A MORE IMPERFECT MACHINE:

Sara Black and John Preus invoke the demiurge in Portland

Proximity Magazine, Spring/Summer 2010,  p.122

“Metalinguistics is the thoroughgoing technicalization of all languages into the sole operative instrument of interplanetary information. Metalanguage and sputnik, metalinguistics and rocketry are the Same.” (Martin Heidegger)

“Listen to wise antiquity on the subject of the first men; it will tell you that they were wondrous and that beings of a higher order destined to favor them with

the most precious of revelations…(S)cience, at its beginnings, remained closed within the temples, where finally it became extinguished when this flame could serve no purpose save to burn.” (Joseph de Maistre)

“When do you become an expert?” asks Sara Black, “When are you approached as an expert?”  These are the kind of issues of practical intersubjectivity that Black and her longtime collaborator, John Preus, hope to bring up in the minds of viewers of Rebuilding Mayfield, the performance installation they have created at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland, Oregon, as part of the Chicago-heavy group show ”Gestures of Resistance,” curated by Shannon Stratton and Judith Leeman.  The concept of the piece begins with Black and Preus agreeing to build on-site various items requested by other artists in the show– a table, a bench, a cube, a pagoda—using wood from a recently demolished barn in the Portland area.

The hitch that marks their gesture as conceptual as well as generous is that over a ten-day period Black and Preus worked on every piece collaboratively while separated by a tall drywall barrier, in which a miniscule hole was cut to facilitate verbal but not visual communication.  The glassed-in two-story atrium of the Craft Museum, located in downtown Portland, provides the most visible working space the artists have ever enjoyed, an ironically appropriate venue to be the first in which they have allowed themselves such limited communication.

The title, Rebuilding Mayfield, refers to words uttered at the end of the Guinness Book of World Records’ longest “telephone” whispering game on record, a testimony to the constantly frustrated utility of language.  Adding this reflective dimension to the collaborative aspect of their shared practice was important enough to Black and Preus that they have suspended their work with the

larger group Material Exchange, with whom they have been associated since 2005.  In Material Exchange they worked alongside Alta Buden and David Wolf on a wide variety of projects, including commissioned carpentry, site-specific installations. educational workshops, and mechanical game design, all making poetic yet sturdy use of salvaged materials, and always in response to a request in a specific context.

What has changed in this new streamlined collaboration is not the emphasis on solid craft in service to particular needs, but an interest in turning away from some of the connotations their work had begun to take on, particularly regarding merely utilitarian diversions from the waste-stream, and the newfound marketability of “D.I.Y. craft.”  Their fascination with the complex relations of materials, tools, and language, especially as an largely ad-hoc process occurring in time, is meant to result in objects that do not pretend to strike a grandiose blow against the contradictions of capitalist production.  Instead these handmade artifacts might offer a glimpse, through a tiny hole perhaps, of a charmed pastoral universe that could be or might have been, in which the walls typifying modern existence crumble to scrap, ripe for “creative reuse.”  Or simply, as Sara Black would have it… use.