issue
80, December 8, 2006
To wrap up the year at …might be good, we asked some of our readers, contributors and friends to tell us what exhibition they thought was 2006’s best. Here’s what they had to say:
Beast at Finesilver in Houston was one of the best shows I have seen in a long time. Good quality drawing is a plus. Here in Austin, Cauleen Smith and A. Van Jordan's show at testsite was also really solid. One of the best I've seen there. Lastly, anything by L_M_N_L, which is spearheaded by Lance Mcmahan and Bill Ivey. It is one of the best kept art secrets in Austin.
- Sterling Allen, Artist and Okay Mountaineer
I had a few favorites this year: the first was the Richard Tuttle show at the Dallas Museum of Art. I walked away from the exhibition with a new understanding of his work and a deep affection for it as well. I also had trouble leaving the Christian Jankowski and Nick Cave exhibitions in New York this past November—both were riveting, but for different reasons. Luis Pérez-Oramas curated a two-part exhibition at MoMA called Transforming Chronologies: An Atlas of Drawings—it was beautiful, and it made a real intellectual contribution both to art history and curatorial practice. And finally, Rachel Cook curated a great video exhibition at Okay Mountain. I'd like to thank her for introducing me to Kalup Linzy's work in particular!
—Kelly Baum, Assistant Curator, Department of American & Contemporary Art, Blanton Museum of Art
I thoroughly enjoyed Carol Bove's WorkSpace show, which Kelly Baum put together. Thoughtful, challenging, elegant and timely! Sorry can't say much else; I'm having art fair meltdown!
Regine Basha, Curator
I have to make a hit list because there is so much that I feel excited about experiencing in the last year.
1. There are a few artists whose work I saw at the Armory Show this past year that deserve mention. Brock Enright's video at Vilma Gold was sitting upright in a cardboard box and singing at you. The best part about the piece was its proximity to Kalup Linzy's Lollipop literally on the wall around the corner. It was as if the two were sining to each other.
2. My other favorite moment was watching Laurel Nakadate's videos but even better was watching other people's reaction to them. They sort did the cringe but still fixated look. Nakadate came to Austin to give a talk during which I realized how she is able to convince anyone to be in her videos. She carries herself with such certainty it places you at ease.
3. I heard Marina Abramovic speak at the Frieze Art Fair this year. She quite possibly the most generous artists and speaker. For all that she has been through, Abramovic still maintains an optimistic attitude about performance and the work.
4. Carsten Höller's slides at the Tate Modern were the best museum installation I have seen in a long time. Höller created multiple silver slides that ranged in size in the entryway of the Tate. Every range of age group were going down them and enjoying every minute of it.
5. I went to Juarez for the first time this year. The whole experience driving across, realizing how close you are to the border and how much this affects El Paso's residents and the community opened up my eyes.
-Rachel Cook, Editor, GLASSTIRE: Texas visual art online
Transforming Chronologies: An Atlas of Drawings, Part Two; curated by Luis Perez-Oramas. This show made me forget that I work in a museum and reminded me why museums can be exquisite places. The curatorial approach was refreshing. It invited the audience to explore and experience MoMA's drawing collection from a new and brilliant perspective.
-Ursula Davila-Villa, Assistant Curator, Department of Latin American Art, Blanton Museum of Art
A few things I loved this year: Pipilotti Rist's wonderful talk and show at the CAM in Houston; Koto Ezawa's show at Artpace, I also loved his lecture on the history of the music video where he showed the truly dazzling 1966 Bruce Conner film Breakaway; Still Points of the Turning World, the Site Santa Fe Biennial, my favorites: beautiful Peter Doig’s paintings, Carsten Nicolai's installation Spray and Stephen Dean's drawings and video projection; Katie Pell and Alison Smith currently at ArtPace; Riley Robinson and Katie Edwards at testsite (!).
—Joey Fauerso, Artist
That's easy. For the Coconuts show at Art Palace, Sam de la Rosa punched little holes in the leaves of the tree in the yard outside, creating all these faces. I don't think many people noticed it, but if you look, I think the cactus still has its face. You can sort of make him barf by pouring gravel through his mouth from behind. The cactus face, not Sam.
—Justin Goldwater, Artist, Okay Mountaineer
Favorite 1: Paul Chan, Present Tense, Blanton Museum of Art. His video and floor projections were visually stunning, thought provoking and relevant to our current political situation. An outstanding premiere exhibition for the Blanton.
—Jessica Halonen, Lora Reynolds and Lauren Grant of Lora Reynolds Gallery
Favorite 2: Droppin’ Drawers, Okay Mountain. Amazing selection of contemporary works from an international group of artists whose primary practice is drawing based.
—Lauren Grant, Lora Reynolds Gallery
Under the “product of visual culture” category, Nohegan was a fantastic idea. Likewise, the concept for Workspace at the Blanton. For exhibitions, Richard Tuttle at the DMA was particularly memorable.
—Caitlin Haskell, graduate student, former CEO of ...mbg
Ann Hamilton’s Voce at Contemporary Art Museum in Kumamoto (Feb. 25 - June 4, 2006). Voce fully demonstrated Ann Hamilton's signature style of orchestrating an experiential space with objects, images, sound, light and protagonists. This time visitors were invited to stand on one of the numerous tables situated in the gallery and mimic the bird songs played through headsets. I tried it. It was hard to not feel shy in the beginning, but as I continued, my body picked up the rhythm and finally I was enjoying it. This experience reminded me of the artist's fascination with the mystery of birdcalls. Scientific research hasn't found out why birds sing, and even music scholars can't figure out how to write down the bird music with musical notes. Voce created a moment to stop the thoughts and stimulate the bodily senses.
—Mayumi Hirano, director of tccjr., an alternative project based in Yokohama
For out-of-town art I have to say my spring trip to New York took away my breath in many wonderful ways. MoMA's Munch exhibit forced me to re-evaluate a modern master I thought I understood, and better grasp his power. Best of all was Roxy Paine's show at the James Cohan Gallery. After years of approaching geologic time in poetic ways he created an "Erosion Machine" that was both blunt and fanciful, industrial and magical. Here in Austin, a recent overlay of art and music stands out as truly exceptional: the intensely original musical performance for the "No Idea Festival" that responded to Heather Johnson's November 18 opening at Women and Their Work sets the bar high for future collaborative responses.
—James Housefield, Ph.D. National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities and Associate Professor of the History of Art, Texas State University Adjunct Curator, Austin Museum of Art
The Susan Sontag white-streak hairclip by Paige Gratland—artist/musician/street-dancer of Toronto. Munch at MoMA—everything but The Scream. Clip, Stamp, Fold: 1960s-70s: Radical DIY Architecture Magazines, Storefront for Art and Architecture, NYC.
—Lyra Kilston, Editorial Researcher, Modern Painters
I truly enjoyed seeing a culmination of Mimi Kato's work at Joan Grona, Judith Cottrell's Pink Lemonade at i2i for the sheer joy of the experience, and, of course, Katie Pell's Bitchen Appliances at ArtPace, where I considered sleeping on the doorstep just to get a t-shirt as soon as it opened but was instead turned away from a full parking lot by security at 7:15.
—Karen Mahaffy, Artist
A Place in Time curated by Claudia Alvarez Arozqueta at Camp Street during Contemporary Art Month.
—John Mata, artist, Unit B
Far and away my favorite art experience of 2006 was Melenie Flynn’s performance piece This Road which I got to see in various incarnations throughout the year. Based on Flynn’s childhood experiences growing up in a commune with her iconoclast parents, the piece upends any notions of the commune as ultimate utopia, yet manages to be devastatingly funny while doing so. On a completely different note, I was so thoroughly traumatized by Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning that I can’t even hear a leaf blower now without conjuring up images of that disgusting chainsaw. It’s not art, it’s not even a good movie, but I’m still thinking about its high blood and guts factor obsessively.
—Mary Katherine Matalon, …mbg editorial assistant
Sculptors Kurt Mueller and Jamie Wentz's summer camp (in both senses of the word) slasher, Camp Nohegan Horror, is a gory, goofy video postcard complete with spooky backing track and an impressive array of Austin art folk. In the 7-minute video, everyone does their best to simulate B-movie death sequences that feature their own special-effects makeup handiwork. Imagine Hana Hillerova's hot dog assault on Cauleen Smith, resulting in a small scale disembowelment. You've sort of got to see it to believe it.
—Jill Pangallo, Artist
Pipilotti Rist at the CAM Houston along with her performance/talk. William Kentridge at Austin Museum of Art and Mario Perez at Joan Grona Gallery in San Antonio.
—Riley Robinson, Artist
Beast at Finesilver in Houston was one of the best shows I have seen in a long time. Good quality drawing is a plus. Here in Austin, Cauleen Smith and A. Van Jordan's show at testsite was also really solid. One of the best I've seen there. Lastly, anything by L_M_N_L, which is spearheaded by Lance Mcmahan and Bill Ivey. It is one of the best kept art secrets in Austin.
- Sterling Allen, Artist and Okay Mountaineer
I had a few favorites this year: the first was the Richard Tuttle show at the Dallas Museum of Art. I walked away from the exhibition with a new understanding of his work and a deep affection for it as well. I also had trouble leaving the Christian Jankowski and Nick Cave exhibitions in New York this past November—both were riveting, but for different reasons. Luis Pérez-Oramas curated a two-part exhibition at MoMA called Transforming Chronologies: An Atlas of Drawings—it was beautiful, and it made a real intellectual contribution both to art history and curatorial practice. And finally, Rachel Cook curated a great video exhibition at Okay Mountain. I'd like to thank her for introducing me to Kalup Linzy's work in particular!
—Kelly Baum, Assistant Curator, Department of American & Contemporary Art, Blanton Museum of Art
I thoroughly enjoyed Carol Bove's WorkSpace show, which Kelly Baum put together. Thoughtful, challenging, elegant and timely! Sorry can't say much else; I'm having art fair meltdown!
Regine Basha, Curator
I have to make a hit list because there is so much that I feel excited about experiencing in the last year.
1. There are a few artists whose work I saw at the Armory Show this past year that deserve mention. Brock Enright's video at Vilma Gold was sitting upright in a cardboard box and singing at you. The best part about the piece was its proximity to Kalup Linzy's Lollipop literally on the wall around the corner. It was as if the two were sining to each other.
2. My other favorite moment was watching Laurel Nakadate's videos but even better was watching other people's reaction to them. They sort did the cringe but still fixated look. Nakadate came to Austin to give a talk during which I realized how she is able to convince anyone to be in her videos. She carries herself with such certainty it places you at ease.
3. I heard Marina Abramovic speak at the Frieze Art Fair this year. She quite possibly the most generous artists and speaker. For all that she has been through, Abramovic still maintains an optimistic attitude about performance and the work.
4. Carsten Höller's slides at the Tate Modern were the best museum installation I have seen in a long time. Höller created multiple silver slides that ranged in size in the entryway of the Tate. Every range of age group were going down them and enjoying every minute of it.
5. I went to Juarez for the first time this year. The whole experience driving across, realizing how close you are to the border and how much this affects El Paso's residents and the community opened up my eyes.
-Rachel Cook, Editor, GLASSTIRE: Texas visual art online
Transforming Chronologies: An Atlas of Drawings, Part Two; curated by Luis Perez-Oramas. This show made me forget that I work in a museum and reminded me why museums can be exquisite places. The curatorial approach was refreshing. It invited the audience to explore and experience MoMA's drawing collection from a new and brilliant perspective.
-Ursula Davila-Villa, Assistant Curator, Department of Latin American Art, Blanton Museum of Art
A few things I loved this year: Pipilotti Rist's wonderful talk and show at the CAM in Houston; Koto Ezawa's show at Artpace, I also loved his lecture on the history of the music video where he showed the truly dazzling 1966 Bruce Conner film Breakaway; Still Points of the Turning World, the Site Santa Fe Biennial, my favorites: beautiful Peter Doig’s paintings, Carsten Nicolai's installation Spray and Stephen Dean's drawings and video projection; Katie Pell and Alison Smith currently at ArtPace; Riley Robinson and Katie Edwards at testsite (!).
—Joey Fauerso, Artist
That's easy. For the Coconuts show at Art Palace, Sam de la Rosa punched little holes in the leaves of the tree in the yard outside, creating all these faces. I don't think many people noticed it, but if you look, I think the cactus still has its face. You can sort of make him barf by pouring gravel through his mouth from behind. The cactus face, not Sam.
—Justin Goldwater, Artist, Okay Mountaineer
Favorite 1: Paul Chan, Present Tense, Blanton Museum of Art. His video and floor projections were visually stunning, thought provoking and relevant to our current political situation. An outstanding premiere exhibition for the Blanton.
—Jessica Halonen, Lora Reynolds and Lauren Grant of Lora Reynolds Gallery
Favorite 2: Droppin’ Drawers, Okay Mountain. Amazing selection of contemporary works from an international group of artists whose primary practice is drawing based.
—Lauren Grant, Lora Reynolds Gallery
Under the “product of visual culture” category, Nohegan was a fantastic idea. Likewise, the concept for Workspace at the Blanton. For exhibitions, Richard Tuttle at the DMA was particularly memorable.
—Caitlin Haskell, graduate student, former CEO of ...mbg
Ann Hamilton’s Voce at Contemporary Art Museum in Kumamoto (Feb. 25 - June 4, 2006). Voce fully demonstrated Ann Hamilton's signature style of orchestrating an experiential space with objects, images, sound, light and protagonists. This time visitors were invited to stand on one of the numerous tables situated in the gallery and mimic the bird songs played through headsets. I tried it. It was hard to not feel shy in the beginning, but as I continued, my body picked up the rhythm and finally I was enjoying it. This experience reminded me of the artist's fascination with the mystery of birdcalls. Scientific research hasn't found out why birds sing, and even music scholars can't figure out how to write down the bird music with musical notes. Voce created a moment to stop the thoughts and stimulate the bodily senses.
—Mayumi Hirano, director of tccjr., an alternative project based in Yokohama
For out-of-town art I have to say my spring trip to New York took away my breath in many wonderful ways. MoMA's Munch exhibit forced me to re-evaluate a modern master I thought I understood, and better grasp his power. Best of all was Roxy Paine's show at the James Cohan Gallery. After years of approaching geologic time in poetic ways he created an "Erosion Machine" that was both blunt and fanciful, industrial and magical. Here in Austin, a recent overlay of art and music stands out as truly exceptional: the intensely original musical performance for the "No Idea Festival" that responded to Heather Johnson's November 18 opening at Women and Their Work sets the bar high for future collaborative responses.
—James Housefield, Ph.D. National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Humanities and Associate Professor of the History of Art, Texas State University Adjunct Curator, Austin Museum of Art
The Susan Sontag white-streak hairclip by Paige Gratland—artist/musician/street-dancer of Toronto. Munch at MoMA—everything but The Scream. Clip, Stamp, Fold: 1960s-70s: Radical DIY Architecture Magazines, Storefront for Art and Architecture, NYC.
—Lyra Kilston, Editorial Researcher, Modern Painters
I truly enjoyed seeing a culmination of Mimi Kato's work at Joan Grona, Judith Cottrell's Pink Lemonade at i2i for the sheer joy of the experience, and, of course, Katie Pell's Bitchen Appliances at ArtPace, where I considered sleeping on the doorstep just to get a t-shirt as soon as it opened but was instead turned away from a full parking lot by security at 7:15.
—Karen Mahaffy, Artist
A Place in Time curated by Claudia Alvarez Arozqueta at Camp Street during Contemporary Art Month.
—John Mata, artist, Unit B
Far and away my favorite art experience of 2006 was Melenie Flynn’s performance piece This Road which I got to see in various incarnations throughout the year. Based on Flynn’s childhood experiences growing up in a commune with her iconoclast parents, the piece upends any notions of the commune as ultimate utopia, yet manages to be devastatingly funny while doing so. On a completely different note, I was so thoroughly traumatized by Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning that I can’t even hear a leaf blower now without conjuring up images of that disgusting chainsaw. It’s not art, it’s not even a good movie, but I’m still thinking about its high blood and guts factor obsessively.
—Mary Katherine Matalon, …mbg editorial assistant
Sculptors Kurt Mueller and Jamie Wentz's summer camp (in both senses of the word) slasher, Camp Nohegan Horror, is a gory, goofy video postcard complete with spooky backing track and an impressive array of Austin art folk. In the 7-minute video, everyone does their best to simulate B-movie death sequences that feature their own special-effects makeup handiwork. Imagine Hana Hillerova's hot dog assault on Cauleen Smith, resulting in a small scale disembowelment. You've sort of got to see it to believe it.
—Jill Pangallo, Artist
Pipilotti Rist at the CAM Houston along with her performance/talk. William Kentridge at Austin Museum of Art and Mario Perez at Joan Grona Gallery in San Antonio.
—Riley Robinson, Artist
Holiday Report
Corinna Kirsch
The holiday season is here, whether you like it or not. Holiday imagery is familiar to us all, making for a ripe topic in contemporary art (although ones not utilized very often). In this sense, it is brave to see the few contemporary artists take on this aspect of visual culture. From oddities to social parody, highlights of this year’s holiday season are listed below:
Christian Marclay: The Sounds of Christmas.
An annual event held at a different space each year, artist Christian Marclay presents his prolific collection of over 1,200 Christmas records for the public’s use. DJs are challenged to create new sounds from both traditional and mainstream Christmas music. Although the performances vary each year, there is always an aspect of collaboration between Marclay and others. Held at the Tate Modern in 2004, the museum’s website is host to an archive of performances created from the collaboration, as well as an artist’s talk about his annual project. This year, The Sounds of Christmas accessed a more visual aspect of performance. Held in conjunction with the ICA Philadelphia's current exhibition John Armleder: About Nothing, Works On Paper 1962-2007, Armleder and Marclay used sounds and images emblematic of the holidays, including Christmas carols, a Santa Claus hat and Christmas tree, while grounding their performance in visual traditions like slapstick and Fluxus.
Santa’s Ghetto
December 6-29, 15 Oxford Street, London
For the past few years, artist Banksy has opened up a temporary gallery called Santa’s Ghetto in central London. Showcasing his art and others, including works by artists Peter Kennard and Nick Walker, Banksy’s work appropriates holiday imagery while inserting contemporary ones into the work, creating obvious social parody. In his retelling of a scene from the fairytale Hansel and Gretel, the orphaned children—instead of finding a witch with a gingerbread house—are confronted by Michael Jackson holding a candy cane.
Tate's e-Advent Calendar
The Tate has re-created the traditional format of the Advent calendar where, instead of unlocking a door to find chocolate or an ornament, the surprise comes in the form of an image of an artwork from the Tate’s permanent collection.
German Christmas Museum
A permanent exhibition space in Rothenburg, Germany, the collection is home to subjects such as Christmas ornaments, nutcrackers and Erzgebirge arts and crafts. The museum also includes “6 feet tall pyramids.”
Tokyo Christmas Museum
The curator of this online museum is from Tokyo, so unfortunately most of the text on this site is in Japanese. The permanent collection consists of blinking Christmas tree .gifs and the temporary collection includes images of poinsettias and Christmas jewelry. You can download any of the images from the site.
The Antique Christmas Lights Museum
This online-museum dedicated to the history of Christmas lights includes informative sections like NOMA, the World's Largest Christmas Lighting Company and The History of Bubble Lights, Once the World's Most Popular Christmas Light.
Santa’s Holiday Depot
Saturday December 9-10, 16-17, 21-23, 7-9 pm
The Texas Transportation Museum, San Antonio
A re-interpretation of Santa Claus as “ChooChoo Claus” the train-conductor provides the axis for this holiday event. Although not as aggressive a re-interpretation of Santa Claus as Balksy’s Santa-in-the-Ghetto, this event also appropriates holiday imagery in order to make new meaning within a certain context.
Image and Sentiment: Five Publishers of Victorian Holiday Cards
Indiana University, Bloomington Indiana
An online version of an exhibition held in the early 1990s at Indiana University, the website attributes the first wide-spread use of the Christmas card to the Victorian-era. The website documents the economic, design and technological aspects that shaped the creation of the Christmas card.
Cristián Silva at the Blanton
Claire Rudd
On view through December 31, 2006
Well, it’s not far down to paradise
At least it’s not for me
And if the wind is right
You can sail away and find tranquility
Oh the canvas can do miracles
Just you wait and see…
…and soon I will be free
-Christopher Cross, Sailing, 1983
Chilean artist Cristián Silva’s site-specific installation in the Blanton Museum’s WorkSpace Gallery is a lyrical meditation on borderlands and the Promised Land. Entering the Workspace gallery, the viewer descends into a dimly lit, dark gray room. Spotlights shine on two very large circular canvases, which hang opposite each other. The images look like photographic negatives held up to the light: a deep turquoise flamingo with black highlights stands in pink water in the canvas on the west wall and a black sun rises over the water on the east one. The viewer is suspended in darkness between the two shores. Pondering the familiar images rising up in unearthly colors on either side her, she may envision lawn ornaments, tropical paradises, border crossings or inverted universes.
Silva takes both images from the cover of a 1983 Christopher Cross record––an album that signifies the tastes of wealthy Chileans and connotes eighties melodrama to North Americans. The colors that dominate Silva’s canvases also recall the flashy style of that affluent decade. The flamingo draws a constellation of associations. On one hand, the bird symbolizes the tropical paradise desired by vacationing Americans. On the other, it brings to mind the promise of Miami in the eyes of immigrant hopefuls.
Silva’s allegories also depend on private associations and a huge image database he has compiled over the years. The rippling waters in these images run deep, all the way back to an image clipped from a Chilean newspaper long ago. This image, like the color green and the tartan pattern, find reoccurring places in Silva’s work and all make appearances in Black Sun - Green Flamingo. The poorly printed photograph depicts a man rescuing belongings from a flood. He stands knee-deep in water and balances a comfortable-looking armchair on his head. Though the quality of the photo prevents us from seeing the features of the man’s face, Silva says it was the man’s “smile” that captured his attention. The smile he imagines expresses the tragicomedy of his work. Immigrant dreams of the United States and American dreams of exotic paradises in impoverished countries are both heartbreaking and amusing for their fragile idealism.
The tragic longing for paradise expressed in Christopher Cross’s hit song, Sailing, echoes in Black Sun - Green Flamingo. Silva’s installation evokes our fantasies surrounding the Texas-Mexico border. Americans look south and see a land filled with sunny beaches and succulent fruit; Mexicans look north and see a land of prosperity. But at the same time, the sentimentalism of American kitsch and eighties soft rock is faintly comic. Through this melodrama, Silva captures the irony of cross-border desire.
Once Upon...Happily After at Unit B Gallery
Spencer Dobbs
Through December 29
Housed in an anonymous duplex in a pleasantly ragged neighborhood south of downtown, Unit B provides a comfortable, unfussy space for contemporary art in San Antonio. In its current exhibition, Once Upon…Happily After, artists Erick Michaud, Seth Johnson and Charlie Morris use the domesticity of Unit B to full advantage, examining the relationship between simple objects and their function in human lives.
Michaud’s garish living room installation (the scene of Michaud's performance on the show's opening night) clamors most loudly for the viewer’s attention. A single string of Christmas lights borders the unkempt spread of faux snow that blankets the gallery’s hardwood floors. Three unornamented artificial Christmas trees rise out of this scene, guarded by a luminous battalion of docile death heads. This ersatz winter wonderland, slightly distorted by the glowing skulls, seems the work of a mischievous Hobby Lobby employee. North 1 and North 2, Michaud’s acrylic paintings that serve as a backdrop to this setting, are serene depictions of evergreens atop cool quilts of snowy hills. The economic use of glitter in these paintings connects them to the kitsch of the aforementioned plastic firs. Offering a third perspective on this theme is a microphone stand at the foreground of the installation, fashioned rudely out of tree limbs and nails. Taken altogether, Michaud invites the viewer to consider the history of these trees, their myth, truth and ultimately banal function in holiday ritual.
The opposite wall of Unit B’s living room holds the work of Seth Johnson, four graphite drawings titled Stichomancy 1-4. These austere compositions, housed in clean white frames, can be read as a swift trip through the trials of man. Cave Man begins the series with a Neanderthal’s head rendered as though processed by a low-grade computer. His gaping mouth and black eyes suggest an infant or an animal oblivious to his anthropological implications. Disfigured Man portrays a more cognizant creature, a modern man encumbered by the curling tumors that grow from his face. His neatly trimmed mustache and calm eye, which coolly regards the viewer, temper the obscenity that is the rest of his unfortunate countenance. Whereas Cave Man remains ignorant of his own existence, Disfigured Man stoically endures his individual burden. Sword evokes the divination practices hinted at by the Stichomancy title. Acting as a deus ex machina of sorts, Sword reinforces Johnson’s thesis of mortality that leads to the series’ final drawing, Casket, a delicate depiction that would sit comfortably in any Batesville merchandise catalogue.
Unit B’s kitchen is inhabited by the sculpture work of Charlie Morris. Black, featureless simulations of laptops and turntables clutter the hardwood floor next to similar red and yellow replications of transistor radios. A gang of less specific forms, black cylinders and blocks, huddle in the kitchen’s corner. Together the appliances appear as the collective shadows of unseen objects or perhaps the deaf, dumb and mute siblings of those on sale at Circuit City.
It is difficult to say with certainty how the installations relate to one another; Unit B’s press materials posit nostalgia. The work is not visually gratifying on any immediate level. But these artists’ offerings are not empty. Michaud, Johnson and Morris may not arouse your eyes, but they do provide the patron plenty to consider as they leave the gallery and return to their ordinary lives.
Nigel Cooke at MAMFW
Kurt Mueller
Navigating a Nigel Cooke canvas can be a rather unnerving experience. It starts, though, gratifying enough. In each of his seven paintings at the Museum of Modern Art in Ft. Worth, some odd cartooned figure—a jack-o-lantern, perched birds, a brain smoking a cigarette—hovers between a strip of fastidiously rendered landscape and expanses of hazy color. Each scribbled glyph carries the boldness of street graffiti, but reads as intimate, delicate even. The effect is akin to that of a clever doodle on a bathroom wall and the charm is the same: mischievously honest and expressive, but also coy, boyish and juvenile.
Cooke is a skilled seducer, and beyond these initial tokens, his intricate images encourage exploration. Caution is advised though as contrariness defines the scene. What appears from a distance to be a sun-drenched or acid-washed color-field painting quickly re-materializes as the image of a vast wall. Occasional relief texture, painted holes, shadows and the aforementioned cartoons corroborate to summon its face. Similarly, in the tufted landscapes below, Cooke’s details conspire the uncanny. He litters severed heads, splashes of radioactive paint, an apple, or a brightly glowing jack-o-lantern along thin bottom-edge margins of rocks, bushes and cracked dirt.
Cooke’s penchant for detail is impressive, but it perhaps also plays his hobgoblin. His miniscule scrawlings wow onlookers (this writer included), but also bow to the limits of illustration (at worst his images could be animation backgrounds). Cooke succeeds, however, by mixing styles and spaces. As a contemporary British landscape painter, Cooke mines the tradition, borrowing equally from Turner and Constable. The result is nothing short of dislocating. Each image becomes an impossibility; each depicts an environment both expansive and constrained, equally tangible and fictive, readily dead and alive. Accordingly, Cooke’s details work best not for their dexterity, but by contributing to an atmosphere of ambiguity. Each, specific and somewhere, helps to build a very precise nowhere.
Likewise, Cooke’s crafty imagery is ultimately less remarkable for what it is or seems to be, than for the spatial relationships it develops with the viewer. Encountering Ghost on the Happy Trail (2003) in Ft. Worth spells a common situation: First, the upper regions of the painting empty out. Vision sinks to the low horizon line, where the safety of a perspectival ground plane and discernible details invite penetration, almost as if on foot. Soon after, the proximity to what is actually not open space, as earlier perceived, but a wall, becomes shockingly apparent—the middle ground collapses into the background while the foreground shortens. Subsequently, one feels wedged between a looming verticality and a thinning horizontal. It is not a trap, but escape is limited. It is the space underneath a bridge or in Bruce Nauman’s corridors, simultaneously foreboding and desperate.
Curiously, in his current show at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York, Cooke has erased the margin of landscape from the paintings. Instead, larger, more textured—as if faux-stone—and filled with increasingly painterly graffiti, the canvases function as the walls only previously imagined. But fortunately at Ft. Worth, Cooke’s creepy space stays within the image, and within the viewer’s imagination. The uncertain, imperceptible horizon of his paintings finds a close analogue in Sugimoto’s foggier seascapes on display directly upstairs. Moreover, who else could portentously twist the seeming placid beauty of Tadao Ando’s rising concrete walls, into an almost frightful experience?
Robert Pruitt: Quiet As Kept
Nicole J. Caruth
Closes January 6, 2007
Quiet as kept could be said a few different ways; quiet as it's kept, quiet is kept. The meaning is secrecy, to keep quiet, not volunteering or distributing information on certain relations. It's often an expression used in [affairs] where sensitive knowledge must be kept secret in order to avoid [reprisals] from other groups within the same society, culture, or subculture.
-Anonymous contributor, www.urbandictionary.com
I suppose that by referencing the Urban Dictionary, I’m perpetuating the dissemination of the “inside information,” to which Robert A. Pruitt refers in his current gallery exhibition Quiet As Kept. As the title indicates, this exhibition explores visual subtleties of secrecy in African American culture through a few sculptures and six life-size, hand-drawn portraits of friends and neighbors from Houston’s Third Ward. The definite strength of the exhibition, these drawings suggest African American and “urban” culture through fashion—a pair of Nikes, a bell-shaped Kangol hat à la LL Cool J and Run DMC or the ornate pattern of Louis Vuitton. The sitter’s contemporary attire merges harmoniously with indicators of African dress and regalia. Quiet as Kept illustrates Pruitt’s maturation since his 2004 solo exhibition at Clementine Gallery of mostly tongue-in-cheek sculptures and especially his incredible draftsmanship.
The face is the mirror of the mind, and eyes without speaking confess the secrets of the heart.
-Saint Jerome (374 AD - 419 AD)
In Pruitt’s series of Conté drawings, secrecy is symbolized in the ways that attire and accessories shroud his subjects, thereby concealing their identity. The title Erika is the only indication of gender in a figure posed with her back to the viewer and wearing asexual clothing. Autumn faces the viewer and is clearly female. Sunglasses hide her eyes and the mirrors and nkisi figure depicted atop her clothing suggest a deflected gaze. A large mask conceals Medina, who sits in a rattan style of chair that evokes Huey P. Newton and the first Black Panther movement. These figures together appear as a community, a team of soldiers, if you will. Pruitt seems to create a new visual language based in polarities of old and new, secular and sacred; a covert visual tongue for the current generation. Unfortunately, birch wood frames enclose these drawings, sterilizing their surface and the jagged edges of the brown butcher paper upon which they are rendered.
Keep it secret. Keep it safe.
-Gandalf, Lord of the Rings I
Though Lord of the Rings may seem far removed, Pruitt’s point with this exhibition is no less the same warning that Gandalf gave to the hobbit Frodo Baggins. What Gandalf meant was that by keeping quiet about his inheritance of the One Ring, Frodo would be able to protect himself. As the saying goes, “To him that you tell your secret, you resign your liberty.” As part of the mainstream, what was once “a black thing, you wouldn’t understand,” is no longer exclusive. Communities (racial, cultural, religious or other) are appropriated and exploited when the door is constantly open to interlopers. What then do we keep for ourselves? What role does imagery play in this exchange?
Pruitt’s sculpture, Slave Bible, resonated with my own personal experience of race, family, religion and commonplace household objects. However, I won’t attempt to interpret this small white bible and the broken porcelain plates that jut from inside of it. Pruitt’s says, “It seems that one of the most damaging aspects of living the black experience is the constant blast of inside information being broadcast to the world.” On that note, you should interpret Slave Bible to the extent that your own cultural insight or suspicion will allow. I keep this one for myself.
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Phantom Captain at Apex Art
Closed November 25, 2006
Curated by Andrea Grover, founder of the Houston microcinema Aurora Picture Show, Phantom Captain: Art and Crowdsourcing engages the latter term and respective phenomenon. As Jeff Howe describes in Wired Magazine’s June 2006 issue, “crowdsourcing” is “a new form of corporate outsourcing of labor to armies of amateurs.” Models like Wikipedia, Ebay, Flickr, YouTube and Blogger are created by a designer or techie-architect of sorts and come to life through user-created content when users upload, share, rate and discuss material, therefore creating a database of images, a ranking (read value) system and, essentially, a community. Grover’s exploration of similar creative collaborations brings this trend into a contemporary exhibition context. One challenge Grover faces is the Web’s status as a quickly evolving medium whose legitimacy has yet to be fully realized by art folk. Suitably, Apexart is not your conventional art space.
It’s not often that I visit Apexart. Some of their previous exhibitions have lacked visual stimulation and were so academically convoluted that they would have been better left to print materials. That’s right folks; some ideas even with visual support are just better as publications and Phantom Captain is, for the most part, proof positive. While there was apparent effort to inflate web projects into three-dimensional objects and installations, Phantom Captain suffered from a visual and physical hollowness that plagues many technological art exhibitions.
One might think I detested this exhibition, but contrary. Ideologically, Phantom Captain was one of the most thought-provoking exhibitions that I have seen this year. After a close read of Grover’s essay and a subsequent walk-through it became clear that Grover has unearthed something quite profound. Between Howe’s notion of crowdsourcing and the selected web/art projects/collaborations was this: Will creative crowdsourcing initiatives change the way we determine what is art and who is an artist? Does crowdsourcing threaten to undermine the established value system and hierarchies of art? This is not a new dialogue, as Grover sites Joseph Beuys’ 1979 documentary Everyone is an Artist, but the concept is radical in any time period.
Amongst Grover’s illustrations of crowdsourcing was Harrell Fletcher’s online project, Learning to Love You More (LTLYM). This site imparts a series of “assignments” like the humorous #41: Document your bald spot; the timely #59: Interview someone who has experienced war; and the creative #30: Take a picture of strangers holding hands. The latter assignment’s installation at Apexart resembled a grid of color Polaroids, though presumably these images were printed using high-quality paper and a local inkjet printer. Who is the artist proper of LTLYM’s Assignment #30? The site designer? The collective community? Andrea Grover? Or the staff of Apexart? Instances of artists operating with complete autonomy are rarer than we think.
Any art institution that is really paying attention to the world outside has recognized the intrinsic power of the World Wide Web, not just as a marketing tool, but as a new medium to which they must turn their attention. The Web is a, and perhaps the, model of globally connected and faster paced societies in which creativity continues to be elemental. Phantom Captain makes for inspiring, open-minded and threatening dialogue in an often hermetic milieu.
The Scupture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air at deYoung Museum
Rina Faletti
On view through January 28th
The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa: Contours in the Air at San Francisco’s de Young Museum is the first major retrospective of work by modernist sculptor Ruth Asawa and focuses specifically on her wire sculpture. Regardless of the complexity of the forms and their repetitions and nestings, Asawa adhered to her practice of weaving even large sculptures from single, continuous wire strands. The resulting interlocking mesh surfaces reveal a technical virtuosity that is difficult to fathom as handwork.
The exhibition argues visually that Asawa’s organic wire forms can be traced to exercises she and fellow Black Mountain College students, including Robert Rauschenberg, were assigned by director and mentor Josef Albers in the late 1940s. In the first gallery, selected art school pieces demonstrate Asawa’s early interest in and development of the motifs to which she returned repeatedly throughout her career. Drawings from the late 1940s demonstrate an able and sensitive reliance on the single line. One such portrait, Marvin Lane of 1947, employs a single-line drafting practice that is indebted to Picasso’s neoclassical-style figural line drawings from around the same period. In the notes, drawings and exercises on display, Asawa practiced a kind of patterned automatic drawing Albers called “the meander,” which exhibits an obsession with repetitive patterning that came to found the basis of Asawa’s finely hand-woven looped wire and tied wire sculptures.
Samples of these exercises from Asawa’s own archive are exhibited near her first looped-wire works, baskets from the late 1940s made just after arriving at the college and inspired by visits to Native American basket weaving communities. She clearly absorbed the native forms and their fabrication on contact, then reconfigured them in her new medium, industrial wire. Over a couple of years, Asawa experimented with her original basket form, enlarging it in scale, elongating its shape and elaborating the vessel format until her sculptural object soon became a vertical series of irregularly shaped, closed wire “baskets” stacked one atop the other.
The works that command the most significant attention are these looped-wire hanging sculptures. The basic form Asawa invented was a vertically oriented, hanging wire sculpture whose fabrication was based on the interlocking and interweaving of single strands of thin industrial wire and which seems to have started with the single basket form. The works range in scale from room-high vertical sculptures from the 1950s and 1960s to miniatures of less than a foot in height made from thin copper wire made in recent years. The mature work presents a vertical series of irregular bulbous shapes stacked atop one another and whose organic irregularity undulates along the vertical axis. In Asawa’s most elaborate versions, she created a form-within-form structure in which smaller bulbs were woven inside larger ones; this results in a series of nested globes hanging in serial suspension, as if one wire bulb containing a smaller bubble within it has dripped from the one directly above. The larger forms are generally symmetrical, with the vertical axis dividing and balancing the composition of each piece. On close inspection the woven wire resembles open yarn work like crochet or macrame; unlike yarn, however, Asawa’s stiff wire medium permits the work to hold its shape in suspension.
Starting in the early 1960s, Asawa also worked in a style she called tied-wire sculpture, which she fashioned to resemble splaying tangles of bare twigs grouped, tied and patterned into bonsai-like sunbursts, branchings and tumbleweed shapes made from simple repetitions of slightly offset parallel lines. These tied-wire works look like sculptural versions of a kid’s Spirograph drawings from the 1960s.
Gallery lighting permits the work to expand the sculptural object into the viewer’s space: galleries are low-lit, but the wire works are spotlighted so that the wire weaving throws shadow-doubles of the works onto floors, ceilings and walls: intricate shadows of the wire handwork show up crisply within the clean outline of each sculpture’s organic whole. The doubling and repetition of the works in shadow enhances not only the refinement of the technical work, but also each form’s composition; additionally, the shadows complement sculptural groupings.
Additional Asawa sculpture on permanent exhibition in the de Young includes an installed grouping of small sculptures suspended in the ground-floor elevator lobby of the monumental tower in the museum’s new Herzog and de Meuron building, which opened in October 2005. The exhibition makes it plain that Ruth Asawa holds an important place in the history of modernist sculpture by virtue of her use of strong design principles, materials borrowed from commerce and industry and reliance on a practice of handwork at such a fine level of technical mastery as to appear to be machine-made.
