NT Cover Story 11.11.10

Art,

the anti-desk

SIR RANTBULFR ASPARLUNDR SCA members get to choose their own warrior names.

Pictured is artist Randy Asplund, or Sir Asparlundr.

P

hotographer E.F. Kitchen spent two years following warriors of the middle ages. Called the Society for Creative Anachronism—SCA for short—the group is made up of modern knights. Kitchen’s portraits show them standing tall against a timeless backdrop of dirt and brush, brandishing swords, hoisting flags, and lifting their shields to show their royal insignia. They wield rattan weapons and invented titles like Duke John Fitzgerald de Clare and The Honorable Lord Otaktay Ogee Wanagee, Thegn of the Iron Heart.

The resulting platinum prints make up the show “Suburban Knights: A Return to the Middle Ages,” currently on display at Paso Robles’ Studios on the Park, as well as a book of the same name. The knights of the SCA are re-enactors who, wearing full armor, regularly get together to stage epic battles.

Some spend hours every day constructing their chain-link armor from scratch. Kitchen discovered the society in the ’90s, though it would be several years before she dedicated herself to the two-year photography project.

Members of the SCA, often (inaccurately) compared to Renaissance Faire enthusiasts, take their neo-medievalism very seriously.

Thus, it was with great caution and respect that Kitchen approached the media-shy

‘At my first [SCA] event, I was home. I had found my people.’

Roberta Brubaker, aka Honorable Lady Bridget Luca MacKenzie, medieval knight

On Alison Walker’s lawnmower installation, E.F. Kitchen’s photography show ‘Suburban Knights,’ and the obvious similarities between the two

BY ANNA WELTNER

society with her project idea.

The SCA is “very reticent about dealing with the media and outside people,” Kitchen said in a phone interview, “so I became a member, and I am still a member.” Still, she recalled, “they didn’t quite know what to do with me.”

Among those Kitchen approached on the battlefield was The Honorable Lady Bridget Lucia MacKenzie, known in the real world as maintenance planner Roberta Brubaker.

“I’m not a professional model, by any stretch of the imagination,” Lady Mackenzie said, “so somebody wanting my picture was kind of strange.”

Brubaker/MacKenzie’s gleaming, metalclad likeness made the final cut, appearing on page 67 of Suburban Knights.

The Venice, California-based photographer, whose extensive portfolio includes portraits, nudes, and land- and cityscapes, was asked to don something resembling period garb

by SCA officials. The introduction to the accompanying book likened the SCA’s request to a model who insisted the photographer be naked, too.

Kitchen also set out to understand, as she put it, “the appeal to these warriors, in a time of peace, that attracted them to go into battle and fight each other.” The answers varied. Some felt that they weren’t heroic in their everyday lives, and relied on the gallant world of the SCA to inject some chivalry and honor into their existence as stay-at-home moms and dads, marketing managers, and computer technicians. Some credited the SCA with providing a healthy outlet for aggression and frustration, which could otherwise have landed them in jail, or, as in one case, possibly take their own life.

“People are not made to sit at a desk,” neomedievalist Katja Spearinviter says, quoted in the book Suburban Knights. “We have a hunting instinct. Some people have more aggression than others, and if they don’t have a safe outlet for it, people get hurt.”

“There is an element of escapism, of being able to leave the real world for a time,” commented Lady MacKenzie. “It's entering a completely different time period and a

AARON PALOMEDES OF BUCKMINSTER Don’t cross Minnesota software engineer Aaron Lloyd.

THE HONORABLE LADY ROISIN Yes, in the new middle ages, there are female knights, too. Pictured is USDA research farmer Rebecca Heidelberger.

PHOTOS BY E.F. KITCHEN

completely different person, … We work manicured home,” a voiceover booms, all day at our normal jobs so that we can “something evil, something terrifying, go and do the play that we enjoy playing.” something horrifying, is haunting Lionel Whether as a noun or a verb, the word Cosgrove: his mother.” The advertised “play” came up again and again. Another film, 1992’s Dead Alive, follows a young knight surveyed by Kitchen, Lord Simon man whose mother, fatally bitten by a Joseph Donnerbauch, said of his society Sumatran monkey, comes back from the participation, “ I don’t playact. I come out dead to eat dogs, friends, and neighbors. here and act the way I normally feel like Los Angeles-based artist Alison acting in the real world. The real world is Walker was just a kid when Peter where I have to playact.”

Jackson’s New Zealand horror flick came For the project, out, but the effect it had Kitchen, something of on her would become A shimmering an anachronism herself, the impetus for her art quality would spend a day show, quite simply titled E.F. Kitchen’s photography show hauling around a giant “New Work,” currently on “Suburban Knights: A Return to the antique camera in 100 display at the Compact Middle Ages,” put on by the Central degree weather to create Gallery. A scene involving California Museum of Art, exhibits at her 8-by-10 platinum ferocious lawnmowers Studios on the Park, 1130 Pine St. in prints, which then so spoke to the young downtown Paso Robles. But act fast!

This show only runs until Nov. 14. required another entire artist that she proposed Alison Walker’s installation show, day to develop. Kitchen a lawnmower installation “New Work,” is on display at the likened the development piece titled Harbinger at Compact Gallery, 1166 Higuera St. in process to baking a cake. the Compact.

San Luis Obispo, through Nov. 27.

“Once you start, you Walker’s work, though can’t break for lunch,” she utterly unlike Kitchen’s, said in a phone interview, heels clonking finds a common inspiration in artfully hollowly in the background. “You’ve got staged violence. “How primitive is that, to stay with it, keep everything going so killing people with lawnmowers?” prints aren’t soaking when they’re not she asked rhetorically, polishing the supposed to be soaking, and you keep piece the afternoon before the show’s everything moving. … You want the opening. In fact, she mused, mowing and chemistry to be fresh.” lawnmowers have become artifacts in Sometimes, out of about 50 prints, only this day and age. Some people don’t even one would be useable. Kitchen pointed mow their own lawns, or think about how out in her artist’s statement that she’s their lawns get mowed, she pointed out. “using an antiquated creative process They go to work and sit at a desk all day, as an alternative to the high-speed and when they come back, it’s done. consumption and production methods of “They don’t connect with the physicality the present”—much like her subjects. of doing things like that,” she said.

Walker told Compact owner Jeff Jamieson it wasn’t terribly important The evils of that her inspiration came from a the early ’90s particular film.

“On this picturesque block, in this “She’s just reacting to this visceral ART continued on page 9

GRANARINTH ALANDOR Nature photographer Vincent Drew is one of 19 SCAers whose images, the painstaking work of photographer E.F. Kitchen, currently hang at Paso Robles’ Studios on the Park.

PHOTOS BY STEVE E. MILLER

REFLECTIONS ON MOWER ANATOMY This is artist Alison Walker, as seen in the blade of one of her mowers. No one ever looks at the bottom of a lawnmower, she said.

ART continued from page 7

experience she had,” Jamieson said in an interview, his voice bouncing off the purposefully spare walls of the Compact Gallery.

“It’s similar to hearing a song and making a painting. Artists make things all the time and filter it through their experience.”

The mowers’ angles are oddly menacing. Jamieson reckoned they were meant to convey the sense of doom one feels when something bad is about to happen. Walker’s gleaming triumvirate could also easily represent a single mower in motion—rather like an object moving too quickly for the shutter of a camera, this writer suggested, hopefully, eager to draw comparisons. Actually, Walker said, the intent of the piece had little to do with photography. The arc created by the three identical machines was made to mimic the trajectory of a lawnmower if one picked it up off the ground and spun around 180 degrees—“As if I were about to defend myself against zombies,” the artist explained.

The show, only the third in the Compact Gallery’s short history, is a bold move, but one the artist came prepared for.

Walker previously worked on projects by Los Angeles artist Jeff Koons, an experience that, she said, “came with the realization that no project is impossible to make.”

A timeless neutrality

Walker obtained the mowers from a repair shop, but not before experiencing some difficulty explaining what they were for. When her vision for an art piece involving mowers failed to come across, she told a shop owner she needed them as a prop for a play. A play seemed an acceptable reason, and Walker then carefully stripped all labels and controls from the equipment before going about creating the single piece that makes up “New Work.”

Kitchen, too, strove for timeless neutrality in creating her images. During battles, the SCA identifies opposing sides with red and blue stickers, which Kitchen found utterly atrociouslooking and took pains to eradicate before taking any photos.

“You would have to take them off and clean the helmet or shield or whatever it was, to make it look natural and not like it had all those silly SCA stickers on it,” said Kitchen.

The photographer also aimed for “a neutral background, so that you wouldn’t see people walking around half-dressed, eating pizza next to an RV,” she said.

PRIMITIVE Artist Alison Walker crouches with her frightful lawnmower piece Harbinger.

Walker was inspired by the Compact's blood-red floor, she said.

A pulsating power

DEADLY TRIUMVIRATE Walker’s ferocious mowers, on display at San Luis Obispo’s Compact Gallery, were inspired by a scene in Peter Jackson’s 1992 film Dead Alive.

Part of the beauty of installation is its insistence on the viewer’s physical presence. Echoing the weekend warriors’ sentiment that we are not made to sit at desks, Walker said, “While I appreciate the ability to view images online and in books, I find that a true understanding comes from being in the same physical space as a piece of art. I, of course, intend to have the viewer engage my work in person if it is possible.”

Art, gallery owner Jamieson insisted repeatedly, is not made to be seen from behind a computer: “There’s a big difference between seeing something on a website and experiencing it in person. These things”—he gestured around the room—“have a kind of power. They’re object-based. Object-based work you need to see. It has a pulsating power, a kind of shimmering quality that you can only get in its presence.”

With such a flourish of offhanded depth, Jamieson could easily be describing the gritty, glittering battles that need to be experienced to be understood. As Kitchen could probably tell you, reading up on the art of medieval warfare while seated comfortably at a desk is a far cry from slamming into someone while wearing heavy armor (which you may have made by hand, spending an hour every day for a year).

“What sets the SCA apart from any Humanities 101 class,” according to sca.org, “is the active participation in the learning process.” This kind of art has nothing to do with a desk.

The two exhibits—one in Paso’s sprawling Studios on the Park, the other in the appropriately named Compact Gallery— are markedly different, and the comparison is not one that automatically occurs to most sane people. Yet when two very unusual art shows come to this county at the same time, the urge to explore the reasons why is hard to suppress.

The response to one art form by another is a hallmark of both.

There remains a trace of Peter Jackson in Walker’s Harbinger, and although Kitchen’s expert hand in “Suburban Knights” is obvious, her show will always owe a certain debt of awesomeness to the Society for Creative Anachronism, which in turn owes its existence to the warriors and artisans of the middle ages.

A passage in the SCA handbook describes the society’s battles as “not just a show for outsiders to watch, but a living play into which new folks can insert themselves.” And in the arts community, too, new folks are inserting themselves all the time, watching from a distance at first, perhaps, in order to appreciate the work of others before them, then filtering it through their own experience, expressing it in their medium of choice, and offering it up—humbly, one hopes— as “New Work.” ∆ Arts Editor Anna Weltner shall henceforth be known as Annawelt the Terrible and Bold. Contact her at aweltner@ newtimesslo.com.