From the Sep 12 – Sep 18, 2002 issue

News

Resistance and Heat

Matthew Richter and Meg Shiffler Prepare to Open Consolidated Works' New Space

by Emily Hall

The new Consolidated Works space is coming into focus. The construction in the former Ducky's warehouse is not quite finished, and portions of it won't be ready for the grand opening on September 13. These parts (the art studios, the dressing rooms, the rehearsal rooms, the build shop) are what Executive Director Matthew Richter calls, with a note of breezy regret, "phase two."

Some weeks before the big opening, which will give us Binocular Parallax, an exhibition of Seattle and Vancouver, BC, artists, I took a tour of the new space--which has retained some of the rough, raw warehouse qualities, including the turquoise and yellow ceiling trusses, with a sleek new inner shell. After the tour, I sat down with Richter and visual arts director Meg Shiffler to talk about ConWorks and the cultural life of the city. As the sun dropped to the horizon and shadows moved across the room, it struck me that they both look less angular now; in the 1999 press pictures, when ConWorks first opened, they were all sharp black suits and severe haircuts. Today they look softer around the edges, a little tired. This is what experience looks like.

The importance of Consolidated Works to Seattle is contained in something more abstract than the string of exhibitions, film series, plays, and events that they've put up. It's more ineffable than the consistent quality and strangeness of these things; even what is by all accounts their biggest failure--Derek Horton's Lear in 2000--was a failure on a grand scale, the kind of ambitious crash we don't often see around here. (For the record, I actually liked it a great deal, from Kathryn Rathke's garish, kingly floats, to the infinite depth of the stage, to the fact that you can fuck with Shakespeare a whole hell of a lot and still retain the essential story.) What ConWorks has done has more to do with what kind of arts city we are, and the kind we want to be, and it's given us sophistication and challenge without condescension, without airless theory, without resorting to the kinds of blockbuster shows that other institutions use to bring people in, hoping they'll stay for something else.

Richter, whose background is in theater, started ConWorks because he thought there was much to be gained from putting different disciplines side by side. This was partly informed by a three-year stint as The Stranger's performance editor, when he watched writers write across genres, reviewing and paying close attention to events and shows outside their fields. "It forces a broadening of horizons," he said, and went on to note the ways that overspecialization hamstrings the arts, isolating them from audiences as well as from each other.

For Shiffler, the event that clarified the potential of a place like ConWorks was the screening of Matthew Barney's Cremaster 2 in 2000. The Cremaster cycle is an excellent example of work that's hard to slot: a five-film series that traces an evolution (metaphorical? actual?) based on Barney's own obsessions, which include but are not limited to alchemy, bodily fluids, nymphs and satyrs, and Busby Berkeley--style dance routines. The films are regularly installed with sculpture and photography, but the screening at the Grand Illusion featured none of these things--no lecture, no art--only the film itself, and this major contemporary work ended up, instead of bringing in film and art crowds, bringing in not much of either.

What Consolidated Works does so well is bring us complete programming without banging us over the head about it. Each Consolidation series, built loosely around a theme such as "imagined landscapes" or "artificial life" or "sublimina," gives the series programmers a certain amount of freedom, while also, as Richter pointed out, answering the question that novice art-viewers find so troubling--"what was that about?" The answer tends not to the prescriptive, but the suggestive, to another question that you can answer using the work as your key. This is in part responsible for the sophisticated atmosphere that pervades ConWorks' programming: They can present difficult work, they don't have to explain too much, and as a result, the audience feels smarter, may in fact be smarter. "The initial draw was the savvy, educated audience," Richter said, "but you don't underestimate your audience, you don't try to 'step them up' to more advanced work. People come for one thing, and then they stay for another."

One thing I've always enjoyed about Consolidated Works dates back to before I was ever writing about it, and I didn't notice it until Shiffler pointed it out. Whenever you showed up, whatever you showed up for, someone would invite you to stay for a party afterward, or tell you about something else down the road. Not only did this automatically make you feel like an insider, but it created a link with a real person there, a director or a curator. Both Richter and Shiffler well understand the social ramifications of the arts, the kind of community that art can build, as opposed to the kind it enforces. "It's partly a social thing," Richter said. "I like different arts crowds partying side by side." And this is not a trite observation; much of what is generated in the arts world--work, buzz, collaboration--happens socially. The spectacle of art is not based on an exclusive club of cognoscenti, but of something that takes place between audiences and artists. It's so deeply part of what Consolidated Works does that its mission statement talks not about creating art, but about creating an audience.

There's also a more-than-tacit acknowledgement of the work of the producer, be it a curator, a director, or a series programmer. Putting a face to these positions creates reputations that must both take risks (to be respected) and accept responsibility. Consolidated Works, more than other institutions, has drawn back the veil on the idea of production, and this is tied to the whole idea of the space itself as generative. "It encourages respect for the frame," Richter said, and ConWorks' frame keeps the organization's identity both established and fluid, changing from season to season, a brand whose equity is shifting, but identifiable.

In fact, much of what works about ConWorks is because Richter and Shiffler understand so well about how space drives work, and how borders shift and reestablish themselves. This is true on as large a level as their neighborhood--a warehouse district on the brink of gentrification, where they've used the neighborhood's future value to negotiate a below-market-rate lease with Paul Allen's City Investors--and on as small a level as the possibility of marking off space for temporary art studios, where artists can create work for ConWorks shows that is bigger than their own studios allow. It is a conceptual notion of space, of putting different genres in close proximity to each other to see what happens, but also keeping them distinct. This respect for borders is built right into the building's interior design. "We carved up the space instead of leaving it wide open," Richter said. "There's a reason for this, that there are things one genre can do that another can't."

"I like to say that ConWorks is based on two laws of liquid," Richter said toward the end of our conversation. "The first is that liquid takes the path of least resistance. That's what the consolidation series is about. The second is the law of thermodynamics, that heat applied to liquid moves molecules up through the middle and then out. We're the container, artists are liquid, money and audience are the heat."