Review: Tarot Workshop at StoreFrontLab in SF
April 28, 2016 — Tarot workshop at StoreFrontLab, an art space in the Mission district of SF.
We waited for the group to exit, then twelve of us entered the room. An assortment of items on a table greeted us: a ball of satisfyingly lush yarn, small square paper with printed letters, crystalline shard, eye of Horus, and other unidentifiable odds and ends.
The artist had the group pick out items they were drawn to. She then gave a reading of the object, with a loose connection to a Tarot card. For instance, two chestnuts (or hazelnuts?) were read as the Hermit, situated between duality of sea and land, or mountain and sky, with a protected overtone. She explained her process and uncertainties about the connection between these personal objects and Tarot cards quite lucidly.
In one sense, her interpretation is a kind of performance of meaning, and perhaps speaks to and problematizes the kind of storytelling and meaning-finding that takes place without being questioned for us in our everyday lives. What does it mean to imbue objects with a symbolic significance? Can symbols be said to subvert our relationship to time and space? This reminds me of the mythical biographies of saints, the stories with fantastical happenings that are somewhere between allegory and reality, refusing to fit neatly into either.
I would have liked for the performance to be more than a demonstration, and to even more directly address or implicate the group in the room as the querent or subject of this storytelling. It was conceptual art, and so perhaps there is a sort of critical distance as a result of certain accepted and expected modalities of this form. I also felt that this style of presentation operated as a window into the subjective interpretative mechanisms of the artist, in a way that highly accentuates an individualistic perspective that may be very contemporary and/or western.
The purposes of the gallery I highly admire: to create space to ask questions and to see things in a wholly different light. Not easy goals to achieve. It was interesting to hear that the curators may like things to take on a more action-oriented approach with the next theme, as opposed to being talk-heavy. The theme of “The Unknown, The Unknowable, The Future” is an exciting one, I’m sorry to have only discovered the last event of the series. I wonder what avenues of approach the art world accommodates right now, and to what depth the quest can go. That being said, the bright flourish of ideas and positions that came out of the evening are fun indeed.
