Art-O-Matic, an unjudged grassroots art exhibition, is currently making its third annual appearance, this time inside an abandoned EPA office building in the elusive southwest quadrant. It’s huge, it’s varied and it’s completely anarchical. Come prepared to exercise your better judgement.
Use an old EPA building for an exhibit, and everyone is doomed to show their work in rooms that look like recently abandoned office space. It isn’t warehouse-y, or loftish, which is how something like this would probably have happened in New York (years of movie viewing, stretching right up to last week when I went to see Igby Goes Down, have cemented that nobody in New York does anything, ever, unless they’re in a room with 14-foot ceilings and exposed pipes). Instead, it’s just federal: accoustic ceiling tiles and narrow, endless hallways marked only with the unbroken stripe of red electrical tape that guides you through a series of rooms that seem to be the very embodiment of blandness. When serving as a backdrop for some of the better pieces on display, the setting is utterly forgettable. But this show is unjudged. Most of the pieces here range from mediocre to bad, and manage to combine with the surroundings to produce a sense of neglect and ineptitude so overwhelming that you may have trouble stomaching it. But if you think you’re tough, now is your chance to indulge in an exhibit so huge that only a true glutton for the arts could possibly take it all in. Just be prepared to walk into a dark cubbyhole of an office to see an array of rocks with words like “love” and “regret” written on them in sparkly paint while a disco ball slowly revolves over your left shoulder.
Of course, for the cynically minded, embarrassingly bad art could be precisely the draw of Art-O-Matic. Whoever you people are, you’re sick. But you ought to at least know that going to the show will feed your addiction, possibly to the point of doing you major bodily harm. As for the rest of us, the real allure is in the quality art that the exhibit has to offer. The most obvious place to start is the room on the first floor, directly ahead of you as you leave the stairs, which is home to a group of industrial designers and a few painters. The paintings are good, and the furniture and furnishings are great. Especially cool was “Mr. Cobrahead,” a gigantic floor lamp made from placing a streetlight on a bent metal tube. It’s straight out of Jeunet’s City of Lost Children, and if you have $500 you could probably find worse ways to waste it on lighting.
Leave this exhibit, and you strike out into the heart of the beast. But after wandering through seemingly endless halls of lukewarm paintings, you may have the good fortune to reach the large performance space on the second floor. In the middle of the room, a few sets of drapes have marked off a makeshift living room full of vaguely retro housewares. Leave cryptic messages on the typewriter, admire the fondue set and play Space Invaders on Atari. Or, just play Space Invaders. After several hours spent trying to take in Art-O-Matic, it may be all you can handle.
Art-O-Matic is showing through Nov. 30 at 401 M St., S.W. Admission is free.
