The opening on August 16 was hyped (overhyped) as a rock
show—on posters wheat-pasted around town—and fittingly, the
crowd was locked out of Lawrimore Project during sound check. A huge
audience had turned up to witness a young artist’s break into the upper
reaches of Seattle’s art world. The artist was Anne Mathern, best known
for her photographic depictions of people doing awkward or abnormal
things in scenes as perfectly coordinated as fashion shoots.
When the doors finally opened to the darkened gallery, Mathern was
suspended from the ceiling and bouncing up and down on a fake sand
mountain, while Seattle fantasy metal band Doomhawk played on the other
side of the room, facing her. It was, as one observer pointed out,
“neoprimitive craziness.”
Doomhawk, also pictured in a photograph on the wall, had been
costumed by Mathern in furs and feathers. Completing the primeval
landscape, each member stood on a carved foam rock. What Mathern was
wearing could be described as biblical—bare feet, a plain brown
sackcloth dress, leather wristbands, a cream-colored robe—if it
weren’t for the big hawk brooch across her chest.
Continuous jumping is a workout, and Mathern’s face turned red and
slick with sweat, but she made no expression. Her eyes fixed on the
band as though she were in thrall to it, and occasionally, the
guitarist glanced over at her, wide-eyed and disbelieving. At first,
she looked like she was miming a slack-jawed groupie, or a dangling
dumb blonde in an Indiana Jones movie. Was she going to do
something else besides this droning bounce? It created weird suspense,
coupled with the driving monotony of the music. The more exhausted she
got, the more she looked entranced, a slave to the music.
Early on, the crowd was split in two, the music people and the art
people back to back, each facing their respective representative. But
the representative for art, strung up like a zombie, had already
surrendered. This wasn’t news. It was a portrait of reality. The size
of the crowd was further proof that if you want a hot art event, you
have to cheat art to get it—you have to invite in a band or a
celebrity, manufacture a spectacle. Art, and in this case the artist
herself, just tags along, even at her own party.
According to an e-mail sent to gallery regulars before the opening,
Mathern was snapping pictures the entire time. She wasn’t a zombie. She
was treating the gallery as her studio, while convincing everyone she
was barely there. The flash to the side of the fake mountain and the
mysterious object (the camera button?) she was holding under her robe
in her right hand corroborated the e-mail. But you didn’t know what she was doing unless you’d gotten the e-mail. No wonder people
kept asking what was going on.
Except that what you knew if you’d read that e-mail turned out to be
wrong. The day after the performance, Scott Lawrimore, asked about the
fate of those photographs, said that Mathern hadn’t been taking
pictures, she’d been pretending to take pictures. The only
photograph to be added to the show for the rest of the run is of
Mathern in performance getup, taken prior to the performance, just like
the band photo. Why the two similar images are treated differently, I
don’t know. In here somewhere is the germ of a thought about the
distance between photography and performance. As it stands, it’s hard
to say whether it matters that Mathern was only pretending to do
something that nobody quite got that she was doing as opposed to
actually doing something that nobody quite got that she was doing.
When the band finished, Mathern looked around, smiled and nodded at
somebody, and a couple of guys brought a box and ladder and got her
down. It was awkward. Ideally, she’d have become like any photographer
(or like any photographer playing a photographer) at the end of a
shoot, summarily wrapping up and leaving without so much as a smile to
acknowledge that there had been a performance. Or, even better, there
would have been an over-the-top climax followed by this
anti-performance ending, completing the total split of the performer’s
personality. As it was, the ending seemed unthinking and almost ruined
what was great about the performance.
Despite everything, Mathern is poking at a rich vein for herself in
performance-photography and photography-performance. Much of her art up
to now has been about the way people feel comfortable in popular
culture, and uncomfortable with art and artists.
She has undeniable charisma and nerve, even if her mature work is
ahead of her. The rest of her exhibition at Lawrimore Project is four
photographs and a video along the theme of Moses Lake, the Eastern
Washington town which, in the press release, is described as an
inspiration because of its “disconnect” between white rural culture, a
Native American chief nicknamed Moses, and Moses leading the Jews out
of Egypt. It’s a sloppy seam where this all purports to come together,
and Mathern, a native of Chicago and a city girl, doesn’t seem remotely
connected to the actual Moses Lake, which makes the work seem shallow.
Not that it was possible to focus on it while Mathern-Doomhawk was in
action. 
