issue
# 64, February 24, 2006 Austin, TX
I. San
Antonio: Talking
with SAMA Director Marion Oettinger about the Museum's
New Contemporary Art Endowment,
Mark Flood and Zane Lewis at Finesilver Gallery &
Southern Space Project's Dancin' and TonightII. Austin: José Clemente Orozco: Graphic Work at
Mexic-Arte Museum, Le Superfantastique! at Concordia University & an Interview with the Founders of Okay Mountain
III. Houston: Mel Chin: Do Not Ask Me at The Station Museum & Eva Hesse Drawing at The Menil Collection
IV. Elsewhere: Carsten Höller's Amusement Park at MASS MoCA, Cornelia Parker and Nicholas Nixon at MAMFW & Alejandro Cesarco at Art in General
V. Press 1 for Announcements, Press 0 for the Operator
I.
San Antonio: Talking
with SAMA Director Marion Oettinger about the Museum's New Contemporary
Art Endowment, Mark Flood
and Zane Lewis at Finesilver Gallery & Southern Space Project's Dancin'
and Tonight
Talking with SAMA Director Marion Oettinger about the Museum's New Contemporary Art Endowment
The San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA) is celebrating its silver anniversary with a handful of landmark events including the Latin American portraiture exhibit Retratos, organized in partnership with the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and El Museo del Barrio of New York City. Perhaps the most exciting news, however, was the January 11 announcement that Houston’s Brown Foundation is endowing a contemporary curator position with a $2 million gift. For the past two decades, San Antonio’s great strength has been its artist-run galleries and experimental spaces, from Cactus Bra to Sala Diaz, but the city has not had a collecting institution that focuses substantively on contemporary art (although the McNay has made strides in this direction in recent years, thanks in large part to their Contemporary Collectors Forum).
SAMA Director Marion Oettinger says that the museum plans to begin interviewing candidates for the new position in early April. He took a few moments to discuss this crucial development with … might be good’s guest interviewer Elaine Wolff.
…mbg: What will be the museum’s main goal once you have a contemporary art curator in place?
Marion Oettinger: The first goal is just to sort of start to engage the community, particularly the contemporary community, which is an area we haven’t been able to play in seriously because we haven’t had a curator. [How to accomplish this?] Well, that will be up to, of course, the new curator. We hope to, as we’ve done in years past, maybe organize some exhibitions and start collecting again. Growing the collection, and then publishing. But we’re interested also in having someone who is able to understand and articulate the place of contemporary art in the full range of artistic expression through time and space. And to talk about how Texas contemporary art or U.S. contemporary art relates to this international expression, which is so strong. And then, perhaps talk about how it’s informed by, or not informed by, previous iterations of painting.
…mbg: Are there specific areas in which you’re looking to grow the collection?
MO: One thing that we don’t want—at least I think they serve the community very, very well indeed—we don’t want a Blue Star and we don’t’ want an Artpace, in the sense that we don’t want necessarily to be collecting in areas that are highly experimental. We would like to have cutting-edge exhibits, but we would rather sort of think in terms of a permanent collection, and therefore a commitment to the storing and care of these materials. We’d like to go with artists who sort of have a strong record in the contemporary.
We also have an important collection of modern art and we would like for this person secondarily to take care of and exhibit that. Photography is another area in which we have good materials. As long as I can remember, we’ve been inviting guest curators to do those shows.
...mbg: I think the public perception has been that in the past SAMA's board wasn’t terribly interested in the contemporary.
MO: Poppycock. The thing that people don’t understand is that museums like ours, like most museums that are collecting institutions, you have to have a commitment for a curator, because if you don’t have a curator you don’t have anything. [You have to have] somebody to fight the battles, somebody to bring their expertise to the museum, and to integrate it into the community. That’s first of all. Second of all, you’ve got to start with a collection. In the case of Western antiquities, we came with one of the best in the country. The same thing’s true with Latin American, and the same thing’s true with Asian.
In the case of the Western antiquities, once we had a committed position dedicated to caring for the collection, and explaining it and so forth, we started getting collections. For example, we have the Ancient Greek glass collection as a result of that. We had no presence in ancient glass at all, and all of a sudden when they realized that here was a museum that had an endowed position, in perpetuity there would be somebody professionally able to care for it …
…mbg: In other words, once you have a curator in place you can begin to approach individuals or entities with collections that may be looking for somewhere to place them.
MO: That’s right. Because one thing you don’t want is a fly-by-night situation when you have a collection that you're invested in emotionally and in other ways, to all of a sudden go into French paperweights the next week. It happens.
…mbg: So, who has the best French paperweight collection?
MO: That would be something, wouldn’t it?
Elaine Wolff is the arts editor of the San Antonio Current. Mark Flood and Zane Lewis at Finesilver Gallery
On view through March 15, 2006
Michelle Valdez
What can be exhumed from a landscape siphoned of pigment? Can maudlin artifacts persist in a culture intolerant of obsolescence? A new exhibition at Finesilver Gallery houses two complementary artists, Mark Flood and Zane Lewis, whose delicate paintings and alternative processes sift through these questions.
San Antonio artist (and Finesilver employee) Zane Lewis houses paint-by-numbers schematics in pristine, white shadow boxes (see above image). Each work anxiously awaits admiration of its chromatic effrontery, lacking color except where it bursts from unanticipated edges. Puddles of cerulean and chlorophyll-green dripping from top or bottom edges drain the works of easy meaning. Complicated patterns—derived from photographs of water digitally converted into paint-by-number maps—carve migraines on the optic nerves that attempt to assimilate their lines into cohesion. Cryptic color-coding adds elements of weather patterning and topographical cartography to each piece, a curious technique particular to the low-brow origins of painting-by-number.
Houston artist Mark Flood drags elements of decay and domesticity into his paintings. Rolling paint over woven objects—wet shawls, lace table runners and rugs—laid on brightly stained canvases, the artist guides viewers with subtlety into fluid dreamscapes. In Rooster (2002), a solitary fowl woven into torn lace is soaked in an oxidized rust hue and pressed between layers. It floats weightlessly upon a pale walnut background. Flood's paintings consistently allure and delight with the palpable dichotomy of fresh paint and disused shawls or lace doilies. The Demon (2002) plucks itself from sporadic green ether; delicate threads of sputum erupt from its ravenous mouth. Flood allows discarded and limp strands of thin blankets to create a soft space where, bearing titles such as Lantern (2005) and Royal Carriage (2004), impossibly thin versions of romantic objects coexist within the abundant gallery space.
The counterweight of Zane Lewis’ tightly skewed color-coded cells makes Flood's endeavors invitingly expansive. The two bodies of work converse across a gallery space that harbors spectacular potential in the persnickety seas of art and patronage.
Michelle Valdez is a writer and performance artist living in San Antonio.
Talking with SAMA Director Marion Oettinger about the Museum's New Contemporary Art Endowment
The San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA) is celebrating its silver anniversary with a handful of landmark events including the Latin American portraiture exhibit Retratos, organized in partnership with the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery and El Museo del Barrio of New York City. Perhaps the most exciting news, however, was the January 11 announcement that Houston’s Brown Foundation is endowing a contemporary curator position with a $2 million gift. For the past two decades, San Antonio’s great strength has been its artist-run galleries and experimental spaces, from Cactus Bra to Sala Diaz, but the city has not had a collecting institution that focuses substantively on contemporary art (although the McNay has made strides in this direction in recent years, thanks in large part to their Contemporary Collectors Forum).
SAMA Director Marion Oettinger says that the museum plans to begin interviewing candidates for the new position in early April. He took a few moments to discuss this crucial development with … might be good’s guest interviewer Elaine Wolff.
…mbg: What will be the museum’s main goal once you have a contemporary art curator in place?
Marion Oettinger: The first goal is just to sort of start to engage the community, particularly the contemporary community, which is an area we haven’t been able to play in seriously because we haven’t had a curator. [How to accomplish this?] Well, that will be up to, of course, the new curator. We hope to, as we’ve done in years past, maybe organize some exhibitions and start collecting again. Growing the collection, and then publishing. But we’re interested also in having someone who is able to understand and articulate the place of contemporary art in the full range of artistic expression through time and space. And to talk about how Texas contemporary art or U.S. contemporary art relates to this international expression, which is so strong. And then, perhaps talk about how it’s informed by, or not informed by, previous iterations of painting.
…mbg: Are there specific areas in which you’re looking to grow the collection?
MO: One thing that we don’t want—at least I think they serve the community very, very well indeed—we don’t want a Blue Star and we don’t’ want an Artpace, in the sense that we don’t want necessarily to be collecting in areas that are highly experimental. We would like to have cutting-edge exhibits, but we would rather sort of think in terms of a permanent collection, and therefore a commitment to the storing and care of these materials. We’d like to go with artists who sort of have a strong record in the contemporary.
We also have an important collection of modern art and we would like for this person secondarily to take care of and exhibit that. Photography is another area in which we have good materials. As long as I can remember, we’ve been inviting guest curators to do those shows.
...mbg: I think the public perception has been that in the past SAMA's board wasn’t terribly interested in the contemporary.
MO: Poppycock. The thing that people don’t understand is that museums like ours, like most museums that are collecting institutions, you have to have a commitment for a curator, because if you don’t have a curator you don’t have anything. [You have to have] somebody to fight the battles, somebody to bring their expertise to the museum, and to integrate it into the community. That’s first of all. Second of all, you’ve got to start with a collection. In the case of Western antiquities, we came with one of the best in the country. The same thing’s true with Latin American, and the same thing’s true with Asian.
In the case of the Western antiquities, once we had a committed position dedicated to caring for the collection, and explaining it and so forth, we started getting collections. For example, we have the Ancient Greek glass collection as a result of that. We had no presence in ancient glass at all, and all of a sudden when they realized that here was a museum that had an endowed position, in perpetuity there would be somebody professionally able to care for it …
…mbg: In other words, once you have a curator in place you can begin to approach individuals or entities with collections that may be looking for somewhere to place them.
MO: That’s right. Because one thing you don’t want is a fly-by-night situation when you have a collection that you're invested in emotionally and in other ways, to all of a sudden go into French paperweights the next week. It happens.
…mbg: So, who has the best French paperweight collection?
MO: That would be something, wouldn’t it?
Elaine Wolff is the arts editor of the San Antonio Current. Mark Flood and Zane Lewis at Finesilver Gallery
On view through March 15, 2006
Michelle Valdez
What can be exhumed from a landscape siphoned of pigment? Can maudlin artifacts persist in a culture intolerant of obsolescence? A new exhibition at Finesilver Gallery houses two complementary artists, Mark Flood and Zane Lewis, whose delicate paintings and alternative processes sift through these questions.
San Antonio artist (and Finesilver employee) Zane Lewis houses paint-by-numbers schematics in pristine, white shadow boxes (see above image). Each work anxiously awaits admiration of its chromatic effrontery, lacking color except where it bursts from unanticipated edges. Puddles of cerulean and chlorophyll-green dripping from top or bottom edges drain the works of easy meaning. Complicated patterns—derived from photographs of water digitally converted into paint-by-number maps—carve migraines on the optic nerves that attempt to assimilate their lines into cohesion. Cryptic color-coding adds elements of weather patterning and topographical cartography to each piece, a curious technique particular to the low-brow origins of painting-by-number.
Houston artist Mark Flood drags elements of decay and domesticity into his paintings. Rolling paint over woven objects—wet shawls, lace table runners and rugs—laid on brightly stained canvases, the artist guides viewers with subtlety into fluid dreamscapes. In Rooster (2002), a solitary fowl woven into torn lace is soaked in an oxidized rust hue and pressed between layers. It floats weightlessly upon a pale walnut background. Flood's paintings consistently allure and delight with the palpable dichotomy of fresh paint and disused shawls or lace doilies. The Demon (2002) plucks itself from sporadic green ether; delicate threads of sputum erupt from its ravenous mouth. Flood allows discarded and limp strands of thin blankets to create a soft space where, bearing titles such as Lantern (2005) and Royal Carriage (2004), impossibly thin versions of romantic objects coexist within the abundant gallery space.
The counterweight of Zane Lewis’ tightly skewed color-coded cells makes Flood's endeavors invitingly expansive. The two bodies of work converse across a gallery space that harbors spectacular potential in the persnickety seas of art and patronage.
Michelle Valdez is a writer and performance artist living in San Antonio.
Southern
Space Project Presents Tonight and Dancin'
Portions on view through March 11
Katie Pell
Charlie Morris’ third curatorial project in the Southern Music Building’s rambling concrete spaces, an ongoing program known as the Southern Space Project, drew large crowds on opening night. Morris’ success has encouraged other art spaces to relocate to his building as well. For Tonight, a title that refers to the heavily performance-based group of artists, Morris invited San Antonio's Cruz Ortiz, Bunnyphonic and David Jurist to install work on the building’s upper floors. He also invited Glasstire editor Rachel Cook to curate a complementary exhibition on the first floor level. Cook’s Dancin’ featured dance-themed videos from Austin and Houston artists Jill Pangalo, Jared Steffensen, Erick Michaud and Jenny Schlief and her inclusion of Matthew Rodriguez’s puppet performance solidified the evening’s overall prankster nature.
David Jurist installed a Hollywood Sign-style text piece (in plywood with wooden cast shadow) that faces the interior from below a set of windows. A set of steel letters skids up the freight ramp, spelling out the same phrase, “That is,” which is again echoed in its shadow. Jurist’s past works have been more formally contemplative, shown in a gallery’s white cube and more extensively crafted with lots to see. This brief work seems to be specific to the space with consideration given to the viewer and the industrial setting—a building where sheet music was once printed. The decontextualized phrase, coupled with the venue and old prop set construction, give the illusion of an unintentional joke, a fragment discarded some time ago that has meaning only in retrospect. It is the only piece in the show that cannot escape the building.
Bunnyphonic is a broken toy. Michelle Valdez (yes, the same Michelle Valdez who authored the article above) transforms into her alter-ego by donning a rabbit-shaped piñata head with a patched and somewhat dingy homemade bunny suit. Dressed as such, she plays the accordion and a keyboard. For Tonight, she built a life-sized cardboard rabbit hutch decorated with candy canes, plastic birds, straw bed and bunnies. Its strange effect is half-North Pole Wonderland, half-Soweto makeshift. It was perfect for an overlooked, big-dreaming and slightly sad bunny. She played to her audience as a broken chanteuse, almost failing, a toy version of Tom Waits. Not surprisingly, seeing her in a gallery, however rough, strips her performance of much of its poetry. Better to hear the longing accordion at Bennigan’s or at the end of the aisle at Bed Bath & Beyond because that’s how she shines—as a wrenching contrast to all that’s new, time efficient and not worth patching.
Cruz Ortiz departed from his usually dead-on portrayal of a very specific San Antonio scene—suburban American kids of Hispanic descent—to address the experience of border crossing. Almost entirely rejecting drawing (there are still dashed lines that imply paths), he exhibits written text in black marker on butcher paper. While this departure should pare the piece down to razor sharp focus, abandoning the atmospheric advantage of photography or painting, or even the repetitive chanting of his previous silkscreen installations, the opposite proves true. Without written or depicted narrative these briefly recounted border stories lack the specificity needed to surprise and jar the viewer out of the familiar dialogue surrounding the politics of the Mexico-US border. Cruz Ortiz is a true visual poet and works with a perfect combination of cynicism, love, mockery and nostalgia. These skills will be formidable when panned out and put to task on the world at large.
Katie Pell is an artist living and working in San Antonio.
Portions on view through March 11
Katie Pell
Charlie Morris’ third curatorial project in the Southern Music Building’s rambling concrete spaces, an ongoing program known as the Southern Space Project, drew large crowds on opening night. Morris’ success has encouraged other art spaces to relocate to his building as well. For Tonight, a title that refers to the heavily performance-based group of artists, Morris invited San Antonio's Cruz Ortiz, Bunnyphonic and David Jurist to install work on the building’s upper floors. He also invited Glasstire editor Rachel Cook to curate a complementary exhibition on the first floor level. Cook’s Dancin’ featured dance-themed videos from Austin and Houston artists Jill Pangalo, Jared Steffensen, Erick Michaud and Jenny Schlief and her inclusion of Matthew Rodriguez’s puppet performance solidified the evening’s overall prankster nature.
David Jurist installed a Hollywood Sign-style text piece (in plywood with wooden cast shadow) that faces the interior from below a set of windows. A set of steel letters skids up the freight ramp, spelling out the same phrase, “That is,” which is again echoed in its shadow. Jurist’s past works have been more formally contemplative, shown in a gallery’s white cube and more extensively crafted with lots to see. This brief work seems to be specific to the space with consideration given to the viewer and the industrial setting—a building where sheet music was once printed. The decontextualized phrase, coupled with the venue and old prop set construction, give the illusion of an unintentional joke, a fragment discarded some time ago that has meaning only in retrospect. It is the only piece in the show that cannot escape the building.
Bunnyphonic is a broken toy. Michelle Valdez (yes, the same Michelle Valdez who authored the article above) transforms into her alter-ego by donning a rabbit-shaped piñata head with a patched and somewhat dingy homemade bunny suit. Dressed as such, she plays the accordion and a keyboard. For Tonight, she built a life-sized cardboard rabbit hutch decorated with candy canes, plastic birds, straw bed and bunnies. Its strange effect is half-North Pole Wonderland, half-Soweto makeshift. It was perfect for an overlooked, big-dreaming and slightly sad bunny. She played to her audience as a broken chanteuse, almost failing, a toy version of Tom Waits. Not surprisingly, seeing her in a gallery, however rough, strips her performance of much of its poetry. Better to hear the longing accordion at Bennigan’s or at the end of the aisle at Bed Bath & Beyond because that’s how she shines—as a wrenching contrast to all that’s new, time efficient and not worth patching.
Cruz Ortiz departed from his usually dead-on portrayal of a very specific San Antonio scene—suburban American kids of Hispanic descent—to address the experience of border crossing. Almost entirely rejecting drawing (there are still dashed lines that imply paths), he exhibits written text in black marker on butcher paper. While this departure should pare the piece down to razor sharp focus, abandoning the atmospheric advantage of photography or painting, or even the repetitive chanting of his previous silkscreen installations, the opposite proves true. Without written or depicted narrative these briefly recounted border stories lack the specificity needed to surprise and jar the viewer out of the familiar dialogue surrounding the politics of the Mexico-US border. Cruz Ortiz is a true visual poet and works with a perfect combination of cynicism, love, mockery and nostalgia. These skills will be formidable when panned out and put to task on the world at large.
Katie Pell is an artist living and working in San Antonio.
|
San
Antonio Museum of Art 200 West Jones Avenue San Antonio, Texas 210.978.8100 www.samuseum.org Finesilver Gallery 816 Camaron, No. 1.2 San Antonio, Texas 210.354.3333 www.finesilver.com Southern Space Project 1100 Broadway San Antonio, Texas 210.269.7264 |
II.
Austin: José Clemente Orozco: Graphic
Work at
Mexic-Arte Museum, Le Superfantastique! at Concordia University & an Interview with the Founders of Okay Mountain
José Clemente Orozco: Graphic Work at Mexic-Arte Museum
On view through March 19, 2006
Michael Wellen
When José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949) first exhibited a series of works on paper in 1916, his images of depraved people and brothels disturbed one art critic so much that in his review he called Orozco “a disillusioned youth with the soul of an old prostitute.” That writer never would have predicted that Orozco, along with Diego Rivera and David Alvaro Siqueiros, would become one of the most celebrated and influential artists in Mexico. Though Orozco is most widely known for his involvement in the Muralist Movement during the 1920s, the current exhibition of his graphic work at the Mexic-Arte Museum in downtown Austin provides a rare chance to view his masterful range and gain a more nuanced understanding of the artist.
Tucked away in the rear gallery of the museum, the exhibition is comprised of forty prints—lithographs, dry point, etchings and aquatints—that Orozco created between 1928 and 1944. In early works, such as Flag (1928) and Requiem (1928), Orozco presents stark visions of the Mexican Revolution. An unmarked flag, a destroyed house, a mourning family: these elements convey violence and a sense of forlorn revolutionary ideals in a way that exposes humanity in all its grotesqueness. Depicting twisting performers onstage in Vaudeville in Harlem (1928), the artist shares a moment of quiet delight. His later series present clowns and contortionists who seem self-composed in the face of chaos.
Orozco often left viewers bewildered by his references and symbolism. During an exhibition of his work at MoMA in 1940, the artist circulated a pamphlet criticizing the notion that his art should be explained: “The public refuses TO SEE painting. They want TO HEAR painting.” Accordingly, Orozco’s art does not spell out a clear message.
A slender exhibition pamphlet and wall labels provide supplemental information that may help some of Mexic-Arte's visitors interpret Orozco’s work. For further illumination, the museum organized a public gallery tour with art historian Clemente Orozco, José Clemente’s grandson. During the tour, the younger Orozco highlighted how his grandfather experimented with each printing technique and revealed to visitors the historical background and disguised symbolism of individual works.
Considering Orozco’s historical importance in the art of Mexico and the astonishing quality of his work on display, it is regrettable that the exhibition wasn’t given more prominence. Here is an exceptional opportunity to view a valuable and unexpected collection of work. It so happens that the critic who once called Orozco a “disillusioned youth,” also may have unwittingly acknowledged his expressive power. While the critic saw only “the soul of an old prostitute,” the prints exhibited at Mexic-Arte may reveal to us the soul of a keenly observant artist.
Michael Wellen is a doctoral student specializing in modern Latin American art history at The University of Texas at Austin.
Le Superfantastique! at Concordia University
On view through March 9
Kurt Dominick
There is very little super or fantastic and, oddly, nothing terribly French about Le Superfantastique!, on view through March 9th at the Gallery at Concordia University. The promising title remains just that; on the edge of potential. It also rescues the show from being just another university hallway-hang. There is an intelligent curatorial hand at work here and if we are supposed to believe it is jeweled-gloved and glowing, then all the better for the art it holds.
The biggest problem with Le Superfantastique! is its stage: an atrium cum elevator bank cum hallway. The gallery, an afterthought, finds a place amongst vents, restrooms and a stunning overhead flat screen messaging system. The walls are orange/yellow/brown brick and the style is institutional drab. The show does its best to wrestle with these limitations by filling the space with twenty-five works including some sculpture. But few pieces openly test the architecture’s expectations for things mediocre.
One exception, and quite possibly the best single work in the show, is Eric Gibbon’s Andre (no dates are given for any works in the exhibition). A large canvas attempts a cloud-form and a dreamy blue sky. Blank sketchbook pages and a few other paper scraps bed the dripping acrylic. Somewhere between J.M.W. Turner, Cy Twombly and Mark Bradford, it’s got gravity, float and an almost-dire physicality that beats its wall. Two other works by Gibbons feel trite by comparison.
Another young artist, Greg Piwonka, plays a similar brut material game with a series of linear or grid drawing arrangements. Microphones, money, sneakers, flowers and a cheetah are treated to kindergarten contour-line cognition. It looks more stupid than it really is, though probably not by much. Another grid of loosely pinned paper, this time with broken letters spelling out phrases like “chill/stop/frontin/open” and “learn/share/ordie/tryin,” reads as both more elegant and thoughtful.
Comparable plays with abstraction define the show. Cinique Hicks turns out a very strong showing of very small portraits, each a square matrix of 1/4” to 1” vertical and horizontal swatches. They are both lush and terse, certain and confident, known and unknown. The kicker: the subjects are anonymous internet photographs. Alyssa Reich’s two canvases take a more freewheeling spin, a spiral actually, into a sub-conscious landscape that is equal doses Babes in Toyland, Alien and Max Ernst. They are fantastical, but not quite "Le Super…”. The color and line in The Red Balloon are spot-on, but both images read pitifully flat and, moreover, feel wrongly fitted to their framing canvas.
David Kroft’s sculptures sport some whimsy—a jester-like crown and a stars and stripes house key—though with potentially graver consequences. Each sculptural-device is a masterful construction of difficult materials: glass, marble, precious and antiquated metals. Yet contemporary titles like Amerikey and Homeland Security fail to resonate within his early-industrial, scientific aesthetic. Likewise, we cannot be sure whether Forrest Elliott’s paintings are exercises in abstraction or irony. Regardless, in Paint Quality and Brushwork with Some Pictorial Space Thrown In he steals a great moment. Near the middle of the canvas a bright turquoise illuminates, echoing some turquoise glass in a neighboring Kroft sculpture. The painting may be amateurish, but it’s valiant and, good or bad, in this show it’s fantastic, even fantastique. Kurt Dominick is pursuing an MFA in studio art at The University of Texas at Austin.
An Interview with the Founders of Okay Mountain
Okay Mountain is a new Austin gallery space that will open later this spring. This week we had a chance to talk with the gallery’s founders: Sterling Allen, Tim Brown, Peat Duggins, Justin Goldwater, Nathan Green, Ryan Hennessee, Enoch Rios, Josh Rios, and Michael Sieben.
…might be good: So, what has brought you all together and when did you decide to start a gallery?
Okay Mountain: We met through a common interest in promoting and making art. Although we have been talking informally about this space for some time, it wasn’t until the last three months that things got serious.…
...mbg: What part of town is the gallery going to be in?
OM: On the East Side—Cesar Chavez and Navasota. We are looking at a 1,200 square foot warehouse space that used to be a sculpture studio and before that a motorcycle garage.
…mbg: Give us a sense of the sorts of work we’ll be likely to see in your space.
OM: We plan to show a mixture of emerging and established artists that represent contemporary culture from a regional to international perspective. As a collective, we all have varying tastes and interests and will draw on this diversity to keep the space unpredictable.
…mbg: Do you have your first show planned?
OM: Our first show is scheduled for the last week of April. We’ll have a website up in the next month which will have more information about the gallery.
…mbg: Last question: Does the gallery’s name, “Okay Mountain,” have significance?
OM: Definitely.
Mexic-Arte Museum, Le Superfantastique! at Concordia University & an Interview with the Founders of Okay Mountain
José Clemente Orozco: Graphic Work at Mexic-Arte Museum
On view through March 19, 2006
Michael Wellen
When José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949) first exhibited a series of works on paper in 1916, his images of depraved people and brothels disturbed one art critic so much that in his review he called Orozco “a disillusioned youth with the soul of an old prostitute.” That writer never would have predicted that Orozco, along with Diego Rivera and David Alvaro Siqueiros, would become one of the most celebrated and influential artists in Mexico. Though Orozco is most widely known for his involvement in the Muralist Movement during the 1920s, the current exhibition of his graphic work at the Mexic-Arte Museum in downtown Austin provides a rare chance to view his masterful range and gain a more nuanced understanding of the artist.
Tucked away in the rear gallery of the museum, the exhibition is comprised of forty prints—lithographs, dry point, etchings and aquatints—that Orozco created between 1928 and 1944. In early works, such as Flag (1928) and Requiem (1928), Orozco presents stark visions of the Mexican Revolution. An unmarked flag, a destroyed house, a mourning family: these elements convey violence and a sense of forlorn revolutionary ideals in a way that exposes humanity in all its grotesqueness. Depicting twisting performers onstage in Vaudeville in Harlem (1928), the artist shares a moment of quiet delight. His later series present clowns and contortionists who seem self-composed in the face of chaos.
Orozco often left viewers bewildered by his references and symbolism. During an exhibition of his work at MoMA in 1940, the artist circulated a pamphlet criticizing the notion that his art should be explained: “The public refuses TO SEE painting. They want TO HEAR painting.” Accordingly, Orozco’s art does not spell out a clear message.
A slender exhibition pamphlet and wall labels provide supplemental information that may help some of Mexic-Arte's visitors interpret Orozco’s work. For further illumination, the museum organized a public gallery tour with art historian Clemente Orozco, José Clemente’s grandson. During the tour, the younger Orozco highlighted how his grandfather experimented with each printing technique and revealed to visitors the historical background and disguised symbolism of individual works.
Considering Orozco’s historical importance in the art of Mexico and the astonishing quality of his work on display, it is regrettable that the exhibition wasn’t given more prominence. Here is an exceptional opportunity to view a valuable and unexpected collection of work. It so happens that the critic who once called Orozco a “disillusioned youth,” also may have unwittingly acknowledged his expressive power. While the critic saw only “the soul of an old prostitute,” the prints exhibited at Mexic-Arte may reveal to us the soul of a keenly observant artist.
Michael Wellen is a doctoral student specializing in modern Latin American art history at The University of Texas at Austin.
Le Superfantastique! at Concordia University
On view through March 9
Kurt Dominick
There is very little super or fantastic and, oddly, nothing terribly French about Le Superfantastique!, on view through March 9th at the Gallery at Concordia University. The promising title remains just that; on the edge of potential. It also rescues the show from being just another university hallway-hang. There is an intelligent curatorial hand at work here and if we are supposed to believe it is jeweled-gloved and glowing, then all the better for the art it holds.
The biggest problem with Le Superfantastique! is its stage: an atrium cum elevator bank cum hallway. The gallery, an afterthought, finds a place amongst vents, restrooms and a stunning overhead flat screen messaging system. The walls are orange/yellow/brown brick and the style is institutional drab. The show does its best to wrestle with these limitations by filling the space with twenty-five works including some sculpture. But few pieces openly test the architecture’s expectations for things mediocre.
One exception, and quite possibly the best single work in the show, is Eric Gibbon’s Andre (no dates are given for any works in the exhibition). A large canvas attempts a cloud-form and a dreamy blue sky. Blank sketchbook pages and a few other paper scraps bed the dripping acrylic. Somewhere between J.M.W. Turner, Cy Twombly and Mark Bradford, it’s got gravity, float and an almost-dire physicality that beats its wall. Two other works by Gibbons feel trite by comparison.
Another young artist, Greg Piwonka, plays a similar brut material game with a series of linear or grid drawing arrangements. Microphones, money, sneakers, flowers and a cheetah are treated to kindergarten contour-line cognition. It looks more stupid than it really is, though probably not by much. Another grid of loosely pinned paper, this time with broken letters spelling out phrases like “chill/stop/frontin/open” and “learn/share/ordie/tryin,” reads as both more elegant and thoughtful.
Comparable plays with abstraction define the show. Cinique Hicks turns out a very strong showing of very small portraits, each a square matrix of 1/4” to 1” vertical and horizontal swatches. They are both lush and terse, certain and confident, known and unknown. The kicker: the subjects are anonymous internet photographs. Alyssa Reich’s two canvases take a more freewheeling spin, a spiral actually, into a sub-conscious landscape that is equal doses Babes in Toyland, Alien and Max Ernst. They are fantastical, but not quite "Le Super…”. The color and line in The Red Balloon are spot-on, but both images read pitifully flat and, moreover, feel wrongly fitted to their framing canvas.
David Kroft’s sculptures sport some whimsy—a jester-like crown and a stars and stripes house key—though with potentially graver consequences. Each sculptural-device is a masterful construction of difficult materials: glass, marble, precious and antiquated metals. Yet contemporary titles like Amerikey and Homeland Security fail to resonate within his early-industrial, scientific aesthetic. Likewise, we cannot be sure whether Forrest Elliott’s paintings are exercises in abstraction or irony. Regardless, in Paint Quality and Brushwork with Some Pictorial Space Thrown In he steals a great moment. Near the middle of the canvas a bright turquoise illuminates, echoing some turquoise glass in a neighboring Kroft sculpture. The painting may be amateurish, but it’s valiant and, good or bad, in this show it’s fantastic, even fantastique. Kurt Dominick is pursuing an MFA in studio art at The University of Texas at Austin.
An Interview with the Founders of Okay Mountain
Okay Mountain is a new Austin gallery space that will open later this spring. This week we had a chance to talk with the gallery’s founders: Sterling Allen, Tim Brown, Peat Duggins, Justin Goldwater, Nathan Green, Ryan Hennessee, Enoch Rios, Josh Rios, and Michael Sieben.
…might be good: So, what has brought you all together and when did you decide to start a gallery?
Okay Mountain: We met through a common interest in promoting and making art. Although we have been talking informally about this space for some time, it wasn’t until the last three months that things got serious.…
...mbg: What part of town is the gallery going to be in?
OM: On the East Side—Cesar Chavez and Navasota. We are looking at a 1,200 square foot warehouse space that used to be a sculpture studio and before that a motorcycle garage.
…mbg: Give us a sense of the sorts of work we’ll be likely to see in your space.
OM: We plan to show a mixture of emerging and established artists that represent contemporary culture from a regional to international perspective. As a collective, we all have varying tastes and interests and will draw on this diversity to keep the space unpredictable.
…mbg: Do you have your first show planned?
OM: Our first show is scheduled for the last week of April. We’ll have a website up in the next month which will have more information about the gallery.
…mbg: Last question: Does the gallery’s name, “Okay Mountain,” have significance?
OM: Definitely.
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Mexic-Arte Museum 419 Congress Avenue Austin, Texas 512.480.9373 www.mexic-artemuseum.org The Gallery at Concordia 3400 I-35 North Austin, Texas 512.486.2000 www.concordia.edu Okay Mountain ...Coming in April! |
III.
Houston:
Mel Chin: Do Not Ask Me at The Station Museum & Eva
Hesse Drawing at The Menil Collection
Mel Chin: Do Not Ask Me at The Station Museum
On view until April 2006
Barna Kantor
The first work that greets visitors to Mel Chin’s exhibition Do Not Ask Me at The Station Museum in Houston is made of cast bronze and extends through a temporary wall. Shape of a Lie (2005)—further described by its label as “a psycho-biomorphic portrait of a lie”—starts on one side of a wall as a one-to-one rendition of Mr. Chin’s mouth and tongue and ends on the other side as a large bronze bubble ready to burst and also growing “legs,” like a heavy sack of testicles. For the record, nobody, not even Mr. Chin, thinks that he is a liar. Chin makes this self-flagellating gesture in order to unleash heavy demands on his visitor’s sense of history and their moral and aesthetic assumptions. Shape of a Lie serves as an introduction to an exhibition that stresses the urgency of self-examination in the midst of a new rhetoric that we Americans have been mastering since 2001. This rhetoric maintains illusions, narratives and political discourses and it also creates taboos, half-truths and conspiracies. The underlying reality, however, is massively exploding violence that increasingly tests environmental and moral boundaries. Chin’s works are catalysts to ground rhetoric in reality and find ways to address that reality with a fresh counter-discourse.
All of the close to three dozen works, which range from jewelry to painting to installation, address historical connections, mainly in the context of US/Western agression. Some of the references are based on events so recent we do not yet have language for them; others are better documented and more embedded in our collective consciousness. Chin is well aware that a historical reconciliation of Guatemala, for instance, cannot happen without “fact-finding,” admittance and healing. Loom (2005), a large-scale installation that addresses the US-aided Guatemalan massacres of the 1980s, is a catalyst for a new language to address the unspeakable.
Another installation, Render (2003), features the weepy eyes and mouth of George Bush II as they poke out of the flat black velvety surface that this abbreviated portrait is painted on, which is surrounded by a frame of military steel. Bush, in his “mask,” faces the fresh remains of a blown-up Palestinian splattered on an opposite wall. Pieces of the Palestinian’s scarf, the kufia or kaffiyeh, mix with flesh and blood to form the Palestinian version of a map of the West Bank. The white wall behind these materials coalesces into a negative image of Israeli settlements and roads. The audience, needless to say, stands between the mask and the map. The white cube that houses this installation is covered in white muslin, a fabric significant for its traditional use by both Jews and Arabs.
Chin’s “unwearable” jewelry pieces are particularly precious. Cluster (2005-6) is a body-sized cylinder of silver mesh that, like a spider web, captures the fragments of a golden cluster bomb that has exploded inside its center. For those of us who have never seen US-made cluster bombs, they are actually very sculptural; sexy, but fatal devices. Terrapene Carolina (Hillbilly Armor) (2005) realizes rumors of US troops stationed in Iraq who use scraps to reinforce the bottom of their Humvees. Made of concrete slabs, smashed shopping carts, wood panels and shiny brass plates they form the belly of a giant animal hung in a menacing tilt above the spectator.
Do Not Ask Me is not your usual art show. It represents a high level of political art that does not preach but rather connects external events in such a way that they remain uncomfortable, unanswered questions. The events become proximal by inventing and reintroducing cultural symbols as raw materials of a counter rhetoric. Chin gives physical form to these ideas, most often as references to the human body—the common ground we all cohabit. He calls for symbolical actions in the emancipative art traditions of Latin America. The artist's war is fought with cultural representations and the redefinition of symbols and Chin’s most valuable accomplishment is to combine this artmaking tradition with the dictionary of cultural resistance inside the US. He creates a position unique to himself as an artist who addresses worldwide power differences from the center.
Barna Kantor is an artist living in Austin and working in Houston.
Eva Hesse Drawing at The Menil Collection
On view through April 23, 2006
Jack Massey
“Drawings. Lines, dots. Rigid, loose. Dashed. Washes. Light to dark. Gradation. Cross hatch.” These words, taken from one of Eva Hesse’s journals, aptly describe her works on display through the April 23 at Houston’s Menil Collection. Tersely beautiful, the works displayed in Eva Hesse Drawing showcase the artist’s sui generis style.
The pencil, ink and water color works on paper from the early 1960s are spare but powerful. A few are ghostly, spectral sketches of shoes or a grocery bag. Some seem like the work of a draftsperson, depicting precise images of machines, while others, the endless spools and circles of a hand moving without apparent design, are childlike in their lack of self-consciousness. The drawings are best when Hesse has supplemented them with color and texture through collage, stains and washes. Her stylistic breadth is apparent even in these early works which run the gamut from black-and-white to colored, organic to inorganic, abstract to figured.
A notable feature of the drawings is their propensity to shift from different viewing angles and distances. At twenty paces, Untitled (1965) seems a loose representation of a doctor’s office; at twenty inches, it’s a ghoulish industrial pastiche. Conversely, in other works, scribbles that seem self-referential reveal descriptive forms when seen askance.
Hesse musters cords, ropes, twine, cheesecloth and aluminum tubes in force. Using materials cast off from a textile mill to add a distinctive physical dimension to her art, Hesse fixated on cord as a manifestation of the drawn line capable of invading, and thus redefining, the audience’s space. Tomorrow’s Apples (5 in White) embodies the material inventiveness of using the cord in a painting. The roughly textured top half of the board that supports this painting anchors five cords, each a different color, that span like bridges to the work’s base, a laminated paper mâché hill.
The cords are also deployed as sculpture; sometimes distressingly. Several pieces comprising cheesecloth, rubber and aluminum tubing resemble nothing so much as intestines, while others, exemplified by the dynamite-like pyramid of tubes and attached cords in Untitled (After Model—Accretion) (1968), take a rigid geometric form.
Geometry also figures importantly in Hesse’s later grid drawings, which, as the Menil’s curators observe, are about more than Minimalist orthodoxy. Some are direct, ink-drawn circles within random squares of a piece of graph paper that resemble superannuated computer punch cards. Others manipulate form more subtly. For Untitled (1967), Hesse filled an entire block of graph paper with discrete circles and depicted a cross by slightly varying the drawing of each circle. A cross-shaped form emerges in three colors (white paper, light blue grid lines, dark blue circles), with two component shapes (circles, squares) depicting a third (the cross). This play continues as the same graph-paper works are re-imagined as paintings, contemplating the nature of repetition and subverting the mathematics of the drawings.
Untitled (1964), a personal favorite, exemplifies the virtues of the works in Eva Hesse Drawing. Pen strokes and paint divide a wintry blue rectangle into twelve squares. Within each square is a thicker patch of paint, still blue-white and scratched in each patch. The grooves and channels depict nonsensically winding lines as well as familiar symbols. It is efficient and rich, muted and colorful, ordered and wild. That doesn’t really do it justice, though. Perhaps we should think of it as the manifestation of a mental list: “Drawings. Lines, dots. Rigid, loose. Dashed. Washes. Light to dark. Gradation. Cross hatch."
Jack Massey is a lawyer and dilettante in Houston, Texas.
Mel Chin: Do Not Ask Me at The Station Museum
On view until April 2006
Barna Kantor
The first work that greets visitors to Mel Chin’s exhibition Do Not Ask Me at The Station Museum in Houston is made of cast bronze and extends through a temporary wall. Shape of a Lie (2005)—further described by its label as “a psycho-biomorphic portrait of a lie”—starts on one side of a wall as a one-to-one rendition of Mr. Chin’s mouth and tongue and ends on the other side as a large bronze bubble ready to burst and also growing “legs,” like a heavy sack of testicles. For the record, nobody, not even Mr. Chin, thinks that he is a liar. Chin makes this self-flagellating gesture in order to unleash heavy demands on his visitor’s sense of history and their moral and aesthetic assumptions. Shape of a Lie serves as an introduction to an exhibition that stresses the urgency of self-examination in the midst of a new rhetoric that we Americans have been mastering since 2001. This rhetoric maintains illusions, narratives and political discourses and it also creates taboos, half-truths and conspiracies. The underlying reality, however, is massively exploding violence that increasingly tests environmental and moral boundaries. Chin’s works are catalysts to ground rhetoric in reality and find ways to address that reality with a fresh counter-discourse.
All of the close to three dozen works, which range from jewelry to painting to installation, address historical connections, mainly in the context of US/Western agression. Some of the references are based on events so recent we do not yet have language for them; others are better documented and more embedded in our collective consciousness. Chin is well aware that a historical reconciliation of Guatemala, for instance, cannot happen without “fact-finding,” admittance and healing. Loom (2005), a large-scale installation that addresses the US-aided Guatemalan massacres of the 1980s, is a catalyst for a new language to address the unspeakable.
Another installation, Render (2003), features the weepy eyes and mouth of George Bush II as they poke out of the flat black velvety surface that this abbreviated portrait is painted on, which is surrounded by a frame of military steel. Bush, in his “mask,” faces the fresh remains of a blown-up Palestinian splattered on an opposite wall. Pieces of the Palestinian’s scarf, the kufia or kaffiyeh, mix with flesh and blood to form the Palestinian version of a map of the West Bank. The white wall behind these materials coalesces into a negative image of Israeli settlements and roads. The audience, needless to say, stands between the mask and the map. The white cube that houses this installation is covered in white muslin, a fabric significant for its traditional use by both Jews and Arabs.
Chin’s “unwearable” jewelry pieces are particularly precious. Cluster (2005-6) is a body-sized cylinder of silver mesh that, like a spider web, captures the fragments of a golden cluster bomb that has exploded inside its center. For those of us who have never seen US-made cluster bombs, they are actually very sculptural; sexy, but fatal devices. Terrapene Carolina (Hillbilly Armor) (2005) realizes rumors of US troops stationed in Iraq who use scraps to reinforce the bottom of their Humvees. Made of concrete slabs, smashed shopping carts, wood panels and shiny brass plates they form the belly of a giant animal hung in a menacing tilt above the spectator.
Do Not Ask Me is not your usual art show. It represents a high level of political art that does not preach but rather connects external events in such a way that they remain uncomfortable, unanswered questions. The events become proximal by inventing and reintroducing cultural symbols as raw materials of a counter rhetoric. Chin gives physical form to these ideas, most often as references to the human body—the common ground we all cohabit. He calls for symbolical actions in the emancipative art traditions of Latin America. The artist's war is fought with cultural representations and the redefinition of symbols and Chin’s most valuable accomplishment is to combine this artmaking tradition with the dictionary of cultural resistance inside the US. He creates a position unique to himself as an artist who addresses worldwide power differences from the center.
Barna Kantor is an artist living in Austin and working in Houston.
Eva Hesse Drawing at The Menil Collection
On view through April 23, 2006
Jack Massey
“Drawings. Lines, dots. Rigid, loose. Dashed. Washes. Light to dark. Gradation. Cross hatch.” These words, taken from one of Eva Hesse’s journals, aptly describe her works on display through the April 23 at Houston’s Menil Collection. Tersely beautiful, the works displayed in Eva Hesse Drawing showcase the artist’s sui generis style.
The pencil, ink and water color works on paper from the early 1960s are spare but powerful. A few are ghostly, spectral sketches of shoes or a grocery bag. Some seem like the work of a draftsperson, depicting precise images of machines, while others, the endless spools and circles of a hand moving without apparent design, are childlike in their lack of self-consciousness. The drawings are best when Hesse has supplemented them with color and texture through collage, stains and washes. Her stylistic breadth is apparent even in these early works which run the gamut from black-and-white to colored, organic to inorganic, abstract to figured.
A notable feature of the drawings is their propensity to shift from different viewing angles and distances. At twenty paces, Untitled (1965) seems a loose representation of a doctor’s office; at twenty inches, it’s a ghoulish industrial pastiche. Conversely, in other works, scribbles that seem self-referential reveal descriptive forms when seen askance.
Hesse musters cords, ropes, twine, cheesecloth and aluminum tubes in force. Using materials cast off from a textile mill to add a distinctive physical dimension to her art, Hesse fixated on cord as a manifestation of the drawn line capable of invading, and thus redefining, the audience’s space. Tomorrow’s Apples (5 in White) embodies the material inventiveness of using the cord in a painting. The roughly textured top half of the board that supports this painting anchors five cords, each a different color, that span like bridges to the work’s base, a laminated paper mâché hill.
The cords are also deployed as sculpture; sometimes distressingly. Several pieces comprising cheesecloth, rubber and aluminum tubing resemble nothing so much as intestines, while others, exemplified by the dynamite-like pyramid of tubes and attached cords in Untitled (After Model—Accretion) (1968), take a rigid geometric form.
Geometry also figures importantly in Hesse’s later grid drawings, which, as the Menil’s curators observe, are about more than Minimalist orthodoxy. Some are direct, ink-drawn circles within random squares of a piece of graph paper that resemble superannuated computer punch cards. Others manipulate form more subtly. For Untitled (1967), Hesse filled an entire block of graph paper with discrete circles and depicted a cross by slightly varying the drawing of each circle. A cross-shaped form emerges in three colors (white paper, light blue grid lines, dark blue circles), with two component shapes (circles, squares) depicting a third (the cross). This play continues as the same graph-paper works are re-imagined as paintings, contemplating the nature of repetition and subverting the mathematics of the drawings.
Untitled (1964), a personal favorite, exemplifies the virtues of the works in Eva Hesse Drawing. Pen strokes and paint divide a wintry blue rectangle into twelve squares. Within each square is a thicker patch of paint, still blue-white and scratched in each patch. The grooves and channels depict nonsensically winding lines as well as familiar symbols. It is efficient and rich, muted and colorful, ordered and wild. That doesn’t really do it justice, though. Perhaps we should think of it as the manifestation of a mental list: “Drawings. Lines, dots. Rigid, loose. Dashed. Washes. Light to dark. Gradation. Cross hatch."
Jack Massey is a lawyer and dilettante in Houston, Texas.
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The Station Museum 1502 Alabama Houston, Texas 713.529.6900 www.stationmuseum.com The Menil Collection 1515 Sul Ross Houston, Texas 713.525.9400 www.menil.org
|
IV.
Elsewhere: Carsten Höller's Amusement
Park at MASS MoCA, Cornelia Parker
and Nicholas Nixon at MAMFW & Alejandro
Cesarco at Art in General
Carsten Höller's Amusement Park at MASS MoCA
On view through October 2006
Matthew Levy
Since the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art opened in 2000, its Building 5 has proven to be fertile ground for the imaginations of some of today’s most innovative installation artists. With floor dimensions approximately those of a football field and a 30-foot high ceiling, the gallery provides the opportunity to take projects in directions typically foreclosed by other museums’ spatial constrictions. Artists have suspended cars from its rafters, flooded it with hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper and transformed it into the world’s largest pipe organ. In January, the history of Building 5 took yet another unexpected turn when the Belgian installation artist Carsten Höller brought a full-blown amusement park inside the museum’s walls.
Amusement Park is the latest product of Höller’s scientifically-motivated exploration of the concept of doubt. Since the mid 1990s, he has applied his extensive academic training in the biological sciences to artistic interventions that bewilder and confound the most fundamental processes of sensory perception. This sense of confusion is palpable at the MASS MoCA exhibition, where the spectacular awe of seeing a Gravitron, Twister and bumper cars in a museum gallery quickly gives way to deflated expectations when you realize that these rides hardly move at all. Höller had these rides (numbering five in total) specially engineered to operate at a speed that lies just on the cusp of human sensory perception. When you move around them, they appear not to move at all. Only when completely still can you just begin to detect their motion. This inverted relationship between the viewers’ and the rides’ movements produces a dynamic exchange between the viewer and the objects of perception that is surprisingly unsettling. These rides might move at a snail’s pace, but they are potent. Particularly affective is the Twister. The cars creep uphill at a glacial pace until they reach a critical height, at which point gravity kicks in and they suddenly lurch downhill. At the back of the gallery, Höller installed a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling mirror presumably to give the illusion of doubling the already massive space. Unfortunately, the rides crowd the gallery a bit too much to create the long sightlines required to achieve this effect.
Behind the mirrored wall, two smaller galleries house three earlier Höller works that are being considered components of Amusement Park’s suite of installations. The first of these, Three-Fold Infrared Delayed Room (2005), is a darkened gallery in which viewers are video-taped and their images projected onto three screens, one in real time and two with slightly different time delays. The disconcerting inconsistency between your own movements and the projected images is heightened when these images change positions, further confusing the distinction between present and past, real and projected.
No amusement park is complete without its house of mirrors and Höller’s comes in the form of Revolving Doors (2004) located in the final gallery of Building 5. This work consists of a circular arrangement of five revolving doors in which the glass has been replaced with mirrored panels. Once these doors are in motion, the dizzying cascade of spinning reflections is overwhelming, stripping the viewer of any sense of spatial orientation in the gallery.
The one object in the exhibition that disappoints is Mason Wheel (2005), a wall-mounted, black-and-white disc that produces colors in one’s peripheral vision when spun. This is the one instance where Höller reverts to gimmicky optical illusionism—though with work as physically exacting as Höller’s, the occasional benign gimmick is a welcomed reprieve.
Matthew Levy is a graduate student of art history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.
Cornelia Parker and Nicholas Nixon at MAMFW
Parker on view through February 26, 2006
Nixon on view through April 30, 2006
Alex Codlin
Named after the inkblot images that Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach developed in the early 1920s, British artist Cornelia Parker’s three new sculptures at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth provide a refreshing respite to the otherwise stale and barely changed downstairs exhibition of the museum’s permanent collection. In each of the three rooms, Parker hung from the ceiling a collection of silver-plated household objects ranging from spoons to bowls and candlestick holders that she crushed under a steam roller. Suspended on thin metal wire, each of the flattened metallic forms delicately hangs a few inches above the gallery floor to create sculptural versions of Rorschach’s inkblots.
In the center gallery, Rorschach (Accidental I) (2005) appears as a quintessential example of its namesake. Yet, instead of evoking familiar images with abstract forms, Parker uses everyday objects to create abstract sculptures using multiple pairs of similar flattened silver objects. The arrangement of the different pieces came about by chance (similar to Rorschach's own ink dropping) as Parker began with paper cutouts of each pair of silver objects and then threw one of the paper pairs onto a gridded floor. Wherever the cutout landed, Parker placed its partner in the adjacent spot on the other half of the grid (akin to Rorschach folding his paper and creating his inkblot.) The location of the paper cutouts were then used as a guide to hang the crushed metallic forms to create a symmetrical composition in space. Say what you will about my subconscious, but the resulting sculptural inkblot looked like an evil alien’s face from Star Trek. Dancing shadows underneath each hanging object only quadrupled the inkblot’s disorientating effect.
In contrast to the ordered chaos of Rorschach (Accidental I), the outer two galleries contained Rorschach (Endless Column I) (2005) and Rorschach (Endless Column II) (2005); two sculptures whose hanging horizontal forms echo what Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column (1918) would look like if it too had been placed under the steam roller and rendered in familiar silver objects. If Brancusi’s sculpture was a memorial to Romanian soldiers killed in World War I, Parker’s works are a memorial to the past lives of everyday objects. Crushed to the brink of non-recognition, the viewer must attempt to re-create the original three-dimensional form of the shiny silver objects from their current two-dimensional states. Although one can read these works in purely formal terms, I was much more interested in the objects’ histories.
Whose dining room table did these candlesticks light? What was served out of these bowls? In the catalog for the exhibition, Parker discusses her use of silver: “It has a monumental and commemorative position in people’s lives as it is bought for all kinds of reasons, including weddings, anniversaries, retirements and christenings.” This commemorative status of silver is nowhere more evident than in the vague engraving found on a trophy at the top of Rorschach (Endless Column I) which states, “The Kentish Town Poultry Club Team Challenge Cup.” This cryptic and bizarre engraving is the only overt clue to the past lives of these individual silver pieces. But what a clue to fuel the viewer’s imagination!
On view upstairs at MAMFW is a recent acquisition of Nicholas Nixon’s series of photographs which chronicle his wife and her three sisters over thirty-one years. Working in black and white, Nixon began photographing the Brown sisters in 1975 and continues to make a portrait of them each year. Each image is similar in composition with the sisters standing in their designated spots and looking stoically at the camera. None of the sisters ever really smile (or at least they lack the big toothy grins that you would expect in a family portrait). Despite the sitters close proximity, the images do not convey any sense of warmth between them. The only photograph that caught my attention and made reference to the siblings’ lives and relationships was the 1992 portrait when one of the sisters is visibly pregnant and presses another sister’s hand down onto her belly and smiles. To me, this is a real moment of tenderness and hints at the complexity of these women—a complexity that in not given justice in the series as a whole. Instead of chronicling the dynamics of their relationships, the images brutely record the effects of time on the women’s bodies and faces. Fashions change throughout the years and the women become older with more lines around their eyes and smiles and more gray in their hair. While these lines may be interpreted as life experiences, the Saturday afternoon crowd at the MAMFW did not read them as such. The halls resounded with remarks to the effect of, “Oh, doesn’t she look bad in this photo?” or “Wow, she looks so old now.” Granted Fort Worth isn’t known for its love of natural aging. Still, no woman I know, myself included, would want to have her aging process so thoroughly revealed and then put on display for critique.
Alex Codlin is a graduate student in art history at The University of Texas at Austin. She is currently writing on the sadness in Gilbert & George’s art and rethinking the relationship between their large landscape paintings and Singing Sculpture performances of the early 1970s.
Alejandro Cesarco’s Margurite Duras’ Indian Song at Art in General
On view through March 18, 2006
Ursula Davila-Villa
Some years ago, while I was camping on a Mexican beach, lying on the sand and looking at the night sky, I found myself intrigued by the thought that the universe is infinite and at the same time it is expanding. The more I thought about it and made an effort to understand it, the more complex and intriguing it seemed. I experienced a similar sensation recently while in front of Alejando Cesarco’s commissioned work Margurite Duras' India Song currently on view at Art in General in New York. The work consists of a two-channel video installation projected onto two freestanding walls, four slowly rotating ceiling-fans and a text by Daniel Link, printed in Spanish and English as an unlimited edition available to the public.
Margurite Duras (1914-1996), French novelist, playwright and film director, wrote India Song in 1973 and originally conceived it as a play. It was made into a film that premiered at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival. In the book, the play and the movie, three voices narrate different versions of the same story. Cesarco’s practice has been a constant investigation towards the construction of meaning and understanding through a process of cataloguing, classification and reinterpretation. In this case, he takes India Song as the source for his project and introduces video-installation to convey ideas of appropriation and abstraction. Cesarco edited the film version of Duras’s India Song using footage that shows different close-up takes and camera angles of the same locations or sets. His editing results in two narratives of the same film that are installed as a two-channel video projection. A woman’s voice, mellow and subtle, provides the voice over that accompanies the videos. She reads a text written by Cesarco that describes the film’s plot and works as a parallel narrative of interpretation.
Cersarco plays with repetition without being repetitive. He has chosen a story that explores the various possible narratives that exist in a narrator’s remembrance of the past. At the same time, he delves deeper into this complexity by layering narrative voices that navigate the use of memory as a form of repetition. His text, which becomes a voice along with Link’s text, and the four ceiling fans are the entrance points to a world of possible readings and understandings of India Song, which itself contains a multiplicity of readings and voices.
Each element of this video-installation works on its own and as a part of the whole to draw tangential paths of understanding. The fans, for example, play a key role by introducing the concept of time, suggesting a tempo within the piece. On the other hand, they work as parallel narratives that engage with the whole but act as independent elements. They could be interpreted as the narrative voices in Duras’ work. They also could represent the viewer’s reading of the work as a parallel voice within the set of relationships in play. What I find deeply interesting is that Cesarco’s work is not about a particular book, play, film, video or text; it is about the possibilities of narrating, interpreting, understanding, remembering and experiencing. The work is about a book, a play, a film, a video and a text not as mediums, but as experience—like life itself.
Ursula Dávila-Villa earned her MA in the Program in Museum Studies at New York University. She currently lives in Austin and works at The Blanton Museum of Art as Assistant Curator of Latin American Art.
Carsten Höller's Amusement Park at MASS MoCA
On view through October 2006
Matthew Levy
Since the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art opened in 2000, its Building 5 has proven to be fertile ground for the imaginations of some of today’s most innovative installation artists. With floor dimensions approximately those of a football field and a 30-foot high ceiling, the gallery provides the opportunity to take projects in directions typically foreclosed by other museums’ spatial constrictions. Artists have suspended cars from its rafters, flooded it with hundreds of thousands of pieces of paper and transformed it into the world’s largest pipe organ. In January, the history of Building 5 took yet another unexpected turn when the Belgian installation artist Carsten Höller brought a full-blown amusement park inside the museum’s walls.
Amusement Park is the latest product of Höller’s scientifically-motivated exploration of the concept of doubt. Since the mid 1990s, he has applied his extensive academic training in the biological sciences to artistic interventions that bewilder and confound the most fundamental processes of sensory perception. This sense of confusion is palpable at the MASS MoCA exhibition, where the spectacular awe of seeing a Gravitron, Twister and bumper cars in a museum gallery quickly gives way to deflated expectations when you realize that these rides hardly move at all. Höller had these rides (numbering five in total) specially engineered to operate at a speed that lies just on the cusp of human sensory perception. When you move around them, they appear not to move at all. Only when completely still can you just begin to detect their motion. This inverted relationship between the viewers’ and the rides’ movements produces a dynamic exchange between the viewer and the objects of perception that is surprisingly unsettling. These rides might move at a snail’s pace, but they are potent. Particularly affective is the Twister. The cars creep uphill at a glacial pace until they reach a critical height, at which point gravity kicks in and they suddenly lurch downhill. At the back of the gallery, Höller installed a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling mirror presumably to give the illusion of doubling the already massive space. Unfortunately, the rides crowd the gallery a bit too much to create the long sightlines required to achieve this effect.
Behind the mirrored wall, two smaller galleries house three earlier Höller works that are being considered components of Amusement Park’s suite of installations. The first of these, Three-Fold Infrared Delayed Room (2005), is a darkened gallery in which viewers are video-taped and their images projected onto three screens, one in real time and two with slightly different time delays. The disconcerting inconsistency between your own movements and the projected images is heightened when these images change positions, further confusing the distinction between present and past, real and projected.
No amusement park is complete without its house of mirrors and Höller’s comes in the form of Revolving Doors (2004) located in the final gallery of Building 5. This work consists of a circular arrangement of five revolving doors in which the glass has been replaced with mirrored panels. Once these doors are in motion, the dizzying cascade of spinning reflections is overwhelming, stripping the viewer of any sense of spatial orientation in the gallery.
The one object in the exhibition that disappoints is Mason Wheel (2005), a wall-mounted, black-and-white disc that produces colors in one’s peripheral vision when spun. This is the one instance where Höller reverts to gimmicky optical illusionism—though with work as physically exacting as Höller’s, the occasional benign gimmick is a welcomed reprieve.
Matthew Levy is a graduate student of art history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts.
Cornelia Parker and Nicholas Nixon at MAMFW
Parker on view through February 26, 2006
Nixon on view through April 30, 2006
Alex Codlin
Named after the inkblot images that Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach developed in the early 1920s, British artist Cornelia Parker’s three new sculptures at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth provide a refreshing respite to the otherwise stale and barely changed downstairs exhibition of the museum’s permanent collection. In each of the three rooms, Parker hung from the ceiling a collection of silver-plated household objects ranging from spoons to bowls and candlestick holders that she crushed under a steam roller. Suspended on thin metal wire, each of the flattened metallic forms delicately hangs a few inches above the gallery floor to create sculptural versions of Rorschach’s inkblots.
In the center gallery, Rorschach (Accidental I) (2005) appears as a quintessential example of its namesake. Yet, instead of evoking familiar images with abstract forms, Parker uses everyday objects to create abstract sculptures using multiple pairs of similar flattened silver objects. The arrangement of the different pieces came about by chance (similar to Rorschach's own ink dropping) as Parker began with paper cutouts of each pair of silver objects and then threw one of the paper pairs onto a gridded floor. Wherever the cutout landed, Parker placed its partner in the adjacent spot on the other half of the grid (akin to Rorschach folding his paper and creating his inkblot.) The location of the paper cutouts were then used as a guide to hang the crushed metallic forms to create a symmetrical composition in space. Say what you will about my subconscious, but the resulting sculptural inkblot looked like an evil alien’s face from Star Trek. Dancing shadows underneath each hanging object only quadrupled the inkblot’s disorientating effect.
In contrast to the ordered chaos of Rorschach (Accidental I), the outer two galleries contained Rorschach (Endless Column I) (2005) and Rorschach (Endless Column II) (2005); two sculptures whose hanging horizontal forms echo what Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column (1918) would look like if it too had been placed under the steam roller and rendered in familiar silver objects. If Brancusi’s sculpture was a memorial to Romanian soldiers killed in World War I, Parker’s works are a memorial to the past lives of everyday objects. Crushed to the brink of non-recognition, the viewer must attempt to re-create the original three-dimensional form of the shiny silver objects from their current two-dimensional states. Although one can read these works in purely formal terms, I was much more interested in the objects’ histories.
Whose dining room table did these candlesticks light? What was served out of these bowls? In the catalog for the exhibition, Parker discusses her use of silver: “It has a monumental and commemorative position in people’s lives as it is bought for all kinds of reasons, including weddings, anniversaries, retirements and christenings.” This commemorative status of silver is nowhere more evident than in the vague engraving found on a trophy at the top of Rorschach (Endless Column I) which states, “The Kentish Town Poultry Club Team Challenge Cup.” This cryptic and bizarre engraving is the only overt clue to the past lives of these individual silver pieces. But what a clue to fuel the viewer’s imagination!
On view upstairs at MAMFW is a recent acquisition of Nicholas Nixon’s series of photographs which chronicle his wife and her three sisters over thirty-one years. Working in black and white, Nixon began photographing the Brown sisters in 1975 and continues to make a portrait of them each year. Each image is similar in composition with the sisters standing in their designated spots and looking stoically at the camera. None of the sisters ever really smile (or at least they lack the big toothy grins that you would expect in a family portrait). Despite the sitters close proximity, the images do not convey any sense of warmth between them. The only photograph that caught my attention and made reference to the siblings’ lives and relationships was the 1992 portrait when one of the sisters is visibly pregnant and presses another sister’s hand down onto her belly and smiles. To me, this is a real moment of tenderness and hints at the complexity of these women—a complexity that in not given justice in the series as a whole. Instead of chronicling the dynamics of their relationships, the images brutely record the effects of time on the women’s bodies and faces. Fashions change throughout the years and the women become older with more lines around their eyes and smiles and more gray in their hair. While these lines may be interpreted as life experiences, the Saturday afternoon crowd at the MAMFW did not read them as such. The halls resounded with remarks to the effect of, “Oh, doesn’t she look bad in this photo?” or “Wow, she looks so old now.” Granted Fort Worth isn’t known for its love of natural aging. Still, no woman I know, myself included, would want to have her aging process so thoroughly revealed and then put on display for critique.
Alex Codlin is a graduate student in art history at The University of Texas at Austin. She is currently writing on the sadness in Gilbert & George’s art and rethinking the relationship between their large landscape paintings and Singing Sculpture performances of the early 1970s.
Alejandro Cesarco’s Margurite Duras’ Indian Song at Art in General
On view through March 18, 2006
Ursula Davila-Villa
Some years ago, while I was camping on a Mexican beach, lying on the sand and looking at the night sky, I found myself intrigued by the thought that the universe is infinite and at the same time it is expanding. The more I thought about it and made an effort to understand it, the more complex and intriguing it seemed. I experienced a similar sensation recently while in front of Alejando Cesarco’s commissioned work Margurite Duras' India Song currently on view at Art in General in New York. The work consists of a two-channel video installation projected onto two freestanding walls, four slowly rotating ceiling-fans and a text by Daniel Link, printed in Spanish and English as an unlimited edition available to the public.
Margurite Duras (1914-1996), French novelist, playwright and film director, wrote India Song in 1973 and originally conceived it as a play. It was made into a film that premiered at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival. In the book, the play and the movie, three voices narrate different versions of the same story. Cesarco’s practice has been a constant investigation towards the construction of meaning and understanding through a process of cataloguing, classification and reinterpretation. In this case, he takes India Song as the source for his project and introduces video-installation to convey ideas of appropriation and abstraction. Cesarco edited the film version of Duras’s India Song using footage that shows different close-up takes and camera angles of the same locations or sets. His editing results in two narratives of the same film that are installed as a two-channel video projection. A woman’s voice, mellow and subtle, provides the voice over that accompanies the videos. She reads a text written by Cesarco that describes the film’s plot and works as a parallel narrative of interpretation.
Cersarco plays with repetition without being repetitive. He has chosen a story that explores the various possible narratives that exist in a narrator’s remembrance of the past. At the same time, he delves deeper into this complexity by layering narrative voices that navigate the use of memory as a form of repetition. His text, which becomes a voice along with Link’s text, and the four ceiling fans are the entrance points to a world of possible readings and understandings of India Song, which itself contains a multiplicity of readings and voices.
Each element of this video-installation works on its own and as a part of the whole to draw tangential paths of understanding. The fans, for example, play a key role by introducing the concept of time, suggesting a tempo within the piece. On the other hand, they work as parallel narratives that engage with the whole but act as independent elements. They could be interpreted as the narrative voices in Duras’ work. They also could represent the viewer’s reading of the work as a parallel voice within the set of relationships in play. What I find deeply interesting is that Cesarco’s work is not about a particular book, play, film, video or text; it is about the possibilities of narrating, interpreting, understanding, remembering and experiencing. The work is about a book, a play, a film, a video and a text not as mediums, but as experience—like life itself.
Ursula Dávila-Villa earned her MA in the Program in Museum Studies at New York University. She currently lives in Austin and works at The Blanton Museum of Art as Assistant Curator of Latin American Art.
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MASS
MoCA
1040 MASS MoCA Way North Adams, Massachusetts 413.662.2111 www.massmoca.org The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth 3200 Darnell Street Fort Worth, Texas 817.738.9215 www.mamfw.org Art in General 79 Walker Street New York, New York 212. 219.0473 www.artingeneral.org |
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Working with UT studio art faculty, Paola Morsiani of Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum selected 60 UT studio art seniors for the efficiently titled exhibition Senior Studio Show opening this Saturday, February 25 from 6-9 pm at Creative Research Laboratory (2832 East MLK). These budding talents will present work in all mediums including drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, metal, prints, photographs, video and performance.
On March 9th head down to the Butridge Gallery of The Dougherty Arts Center (1110 Barton Springs Road) for the opening of Boundless: Perceptions from Within, an exhibition of identity-oriented work by six African-American women artists from around the country. Boundless offers a chance to get to know the work of Austin filmmaker Cauleen Smith before her exhibition at testsite opens in October.
In San Antonio, Edgar Arceneaux (Los Angeles) Augusto di Stefano (San Antonio) and Ranjani Shettar (Bangalore) will showcase the results of their two-month residencies at Artpace on March 8th.
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The Sylvia Smith Percussion Duo and members of the Austin New Music Co-op will perform the music of Balimore-based composer Stuart Sanders Smith on Saturday March 4th. The performance begins at 8 pm at the Ballet Austin Academy (3002 Guadalupe). Watch the troop use alternative materials and cultural castoffs as percussion instruments in a series of compositions that incorporate text and theatre.
For Upcoming Lectures, Press or Say 9…
Art Encounters at The Benini Foundation Galleries and Sculpture Ranch in Johnson City, Texas will take place this Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday, from 1 to 6 p.m. Artists from Austin and beyond will speak about their work. On the roster to present are Catherine Care of Paris, Robert McConaughy of Blue Ash, Ohio and Beth and Carlos Austin of Austin, Texas.
On Wednesday, March 1, Professor Eric M. Moormann from the University of Amsterdam will lecture on Roman Paintings of Life-Size Figures (60-40 B.C.). Come rediscover Villa 6 at Terzigno near Pompeii in UT’s Art Buidling, Room 1.110 at 4:30 p.m.
Antarctica: frozen desert or warm place in our cultural imagination? Discuss. William L. Fox examines a history of representing Antarctica in art, maps and science in his talk Terra Antarctica on March 9th at UT’s Art Building, Room 1.110. The talk begins a 5 p.m. Bring a warm hat and gloves.
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The Austin Fine Arts Alliance kicks off its Fine Arts Festival with Night in the Galleries, a chauffeured trek to Austin museums and galleries complete with food and drink from Austin’s finest purveyors. The event happens tomorrow night from 6:30 to 10 p.m. with an after party at Thistle directly following. Cost is $70 per person. Proceeds benefit the Austin Fine Arts Alliance, the Austin Museum of Art and The Blanton Museum of Art.
Thank you for reading. Goodbye.
Welcome to …might be good’s automated announcements. Your call is extremely important to us, so please stay on the line.
For Exhibitions in Austin and San Antonio, Press or Say 4…
Working with UT studio art faculty, Paola Morsiani of Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum selected 60 UT studio art seniors for the efficiently titled exhibition Senior Studio Show opening this Saturday, February 25 from 6-9 pm at Creative Research Laboratory (2832 East MLK). These budding talents will present work in all mediums including drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, metal, prints, photographs, video and performance.
On March 9th head down to the Butridge Gallery of The Dougherty Arts Center (1110 Barton Springs Road) for the opening of Boundless: Perceptions from Within, an exhibition of identity-oriented work by six African-American women artists from around the country. Boundless offers a chance to get to know the work of Austin filmmaker Cauleen Smith before her exhibition at testsite opens in October.
In San Antonio, Edgar Arceneaux (Los Angeles) Augusto di Stefano (San Antonio) and Ranjani Shettar (Bangalore) will showcase the results of their two-month residencies at Artpace on March 8th.
For Performances, Press or Say 7…
The Sylvia Smith Percussion Duo and members of the Austin New Music Co-op will perform the music of Balimore-based composer Stuart Sanders Smith on Saturday March 4th. The performance begins at 8 pm at the Ballet Austin Academy (3002 Guadalupe). Watch the troop use alternative materials and cultural castoffs as percussion instruments in a series of compositions that incorporate text and theatre.
For Upcoming Lectures, Press or Say 9…
Art Encounters at The Benini Foundation Galleries and Sculpture Ranch in Johnson City, Texas will take place this Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and Sunday, from 1 to 6 p.m. Artists from Austin and beyond will speak about their work. On the roster to present are Catherine Care of Paris, Robert McConaughy of Blue Ash, Ohio and Beth and Carlos Austin of Austin, Texas.
On Wednesday, March 1, Professor Eric M. Moormann from the University of Amsterdam will lecture on Roman Paintings of Life-Size Figures (60-40 B.C.). Come rediscover Villa 6 at Terzigno near Pompeii in UT’s Art Buidling, Room 1.110 at 4:30 p.m.
Antarctica: frozen desert or warm place in our cultural imagination? Discuss. William L. Fox examines a history of representing Antarctica in art, maps and science in his talk Terra Antarctica on March 9th at UT’s Art Building, Room 1.110. The talk begins a 5 p.m. Bring a warm hat and gloves.
To Get this Party Started, Press the # Key…
The Austin Fine Arts Alliance kicks off its Fine Arts Festival with Night in the Galleries, a chauffeured trek to Austin museums and galleries complete with food and drink from Austin’s finest purveyors. The event happens tomorrow night from 6:30 to 10 p.m. with an after party at Thistle directly following. Cost is $70 per person. Proceeds benefit the Austin Fine Arts Alliance, the Austin Museum of Art and The Blanton Museum of Art.
Thank you for reading. Goodbye.
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Creative Research Laboratory
uts.cc.utexas.edu/~crlab/ Butridge Gallery at The Dougherty Art Center www.ci.austin.tx.us/dougherty/gallery.htm Artpace www.artpace.org Art Encounters at the Benini’s www.artsencountersatbeninis.com Austin New Music Co-op www.newmusiccoop.org Austin Fine Arts Alliance- Fine Arts Festival www.austinfineartsfestival.org/index.html |
Image
courtesy of the artist and Finesilver Gallery.
Detail of Zane Lewis, Rainbow Falls, 2006.
33.5 x 27 x 2.5 inch ink on canvas and acrylic.
Detail of Zane Lewis, Rainbow Falls, 2006.
33.5 x 27 x 2.5 inch ink on canvas and acrylic.
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