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Artomatic: Part the First

May 23, 2008

Ara Laughlin's big fly

Over the past few days, I have visited the latest incarnation of Artomatic a couple of times and am ready to say some words, with more to come. Disclosure: I was one of the founders of Artomatic almost ten years ago when local developer Douglas Jemal loaned DC artists a shabby-ass building redolent with history called the Manhattan Laundry and allowed us to do with it as we wished for a few months. It was a wonderful creative free-for-all that began with just a couple of fundamental rules/principles:1) no juries, 2) all the work to prepare and run the show would be done by the artists.

nightmare fridge

A. Zealand's coffee filters

Exhibition space was allocated in the 100,000 square foot building in a kind of semi-organized gold rush, where groups of 50 artists at a time ran through the three oddly-connected buildings in 15 minute increments, staking claims by post-it on segments of floor and wall space. Then, over a period of less than a month, over 300 artists colonized the space and transformed a dingy, mostly unlit warren of rooms, hallways and basements into a vibrant and living tapestry of the creative impulse in virtually all of its forms and all of its shades of quality.

Chuck Baxter (I want this)

Mr. Robot

Artomatic 2008 is Number Six in the series and it must be said that the insanity/spontaneity of the original event has been tempered by the probably inevitable institutionalization of the enterprise; Artomatic is now a registered non-profit corporation with a Board (on which I served until 6 months ago), corporate sponsors, a bank balance, and a bunch of rules, most of which are no-doubt necessary but nonetheless to be regretted, at least by me. Us old originals can't help sniffing a bit at the upscale nature of the venue for 2008, a brand new office building with gorgeous views of the Capital and bathrooms that Donald Trump would be proud of. ("Shoes? You had shoes?!?"). Having done my old-timer's grumbling, then, let me assure you that the 2008 version may be cleaned up but it is still brimming with energy and surprises.

Juice Guy

Mary Frank's boxes

Sonra Arkin and her Checkpoint

Let's get this part out of the way: if you can't stand the dreck, stay out of the kitchen. As is inevitable with Artomatic, there is plenty of mediocre-at-best photography and lame painting and some stuff that is so dreadful it makes you wonder whether irony was the intention - and that makes you stop and think, which is a good thing. But, Blake Gopnik to the contrary notwithstanding, there is also a lot of stuff to love and a whole lot of stuff that puts a smile on your face and to my mind, that's what Artomatic is all about. I'm going to write separately about just a few individual artists among the many whose work interested me, but here I've just included some quintessentially Artomatic artwork.

Bob Weiss on Juice Guy's crazed exercise bike

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