“I had to explain what performance art was to
campus security,” Jenny Gräf Sheppard says as she fumbles with a DVD in Harford Community College’s handsomely outfitted computer lab. The laptop keeps swallowing the disk with an audible, very unsleek crunch, but all is well—that unsettling gear teeth-on-plastic sound is just a quirk of Apple’s newest hardware. A digital-media lab tricked out with Steve Jobs’ very latest might be a bit of a surprise to those expecting community college to be equipped with leftover gear, for use by leftover students. But those are exactly the stereotypes that art professor Sheppard—a sound and video artist, and Chicago transplant, whose funky armadillo-print tee and careless limbs give her an agelessly teenage air—and colleague Kenneth Jones are out to dispel.
“A lot of people approach this school with the idea that it’s not really important, that there isn’t anything happening here,” says Jones, an amiable, shaggy dude-in-black with the requisite Daniel Libeskind glasses. “It’s like an airport. Ask the students ‘Why are you here?’ and their answer is always, ‘Well, I’m going to go over here.’ And I say, ‘Well, you’re here now.’ I’m interested in making this school a place.”
The pair are doing so by curating an ambitious and edgy multimedia show with the double-take title Chthonic Cartographers. (Don’t run to the dictionary—it’s pronounced “thonic,” like the famous video-game hedgehog voiced with a lisp.) Place is the distinct concern of the show—specifically, how existing locations hold unseen magic for the metaphysic spelunkers willing to uncover their truths. All the show’s works—video, performance, photo, and interactive whatnot, including artist lectures and podcasts—stem to this site-specific archaeology, not necessarily of places in Harford County (or of this dimension on Earth, for that matter), but hopefully drawing enough parallels to get viewers interested in the possibilities of their own habitats. For example, artist Melissa Moore has mapped the Baltimore sewer system by economic demographic and created an installation that people can climb on. Then there’s filmmaker Rebecca Baron, whose documentary How Little We Know of Our Neighbors explores the Mass Observation Movement, a performance-art/social-science clutch of artists “studying the minutiae of their own culture, like recording how many times someone coughed,” Sheppard explains. “It was almost an absurdist gathering of information.”
The DVD is finally working. A middle-aged woman wearing a white coat, her unruly boho curls tied back in a sensible ponytail, is approaching strangers at Niagara Falls and asking if she can plot the perimeter of their aura. “That’s Stephanie Rothenberg,” Sheppard says, pointing to the earnest performance artist on screen pacing slowly toward the befuddled tourist, copper divining rods twitching in search of her subject’s bioelectric nimbus. Rothenberg’s performance “laboratory” Pan-O-Matic will be visiting, continuing its “divine data mining” mission in a performance at Harford’s Hays-Heighe House, where the famous—“very, very, very famous,” Sheppard emphasizes—racehorse Durbar II is buried. Back on the screen, the tourist tries to concentrate as an opera singer singing the frequency calculated to correspond to her aura circles around her. Rothenberg, with guidance-counselor delicacy, asks the bewildered subject, “Did any colors come to mind?”
Sheppard pops out the DVD and inserts another disc. This one’s an interactive CD-ROM created under the aegis of the Labyrinth Project, a “research initiative for expanding the language of interactive narrative.” The screen lights up—we’re in the lobby of the now-abandoned Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. If The Shining fanatics were on the prowl for a real-life Overlook hotel, the Ambassador might be the top contender. Since being built in the 1920s, it has been the site of Oscar ceremonies, endless famous and infamous guests, movie shoots (its lobby is where Benjamin meets Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate), and, most notoriously, Robert Kennedy’s assassination. Now abandoned and slated for partial demolition, Marsha Kinder’s team of digital artists have painstakingly created a navigatable floor plan of the hotel, layering video and stills of the now-decrepit interiors with archival footage from a near-century of human behavior laudable and deplorable. Click on the elevator button and transparent scenes from some forgotten movie overlay themselves perfectly on the existing landscape. The cross hairs of the mouse skip across some secreted hot spot embedded in the ballroom, revealing a clip of Kennedy giving his last public speech, the movie springboarding onto several other primary sources, including newspaper accounts and still photos, recounting the tragedy. A half-hour’s exploration doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of the work’s layers of meaning or uncover all its easter eggs. Anyone unclear on Chthonic’s unifying concept—the hidden mojo of a given place—will find all their questions answered.
So what was the deciding impetus behind this show? “Being new here, I’m interested to understand this place,” Sheppard says. “Where do I go to get a sense of what Harford County is about?”
The campus’ surroundings—bucolic hills fighting off a mini-mall infection—aren’t giving off any mystery, and don’t look like an immediate stimulation point for an artist, but Sheppard and Jones are committed to unearthing the hidden, inherent meanings in every landscape. “The land, really, is a big part of the identity here,” Sheppard says. “‘Harford is for Horses’ was the whole slogan for the community, and you need land to have horses.”
The land still exists, but it has been mostly subsumed under developments and asphalt. Still, Sheppard is undeterred, and delights in pointing out to her students how hanging out at the local Wawa is the 21st-century equivalent of their ancestors revolving around the now-defunct—but still standing—grist mill. And once minds are stretched to handle a concept like that, performance art’s just a day trip away.
“I’d like the community here to reinterpret what they might think what art is,” Jones says. “That it’s not always this erratic piece that’s collected, but that it can be experienced, that it’s ephemeral, that it exists in the wall, not on the wall.”
And, hopefully, that revelation includes venturing beyond the Nov. 2 opening at the college to making the slightly long, slightly outside-the-comfort-zone trek to the 14 Karat Cabaret in Baltimore for an accompanying performance Nov. 5 by talking-in-my-sleep monologist Paul Dickinson. “I want to remap the gallery space,” Sheppard says. “That’s the point of having this remote location at the Cabaret. I think that part of how you identify a place is then by going out of that place. Then you can have perspective on how these different works play in different areas.”
But before we get too smug about us slicker-than-a-postmodern-thesis city folk edjumacatin’ the cow-milking masses, Sheppard rightly points out, “I would love it if people from Baltimore came up here, and see this place as a place where things are happening that are worth attending.” A trip north might be exactly what’s needed to remind city-centric Baltimoreans that fears of the great rural north—or the conviction that good art can only be made within city limits—are irrational constructs of our own sense of place, too. “You’d think that people would be very exposed to things because they have the internet,” Sheppard says. “But it really shows how culture is not just about looking at something on a computer. It’s about applying that to your life.
“I think it’s the whole idea of segregating types of schools is becoming a moot point,” she continues. “There are people here at HCC who are totally competent and smart and all that, and the only reason they’re here is that they’ve chosen not to leave. I don’t want that to mean they can’t see something that’s worthwhile.”
But maybe more shows highlighting the secret magic under their own community is just the worthwhile thing to see. “It’s called a community college,” Sheppard says. “But the whole assumption is that there’s no community. We’re trying to make that community part happen.” No secret there.
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