Jane Mulfinger: West is South, The Atkinson Gallery
By Tom Pazderka
To say that I agree with Jane Mulfinger’s underlying premise of her current exhibition, “West is South,” at The Atkinson Gallery would be an understatement—belonging or the lack of belonging is as much a personal problem as it is a universal problem.
The space is anchored by a large compass drawn on the ground, a replica of the compass drawn on the Santa Barbara pier, with precise cardinal points, north, east, south and west. At each compass point is a tripod with a mini projector hooked to media players that screen four separate videos on a loop. Each video is filmed from Mulfinger’s point-of-view as she walks in each direction. Drawn above the video projections are maps of her path, ending in a terminus.
The terminus marks not only a physical but also a psychical end point beyond which the artist and the audience cannot pass. What this terminus is and why it was chosen is a mystery, but one can surmise that the idea is that the place mark is where Mulfinger was no longer able to walk any further or carry on with her mission.
On the middle wall, a separate piece projects varied pronouncements of individual belonging prompted by Mulfinger in a survey that anyone can take. Some of these pronouncements are also printed onto white flags, mounted on thin black poles and dispersed around the gallery space and back porch.
Vintage exercise bicycles, retrofitted via pullies to a rotating metal wheel of cowbells, spin on the back-porch space when the pedals are engaged, producing a clangy noise that, with acceleration, yields to simple ambient sounds of wheels rotating in space. The installation is mounted on a miniature replica of the pier that the audience is invited to climb and participate in the sonic experience by riding the exercise bikes.
There is no fanaticism adhering to form or any particular style. In and of itself and aesthetically, the exhibition is a bare bones affair, but with robust implications.
Despite its austerity, the show is nothing but meat and potatoes once the premise is unpacked. The videos are projected as oddly shaped trapezoids instead of the standard rectangle—a detail that indicates the direction of Mulfinger’s path analogous to the compass’ cardinal points. It’s a small detail, but it is essential to the nature of the piece. While this is a site-specific installation, it is nonetheless an installation that is not ‘of’ the space or even ‘in’ or ‘within’ the space, it is delineated by the space and the walls that make it. The video projections become meta-projections into the ‘real’ space beyond the gallery walls. A redoubling of belonging that extends outwardly the show’s participatory aspect.
I’m not one for participatory art, at least I haven’t seen a lot of participatory art that wasn’t spontaneous, that really piqued my interest, but that is because much of it seems to sit at the level of a chain letter, ideas wasted on superficial results and based on thin premises. But here the result is worth the time and energy put into it. Mulfinger uses participatory art to nudge her audience in their sides.
The meta-narrative of the white flag, with phrases that describe each individual’s sense of belonging, planted in the ground on the westernmost coast of the US speaks not only of the individual’s sense of firmly planting their sense of belonging and themselves to a time, place or idea, but also anchors that belief in very real and concrete terms.
Each individual lays claim to a piece of individual ‘property’ which in the US is a sacred, almost inalienable right. Whether this comes from a place of latent colonialism or territorialism is unclear, but it begs the question: In this age of bitter conquest of all things ideological, when even the idea of de-colonization can quickly become the front-line of a neo-colonialist struggle, is there really a way to deal with issues of belonging in some sort of ‘proper’ way?
I believe that perhaps the opposite is true. The white flag is a universal sign of truce or peace, perhaps a giving up of sorts, hands thrown up in the air. The question asked and eventually answered is planted on a white flag which is symbolically planted in the ground in a gesture of resolute acquiescence. One can imagine each flag planted at each terminus described by the map and shown in the video projections. This gesture lays claim to the pronouncement and territory, and let’s go of it just as quickly and easily via an almost self-reflexive way that borders on impotence.
It helps when one knows who Jane Mulfinger is. Mulfinger’s artistic path led her to Santa Barbara where, despite having lived in this area since the 1990s, she feels she still does not belong, and this led her to conceptualize and make this installation. Perhaps out of wonderment or frustration, or a deep desire to understand a place, Mulfinger’s conceptual point of departure for the exhibition, as the title refers, is Santa Barbara’s south-facing coast, a subtle and disorienting fact.
Santa Barbara is not an easy place to belong to. In “A Place Like Santa Barbara,” Dave Hickey wrote that Santa Barbara was a place where he felt out of place each time he visited, where he seemed to always step on someone’s toes and that the ‘paradise’ everyone seemed to talk about was a mirage.
Because of the city’s proximity to wealth the idea of a paradise is something almost entirely constructed and artificial, and belonging can be an alienating notion. Santa Barbara is an island even though it’s on the mainland. It has a troubled past, a troubled present and a troubling future. Occasional cracks reveal glimpses of the ‘other’ side: gang violence, natural disaster, homelessness, the mundanity of traffic jams, office meetings, weddings at the courthouse, and so on.
One does not belong “to” or “in” Santa Barbara. One can only be subject to it. A troubling reality in paradise.
“West is South,” a solo exhibition by Jane Mulfinger is on view September 27 to December 6, 2019, at The Atkinson Gallery at Santa Barbara City College.
gallery.sbcc.edu
All images: JANE MULFINGER, West is South, 2019, Mixed media site specific installation, Courtesy the artist and The Atkinson Gallery at Santa Barbara City College.
