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The Blood Rainbow Family

By Jessica Bromer

Appropriately, The Blood Rainbow Family's Haunted exhibition at Disjecta is filled with residual material. Documentary evidence and detritus left over from opening night performances add to the various interpretations of haunting already in play at the historic R.J. Templeton Building, a former warehouse with creaky wooden floors and decades of accumulated wear and tear. Installations and video works occupy all three floors.

An opening night performance by artist/curators The Blood Rainbow Family left behind evidence including, but not limited to: a circle of white candles, a pile of pulverized golden piñatas, and a shifting blanket of feathers. The BRF (Brenden Clenaghen, Margaret Currin, and Patrick Rock) draw on personal experience with Punk and Hippie communities to form their own über-subculture, but the mood of Haunted is most evocative of the ritualized hysterics and perpetual Halloween of Death Metal. Situated in a building that feels as much like a home as a business—reinforcing the exhibition's secondary theme of chosen family—Haunted occupies a physical and psychological space far removed from the white cube.

Installation view of Gated Community
© David Johnson, 2006
By Permission of the Artist and the Blood Rainbow Family

David Johnson's well-placed Gated Community illuminates a corner of Disjecta's basement with glowing red neon, hinting at the pearly gates symbolism implicit in the ideal of the gated community by evoking its exact opposite: Hell. The subterranean location and fiery material presence of the piece suggested a direct correlation between barriers and suffering. By collapsing the distinction between the imprisoned and those who employ bars to keep criminals out, Johnson suggests that the "haves" and "have-nots" alike may be Haunted by their fear of, and identification with, one another.

Ian Treasure's Exit also uses irony and red illumination to comment on entrapment, but Treasure's concept is less nuanced and more dependent on the symbolic force of the space surrounding the work. Exit, a section of wall in which each brick has the appearance of a mass-produced Exit Sign, has a one-liner premise that accrues power through its installation in a dark and genuinely creepy basement. It brings to mind 19th century mystery tropes—the false door, the secret chamber, the covert mausoleum—and hints at the disturbing depths that can be concealed behind the most banal of markers.

Installation view of X
© Chris Sollars, 2006
By Permission of the Artist and the Blood Rainbow Family

The American military's media presentation of the Iraq War is held up for scrutiny in Chris Sollar's X. A photograph of soldiers displaying photographs showing the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al Qaeda's leader in Iraq, points to the odd formal decisions military leaders made when communicating proof of his death visually—the photographs crudely but still "artistically" matted and framed, then displayed on an easel shrouded, burqa-like, in a black cloth. Most strikingly, it highlights the decision to show al-Zarqawi's pictorially disembodied head in death, a questionable choice for a government that morally distinguishes itself from the enemy by refusing to stoop to the level of beheading prisoners. Upon seeing this image excised from the stream of media and relocated to an art venue, the viewer is prompted to reflect. Why is the easel draped in black? Might this be a nod to the concept of mourning? Or, is it a conscious attempt to avoid displaying this "martyr to Islam" on a bare easel, i.e. a wooden cross? This simple piece invites contemplation with a lack of didacticism that's refreshing in a politically loaded artwork.

Installation view of Two, Three, Many
© Jackie Sumell, 2006
By Permission of the Artist and the Blood Rainbow Family

Upstairs on the first floor, Jackie Sumell's response to war, Two, Three, Many, fails to achieve equal resonance. The piece draws on a constellation of American military conflicts, but this cross-referential web holds minimal potential for visual impact. This work's placement is problematic as well; it can't be seen in its entirety from a distance appropriate to its scale.

The phrase "two, three, many" is part of a longer quote:

"How close and bright would the future appear if two, three, many Vietnams flowered on the face of the globe, with their quota of death and their immense tragedies, with their daily heroism, with their repeated blows against imperialism, forcing it to disperse its forces under the lash of the growing hatred of the people of the world."

Setting aside the debatable logic of the statement itself, the artist's attempt to heighten its power falters because the words don't carry much weight in this excised form, beyond their inverse relationship to America's Latin motto, "E Pluribus Unum," which translates to "From Many, One." Laid out in vinyl on the floor below the three large words of the piece's title, the full sentence is punctuated with quotation marks, but the quote is not attributed to anyone. Does the artist assume that all viewers will know who made this statement (Che Guevara) or that the author's identity is unimportant?

The words "Two, Three, Many" are composed of a variety of "Support Our Troops" ribbons. The connection drawn between multiple imperialist wars and multiple product choices is a sensible criticism of the growing lack of distinction between capitalism and patriotism in American mass culture. However, the choice to employ these ribbons seems a bit too obvious. Already loaded with their own highly specific language and symbolism, they are not ideal material for the rhetorical redirection attempted here. The work exists on the perimeter of formal interest—the ribbons are almost, but not quite, at a density where they begin to evoke Celtic or, more interestingly, Islamic patterning.

Tim Sullivan's 450 x Disaster distills the mystique of Oregon's bright shadow, California, into a consumer culture pyre in the Northwest corner of Disjecta's third floor. A mound of candy colored matchbooks labeled with titles of songs about California, Satan, or both, riffs on the theme of latent danger. Like Felix Gonzales-Torres' piles of candy or paper, 450 x Disaster seems to offer the viewer a tangible sample of the total artwork. After all, no product is given away more freely than matches—they provide ideal advertising space while enabling addiction. Sullivan offers us something that looks sweet, but suggests that in exchange for partaking we may be forced to sell our souls to the devil, as Robert Johnson alludes to having done in the pink matchbooks' song, "Cross Road Blues." Johnson, as legend has it, sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads in exchange for virtuosic guitar playing skills. "I Love L.A." says another of the matchbooks, in another, brighter shade of pink. Embodied in a glowing pile of faux-souvenirs, positioned in front of a sweeping Portland-grey view of the Burnside Bridge, La-La Land feels at once so far away and so close.