The Riffin' Griffin

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.

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