Jamie Isenstein ’98 doesn’t hesitate to inhabit her art, literally. She’ll pose as an arm chair or a headless lady and lie under a wolf in sheep’s clothing covered by a taxidermy bearskin for hours on end. Last Thursday evening she returned to Reed, in conjunction with the Cooley Gallery’s Museion exhibition, to speak about this sleight of hand.
Resistant to being called a performance artist, she has been recognized for her inventive blending of media installation, performance, sculpture, and drawing. After viewing some of her exhibitions, we might ask ourselves, what is sculpture? or what is performance? and she’d be delighted to use this confusion to get us thinking about the immortality of art. Inspired by the “materials challenge” embraced by Marcel Duchamp and others in the Dadaist tradition, Jamie thought that the ultimate combination of art and life would be lending her own limbs to the creations she conceives.
Whether she is becoming an arm chair or making art-historical gestures with her hand inside a gilded picture frame, Jamie would like us to consider: if a work of art is forever, is it comprised of a human element that is by nature finite in its existence? To play with this question, and propose her own “ephemeral solution,” she has created a body of work (no pun intended) that is very much tied to her own lifespan. Though patrons have purchased the physical trappings of her art (the empty gilded frame, for example), Jamie’s personal presence is required to breathe life into it (yes, she is willing to perform the hand gestures at the patron’s home). When she is not occupying her art pieces, she hangs a conventional “will return” sign on them, titillating us with the perpetual postponement of it all.
Should this sound ponderous, rest assured that there is a genuine levity to Jamie’s artistic expression, traceable back to her thesis explorations of a favorite 19th-century art pastime, tableau vivant (this French term for “living picture” describes a group of costumed actors or artist’s models posed in period detail). Since then and through the course of her career she has been interested in the expiration date of fashion, flowers, and even 300 pounds of ice installed in sidewalk gallery. She recently participated in Art Basel 2011, staging an “anti-concert” in which she spent two weeks weaving a rug onto a harp, compromising its strings and thereby removing music (dampening sound) vs. making music.
You can see Arm Chair (2006) for yourself, sans Jamie, during the Museion exhibition, running through December 7. If you’re wondering how she bides her time while in character, at a lecture last Thursday, she readily admitted to scholarly diversions like listening to the entire audiobook of Moby Dick.
