The group’s members are college-level art teachers — Goodman at the Corcoran, Ashcraft and Winant at George Mason University — with expertise in sculpture, drawing and printmaking. Yet they’re also experienced carpenters and contractors with an affinity for woodworking.
“We made everything here,” Winant says. Although sometimes making means repurposing: The rain barrel is a 55-gallon syrup container from a nearby Pepsi plant.
In a way, Workingman Collective is a build/design firm without a client. Perhaps that’s why its members seek collaborations with outsiders, including friends, kindred spirits and the potential collector who gets a consultation as part of the art.
The group’s motto is “your ideas are ours,” which Winant calls “a comment on the conceit of originality.” Ideas worth appropriating may arise at the gallery lunches, which will be hosted by one or more artists in the collective, and are open to all comers, every Wednesday at 1 p.m. until the show closes.
Marcel Duchamp, the godfather of conceptual art, also reused manufactured objects, but his “readymades” were not chosen for either aesthetic or practical value. The collective seems prepared to jettison (or at least play down) the former. “We quit asking if it’s art,” Ashcraft says. “Now we just ask, ‘Is it any good?’ ”
This sort of art can be good if it’s provocative or intriguing. Yet the collective remains keen on the functional: The swing swings, the train chugs and the rain barrel captures water. And the trio is planning to work in Haiti, a place with no pressing need for whimsy. The Workingman Collective artists may dabble in abstract or absurd ideas, but for them, it’s also important to be earnest.
Sparkplug at D.C. Arts
The work of another collective of local artists, Sparkplug, is on display in “Something Other than the Present” at the D.C. Arts Center. The six artists in this exhibition work separately rather than collaboratively, and generally explore individual themes. These include female self-image and the opposition between modernity and tradition.
The latter theme cuts both ways. Todd Gardner’s hand-painted banners play on contemporary themes while taking the form of old-fashioned ads for circus attractions. Matt Smith contrasts modern technology and traditional craft by quilting near-abstract patterns of enlarged computer pixels.
Chandi Kelley’s photograph, “Remembrance of an Untouched Wilderness,” confines an image of a grand landscape inside an office building’s ground-floor display space. And Joseph Hale loosely paints such elementary devices as a canteen and a compass on large-scale photocopies of places and situations that can’t be escaped with such simple tools.
Chajana denHarder’s short video, “Body (Leg and Hand),” depicts a barefooted woman’s methodical assault on a plaster limb, crushing it into dust. This attack on the disappointing body is paired with Dafna Steinberg’s “The Toad,” a catalog ue of disappointing men. Steinberg’s work is simply 25 sheets of white paper, each with the red outline of a kiss and the name of a man — from Adam to Wayne — who didn’t turn out to be a prince. It’s conceptual art but as personal as a lipstick trace.
Jenkins is a freelance writer.
Workingman Collective: Prospects and Provisions
on view through Aug. 20 at Hemphill Fine Arts, 1515 14 St. NW. 202-234-5601. www.hemphillfinearts.com .
Something Other
Than the Present
on view through July 17 at the D.C. Arts Center, 2438 18th St. NW. 202-462-7833. www.dcartscenter.org .
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