Bayard: “T/HOWS@RT/HOWS”
- Aug 28
- 4 min read
An immersive installation in the truest sense: you're invited to get comfortable and dive in, in person.
Bayard asks us to remove our shoes before interacting with “T/HOWS@RT/HOWS,” his installation at Art House Productions (345 Marin Blvd.) We’re to approach his plush playpen barefoot. So much so expected: many creators of ambitious exhibitions make the same request. The joke — and it’s up to us to decide how much of a gag it is — is that pants are optional. Just about everybody I saw in socks at the opening in this very modest town ignored the provocation to go further. Nevertheless, I’m sure they’d agree that if circumstances compelled them to drop their trousers and collide with a work of art, this, indisputably, would be the one they’d pick.
To view “T/HOWS@RT/HOWS” is to plunge into it, just as a child might fall into an aunt’s feather bed after a long car ride. These giant cloth-draped sculptures bypass our inhibitions and speak directly to the body and invite an immediate physical response. We want to jump on them. Some children did just that, gleefully losing themselves in the padded apertures and the fiber-art foliage.
Grown-ups were a bit more reticent. A few brave ones took seats in the more obvious resting places built into a central sculpture as large as a tour bus (and much more accommodating). Perhaps after years of conditioning by museums and galleries not to touch the art, we oafs were afraid of damaging it.
No chance of that. Bayard, a practiced hand at the fabrication of room-filling sculptures that resemble Muppet spawning grounds, builds sturdy pieces that simultaneously anticipate and recall human contact. The colorful clothes he slices into thick ribbons and hangs from columns and crossbars come to him (and to us) from the wardrobes of ordinary human actors engaged in such activities as house-chores, office work, and the hard labor of going out on the town and socializing. “T/HOWS@RT/HOWS” responds to the touch: the skeletons of these pieces have built-in hinges and swings. Rustling the canopy of cloth strips can send ripples through these sliced up drapes. So can a breeze from an open door. Calder they aren’t, but it’s not unreasonable to think of these pieces as mobiles.
Prior Bayard installations, including ones mounted at his headquarters at Eonta Space (47 DeKalb Ave.), seemed to allude to the shaggy creatures on Sesame Street and the doomed efflorescence of The Lorax; childhood stuff, in other words, but not without its serious dimensions. Like much kids literature, it welcomed us into a bright, irresistible world that contained the seeds of its own obsolescence. Soon the wardrobe will close and all will be taken away, so it’s best to enjoy it now. At the 2019 show “Theme M Purr Purse Knew Close Or He Nay Kid Mother Far Curr,” Bayard gave us great heaps of lurid cloth, balls of fabric, cushioned frames, friendly aliens fashioned from thousands of torn strips from shredded dresses. It was, at once, a testament to the sturdiness of textiles, and an acknowledgement of how easy pliable stuff is to turn inside out.
“T/HOWS@RT/HOWS,” presented by Art House curator Andrea McKenna, is similar in execution. The overgrown mops, fluffy, knee-high fellows with the poise of lhasa apsos, and slung drapes that resemble weeping willows and the final boss at the end of the car wash are all back. Everything is, as always in Bayard’s work, fun. Yet this time around, Bayard is leaving us a clear tether to the articles he’s decided to cut up. It’s possible to reassemble a few of these in our imaginations.
We get a sense of the people who wore these shirts and dresses were, and who they weren’t. They were not rich, but they had aspirations. Their senses of fashion may have been compromised, but they also wanted to make an impression. They stepped out in floral patterns, seaside-umbrella stripes, dots, little starbursts, and Play-doh shades befitting a tablecloth. We do not get the sense that they would have minded that their old clothes would have gotten mixed up in Bayard’s designs. They would have considered that a worthy fate for a flamboyant cover-up.
How does it feel to take a seat in the midst of Bayard’s creation? It’s a little like riding in a palanquin through a jungle where the palm trees are made of the same sort of material that provides stuffed animals their pelts. If you do it right, you can be surrounded and maybe even swathed on all sides by fronds and tassels in pastel colors. Though the residue of the rambunctious energy with which the artist has torn these strips is palpable, the mood inside is also protective. It feels like a safe place to be during an earthquake, or just a time of social upheaval. That’s something worth taking your shoes off for. As for your pants, well, if they get lost somewhere in the sea of fabric, I won’t tell.
(This weekend is your last chance to experience this show. It closes on Sunday. But just as this one comes down, a new group exhibition opes at Eonta Space tonight. It’ll be viewable all weekend. Bayard: always up to something.)
