An enigmatic but inclusive not-for-profit artist collective, Experimental Skeleton has worked under different names at different venues, from Ybor to Franklin Street to Seminole Heights and back downtown, for more than a decade. With Flight 19, their new home in the former baggage claim building of Union Station, those wanderings could be over for a while. But the name they chose for the space reflects their buoyant fatalism about the project; as group spokesperson Joe Griffith points out, Flight 19 was the first flight to disappear over the Bermuda Triangle. He knows that one day a paying developer may come along and make an offer for the building that the city can't refuse.Still, Griffith hopes that the time may be right for their ambitious programming to flourish here. In his press release, he writes, "It is a chance to be part of a vital, energetic time in our city's history and help focus the talent that inhabits this city like a coiled spring. There is no doubt that Tampa has the potential energy… we are in search of the lightning rod."
Flight 19's first show is a relatively conservative debut of two-dimensional works. In the large gallery is Beautiful Mutants, digitally altered 19th-century photographs by Mark Mothersbaugh. The smaller room shows Steeples, painting and collage by Tampa artist Giancarlo Rendina. The two artists, separated by two decades (Mothersbaugh born in 1950, Rendina in 1971), share punk sensibility and fringe pop sources, but their contrasting method and media enrich the context of both exhibitions.
Mothersbaugh's Mutants
The godfather of punk-pop, Mothersbaugh is a founding member of the 1970s band Devo. Far from "through being cool," Devo invented nerd chic – bad hair, ugly glasses and thrift store clothes – an artist style that has endured for 30 years and officially crossed over to mall culture.
Mothersbaugh has been drawing for as long as he can remember. Devo was one of the first art-school bands, formed at Kent State in Akron, Ohio, by Mothersbaugh and his brother Bob, Gerald Casale and his brother Bob, and Bob Lewis. The band's birth was indirectly political, forming in the wake of the shootings of anti-war protesters by National Guardsmen on Kent State's campus. The university was closed for months, giving the five students time to write, rehearse and perform.
Mothersbaugh recalls, "People felt morally responsible to stand up against the war in Vietnam. In Akron, a lot of people were coming back from Vietnam as pacifists or very angry."
In his music, the message was always political, but with an absurd humor that was a welcome departure from the nihilism and violence of punk pioneers the Sex Pistols and Iggy Pop. Mothersbaugh still holds the same ideals: "I was anti-stupidity, anti-asshole, pro-information."
The band took off immediately, yet continued to innovate: the first music films before there was MTV; electronic music before there was digital recording; graphic, costume and set design; and concerts that were performance art.
Mothersbaugh never stopped drawing. The works that were first exhibited in galleries were his Postcard Diaries: pop illustrations that he created daily and sent – with messages on the back – to family and friends. (Tampa's Beaker and Matthews galleries showed the Diaries in 2003.)
Today he has a consuming and hugely successful career scoring music for film, television and the Web. After working with digital sound, it was a natural jump to working in Photoshop. During production breaks he moves from one computer to another to work on his Beautiful Mutants imagery. He collects vintage photographs, scans them, manipulates them on the computer and prints them out. Often he reworks the images with drawing and paint, then rescans them and adds more computer illustration.
The prints are reminiscent of surrealist works of Magritte and Dali, a departure from the comic-book, pop-culture sources of Mothersbaugh's previous imagery. One surprise for artist and viewer is that these hundred-year-old snapshots have a new kind of beauty after digital manipulations. Each person's oddities, on the other hand, are more disturbing after they are made symmetrical and distorted. Symmetry gives the images a cellular quality, engendering an instinctive repulsion.
"I have always been fascinated with funhouse mirrors and kaleidoscopes. At first I tried to do it with a camera and mirrors, but there was always that line in the middle of the face. It's really hard to make it disappear."
Psychologists call the first behavioral skill learned by newborns "mirroring." Infants mirror the facial expressions and sounds first seen and heard from their caregiver. Reflections in pools, glass and fun-house mirrors are a constant and conscious part of childhood play, inescapable evidence of life's mystery. The surrealists mined this magic as an investigation of the unconscious, while contemporary artists have begun to explore symmetry in a more scientific and digital realm.
Mothersbaugh taps into this universal consciousness and mystery: "I find humans interesting, mesmerizing. People have one kind of cute side to their face and one uglier side. We are less symmetrical than other creatures. The mirror image from one side is always fascinating and strange, like a Rorschach test."
Beautiful Mutants are just that, escaping the moral conundrum of evolution or devolution, but still asking the question, "Are we not men?"
Rendina's Steeples
Giancarlo Rendina, a young writer, musician and visual artist, is a punk two generations removed from Mothersbaugh. Rendina studied art at USF in the '90s and collaborated with Experimental Skeleton's earlier manifestation, Titanic Anatomy. He says that his band, The People's Court, was one of the first in the region in the emo genre, an offshoot of '90s punk he feels has been corrupted by mainstream bands whose only vestige of the form is "the hair and weird glasses."
Experimental Skeleton invited Rendina to be part of Flight 19's first show, in part due to his hands-on drawing, painting and collage methods, that would counterbalance the digital remove of Mothersbaugh's computer-generated images. Rendina's work for this show is mostly small-scale – paintings on paper and small canvases with collaged text and cartoon elements. The works hang unframed, emphasizing their organic and tactile nature.
Rendina's figurative images are sketchy and painterly. He identifies with the surrealists, but his sources, if not his choice of images, owe clearly to Pop Art. Images and text from comic books, GI Joes and 1960s "men's magazines" are collaged and reproduced in his compositions. Though he's weary of what he calls "identity politics," the cultural politics of academia, his images are preoccupied with our cultural stereotypes of men. Action figures, with their angular plastic musculature and robotic bends, are his artist's models.
A recurrent image is a soldier's face painted as a skeleton. Rendina has begun to notice that, the more he draws this face, the more the bone structure begins to resemble his own. He confronts his personal identity and examines his own complicity in our militarization of the male identity. The work goes beyond the stock pop icons of warheads and tanks to show the human bodies that are both victims and aggressors. His series of drawings and acrylic washes on paper, "Helmet Crab," depicts human/plastic arms as crab legs, protruding from their army helmet hermitages.
Rendina feels that "punk rock is the most moral way of thinking. It is a movement like surrealism, seeking solid intellectual change." Eschewing what he calls "punk-pop's lexicon of icons," Rendina is in search of a new vocabulary. His work is evolving toward a personal and humane core, hand-drawn in acrylic but with a bleeding heart.
He couldn't be in better company than Experimental Skeleton, or wish for a better role model than Mark Mothersbaugh.
Experimental Skeleton will continue to program Flight 19, but invites artists outside of their circle to submit proposals for future events. We can look forward to "Atmospheric Collage," a one-night installation, for the next opening. The collective will use projection on the spray from misters to create transient images. In this non-air-conditioned space, mist will be a welcome format.
This article appears in Jul 13-19, 2005.