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Con/Temp Cultivates Community through Creativity
The simple dining room paneled with honey-colored wood has been obeying the jovial command of Max Flannery Sr. for “30 years and four months.” It’s a subtle place with faces you’ve never seen before that seem oddly familiar, with food you might not recognize that makes your stomach growl. It’s Max’s Loudon Square Buffet, and it’s not a place you’d expect to find any art. But for the last month, this peculiar little diner has been the stage for a contemporary art project starring Tammy Ramsey. A professor of English and journalism at LCC, Ramsey had no idea she’d be falling in love with Max’s when she answered an ad for a poet-in-residence at a restaurant. “It was just too unique an ad not to answer it,” she said. “I sent in my poem, my 50-word essay, and then I waited to hear from them. I’d almost given up on the whole thing when I finally heard I got it. They asked me, ‘Do you write poetry? Do you eat?’ and I thought, ‘Well, yes I do.’” The poet-in-residence project was the second event put on by Lexington’s two-man contemporary art center, Con/Temp. Latitude Co-Owner and Artist Bruce Burris and Transy Professor and Artist Kurt Gohde met several years ago when Gohde walked past Burris’s house on his way to work. Burris learned he was the new art professor in town and decided they needed to talk. “Kurt wasn’t the first person I approached with my list of gripes about the art scene,” Burris said. “But he was one of the few who stood still long enough to take the list and take it home and call me back.” The infamous list, which Gohde said took Burris an hour of non-stop talking to get through, became the motivation for this unlikely pair to launch a contemporary art center on a very grassroots level. “Most of the art scene here and artists here are dominated by a culture of selling art,” Gohde said. “The point of Con/Temp is to show that if there is a viable arena for art that is community-driven and not sales-driven, people will want more art exposure.” So Con/Temp is taking art to unlikely places. Its first project was a 24-hour photography exhibit in the back of a rented Penske truck. The showcase of Architect Thomas Dutton’s work parked at private residences, Latitude, Wal-Mart, UK’s Reynolds Building, Gray Construction and Third Street Stuff, among others, and opened its doors to whomever wanted to take a look. Dutton, who is director of Miami University’s Center for Community Engagement in Over-The-Rhine, has worked extensively renovating residences in the Over-The-Rhine neighborhood, which suffers from homelessness, segregation, building abandonment, unemployment and political alienation, to provide well-designed living space that will enhance quality of life. He’s been on this mission since 1981. Dutton participated in the Penske truck exhibit not only by offering photographs of his work, but also by giving a lecture at the close of the reception to a standing-room-only audience. The entire event was $35, the cost of the truck rental, Burris said. Dutton offered his services for free, and Gohde and Burris did the rest of the work pro bono. The spirit of Con/Temp was contagious after that first event. Gohde and Burris befriended Max Flannery Jr., who has had an affinity for art practically his whole life. At age 15, Flannery Jr. tested his craftsmanship in bicycle making, producing a long, low, lawn-chaired cycle and winning the prize for most unique bike. Now an architect at Gray Inc., he’s also involved in the public art project in the Ashland Park neighborhood. His interest in Con/Temp and his connection to his father’s restaurant wrote the script for the next event. The call to artists was answered by more than 20 interested poets. Ramsey’s poem “Button Show” earned her the top spot, and she took up residence on June 4. The commitment only required her to visit the restaurant three times and for a final reading, but Ramsey spent twice as much time there. “I loved it,” she said. “They treated me like a queen. And I got to eat for free.” Aside from the nutritional nourishment the gig got her, Ramsey said the experience gave her more ideas than she could put to paper. “I’ll be thanking Max Sr., Max Jr., Kurt and Bruce for years to come for all the ideas this project supplied,” she said. “It reinvigorated me as an artist. It inspired me and pushed my comfortability. I’d like to line one of these up every month.” Ramsey made a point to visit Max’s at different times of the day to get a full feel of the place. Sometimes she’d work on drafts or take notes, sometimes she’d write poetry, and sometimes she’d talk to the people coming in. Once she even got to watch Max Sr. make his top-secret beer cheese recipe. “I got a lot of perspective from this experience,” she said. “I would sit for long stretches and watch people come and go, and I became very interested and curious about the lives that people stepped out of to come in here and then stepped back into when they left. You start to be really aware about what people carry around with them when you sit still and pay attention.” Among the people Ramsey met while doing her residency were a woman grieving her dog, men in fatigues waiting to hear if they were called to duty, grandparents who had been eating at Max’s since it opened bringing in their grandchildren. All walks of life passed through the doors at Max’s, and every one of them got a warm welcome and a hot, renewable plate of food for only $6. “You see people that could be eating anywhere they wanted, and you can tell based on their dress and adornments,” Ramsey said. The diversity of clientele is something that Flannery Sr. is quietly proud about. Ramsey said Flannery Sr. was one of the greatest inspirations she got from the experience. He works seven days a week, unless it’s his annual vacation week, in which case he works three days. He doesn’t slow down, is friendly to everyone he meets and is up for trying anything new. When Flannery Jr. brought the idea of a poet-in-residence to him, he said go ahead “I’ve always liked art, but I’ve never taken time to pursue or enjoy it,” he said. “It was nice to have it walk in the door and stay for a while.” The residency culminated in a poetry reading on June 26, complete with Bluegrass music from Blue Dawg and overflowing plates of country style flavor. The shell of the building looked as unintimidating as ever, and the only thing different about the dining room was the oversized speakers against one wall. But in this simple space, art was created, lingered for a moment and left a lasting impression in the most unlikely of places. “It’s important to find links to other communities – Hispanics, blacks – and to expose them to art, even if it’s just for a couple hours,” Gohde said. And that mission has led them right into their next project. Refusing to let the community rest on its heels, the next Con/Temp exhibit is being put to a vote. Anyone can go to http://homepages.transy.edu/~kgohde/contemp/index.html and cast a vote for what should be the next Con/Temp event. Perhaps you’d like to see seven strangers picked to curate a show together and offer it to the community to find out what happens when art stops being for museums and starts being for you. Maybe you’d be interested in unexpected conversations on public access television that bring together very different people that share a least common denominator. How about a showcase of stolen flyers or show posters whose imagery compelled someone to take it for themselves? Or would you like to see Salomon Vergara expand his remarkable puppet community and produce a bi-lingual performance based on the work of a Kentucky writer? You decide. “There are so many processes for getting people involved in something that they might otherwise not be involved in that we might just experiment with all the different processes, continuing with community-driven and selected events,” Burris said. “The structure of Con/Temp is as interesting as the projects it inspires. “The great thing about art is that it’s so democratic. You don’t need to know how to play a bass guitar to go buy one and be in a rock n’ roll band. It’s the same way with art. There’s so much space for people, they’re really is… We want to show people that you don’t need everything in the world to change the world. It’s really just a dynamic of energy and wanting to do something you believe in.”
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