Leap of Faith

Western Bridge is one of the most important places to see art in
Seattle. Exhibitions thoughtfully mix and remix a permanent collection
that’s always increasing and advancing in connection to the world
around it. Everything finds expression in a flexible and atmospheric
showplace that’s an architectural statement in itself. Nothing is for
sale. It’s like an ideal museum. But what we never think about is the
delicate fact that all of it—this monument of civic good, where a
recent opening brought together, liquored up, and fed big sloppy
sandwiches to hundreds of people—rises from the tip of one tiny,
fragile act: the first time Bill and Ruth True said, “I love you.”

Western Bridge is the Trues’ gallery, where they show what they’ve
bought together, and where they invite everybody to explore why they’ve
bought it and what it all means. Their new show, Parenthesis (as in parent-thesis), is a reminder of both the essential power and
the incredible fragility of the family—the family as the edifice
upon which all of society’s edifices are built, but the family also as
nothing more than the reverberations of a whispered promise.

It’s hard holding both these ideas at once, accepting them, but
trying to do so has a rich history in art. The heartsick Dadaists of
the early 20th century, their spirits broken by the devastations of
World War I, lashed out at the conventions of art, sure. But when I
first read Tristan Tzara’s 1918 Dada manifesto in college, as a kid
still angry over my parents’ messy divorce and the messy new
relationships that followed, I was moved by Tzara’s childlike claim
that “every product of disgust that is capable of becoming a negation
of the family is dada.” If the family, like art, could not be a strong,
safe nest, then it had to be abolished; it’s less painful to do away
with families than to watch them fail. (Dada was always from the
perspective of a disillusioned child.)

“The family, just like money, is based on a leap of faith,” artist
Guy Ben-Ner tells his son in the video Stealing Beauty, one of
the many highlights of Parenthesis. Ben-Ner, his wife, his
son, and his daughter enact a day-in-the-life domestic scenario in IKEA
store displays as people shop around them. Everything they touch has a
price tag on it; they mime activities like dishwashing and
toothbrushing, and the sounds are added in the editing. In the story
line about the son stealing from the neighbor boy (and the parallel
plotline that the father covets the neighbor’s mother), and in staged
discussions between the children and their parents, the video
articulates the rifts between hard systems of economics and the soft
social experiences they’re founded on. We see the stereotypical
bourgeois family unit. The father works and brings the money; the
mother shops and spends the money. The daughter asks her father
complicated questions, and the father responds in conflicting
aphorisms: The children “are our investments for the future,” but
“Princess, some things in life are not for sale.” The tone is not
strictly ironic; Ben-Ner presents a family that’s both mockable and
familiar, built on clichés that are true because we reinforce
them. Stealing Beauty is cerebral but also touching.

The staircase leading up to the room where Stealing Beauty plays is the opposite of cerebral. It acts directly on the body. It’s a
replica of the central staircase in Jennifer Zeyl’s childhood home
(there was a step she’d sit on when she was in trouble). She re-created
it at 150-percent scale, so walking up it is especially taxing, while
walking down it is slightly dangerous. On these stairs, you have a
double awareness: You have the mind of an adult but the body of a
child.

Zeyl is not a formal visual artist, she’s a set designer (and a
Stranger theater Genius), but her set pieces—she also
re-created the front door from her childhood home as an entrance to the
show—function masterfully both as experiential sculptures and as
the choreography of the whole exhibition. Western Bridge’s two-story
space has never been altered this dramatically. It’s transformed into a
sort of meta-home with new arrangements of rooms and hallways and
passageways. The theatrical framework underscores the idea that a
family is something that has to be performed in order to survive. A
home is a set that tells us what to do as much as it reflects us.

Of course the art is good; this is Western Bridge. And there are
some works you’d expect: a Sally Mann photograph of her children at
half-naked play; a Tina Barney photograph of an upscale family; Neil
Goldberg’s video of his father breathing onto a mirror, proving his
existence. But most things are terrific surprises. In Kerry Tribe’s
two-channel video Here and Elsewhere, on loan and playing in
the giant back room (the garage/toolshed in this model?), a father
interviews his daughter about memory and representation. The questions
and answers are based on footage from 1977 by Jean-Luc Godard and
Anne-Marie Miéville, and the two channels aren’t quite lined up,
which leads to fractured sequences that pose the same questions
visually as the father does verbally. The daughter tries to please her
father, enacting how parents educate children through a mishmash of
explicit explanation and implicit example.

Jessica Jackson Hutchins proposes parenting as an endurance sport in
her 49-minute video of a road trip with her squirmy 2-year-old. Ann
Hamilton presents it as an obsession; she runs her finger, with a
camera attached to it, over a photograph of her child’s face as she
whispers about the lines and parts as if not to wake it. In portraying
their children or parents, all the artists portray themselves, too.
Goldberg’s videos of his parents—they recite dreams he’s had of
them in one video; in the next, his father describes their system for
writing thank-you cards after the mother’s funeral (the phrase “Thank
you for your visit during the shiva period” might be paired with the
phrase “We hope you remember Shirley as she was in the picture
attached,” for instance)—are simple and accessible, but hint at
the incredible folds and layers in every family complex, which are
never all visible to any member.

Part of the upstairs floor of Western Bridge was originally designed
as an apartment with a kitchen, a bedroom, and a bathroom. For
Parenthesis, this space is dominated by portraits of True
family members: Bill and Ruth’s parents and their five children (one
together, two from his former marriage, two from her former marriage),
in photographs by Alice Wheeler and Colleen Chartier, among other
artists. You don’t see Bill and Ruth’s faces here. They’re everywhere
and nowhere.