Jay Critchley digs into the Renaissance City

February 1 - 8, 2001

[Art Reviews]

Downtown dirt

Jay Critchley digs into the Renaissance City

by Bill Rodriguez
The presentation by Jay Critchley, AS220's first artist-in-residence, left no doubt that Providence is in for an entertaining and perhaps enlightening time before he leaves town. The Provincetown artist is here for three months to develop a project called "Providence Dirt," and the work he showed on slides and videos in the artist collaborative's café displayed satirical wit and confrontational imagination.
The conceptual artist wants to get five, 10, maybe 15 co-conspirators to brainstorm and help develop content. Filmmakers and videographers, technicians and editors, actors, writers, whoever. The idea is to produce three- to five-minute footage in vintage newsreel style. Interviews, commentary on matters of local -- and maybe cosmic -- import. The "dirt" part of the project's title refers to the underground, which can be literal -- bus and train tunnels, wine caves, whatever -- or figurative, as in subcultures. The newsreel format assures humor.
So at the AS220 open meeting on January 16, Critchley, looking like an ordinary 54-year-old with a receding hairline -- except for that Necklace by Tampax -- showed the throng of several dozen where he was coming from. On slides and videos was work that had been displayed at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the List Gallery at MIT, and other spaces.
There he was on the screen as Miss Tampon Liberty, giving new meaning to the phrase "Give me . . . the wretched refuse of your teeming shores," which is inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty. Festooned with some 3000 plastic tampon applicators that he'd picked up mostly on Cape Cod beaches, we saw him at the statue during its 1986 centennial celebration. We also saw him reprise the character last fall, reading a poem and performing a water-appreciation ceremony on a Provincetown beach. This was at the very hour that a new 9.5 Boston sewage outfall pipe was being activated, pumping dubiously treated water into the Massachusetts Bay that had already carried the plastic flotsam to him.
Closer to the theme of the Providence project, we saw some uses of Critchley's "Theatre In the Ground @ Septic Space," the septic tank in his backyard that he converted to a performance space, protesting the decreasing availability of affordable housing in Provincetown. Other art projects at his home base included sand cars, one of which was displayed at the Museum of Transportation in Boston. Sited at the McMillan Wharf parking lot -- the cars were registered, insured and had season parking paid for, to the annoyance of the lot's owners -- the idea was to help the beach reclaim some of the asphalt.
Perhaps his most outrageous, albeit gently tongue-in-cheek, affronts to the Powers that Be, are when he costumes up in suit and tie and becomes a corporation president, with all the authority and expertise society invests in such positions. In one slide, the dapper Critchley was paling around with some investment club members as the purported president of the NRC, the Nuclear Recycling Consultants. The booster club near Seabrook, New Hampshire, had pestered him so long to come and speak to them that he eventually relented; they thought his ideas to make scads of money out of radioactivity were just peachy keen.
Critchley's most widely known such enterprise was the actual, legal incorporation of the Old Glory Condom Company on Flag Day in 1990. He said he did it out of patriotism. Why not unfurl the stars and bars on something that can stand tall and protect the country in the age of AIDS? Isn't that patriotic? The United States Patent and Trademark Office didn't think so and rejected his application in emotional language uncharacteristic for a bureaucracy -- the rejection letter called his proposal "immoral" and "scandalous." Fortunately, the lawyer who took on his case pro bono had recently gotten the U.S. Supreme Court to sigh, cite the First Amendment free speech provision, and reject a Texas law banning flag burning. Sweet victory, and a trademark, came three years after the rejection. So now, if you want to sell a condom that has an American flag on it, you gotta pay Jay Critchley.
When he is done with his AS220 presentation, suggestions come trickling in from the crowd. Someone mentions that up in the top of City Hall there's a room full of old local maps, guarded by a wizened ancient, which could give some ideas for locations to film. Critchley says that an abandoned, water-filled railroad tunnel has been mentioned a million times. Somebody brings up the Weybosset restroom for a subway that was never built.
It looks like that by April the "Providence Dirt" project will have dug up some interesting stuff.

UPSTAIRS AT AS220, in the third-floor apartment provided for his artist-in-resident stint, Critchley relaxes on a long mustard-colored sofa and muses aloud about the project.
"This is a whole new direction for my work, and I'm not making any promises about what's going to happen with it," he says. "It's not like I've done this before and I'm just going to repeat it -- I don't like to do that. I don't have a road show that I do. The performances that I do are often time- and site-specific."
Critchley says he's not a city person, having lived for 25 years in Provincetown, where he is a licensed massage therapist. So he has to orient himself to the sounds, smells, and the energy of the city. Just the night before he did so with an exotic dancer from the Satin Doll, the nightclub he can see from his rear window. They were both fumbling with their keys at their parked cars, and he commiserated with her when she broke a fingernail and muttered about how hard it was sometimes to be a woman. He said that he knows a lot of guys with long fingernails, and it can be hard to be them, too.
It looks like exploring the underground of Providence subcultures is going to be more available than he'd thought.
The artist certainly sees with an outsider's perspective. He's a man with a 25-year-old son, a strictly raised Catholic who had as hard a time with his father becoming an artist as with his admitting he was gay. They're getting along fine now.
Critchley calls himself a "born-again artist" who "came out as an artist" late in life, at 33, internally impelled to create the first of his sand car series. "It just sort of happened."
Critchley has developed a strong-minded, wry esthetic. "A lot of what is called art is boring," he says. "The power of art has been so diffused in the culture. I think that we are so overwhelmed with a glut of images, we're so glutted by visuals."
Raised near Bristol, Connecticut, propelled through Catholic schools and Jesuit college, he worked for 10 years in human services for youths and as a drug counselor. He has no art school and little creative expression since performing in high school musicals.
But that's all behind him now. Providence is a new opportunity --one he's quite looking forward to. "There's a lot of energy in this place, in AS220. Last night they had a little gathering for me, and I was watching all these digital, multimedia computer pieces and films. So there's a lot of talent here, a lot of energy. I'm really excited about that," Critchley says.

To help on the Providence Dirt project, contact Jay at 454-4049 or reroot@tiac.net. His Web site is tiac.net/users/reroot/ptowninc.html