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MATTHEW STADLER ON RED76
IN PORTLAND, OREGON, two people with no art school training and scant interest in art history, calling themselves Redy6, prevailed upon a half-dozen friends to loan them the modest resources needed for a monthlong cluster of "art events," called Ghosttown, 2.006. These events were announced in a cheap newsprint circular and included "Open Kitchen," a potluck restaurant where strangers served strangers five hundred meals; a storefront "Clothing Exchange and Welcome Center" where several hundred garments (and the stones they carried) were swapped; evening jukebox programs at unsuspecting local bars; home dinners open to the public; movie festivals in people's living rooms; and more, all of it borrowed or freely given. Now it's over.
Ghosttown is typical of Red76, a self-described "arts group" founded in 2000 with shifting membership that (this time around) included Sam Gould and Khris Soden. Redy6 has enabled similar exchanges through projects like Dim Sum, 2.002.- (a show-andtell buffet of in-progress artwork served with a sitdown breakfast), Little Cities, 2.005- (cut-and-paste panics to make model cities), and Laundry Lectures, 2003- (talks given at Laundromats), both inside and outside art institutions in North America and Europe, including the Drawing Center in New York, Southern Exposure in San Francisco, and the Autonomous Cultural Center in Weimar, Germany.
Like much of the most trenchant art in Portland, Ghosttown was exquisitely half-assed. If only a few people showed up, it didn't matter; Sam and Khris were psyched. When someone had no dish for the potluck, he or she still ate. Ditto at the store: You could get what you wanted with a promise (though no one would ever take your money). Sam said Ghosttown was art; Khris said it wasn't. This ease with the malleability of form, the contingency of relations-let's just say "winging it"-had its material corollary in the disposable news circular and the miscellaneous detritus of the project (cardboard clothing tags, dinner sign-up sheets penned directly on Sheetrock at the store, Xeroxed handscrawled flyers for the jukebox playlists). It gave a hum of lightness and optimism to the whole project, a takeit-for-granted sense of abundance and possibility that disabled any programmatic readings of the work as a site of struggle, whether social, political, or artistic.
Such ease can also...