.
12 “The Artist As Worker: Radical Responses to the New Deal Federal Arts Projects’, Painting The Implicit Horizon, Carter, Warren, pages 23-34. The Jan van Eyck Academie, Maasticht, Netherlands. This chapter has been the subject of heavy discussion between Tomasello and I for a number of years. Warren’s essay speaks to the history of American artists in the 1930s learning the tactics of labor-rights activism to demand recognition by the United States government. During the New Deal era, artists organized, created unions, and held jobs funded by federal money. Part of Tomasello and my conversations on this chapter regard how artists in the 21st century can learn lessons from the New Deal era to better organize and care for each other.
13 Tomasello, Taryn, Email to John Knight, January 9, 2022. In our email exchanges, Tomasello spoke at length that motherhood should be understood outside of gendered roles. Tomasello stated that: “I'm really into this idea that we are all potentially mothering: Raising the next generation of critical thinkers. But we need to develop relationships of true accountability and radical investment or the kids just won't buy it. There is so much blame put on mothers for the failures of individual people and thus the failures of society.”