Artists’ experiment puts reality to the test

The popularity of reality TV was unfathomable to Mandi Mauldin Felici, a graduate art student at Cal State Long Beach. She didn’t understand what it was about conspiracy, greed, hot tubs and maggots that so enthralled viewers, so she decided to do an experiment.

What would happen, she wondered, if artists holed up in a gallery for three days and were forced to work on a collaboration? Would they turn ruthless like television characters? Would there be bickering and back-stabbing? Would there be romance? Would there be art?

“Collaborate: A Reality Show” began Friday morning in a small gallery on the Long Beach campus. Participating artists were allowed to leave only for bathroom breaks until Sunday evening’s reception.

The exhibition, including raw video shot during the experiment, will continue through Thursday.

Felici wanted 10 artists, found eight, but four bailed out at the last minute. That, more than champagne or maggots, said Felici, tasted of reality. The artists, all art majors, brought sleeping bags and food, no music and, absolutely, no television. For the collaboration, they were allowed to use only whatever materials they brought with them.

Daal Praderas was the first to arrive. “This could be a situation where I totally have a lot of fun or really, really hate it,” she said, “but either way it will be an exploration.”

Praderas, 44, worked 20 years as a journalist before enrolling in art school. In describing details of her life, her tone was matter-of-fact.

She used to work at a car rental place. She used to work at a gas station. She lasted one day as a waitress. She worked for newspapers and a radio station.

She had a nervous breakdown. She had a miscarriage. She found a man she loved. She found art. Things are better now. That is her reality.

Felici, 30, arrived next. Among her supplies were a box of Barbie dolls, fabric and a quilt made from clothes she wore during an 18-month trip to southern France in 1994.

She has been married a month, and the process of beginning her own family has prompted thoughts about the role of family in her life.

She sees how she lives within a network of friends and family members. Life is a collaboration, she said, so why shouldn’t art be the same?

Kristin Day Larmer, 20, the group’s youngest member, arrived with a cooler, a stash of Cap’n Crunch, her father’s sleeping bag, a potter’s wheel and 150 pounds of clay. Her goal is to someday open a gallery for young artists and to show her own work, which tends to be more sculptural than functional. Her favorite artist is the late George Ohr, known as the Mad Potter of Biloxi.

Larmer described herself as creative and shy.

“My main concern is that we have talent and a lot of stuff, but can we take that stuff and make something, you know, and can we do it without fighting? Whether it’s good or bad, the experience will be interesting. That’s the most important thing.”

The fourth artist, Niza Juarez, 23, had called earlier to say she was recovering from a cold and had a doctor’s appointment that would delay her arrival until 1 p.m. The others started work without her. Since there would be four of them, they decided, each would take a corner, begin work individually, then move toward the center of the gallery, where, somehow, they would integrate their work.

By 1 p.m., there was still no word from Juarez. The others wondered if she had gotten sick or if she had decided not to participate. Finally, at 3:30, she pulled up in a black 1974 Lincoln with expired Texas plates.

A senior, Juarez, 23, plans to study makeup artistry for television and film after she graduates. While the others brought saws and sanders, hammers and nails, metal and wire, tree branches and drills, fabrics and clay, Juarez brought magazines, a book about the history of punk, a curling iron and a blow dryer.

These things, she said, say something about who she is, but there is much more to her story. Her father is a truck driver, her mother a housekeeper. Her older sister, the first member of the family to graduate from college, is a recruiter for UC Berkeley.

When Juarez’s sister was deciding on a college, her father drove her in his truck to the three schools she was considering: UC Riverside, UC Santa Barbara and Berkeley. Juarez too has spent time in the passenger’s seat next to her father.

When she was a child having trouble learning to read and write, her parents bought her a camera and binoculars. She would go with her father and take pictures, then, later, write stories about the photographs and all the things she had seen through binoculars.

She said she is motivated to work hard because her family has sacrificed a great deal for her education.

It wasn’t easy to tell her father that because she was involved in the art project, she wouldn’t be home to celebrate his birthday. He told her it was OK; school comes first. They will celebrate later.

Juarez, suffering from the final stages of a cold, rested a bit, then started going through magazines. Inspiration follows its own path to each artist. Juarez’s came when she went to the restroom. On the door, she noticed the universal outline of a woman in a dress.

When she returned, she went to work, drawing the same outline on the wall of the gallery. She filled it with photographs of women she considers positive role models. Included were Mother Teresa, Katharine Hepburn, Grace Kelly.

It was in contrast to Larmer’s work in the opposite corner. Larmer made more than 100 clay flowers and stuffed most of them with various Barbie parts under the words, “Mary, Mary, quite ordinary. How does your garden grow?” Images of women as portrayed by reality TV or television were, in general, she said, as unreal as Barbies.

Watching her make 100 clay flowers may not be as exciting as watching 10 people groping in a hot tub, but it’s how reality really is. “If this was a TV show,” she said of the experiment, “I wouldn’t watch it.”

Next to Larmer’s corner, Praderas hung branches from the ceiling, attaching empty toilet-paper rolls, paper sacks and other items. How disgraceful to something as noble as a tree that it should be reduced to toilet paper, she said. Using strips of transparent tape, she also created a mold of a television and surrounded it with play money.

The media aren’t about reality, she noted. They’re about greed and money.

In the opposite corner, Felici sewed together fabrics of different designs, colors and shapes and attached them to the wall.

She made a long snake of crumpled paper symbolizing roots, coiling it from the ceiling in the center of the room to her corner, where on the wall next to the fabrics she wrote words pertaining to family.

One by one, starting from about 9 p.m. Friday, they turned to sleep.

Juarez was the last one standing, working until about 11 p.m. Felici was the first to rise, at around 7:30 Saturday morning. The four women worked quietly throughout the day. There were no conspiracies, no arguments.

Late Saturday, as Juarez worked in her corner, the other three gathered in the center of the gallery to cut out more magazine photographs of faces and eyes, men and women, paste them on paper, string them together and wrap them around Felici’s swirling paper root, suspended from the ceiling. Propaganda and lies, reality TV, attacking their roots.

They decided to leave some of their sleeping bags and blankets as part of the exhibition.

As they entered Sunday, the final day of their experiment, it was apparent that TV was TV and reality was reality, and there was little overlap. The experiment showed that reality is not necessarily jealousy or maggots or hot tubs.

It is pain and love and family. It is healing. It is the feeling of clay spinning in one’s hands, fabric as it is pushed through a patch of light toward a sewing machine’s needle. It is the world as seen from beneath shadow and eyeliner, from the inside of a truck or behind the wheel of a ’74 Lincoln.

It’s collaboration. It’s speaking out against oppression and greed. It’s a shared box of Cap’n Crunch.

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‘Collaborate: A Reality Show’

Where: Marilyn Werby Gallery on the campus of Cal State Long Beach

When: Daily, noon to 5 p.m.

Ends: Thursday