When you walk into Crawl Space this month, there is a big photograph
straight ahead of you, a blurry portrait of the young artist Chad
Wentzel sitting at some distance from the camera in the Olympic
National Forest, communing. To your right is a video of Wentzel
dancing, rave-style, his movements fast and fluid, his body animated by
an inspiration that rises to the level of the spiritual, the
ritualistic. Overhead is singing: the voice of Wentzel and his sister,
a cappella, performing the simple Catholic round they learned in
parochial school: Dona Nobis Pacem. The siblings are
connected by speakerphone; both originally from Tacoma, he now
lives in New York City and she lives in Alaska. They occupy the two
poles of Northwest existence: the displaced rural and the displaced
urban—the epitomization of a national condition of disconnect and
longing.
Anne Mathern, Wentzel’s best friend, is the one who took the large
photograph of Wentzel in the forest. He was on a “quasi Vision
Quest,” a term that refers to the coming-of-age ritual of the
native Salish people of this region, who keep their ritual discoveries
secret. Whatever Wentzel is channeling in the woods and in his dance,
it’s secret, too: Mathern can grasp it only incompletely, in blurry
focus or in awkward translation. The heart of the show is a video of
Mathern performing Wentzel’s rave dance herself. She goes through the
movements carefully and earnestly, but all she can do is go through the
movements. As Emily Pothast writes in a terrific review on her blog,
this is the original unit of culture (the dance) transformed into
meme.
Mathern watches Wentzel like a voyeur despite their avowed
closeness, trying to grasp or reenact his moments of communion. She
digs through stuff he leaves behind in the woods to find a stick
he absent-mindedly whittled into a crochet hook. She rescues it and
displays it as a sculpture in the gallery (both the stick and the large
photograph are attributed to neither artist, as if they were naturally
occurring), across from his monochrome (cream) crocheted banner reading
“I Want To Go Home.”
Craft, wilderness, primitive rituals—the longed-for,
“quasi”-restorative systems of a “pre-apocalyptic” American
generation—these have been the hallmarks of art by Mathern,
Wentzel, and other young artists, too. There’s a danger in adding
“quasi” to anything: the danger of being evasive, ironic, insincere.
But here, the longing is real. The show is a landmark that delivers
brilliantly on these two artists’ earlier ideas. But it’s much more
than that; I wish it were touring the nation. Because what they’ve
created is also a portrait of their generation—its
post–Burning Man, pre-Depression, idling
reflectiveness—that anyone can tap into. 
chad is a big tree hugger.