Oregon Public Broadcasting

This year, one of the most prestigious and highly regarded art shows in the world features a Portland artist. MK Guth is one of just 81 American artists showcased in the 2008 Whitney Biennial in Manhattan.

Lisa Smith was there for the recent opening and files this report on the artist, who also happens to be the only Northwest artist selected.

Adam Weinberg:  "Good morning, class...."

That’s Adam Weinberg, the director of the Whitney Museum.  He told the assembled band of international journalists that this show represents an important moment.

Adam Weinberg: "It is a time when we take the temperature in the art of the United States.  It is a time when we contemplate...the seven deadly virtues of contemporary art:  originality, spontaneity, simplicity, intensity, immediacy, impenetrability and shock."

Portland artist M K Guth knows a little something about those “deadly virtues.” In addition to creating her own work, she also chairs the Visual Studies program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.

Guth’s work is rooted in myth and metaphor. Her Biennial piece takes the form of a braid. She calls it, “Ties of Protection and Safekeeping.”

M K Guth: "It’s an interactive sculptural project that uses the braid or the notion of the metaphor of Rapunzel’s braid as kind of a starting point. Over the last two months I’ve traveled across the country, starting out in Portland, Oregon, stopping in different cities and asking people to respond to the question “what is worth protecting?” and I ask them to write it on one of these pieces of red flannel."

Guth is seated on a bench in the elegant former library of the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan.  The cavernous building is being used for the first time to accommodate the Biennial’s many large-scale installations and pieces that have performance elements -- like Guth’s.

She sits surrounded by long strips of red flannel and artificial blonde hair. Nearby, visitors with black markers in hand scrawl their answers to her question “what is worth protecting?” onto the ribbons of red fabric.  Guth braids each response into the locks of hair with help from fellow Portland artist Molly Dilworth.

Molly: "Hi."

M K Guth: [to Molly] "I’ll take some more hair.

Suspended from the library’s vaulted ceiling and draped around the room’s chandelier and Tiffany-designed windows is Guth’s braid. It stretches for hundreds of feet in every direction.

I look up and read some of the responses dangling above our heads:  “water, soil”  “my ass”  “love – and oh, my secret identity.”

M K Guth: "This one says “masculinity,” this ribbon that we’re braiding in right now. The responses really range from national, global concerns to really personal concerns, so everything from the woman who just awhile ago handed off something very simple like “freedom” or “a constitution” or “civil liberties” to very personal and family-oriented responses."

The co-curator of the 2008 Biennial is Henriette Huldisch. She says all the pieces in the show reflect a “desire to locate meaning . . . in what feels like a transitional moment in history.”

Henriette Huldisch: "M K Guth is very much interested in what is often called social practice. Most of her works engage a broad community or broad general audience that she brings into her projects. She has collected people’s answers written on these scraps of fabric for months, traveling throughout the country and organizing free workshops for people to participate."

M K Guth: "There's hundreds and hundreds of responses in this...."

Again, Artist M K Guth.

M K Guth: "...And the thing to me that’s more interesting is not what they are individually, but rather, how in essence they kind of collapse into one notion, which is that there are things out there that people believe are still worth protecting."

Guth will continue to incorporate visitors’ responses into her piece through March 15th. That’s when the performance piece, the braiding, ends, and the sculpture is born.