issue
# 66, March 24, 2006 Austin, TX
I.
Austin:
Robert Therrien at Lora Reynolds Gallery &Guy Brett's Lecture on Force Fields
II. San Antonio: Liminal Britain at UTSA & Reconstructing the Mundane at Unit B Gallery
III. Elsewhere: Day For Night: The 2006 Whitney Biennial, Robert Ryman at the Dallas Museum of Art, Martin Kippenberger at Tate Modern & Blogging from Istanbul
IV. Two Views: Critiquing America Starts Here: Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler as Exhibition and Catalog
V. Readers Write Back: Mel Chin: Do Not Ask Me
VI. Announcements: Luke, I am Your Father
I.
Austin:
Robert Therrien at Lora Reynolds Gallery &
Guy Brett's Lecture on Force Fields
Robert Therrien at Lora Reynolds Gallery
On view through May 6, 2006
Tobin Levy
A wall is crying at the Lora Reynolds Gallery where, as part of Robert Therrien’s solo exhibition, the artist has installed six silver-plated brass teardrop-shaped objects. At roughly three inches in length, the teardrops have a flat, mirrored surface and project off the wall to showcase the fragmented reflections of itinerant viewers. Like snowflakes, the teardrops are slightly different in shape. But unlike falling snow the teardrops are static. Their inability to physically fall offers a stark reminder that here, in this very public setting, the most private and humane expression—of acute sadness, happiness, remorse—emanates from an inanimate object.
Along with the five additional sculptures and fourteen drawings in the exhibition, the tears are rendered oxymoronic, representing an intentional conflation of seemingly incongruous mediums and ideas. A solid bronze keyhole, fifty times the size of the original void it represents, hangs at doorknob level on the middle wall. A stainless steel oilcan, functionless at eight feet tall, protrudes in the front gallery alongside an eight-inch ink and graphite drawing of the same subject (see above image - left). In another drawing, treacly blue birds flutter against a vacant backdrop. These are Cinderella’s birds long after she has passed away. With no one to look after them, the birds are trapped on paper inside a frame. This depiction of stationary mobility is as daunting as it is cartoon-like. The work has stylistic similarities to Therrien’s series of two- and three-dimensional works featuring “Joyce,” an anonymous caricature from the artist’s childhood who has been named for her coincidental resemblance to Joyce Carol Oates. Therrien pictures Joyce in profile, mouth agape, and looking disarmingly like Popeye’s Olive Oyl. The viewer doesn’t know whether to laugh, cry or remain indifferent.
Dana Friis-Hansen, Director of the Austin Museum of Art, spoke about Therrien’s work at the opening reception. He noted the artist’s history as one of gallery owner Leo Castelli’s disciples (joining the ranks of Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Frank Stella, among others), and Therrien’s sustained preoccupations with everyday objects and issues of scale and points of view. Look closely and you will find humor, wit, reduced forms and comic-book sensibilities that seem to pay veiled tribute to Duchamp, Magritte, Lichenstein and Judd.
However, the success of the show does not rely on contextualizing the artist and his work within the history of post-War art. To view the collection as a reflection of the artist’s oeuvre is to become distracted by what you’re not seeing. The exhibition’s modest size, the various media—steel, wood, laundry markers, pots and pans—and subject matter—rogue red feet in one drawing, the silhouette of a baby’s head in another—encourage a more visceral approach.
Over the years, Therrien has developed a vocabulary of signature motifs, many of which are exhibited here: oilcans, running feet, silhouetted profiles, pinochle scorecards, that he continuously transforms by obscuring the object’s size, function and the context of its presentation. It’s a game of visual semantics that, in this case, without a guide to the vocabulary’s evolution, is most thoroughly enjoyed by discarding the directions and simply jumping in.
Tobin Levy is a writer living and working in Austin.
Guy Brett's Lecture on Force Fields
A review of Brett's March 23, 2006 lecture at The University of Texas
Caitlin Haskell
To readers who prefer interviews to essays, I must apologize. This was, for all accounts, supposed to be an interview with Guy Brett, the prominent art critic who began writing for the London Times in the 1960s. But over coffee earlier this week, my conversation with Brett never reached a point where my own prepared questions would have been more interesting to consider than the ideas that arose freely. Following Brett’s diverse interests, our topics ranged from an under-recognized genre of painting (angels with guns), to the nature of abstract art, foam machines, deliberately disorienting architecture, and our own speculations about why people write about art. Very rarely did we talk about kinetic art or Brett’s 2000 exhibition Force Fields: Phases of the Kinetic that was, officially, the subject that brought him to Austin. Speaking at The University of Texas last Thursday, Brett began with a question of his own, “Have you ever set a Calder in motion?”
Exhibited at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and at the Hayward Gallery in London, Force Fields recast the terms of kinetic art by displacing the idea that this phase of modernism should be limited to works that have perceptibly moving parts. Spanning a period from the 1920s to the 1970s, Force Fields opened the concept of the kinetic to works that revealed the qualities of space, time and energy. One result was that canonical kinetic works by Alexander Calder and Jean Tinguely appeared beside works (including works on paper and paintings) by an expansive array of international artists: Henri Michaux, Takis, Gego, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Haacke, Len Lye, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Pol Bury, Georges Vantongerloo, Hélio Oiticica and Jesús Rafael Soto, to name just a few, whose works were likely deemed kinetic for the first time. Another result was that Brett revealed a particularly cosmic strain of kineticism; abstract artworks that (often playfully) served as metaphors of the principles of the universe and demonstrated that just because our senses cannot perceive cosmic infinity, it doesn’t make the infinite any less real. As such, many of the works in Force Fields express unfathomable concepts in compact, sensory-perceptual packages.
That kinetic art was not a particularly fashionable movement in 2000 seems to have made the Force Fields project all the more appealing for Brett. This was, in some respects, an attempt to “rescue the language of movement.” Brett's rescue mission was ambitious and his methodology was equally so. He selected seven pairs of oppositional concepts: calculation/hallucination, forces of nature/aesthetic choice, for example, and showed how both sides of the dichotomy could be accommodated under the single term, kinetic. With such criteria, style was rarely used as a crutch to identify artistic goals and visually dissonant pairings took on mutual affinity. By focusing on these concepts, Force Fields exhibited a broad map of experimentation, showing work from seventeen geo-politically diverse countries.
Concluding his talk, Brett considered art that post-dated 1970 and was therefore beyond Force Fields' period, but not necessarily beyond its scope. Might, for example, Ilya Kabakov’s installation The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment (1981-88), fit within Brett’s terms for kinetic art? While Brett found this piece too ironic to include, I disagree. Kabakov’s comments may appear to be directed to the failings of late-communism, but one could argue that the artist was calling on the tradition of nineteenth-century Russian science fiction writing, as well. Like Kabakov’s escaped protagonist, writers such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) imagined an existence free from gravitational constraints. In a letter from 1911, Tsiolkovsky claimed quite seriously, “The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but we can not live forever in a cradle.” Readers of Tsiolkovsky will note the fantastic utopian visions he imagined of a beautifully new world beyond the planet earth. In Tsiolkovsky's world, and potentially in Kabakov’s, citizens glided freely, like components of a Calder mobile gently set into motion. Caitlin Haskell studies art history at The University of Texas at Austin and is Editor of …might be good.
Guy Brett's Lecture on Force Fields
Robert Therrien at Lora Reynolds Gallery
On view through May 6, 2006
Tobin Levy
A wall is crying at the Lora Reynolds Gallery where, as part of Robert Therrien’s solo exhibition, the artist has installed six silver-plated brass teardrop-shaped objects. At roughly three inches in length, the teardrops have a flat, mirrored surface and project off the wall to showcase the fragmented reflections of itinerant viewers. Like snowflakes, the teardrops are slightly different in shape. But unlike falling snow the teardrops are static. Their inability to physically fall offers a stark reminder that here, in this very public setting, the most private and humane expression—of acute sadness, happiness, remorse—emanates from an inanimate object.
Along with the five additional sculptures and fourteen drawings in the exhibition, the tears are rendered oxymoronic, representing an intentional conflation of seemingly incongruous mediums and ideas. A solid bronze keyhole, fifty times the size of the original void it represents, hangs at doorknob level on the middle wall. A stainless steel oilcan, functionless at eight feet tall, protrudes in the front gallery alongside an eight-inch ink and graphite drawing of the same subject (see above image - left). In another drawing, treacly blue birds flutter against a vacant backdrop. These are Cinderella’s birds long after she has passed away. With no one to look after them, the birds are trapped on paper inside a frame. This depiction of stationary mobility is as daunting as it is cartoon-like. The work has stylistic similarities to Therrien’s series of two- and three-dimensional works featuring “Joyce,” an anonymous caricature from the artist’s childhood who has been named for her coincidental resemblance to Joyce Carol Oates. Therrien pictures Joyce in profile, mouth agape, and looking disarmingly like Popeye’s Olive Oyl. The viewer doesn’t know whether to laugh, cry or remain indifferent.
Dana Friis-Hansen, Director of the Austin Museum of Art, spoke about Therrien’s work at the opening reception. He noted the artist’s history as one of gallery owner Leo Castelli’s disciples (joining the ranks of Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Frank Stella, among others), and Therrien’s sustained preoccupations with everyday objects and issues of scale and points of view. Look closely and you will find humor, wit, reduced forms and comic-book sensibilities that seem to pay veiled tribute to Duchamp, Magritte, Lichenstein and Judd.
However, the success of the show does not rely on contextualizing the artist and his work within the history of post-War art. To view the collection as a reflection of the artist’s oeuvre is to become distracted by what you’re not seeing. The exhibition’s modest size, the various media—steel, wood, laundry markers, pots and pans—and subject matter—rogue red feet in one drawing, the silhouette of a baby’s head in another—encourage a more visceral approach.
Over the years, Therrien has developed a vocabulary of signature motifs, many of which are exhibited here: oilcans, running feet, silhouetted profiles, pinochle scorecards, that he continuously transforms by obscuring the object’s size, function and the context of its presentation. It’s a game of visual semantics that, in this case, without a guide to the vocabulary’s evolution, is most thoroughly enjoyed by discarding the directions and simply jumping in.
Tobin Levy is a writer living and working in Austin.
Guy Brett's Lecture on Force Fields
A review of Brett's March 23, 2006 lecture at The University of Texas
Caitlin Haskell
To readers who prefer interviews to essays, I must apologize. This was, for all accounts, supposed to be an interview with Guy Brett, the prominent art critic who began writing for the London Times in the 1960s. But over coffee earlier this week, my conversation with Brett never reached a point where my own prepared questions would have been more interesting to consider than the ideas that arose freely. Following Brett’s diverse interests, our topics ranged from an under-recognized genre of painting (angels with guns), to the nature of abstract art, foam machines, deliberately disorienting architecture, and our own speculations about why people write about art. Very rarely did we talk about kinetic art or Brett’s 2000 exhibition Force Fields: Phases of the Kinetic that was, officially, the subject that brought him to Austin. Speaking at The University of Texas last Thursday, Brett began with a question of his own, “Have you ever set a Calder in motion?”
Exhibited at the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona and at the Hayward Gallery in London, Force Fields recast the terms of kinetic art by displacing the idea that this phase of modernism should be limited to works that have perceptibly moving parts. Spanning a period from the 1920s to the 1970s, Force Fields opened the concept of the kinetic to works that revealed the qualities of space, time and energy. One result was that canonical kinetic works by Alexander Calder and Jean Tinguely appeared beside works (including works on paper and paintings) by an expansive array of international artists: Henri Michaux, Takis, Gego, Marcel Duchamp, Hans Haacke, Len Lye, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Pol Bury, Georges Vantongerloo, Hélio Oiticica and Jesús Rafael Soto, to name just a few, whose works were likely deemed kinetic for the first time. Another result was that Brett revealed a particularly cosmic strain of kineticism; abstract artworks that (often playfully) served as metaphors of the principles of the universe and demonstrated that just because our senses cannot perceive cosmic infinity, it doesn’t make the infinite any less real. As such, many of the works in Force Fields express unfathomable concepts in compact, sensory-perceptual packages.
That kinetic art was not a particularly fashionable movement in 2000 seems to have made the Force Fields project all the more appealing for Brett. This was, in some respects, an attempt to “rescue the language of movement.” Brett's rescue mission was ambitious and his methodology was equally so. He selected seven pairs of oppositional concepts: calculation/hallucination, forces of nature/aesthetic choice, for example, and showed how both sides of the dichotomy could be accommodated under the single term, kinetic. With such criteria, style was rarely used as a crutch to identify artistic goals and visually dissonant pairings took on mutual affinity. By focusing on these concepts, Force Fields exhibited a broad map of experimentation, showing work from seventeen geo-politically diverse countries.
Concluding his talk, Brett considered art that post-dated 1970 and was therefore beyond Force Fields' period, but not necessarily beyond its scope. Might, for example, Ilya Kabakov’s installation The Man Who Flew into Space from His Apartment (1981-88), fit within Brett’s terms for kinetic art? While Brett found this piece too ironic to include, I disagree. Kabakov’s comments may appear to be directed to the failings of late-communism, but one could argue that the artist was calling on the tradition of nineteenth-century Russian science fiction writing, as well. Like Kabakov’s escaped protagonist, writers such as Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) imagined an existence free from gravitational constraints. In a letter from 1911, Tsiolkovsky claimed quite seriously, “The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but we can not live forever in a cradle.” Readers of Tsiolkovsky will note the fantastic utopian visions he imagined of a beautifully new world beyond the planet earth. In Tsiolkovsky's world, and potentially in Kabakov’s, citizens glided freely, like components of a Calder mobile gently set into motion. Caitlin Haskell studies art history at The University of Texas at Austin and is Editor of …might be good.
| Lora
Reynolds Gallery
www.lorareynolds.com
300 West Ave. #1318 Austin, Texas tel. 512.215.4965 The University of Texas at Austin Department of Art and Art History www.finearts.utexas.edu/aah |
II. SanAntonio:
Liminal Britain
at UTSA & Reconstructing the Mundane at Unit B Gallery
Liminal Britain at UTSA
On view through April 2, 2006
Michelle Gonzalez Valdez
In the current political climate, the United States and Great Britain seem to be simultaneously collaborating and confronting each other. A new exhibit at the University of Texas at San Antonio, Liminal Britain, plucks scenes of bliss and malcontent, ambiguous loss and vacuous urban landscapes to push politics into a quiet background. Curator Sara-Jayne Parsons takes chances in this show by gathering photographers who balance the tensions of past and present, thus clinging to an ephemeral moment in both a physical and psychological sense. In her catalog essay, Parsons investigates a kernel of philosophy left by French semiotician Roland Barthes. The peculiar insistence that madness is a characteristic specific to the photographic medium ensues throughout the works of British photographers at UTSA, particularly Dinu Li, Trish Simonite and Jason Oddy.
A subtle and brutally honest photographer, Oddy, takes the dichotomy of Parsons' vision and focuses on forensic-style scenes of lives left mid-song. In The Waiting Room Series, Oddy followed a Social Services official on her rounds to visit dwellings of the recently deceased. Oddy's ability to coax filtering light through molding flora makes his work the quintessence of Liminal Britain. All of the photographs take a square, C-print on aluminum format and transcend expectations for an aesthetically pleasant mood. Instead, Oddy looks intently upon the decrepit messes and bitten pieces of forgotten toast to magnify lives unraveling.
Trish Simonite, an Assistant Professor of photography at Trinity University, embraces the art of absence with her pictures of vacuous suburbia. At first blush, Simonite's snapshots seem like static scenes captured in 90-degree increments. However, the images of connecting corners at spatial thresholds gradually pulls the works within the thematic terriroty of Liminal Britain. Viewers should be keen to note her precise yet playful sense of line, texture and emotive potential. One of her best pieces is the blissful, sweet moment of two elderly friends holding hands.
Amid the photos of abandoned spaces and episodes of lives in flux, continuities emerge. Each photographer cherishes the gaze. The end result is a show that forces viewers to slow down at each point of entry and connect with an ever-elusive presentness. Dinu Li takes the camera into the tender innards of cheap Chinese hotels to reveal things most likely overlooked by frazzled backpackers and other vagabonds. Li's photos magnify neglected light switches, dirty linen and absolutely bizarre artifacts such as shrink-wrapped baby shoes hanging in a closet. These surprises pleasantly pepper the gallery.
Though UTSA attracts a sliver of the art-going audience it deserves due to its peripheral location, photography lovers should not allow this moment to pass.
Michelle Gonzalez Valdez is a performance artist. She is also the future San Antonio Contributing Editor of ...might be good.
Reconstructing the Mundane at Unit B Gallery
On view through May 7, 2006
Amy Ritthaler Gilmour
Mundane (adj.) Quotidian. Routine. Commonplace.
“Mundane” may be a word saddled with its share of pejorative connotations, but its latest vehicle, currently on display at Unit B Gallery, is far from tedious. Kim Aubuchon and John Mata, co-directors of Unit B, present a three-artist show that playfully addresses the significance of the mundane.
Mundus, the root word, means worldly and is historically associated with the Pythagorean sense of the physical universe, its orderly arrangement and the creation of a taxonomical structure for information—the naming of names, so to speak. Chicagoan Brian Dettmer plays with this and other epistemological issues in the fifteen pieces included in Unit B’s show. In Eye Surgery (2004), Dettmer excavates a medical textbook by cutting portions of image and text, but leaving them within their original structures to reveal new meanings within a constant set of contents. The eye (window to the soul) and vision (the sense most associated with the power of perception) are here objectified through the science of optical surgery and surgical terminology. Playing with the idea of the book as a conveyer of knowledge, Dettmer acts out what students sometimes refer to as “gutting a book”— taking what is delicious, useful or digestible and leaving behind a carcass of paper and binding.
Scoop (2003) is a series of reference books configured into a rectangle. Looking down into the piece, one sees a hollowed-out vessel filled with shredded paper delineating what was and what still remains. Has some ravenous reader consumed the core? Has the space been left by an accommodating author making room for “reader response”? [INSERT SELF HERE.] While Dettmer does refer to the book as an “enclosed vessel,” his work tells us that a book is an ephemeral medium allowing for a transmigration of ideas and interpretations that can never be wholly contained. The “gaps” and what Dettmer refers to as “hidden, fragmented memory” sometimes resonate more deeply than the authorial intent.
But, back to the mundane. Its etymology also reveals that the word has been historically used to describe a woman’s ornaments and dress. Destina Mata Olivares plays with this meaning in her disembodied dress forms and appliance coverlets. The brevity of Olivares’ statement leaves me wanting an erudite docent with feminist/philosophical predilections. As a writer and mother of two walking the tightrope of creativity, I can’t help but wonder if the lack of substantive statement might be a statement-in-itself regarding the constraints of time and space, articulation and responsibility. Regardless, the practical effect is that the work must literally speak for itself in lieu of a philosophical map from the artist herself.
Husband, Wife and Daughter (all 2006) are skillfully-wrought photographic replicas of what might be 1950’s stock costuming from Leave it to Beaver. The husband’s suit, wife’s apron and daughter’s sweet dress float disembodied within Unit B’s spare, early-twentieth-century kitchen like ethereal specters from a bygone era. Their meaning is ambiguous, and while I have my own personal entrée into the work, I can’t help my curiosity about Olivares’ purpose. These hand-made and socially significant “cozies” (as she refers to them) are fashioned to protect both humans and appliances from everyday wear-and-tear. Especially intriguing in these works is Olivares’ embellishment of the fabric with action-oriented descriptives. Whether the insignia says "useful" (toaster), "helpful" (telephone), "wife," "husband" or "daughter," the modifiers embroidered upon the fabric provokes thought and plays with our proclivity for labeling. Theorist Mieke Bahl once told me that political art does not make statements, but pushes the viewer away with a pocketful of questions. This was certainly the case with Olivares’ work.
If the mundane is complicated, then perhaps Matthew Noel-Tod’s Jezt Im Kino (2003) is the most apt exploration of this topic. Personal, corporeal and deeply philosophical, Jezt Im Kino is an onslaught that wholly and immediately demands one’s sensual and intellectual attention. Self, other, non-self, persona and “I” are explored in this fast-paced and complex video. Noel-Tod incorporates literary and cinematic elements: soundtrack, dialogue, plotline and narrative voice, with political and philosophical musings on perception, media, politics, confusion and the desire for human connection. Drawing on Mozart, David Cooper’s 1974 manifesto The Grammar of Living and other far-flung inspirations, the piece is not to be written about, but must be seen. Noel-Tod’s piece asserts, “REPRESENTATION IS NOT CREATION.” The highest compliment I can pay it is to urge you to experience it for yourself.
Amy Ritthaler Gilmour is currently writing a Ph.D. dissertation in American literature, exploring the literary garden and its significance for the spiritual, intellectual and material needs of the American female subject.
Liminal Britain at UTSA
On view through April 2, 2006
Michelle Gonzalez Valdez
In the current political climate, the United States and Great Britain seem to be simultaneously collaborating and confronting each other. A new exhibit at the University of Texas at San Antonio, Liminal Britain, plucks scenes of bliss and malcontent, ambiguous loss and vacuous urban landscapes to push politics into a quiet background. Curator Sara-Jayne Parsons takes chances in this show by gathering photographers who balance the tensions of past and present, thus clinging to an ephemeral moment in both a physical and psychological sense. In her catalog essay, Parsons investigates a kernel of philosophy left by French semiotician Roland Barthes. The peculiar insistence that madness is a characteristic specific to the photographic medium ensues throughout the works of British photographers at UTSA, particularly Dinu Li, Trish Simonite and Jason Oddy.
A subtle and brutally honest photographer, Oddy, takes the dichotomy of Parsons' vision and focuses on forensic-style scenes of lives left mid-song. In The Waiting Room Series, Oddy followed a Social Services official on her rounds to visit dwellings of the recently deceased. Oddy's ability to coax filtering light through molding flora makes his work the quintessence of Liminal Britain. All of the photographs take a square, C-print on aluminum format and transcend expectations for an aesthetically pleasant mood. Instead, Oddy looks intently upon the decrepit messes and bitten pieces of forgotten toast to magnify lives unraveling.
Trish Simonite, an Assistant Professor of photography at Trinity University, embraces the art of absence with her pictures of vacuous suburbia. At first blush, Simonite's snapshots seem like static scenes captured in 90-degree increments. However, the images of connecting corners at spatial thresholds gradually pulls the works within the thematic terriroty of Liminal Britain. Viewers should be keen to note her precise yet playful sense of line, texture and emotive potential. One of her best pieces is the blissful, sweet moment of two elderly friends holding hands.
Amid the photos of abandoned spaces and episodes of lives in flux, continuities emerge. Each photographer cherishes the gaze. The end result is a show that forces viewers to slow down at each point of entry and connect with an ever-elusive presentness. Dinu Li takes the camera into the tender innards of cheap Chinese hotels to reveal things most likely overlooked by frazzled backpackers and other vagabonds. Li's photos magnify neglected light switches, dirty linen and absolutely bizarre artifacts such as shrink-wrapped baby shoes hanging in a closet. These surprises pleasantly pepper the gallery.
Though UTSA attracts a sliver of the art-going audience it deserves due to its peripheral location, photography lovers should not allow this moment to pass.
Michelle Gonzalez Valdez is a performance artist. She is also the future San Antonio Contributing Editor of ...might be good.
Reconstructing the Mundane at Unit B Gallery
On view through May 7, 2006
Amy Ritthaler Gilmour
Mundane (adj.) Quotidian. Routine. Commonplace.
“Mundane” may be a word saddled with its share of pejorative connotations, but its latest vehicle, currently on display at Unit B Gallery, is far from tedious. Kim Aubuchon and John Mata, co-directors of Unit B, present a three-artist show that playfully addresses the significance of the mundane.
Mundus, the root word, means worldly and is historically associated with the Pythagorean sense of the physical universe, its orderly arrangement and the creation of a taxonomical structure for information—the naming of names, so to speak. Chicagoan Brian Dettmer plays with this and other epistemological issues in the fifteen pieces included in Unit B’s show. In Eye Surgery (2004), Dettmer excavates a medical textbook by cutting portions of image and text, but leaving them within their original structures to reveal new meanings within a constant set of contents. The eye (window to the soul) and vision (the sense most associated with the power of perception) are here objectified through the science of optical surgery and surgical terminology. Playing with the idea of the book as a conveyer of knowledge, Dettmer acts out what students sometimes refer to as “gutting a book”— taking what is delicious, useful or digestible and leaving behind a carcass of paper and binding.
Scoop (2003) is a series of reference books configured into a rectangle. Looking down into the piece, one sees a hollowed-out vessel filled with shredded paper delineating what was and what still remains. Has some ravenous reader consumed the core? Has the space been left by an accommodating author making room for “reader response”? [INSERT SELF HERE.] While Dettmer does refer to the book as an “enclosed vessel,” his work tells us that a book is an ephemeral medium allowing for a transmigration of ideas and interpretations that can never be wholly contained. The “gaps” and what Dettmer refers to as “hidden, fragmented memory” sometimes resonate more deeply than the authorial intent.
But, back to the mundane. Its etymology also reveals that the word has been historically used to describe a woman’s ornaments and dress. Destina Mata Olivares plays with this meaning in her disembodied dress forms and appliance coverlets. The brevity of Olivares’ statement leaves me wanting an erudite docent with feminist/philosophical predilections. As a writer and mother of two walking the tightrope of creativity, I can’t help but wonder if the lack of substantive statement might be a statement-in-itself regarding the constraints of time and space, articulation and responsibility. Regardless, the practical effect is that the work must literally speak for itself in lieu of a philosophical map from the artist herself.
Husband, Wife and Daughter (all 2006) are skillfully-wrought photographic replicas of what might be 1950’s stock costuming from Leave it to Beaver. The husband’s suit, wife’s apron and daughter’s sweet dress float disembodied within Unit B’s spare, early-twentieth-century kitchen like ethereal specters from a bygone era. Their meaning is ambiguous, and while I have my own personal entrée into the work, I can’t help my curiosity about Olivares’ purpose. These hand-made and socially significant “cozies” (as she refers to them) are fashioned to protect both humans and appliances from everyday wear-and-tear. Especially intriguing in these works is Olivares’ embellishment of the fabric with action-oriented descriptives. Whether the insignia says "useful" (toaster), "helpful" (telephone), "wife," "husband" or "daughter," the modifiers embroidered upon the fabric provokes thought and plays with our proclivity for labeling. Theorist Mieke Bahl once told me that political art does not make statements, but pushes the viewer away with a pocketful of questions. This was certainly the case with Olivares’ work.
If the mundane is complicated, then perhaps Matthew Noel-Tod’s Jezt Im Kino (2003) is the most apt exploration of this topic. Personal, corporeal and deeply philosophical, Jezt Im Kino is an onslaught that wholly and immediately demands one’s sensual and intellectual attention. Self, other, non-self, persona and “I” are explored in this fast-paced and complex video. Noel-Tod incorporates literary and cinematic elements: soundtrack, dialogue, plotline and narrative voice, with political and philosophical musings on perception, media, politics, confusion and the desire for human connection. Drawing on Mozart, David Cooper’s 1974 manifesto The Grammar of Living and other far-flung inspirations, the piece is not to be written about, but must be seen. Noel-Tod’s piece asserts, “REPRESENTATION IS NOT CREATION.” The highest compliment I can pay it is to urge you to experience it for yourself.
Amy Ritthaler Gilmour is currently writing a Ph.D. dissertation in American literature, exploring the literary garden and its significance for the spiritual, intellectual and material needs of the American female subject.
|
University of Texas at San Antonio Department of Art and Art History Art Gallery 6900 North Loop 1604 West San Antonio, Texas 210.458.4402 colfa.utsa.edu/colfa Unit B (Gallery) 500 Stieren Street at Cedar San Antonio, Texas 312.375.1871 www.unitbgallery.com |
III.
Elsewhere: Day For Night: The 2006 Whitney Biennial,
Robert
Ryman at the Dallas Museum of Art,
Martin Kippenberger at Tate Modern & Blogging from Istanbul
Day For Night: The 2006 Whitney Biennial
On view through May 28, 2006
Kurt Dominick Mueller
Black, white, and dead all over?
Faced with the improbable task of regurgitating the current culture back to a dubious public, the curators of Whitney's 2006 Biennial, Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne, modeled their selection on two uncertain forms: the cabaret and the shape-shifter. (See Tim Griffin's interview with Iles and Vergne in the January 2006 issue of Artforum.) The shape-shifting is evident from the start, literally, in the Biennial’s first-ever title, Day for Night. Like two big parenthesis, Day for Night takes in Truffaut’s cinematic technique for transposing daylight as darkness, as well as the liminal space within which today’s artists work. Existing between fact, fiction, identity, ignorance, action and apathy, this “twilight zone” is our moment’s marker. Polymorphous, dramatic and critical, it finds expression in the after-hours, all-go-zone of the cabaret.
Accordingly, this year’s biennial is nothing if not a spectacle. It is dumb, shiny, loud and morbidly sexy. But as a spectacle, it is also painfully smart. For all its chaos, it isn’t messy. For all its vagueness, it is very present. Iles and Vergne’s editorial touch can be felt everywhere and pointedly: this cabaret is very carefully, if not dead-seriously, directed.
The top floor plays it out best. From under an awning for Reena Spaulings, the view opens into two giant holes cut floor to ceiling in adjacent walls and giving way to a pair of cast aluminum tree limbs, each with a burning candle on its end. An installation by Urs Fisher, The Intelligence of Flowers (2003-06) and Untitled (branches) (2005), the limbs are suspended from chains and motors, and twirling, they circumscribe rings of melted wax on the floor. An enormous photorealist portrait by Rudolf Stingel and Dan Colen’s graffitied boulder totems are also visible through the holes. Everything is black-and-white or black-and-white with a dash of color. A final touch comes with the occasional trickling of “I’m Your Puppet”, the soundtrack to Kenneth Anger’s nearby video Mouse Heaven (2005).
This act leads into a series of smaller scenes, each a single room devoted to a single artist. The intimacy and redundancy thus afforded allows difficult artists (Steven Parrino, Jutta Koether) needed contemplation and new kids (Anne Collier, Lucas deGiulio) a chance to make a complete thought. It is a space attempted but ultimately lost on the lower floors. Here, video dominates private rooms, installations cling to corners and two-dimensional works, including a grid of Daniel Johnston's drawings, are pressed into hallway decoration.
There are exceptions, like Sturtevant’s Duchamp room. One of the sharpest hangs in the show is a mix of sculpture and painting-drawings by Jamal Cyrus, Kenya Evan, Robert Pruitt and Dawolu Jabari Anderson (these artists are also featured less interestingly as the collective Otabenga Jones & Associates). Noticeably, the best work by a painter, Billy Sullivan’s gorgeous and tender 1969-2005 (2005), is actually a slide show of his source photography.
Likewise, the rest of the 2006 Biennial is projector-heavy: of the hundred-some artists included, about half present video or film projects. Several of these are entertaining and biting and account for some of the show’s strongest work. Francesco Vezzoli’s star and sex-fueled Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s “Caligula” (2005) is as funny and back-handed as advertised. Ryan Trecartin’s hyper-balladic A Family Finds Entertainment (2004) seems ready to break the tiny monitor from which it rants.
Cinematic works by Jim O’Rourke, Diana Thater & T. Kelly Mason and Mathias Poledna also drum successfully, as Rock aesthetics, an Iles predilection, are everywhere in the Biennial. To be sure, the take is late-phase Rock. Excess and decadence, drugs and sex, high contrast and stark distortion; it is Rock sans its Roll. It is a formula reminiscent of the Seventies, of a bleak morning after, utopia’s promise turned under. Moreover, it is a fashion that feels political, but without looking the usual part. Protest voices are issued: Richard Serra’s Stop Bush, the above mentioned Otabenga Jones & Associates and the Wrong Gallery’s smart fifth floor parasite exhibition, Down by Law. But the visible noise is louder.
The 2006 Biennial, similarly, fails to deliver a coherent critique. A biennial doesn’t need one, but Iles and Vergne’s tight editing of artists and works sets up the expectation for a thesis that never quite arises. This robs the show of much potency, but may also prevent it from falling into didactic over-determination. Instead of an argument, we are audience to—if not participants in—a chorus of shouts and murmurs, a cabaret of anger, skepticism and, foremost, resignation.
This year's Whitney Biennial is redolent with the fear and fatigue, the failure of a coming permanent midnight. Adam McEwan’s fake obituaries mount each stairwell landing. The photographs of Amy Blakemore and Hanna Linden wax poetic with loss and distance. And in a corner gallery, Troy Brauntuch’s four conte-crayon canvases form an empty, quieting mausoleum. If the Whitney is right, we might not all be dead yet, but we are lost and it is getting dark.
Kurt Dominick Mueller is pursuing an MFA in studio art at The University of Texas at Austin.
Robert Ryman at the Dallas Museum of Art
On view through April 2, 2006
Catherine Walworth
Walking into the barrel-vaulted gallery of the Dallas Museum of Art, four works on aluminum stand out from the ocean of white walls. The paintings, completed by Robert Ryman between 1963 and 1964, are from the never-before-seen New Masters series. Studying them, it didn’t seem such a tragedy that they hadn’t been shown before. Their metal surfaces are cold, making the artist's snowy white paintings oddly warm by comparison. Ryman brushed their surfaces in varying directions, similar to his handling of paint, and placed rectangles of blue, orange or green alongside these planes of subtle texture. Like oil and water, the juxtaposition jumps out from the surface. There are successful moments, but these paintings are curious in relation to the rest of Ryman's work.
Four galleries off the main barrel-vaulted area contain mostly monochrome paintings of various sizes and hanging heights that flicker with subtle structural differences. Their whiteness riffs off the rooms themselves. Amply spaced, large paintings get their own walls. The guard on duty was eager to talk about the show, proudly mentioning that Robert Ryman worked as a museum guard at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in the ‘50s. Ryman began painting at that time, after having been a soldier and a serious jazz musician. His first mature painting was, interestingly enough, orange.
By the early 1960s, Ryman was making works like the New Masters series and Delta II (1966), a large stretched canvas with a creamy white surface, its paint pushed horizontally from one side to the other like cake frosting. The field of paint covers all but a very thin edge around the edge of the canvas, leaving the dark linen structural support as part of the equation.
Ryman examines several related concepts: how paintings are made, what they are made of, how they are installed and how they are experienced by the viewer. As a result, there is not a single frame to be seen, but rather staples, Velcro fasteners, aluminum bands (that give the optical illusion of canvas shadow), nails and packing tape. While this list sounds a bit suspicious, Ryman’s treatment is elegant and thought-provoking. Viewers are compelled to treat them like sculpture and examine various sides for details, like stenciled dates and peculiar hanging devices.
Each of Ryman's works is an experiment. He even repainted the same piece five times in Back Talk (1964) and hungs the canvases in a row. This is one of the times when colors like orange and blue make an appearance, and while he generally overlays colors with white, in the end they manage to stick out from the edges like wrists from an outgrown jacket. His color shades are, unfortunately, pretty unappetizing, almost rusty compared to his luminous, lightly-tinted whites.
For Philadelphia (2002), Ryman fastened ten vinyl sheets directly to the wall as it turns a corner and brushed white paint over both vinyl and wall—leaving the viewer to tilt her head from side to side looking for slight changes in sheen. According to this work's label, the artist considers the walls part of the medium. While Ryman’s paintings—and his series of recent monotypes in yet another gallery—can seem dull when hung next to some of his splashier peers from the 1960's, these galleries were buoyed up by the play of work against work and white against white. The end result is light as air and lovely.
Leaving Robert Ryman, I found that I couldn’t leave Robert Ryman. In the DMA’s permanent collection, the Mondrians reminded me of his obsessive exploration, Brancusi’s Beginning of the World (c. 1920), a white marble egg on a stone pedestal, recalled the pristine whiteness and incorporation of architectural supports into Ryman's work. A white blob of paint on any nineteenth-century canvas stood out as the single most important part of that piece. Ryman’s works certainly are not “about” these art historical precedents and yet, they are fundamentally about art. Catherine Walworth is an artist and art historian living in San Antonio. After this issue, she is stepping down as Contributing Editor of ...might be good. She writes for Glasstire, the San Antonio Current and ArtLies.
Martin Kippenberger at Tate Modern
On view through May 14, 2006
Lillian Davies
The flashy, almost overwhelming, industrial space of Tate Modern is an appropriately charged site for London’s first major exhibition of work by Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997). The exhibition is an encounter with the frenetic breadth of this artist’s often hysterical range of production, strongest when the curators resist the urge to interpret and give Kippenberger’s "aesthetic of excess" room to explode.
Referring to himself as type of "salesman," Kippenberger questions the dynamics of power in commercial exchange with the series Lieber Maler, male mir [Dear painter, paint for me] (1981). Installed in the first rooms of the show, the enormous canvases that compose this series were executed by a Berlin sign-painter, Mr. Werner, under Kippenberger's direction. Picturing a series of disconnected scenes—an extreme close-up of a bug-eyed white dog; the artist himself elegantly seated on an abandoned couch on a Manhattan street corner; a tin of Nivea crème balanced on an orange soda bottle and a cube of soap—we find an edgy discordance that is an introduction to Kippenberger’s exuberant way of living and making art. Paintings that Kippenberger executed himself fill the subsequent rooms, each overloaded with similarly bizarre combinations of figurative and textual elements that push at the edge of each canvas. Promoting the fried egg, simply because Andy Warhol had given status to the banana, its image appears repeatedly with sausage links, winter squash, along with human figures, young and old, nude and dressed in tennis whites. Kippenberger’s seemingly unplanned, unbalanced compositions look rushed, rapidly painted—more immediately diaristic than distanced and reflective.
In addition to Kippenberger’s tendency to frantically amass superficial references and cross-references, his oscillation between a robust confidence and an uncomfortable self-consciousness also becomes apparent. Prolific and exuberant, Kippenberger drew directly from personal experience to produce highly anecdotal and self-referential work. Several times, Kippenberger’s life-size sculpture, Martin, Into the Corner, You Should be Ashamed of Yourself (1989) appears, suddenly experiencing shame and isolation. Perhaps due to a combination of personal insecurity and an awareness of the overwhelming power of established systems of communication, Kippenberger was determined to control all aspects of the way his work reached the public. He directed the design of all of his exhibition invitation cards, installation shots and catalogues. Many examples of this ephemera have been gathered in a large vitrine where they are treated, as Kippenberger wished, as works in themselves.
Considered to be Kippenberger’s "masterwork," The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s ‘Amerika’ (1994) is an installation of works by Kippenberger and artists Reinhard Mucha, Franz West and Tony Oursler, mixed with bulky and anonymous office and sporting furniture over an expanse of green Astroturf. The work is said have been based on Franz Kafka’s Amerika, a book that Kafka left unfinished and that, supposedly, Kippenberger never read through to the end. The scene that Kippenberger has arranged is arresting. Many speculate that the work specifically references the apocalyptic mass-interview scene that takes place in the Theatre of Oklahoma at the end of Kafka's novel. The cold planks of the metal stadium bleachers that frames the installation of The Happy End provide an appropriately precarious perch from which an attempt at deciphering the clumsy, cluttered scene can begin. The installation is silent, perfectly still, save for a row of glass jars containing organs preserved in a translucent liquid. In Tony Oursler’s work, Organ Play No. 2, an image of a mouth is projected on organic specimens and speaks through concealed speakers. The voice rambles in a monotonous, nasal, American accent, "If you keep taking pieces away, keep taking them away, eventually you will be left with nothing.” The message is ominous; the despair of the individual within the collective, an echo of the last scenes that Kafka wrote for Amerika: "If you think of your future you are one of us! Down with all of those that do not believe in us!"
The show concludes with the violently destructive Heavy Burschi / Heavy Guy (1989/90), Kippenberger’s realization of what Kafka had wished would happen to his works upon his death. Again, asking a sign-painter to realize a series of paintings loaded with color, text and cross-references, Kippenberger then had these paintings photographed and destroyed. The final work is an installation of the full-scale photographs of the original paintings hung on the walls surrounding an industrial waste-bin that contains the destroyed canvases.
The exhibition catalogue offers a range of texts by the show’s curators as well as close friends and family. The autobiography that Kippenberger wrote just before is death, however is the most revealing with its deliberate omissions and bizarre focus. The 1993 entry begins: “Revises his address book, parting from several friends. Becomes increasingly convinced that the world of music is defunct and the theatre is insular.” Kippenberger’s manic research, production and constant re-editing continued until his young death. Unlike, Kafka, Kippenberger did make it to America, to California at the end of 1989, where he met Mike Kelley, John Caldwell and Ira Wool and would later collaborate with Cady Noland. In 1995, Kippenberger notes in his biography that he: “Gives up spirits in favor of Californian red wine.” He died just two years later; still, presumably unconvinced by the ideals of American society.
Austin native Lillian Davies studied art history at Columbia University and curating contemporary art at the Royal College of Art, London. She now lives and works in the U.K.
Blogging from Istanbul
Regine Basha, Co-Founder of Fluent~Collaborative and Consulting Curator for Arthouse, recently wrote home from Istanbul where she is traveling with her husband, Gabriel Perez-Barreiro, Curator of Latin American Art at the Blanton Museum. …mbg loved this candid email, direct from the floor of Istanbul Atatürk Airport, and asked for Basha's permission to publish it. Her response, also via email, says it all: “gulp. okay.”
I'm in the Istanbul airport—shiny and new but smelling a bit like farts. I'm waiting for Gabriel who gets in from London in an hour and 45 minutes. Getting some funny looks (because I'm sitting on the floor with my laptop) from the passengers off the Tehran flight (all men, of course).
Israel was just too weird. Of course, there is a Paris Hilton look-a-like (slightly bigger nose) with Chihuahua and all. In fact, there were a lot of buxom blonds with Swarovski-encrusted stonewash jeans. I have a feeling it's a Russian thing. There is a lot of internal tension between all the different Israeli cultures. Russians, Ethiopians, Morrocans, Poles—their version of Crash would be so much more brutal. So, it makes me wonder when anyone really has time to think of the Palestinians. They are worlds away when you're actually here. I got majorly grilled by security (like my parents say, "it's good, it's good"). I was asked for the origin of my first name, the origin of my last name, why I only speak a little bit of Hebrew, why I don't read or write and what synagogue my parents belong to in Los Angeles, as well as other questions, repeatedly. It was definitely unsettling. But it's good, it's good. Rumor has it that there is a special fish (don't know what it's called) that has been introduced into the drinking water source in order to detect poison (it's anticipated that poisoning the water will be next). I was wondering if it may be the salamander again.
Day For Night: The 2006 Whitney Biennial
On view through May 28, 2006
Kurt Dominick Mueller
Black, white, and dead all over?
Faced with the improbable task of regurgitating the current culture back to a dubious public, the curators of Whitney's 2006 Biennial, Chrissie Iles and Philippe Vergne, modeled their selection on two uncertain forms: the cabaret and the shape-shifter. (See Tim Griffin's interview with Iles and Vergne in the January 2006 issue of Artforum.) The shape-shifting is evident from the start, literally, in the Biennial’s first-ever title, Day for Night. Like two big parenthesis, Day for Night takes in Truffaut’s cinematic technique for transposing daylight as darkness, as well as the liminal space within which today’s artists work. Existing between fact, fiction, identity, ignorance, action and apathy, this “twilight zone” is our moment’s marker. Polymorphous, dramatic and critical, it finds expression in the after-hours, all-go-zone of the cabaret.
Accordingly, this year’s biennial is nothing if not a spectacle. It is dumb, shiny, loud and morbidly sexy. But as a spectacle, it is also painfully smart. For all its chaos, it isn’t messy. For all its vagueness, it is very present. Iles and Vergne’s editorial touch can be felt everywhere and pointedly: this cabaret is very carefully, if not dead-seriously, directed.
The top floor plays it out best. From under an awning for Reena Spaulings, the view opens into two giant holes cut floor to ceiling in adjacent walls and giving way to a pair of cast aluminum tree limbs, each with a burning candle on its end. An installation by Urs Fisher, The Intelligence of Flowers (2003-06) and Untitled (branches) (2005), the limbs are suspended from chains and motors, and twirling, they circumscribe rings of melted wax on the floor. An enormous photorealist portrait by Rudolf Stingel and Dan Colen’s graffitied boulder totems are also visible through the holes. Everything is black-and-white or black-and-white with a dash of color. A final touch comes with the occasional trickling of “I’m Your Puppet”, the soundtrack to Kenneth Anger’s nearby video Mouse Heaven (2005).
This act leads into a series of smaller scenes, each a single room devoted to a single artist. The intimacy and redundancy thus afforded allows difficult artists (Steven Parrino, Jutta Koether) needed contemplation and new kids (Anne Collier, Lucas deGiulio) a chance to make a complete thought. It is a space attempted but ultimately lost on the lower floors. Here, video dominates private rooms, installations cling to corners and two-dimensional works, including a grid of Daniel Johnston's drawings, are pressed into hallway decoration.
There are exceptions, like Sturtevant’s Duchamp room. One of the sharpest hangs in the show is a mix of sculpture and painting-drawings by Jamal Cyrus, Kenya Evan, Robert Pruitt and Dawolu Jabari Anderson (these artists are also featured less interestingly as the collective Otabenga Jones & Associates). Noticeably, the best work by a painter, Billy Sullivan’s gorgeous and tender 1969-2005 (2005), is actually a slide show of his source photography.
Likewise, the rest of the 2006 Biennial is projector-heavy: of the hundred-some artists included, about half present video or film projects. Several of these are entertaining and biting and account for some of the show’s strongest work. Francesco Vezzoli’s star and sex-fueled Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s “Caligula” (2005) is as funny and back-handed as advertised. Ryan Trecartin’s hyper-balladic A Family Finds Entertainment (2004) seems ready to break the tiny monitor from which it rants.
Cinematic works by Jim O’Rourke, Diana Thater & T. Kelly Mason and Mathias Poledna also drum successfully, as Rock aesthetics, an Iles predilection, are everywhere in the Biennial. To be sure, the take is late-phase Rock. Excess and decadence, drugs and sex, high contrast and stark distortion; it is Rock sans its Roll. It is a formula reminiscent of the Seventies, of a bleak morning after, utopia’s promise turned under. Moreover, it is a fashion that feels political, but without looking the usual part. Protest voices are issued: Richard Serra’s Stop Bush, the above mentioned Otabenga Jones & Associates and the Wrong Gallery’s smart fifth floor parasite exhibition, Down by Law. But the visible noise is louder.
The 2006 Biennial, similarly, fails to deliver a coherent critique. A biennial doesn’t need one, but Iles and Vergne’s tight editing of artists and works sets up the expectation for a thesis that never quite arises. This robs the show of much potency, but may also prevent it from falling into didactic over-determination. Instead of an argument, we are audience to—if not participants in—a chorus of shouts and murmurs, a cabaret of anger, skepticism and, foremost, resignation.
This year's Whitney Biennial is redolent with the fear and fatigue, the failure of a coming permanent midnight. Adam McEwan’s fake obituaries mount each stairwell landing. The photographs of Amy Blakemore and Hanna Linden wax poetic with loss and distance. And in a corner gallery, Troy Brauntuch’s four conte-crayon canvases form an empty, quieting mausoleum. If the Whitney is right, we might not all be dead yet, but we are lost and it is getting dark.
Kurt Dominick Mueller is pursuing an MFA in studio art at The University of Texas at Austin.
Robert Ryman at the Dallas Museum of Art
On view through April 2, 2006
Catherine Walworth
Walking into the barrel-vaulted gallery of the Dallas Museum of Art, four works on aluminum stand out from the ocean of white walls. The paintings, completed by Robert Ryman between 1963 and 1964, are from the never-before-seen New Masters series. Studying them, it didn’t seem such a tragedy that they hadn’t been shown before. Their metal surfaces are cold, making the artist's snowy white paintings oddly warm by comparison. Ryman brushed their surfaces in varying directions, similar to his handling of paint, and placed rectangles of blue, orange or green alongside these planes of subtle texture. Like oil and water, the juxtaposition jumps out from the surface. There are successful moments, but these paintings are curious in relation to the rest of Ryman's work.
Four galleries off the main barrel-vaulted area contain mostly monochrome paintings of various sizes and hanging heights that flicker with subtle structural differences. Their whiteness riffs off the rooms themselves. Amply spaced, large paintings get their own walls. The guard on duty was eager to talk about the show, proudly mentioning that Robert Ryman worked as a museum guard at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in the ‘50s. Ryman began painting at that time, after having been a soldier and a serious jazz musician. His first mature painting was, interestingly enough, orange.
By the early 1960s, Ryman was making works like the New Masters series and Delta II (1966), a large stretched canvas with a creamy white surface, its paint pushed horizontally from one side to the other like cake frosting. The field of paint covers all but a very thin edge around the edge of the canvas, leaving the dark linen structural support as part of the equation.
Ryman examines several related concepts: how paintings are made, what they are made of, how they are installed and how they are experienced by the viewer. As a result, there is not a single frame to be seen, but rather staples, Velcro fasteners, aluminum bands (that give the optical illusion of canvas shadow), nails and packing tape. While this list sounds a bit suspicious, Ryman’s treatment is elegant and thought-provoking. Viewers are compelled to treat them like sculpture and examine various sides for details, like stenciled dates and peculiar hanging devices.
Each of Ryman's works is an experiment. He even repainted the same piece five times in Back Talk (1964) and hungs the canvases in a row. This is one of the times when colors like orange and blue make an appearance, and while he generally overlays colors with white, in the end they manage to stick out from the edges like wrists from an outgrown jacket. His color shades are, unfortunately, pretty unappetizing, almost rusty compared to his luminous, lightly-tinted whites.
For Philadelphia (2002), Ryman fastened ten vinyl sheets directly to the wall as it turns a corner and brushed white paint over both vinyl and wall—leaving the viewer to tilt her head from side to side looking for slight changes in sheen. According to this work's label, the artist considers the walls part of the medium. While Ryman’s paintings—and his series of recent monotypes in yet another gallery—can seem dull when hung next to some of his splashier peers from the 1960's, these galleries were buoyed up by the play of work against work and white against white. The end result is light as air and lovely.
Leaving Robert Ryman, I found that I couldn’t leave Robert Ryman. In the DMA’s permanent collection, the Mondrians reminded me of his obsessive exploration, Brancusi’s Beginning of the World (c. 1920), a white marble egg on a stone pedestal, recalled the pristine whiteness and incorporation of architectural supports into Ryman's work. A white blob of paint on any nineteenth-century canvas stood out as the single most important part of that piece. Ryman’s works certainly are not “about” these art historical precedents and yet, they are fundamentally about art. Catherine Walworth is an artist and art historian living in San Antonio. After this issue, she is stepping down as Contributing Editor of ...might be good. She writes for Glasstire, the San Antonio Current and ArtLies.
Martin Kippenberger at Tate Modern
On view through May 14, 2006
Lillian Davies
The flashy, almost overwhelming, industrial space of Tate Modern is an appropriately charged site for London’s first major exhibition of work by Martin Kippenberger (1953-1997). The exhibition is an encounter with the frenetic breadth of this artist’s often hysterical range of production, strongest when the curators resist the urge to interpret and give Kippenberger’s "aesthetic of excess" room to explode.
Referring to himself as type of "salesman," Kippenberger questions the dynamics of power in commercial exchange with the series Lieber Maler, male mir [Dear painter, paint for me] (1981). Installed in the first rooms of the show, the enormous canvases that compose this series were executed by a Berlin sign-painter, Mr. Werner, under Kippenberger's direction. Picturing a series of disconnected scenes—an extreme close-up of a bug-eyed white dog; the artist himself elegantly seated on an abandoned couch on a Manhattan street corner; a tin of Nivea crème balanced on an orange soda bottle and a cube of soap—we find an edgy discordance that is an introduction to Kippenberger’s exuberant way of living and making art. Paintings that Kippenberger executed himself fill the subsequent rooms, each overloaded with similarly bizarre combinations of figurative and textual elements that push at the edge of each canvas. Promoting the fried egg, simply because Andy Warhol had given status to the banana, its image appears repeatedly with sausage links, winter squash, along with human figures, young and old, nude and dressed in tennis whites. Kippenberger’s seemingly unplanned, unbalanced compositions look rushed, rapidly painted—more immediately diaristic than distanced and reflective.
In addition to Kippenberger’s tendency to frantically amass superficial references and cross-references, his oscillation between a robust confidence and an uncomfortable self-consciousness also becomes apparent. Prolific and exuberant, Kippenberger drew directly from personal experience to produce highly anecdotal and self-referential work. Several times, Kippenberger’s life-size sculpture, Martin, Into the Corner, You Should be Ashamed of Yourself (1989) appears, suddenly experiencing shame and isolation. Perhaps due to a combination of personal insecurity and an awareness of the overwhelming power of established systems of communication, Kippenberger was determined to control all aspects of the way his work reached the public. He directed the design of all of his exhibition invitation cards, installation shots and catalogues. Many examples of this ephemera have been gathered in a large vitrine where they are treated, as Kippenberger wished, as works in themselves.
Considered to be Kippenberger’s "masterwork," The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s ‘Amerika’ (1994) is an installation of works by Kippenberger and artists Reinhard Mucha, Franz West and Tony Oursler, mixed with bulky and anonymous office and sporting furniture over an expanse of green Astroturf. The work is said have been based on Franz Kafka’s Amerika, a book that Kafka left unfinished and that, supposedly, Kippenberger never read through to the end. The scene that Kippenberger has arranged is arresting. Many speculate that the work specifically references the apocalyptic mass-interview scene that takes place in the Theatre of Oklahoma at the end of Kafka's novel. The cold planks of the metal stadium bleachers that frames the installation of The Happy End provide an appropriately precarious perch from which an attempt at deciphering the clumsy, cluttered scene can begin. The installation is silent, perfectly still, save for a row of glass jars containing organs preserved in a translucent liquid. In Tony Oursler’s work, Organ Play No. 2, an image of a mouth is projected on organic specimens and speaks through concealed speakers. The voice rambles in a monotonous, nasal, American accent, "If you keep taking pieces away, keep taking them away, eventually you will be left with nothing.” The message is ominous; the despair of the individual within the collective, an echo of the last scenes that Kafka wrote for Amerika: "If you think of your future you are one of us! Down with all of those that do not believe in us!"
The show concludes with the violently destructive Heavy Burschi / Heavy Guy (1989/90), Kippenberger’s realization of what Kafka had wished would happen to his works upon his death. Again, asking a sign-painter to realize a series of paintings loaded with color, text and cross-references, Kippenberger then had these paintings photographed and destroyed. The final work is an installation of the full-scale photographs of the original paintings hung on the walls surrounding an industrial waste-bin that contains the destroyed canvases.
The exhibition catalogue offers a range of texts by the show’s curators as well as close friends and family. The autobiography that Kippenberger wrote just before is death, however is the most revealing with its deliberate omissions and bizarre focus. The 1993 entry begins: “Revises his address book, parting from several friends. Becomes increasingly convinced that the world of music is defunct and the theatre is insular.” Kippenberger’s manic research, production and constant re-editing continued until his young death. Unlike, Kafka, Kippenberger did make it to America, to California at the end of 1989, where he met Mike Kelley, John Caldwell and Ira Wool and would later collaborate with Cady Noland. In 1995, Kippenberger notes in his biography that he: “Gives up spirits in favor of Californian red wine.” He died just two years later; still, presumably unconvinced by the ideals of American society.
Austin native Lillian Davies studied art history at Columbia University and curating contemporary art at the Royal College of Art, London. She now lives and works in the U.K.
Blogging from Istanbul
Regine Basha, Co-Founder of Fluent~Collaborative and Consulting Curator for Arthouse, recently wrote home from Istanbul where she is traveling with her husband, Gabriel Perez-Barreiro, Curator of Latin American Art at the Blanton Museum. …mbg loved this candid email, direct from the floor of Istanbul Atatürk Airport, and asked for Basha's permission to publish it. Her response, also via email, says it all: “gulp. okay.”
I'm in the Istanbul airport—shiny and new but smelling a bit like farts. I'm waiting for Gabriel who gets in from London in an hour and 45 minutes. Getting some funny looks (because I'm sitting on the floor with my laptop) from the passengers off the Tehran flight (all men, of course).
Israel was just too weird. Of course, there is a Paris Hilton look-a-like (slightly bigger nose) with Chihuahua and all. In fact, there were a lot of buxom blonds with Swarovski-encrusted stonewash jeans. I have a feeling it's a Russian thing. There is a lot of internal tension between all the different Israeli cultures. Russians, Ethiopians, Morrocans, Poles—their version of Crash would be so much more brutal. So, it makes me wonder when anyone really has time to think of the Palestinians. They are worlds away when you're actually here. I got majorly grilled by security (like my parents say, "it's good, it's good"). I was asked for the origin of my first name, the origin of my last name, why I only speak a little bit of Hebrew, why I don't read or write and what synagogue my parents belong to in Los Angeles, as well as other questions, repeatedly. It was definitely unsettling. But it's good, it's good. Rumor has it that there is a special fish (don't know what it's called) that has been introduced into the drinking water source in order to detect poison (it's anticipated that poisoning the water will be next). I was wondering if it may be the salamander again.
|
The
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Avenue at 75th Street New York, New York 1-800-944-8639 www.whitney.org Dallas Museum of Art 1717 North Harwood Dallas, Texas 214.922.1200 www.dallasmuseumofart.org Tate Modern Bankside London SE1 9TG 44.20.7887.8888 www.tate.org.uk/modern |
IV.
Two Views: Critiquing America Starts Here as Exhibition
and Catalog
America Starts Here at the The List Visual Arts Center
On view through April 9, 2006
Joy Morgan
“Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing things historians usually record, while on the banks unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks…”
--Will Durant
The Story of Civilization
If this quote resonates with you and you would like to see the “ordinary” spotlighted, then America Starts Here (on view through April 9 at the List Visual Arts Center at M.I.T. and coming to Austin Museum of Art in February, 2007) will be to your liking. However, if there is enough ordinary in your life and you prefer your art to be visually rather than textually stimulating, this exhibition, which showcases ten years of work by Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler, may not be to your liking.
Before taking in America Starts Here, the List Museum strongly recommended that visitors view two DVD presentations that provide historical context to Ericson and Ziegler’s work. The presentations duly noted the background of the artists who studied at the Kansas City Art Institute in the late 1970s where they began to informally collaborate on projects, formalizing their partnership in 1985. Their collaboration ended in 1995 when Ericson passed away from brain cancer.
Although Ericson and Ziegler focus on the ordinary, their work is not without subversive humor. It was not unusual for the artists to be commissioned for a piece and then destroy the work they had created. For example in Loaded Text (1989) the artists created a pathway, inscribing words related to their project on the surface of a sidewalk in Durham, North Carolina only to jackhammer their work and use the shards as riprap in a subsequent construction project. Similarly, an idiosyncratic image of Unplanted Landscape (1985) in the DVD presentation documented a project for a homeowner in Bellport, New York where the artists stipulated that every burlap-wrapped tree and shrub must remain above ground for six weeks prior to planting. Likewise, Half Slave Half Free (1987) depicts a lawn, half of which is mown and the other left unattended for weeks. The homeowners in Hawley, PA, George and Maria Plamer, were compensated to not mow half their lawn for a month.
After watching the presentations on flat screen monitors, visitors have an opportunity to view the exhibition. The works, for the most part, were not eye-catching and depended heavily on texts to convey their messages. The best pieces, however, quietly commanded their wall spaces. Peas, Carrots, Potatoes (1994-1996) displays an American flag formed from 364 baby food jars filled with strained vegetables and etched with infants’ pre-linguistic phonetic sounds. Feed and Seed (Heisey Farm) (1990) was stronger on philosophy but shorter on visual satisfaction. Ericson and Ziegler placed empty seed bags beneath Plexiglas that had been sandblasted with the name of the crop and number of acres sown with seed. The artists paid the farmers ten-percent of the cost of the seeds for the bags and ninety-percent of the proceeds from the sale of the art. The museum text accompanying the piece pointed out the vagaries of valuing the production of food and the financial rewards for the farmers work versus the riches that artists sometimes recover for less physical effort. In contrast, Dianna Drawings (1995), a poignant work comprising sketches of future projects Ericson made on diner napkins when she became too ill to work on their installations, seems to argue for art’s necessity.
America Starts Here gives its viewer much to think about regarding the politics of what art actually constitutes within our society. Ericson and Zeigler demonstrated a consistent vision, cataloging the commonplace in our lives and, by implication, asking why this might not be art when viewed in another context. For this reviewer, however, many of the exhibition's best ideas were not borne out in the works themselves and the visual remained subordinate to the intentions expressed in ancillary textual aids.
Joy
Morgan is a writer in Exeter, New Hampshire.
Catalog Review of America Starts
Here: Kate Ericson and Mel Ziegler
(Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College,
MIT List Visual Arts Center, MIT Press)
Lamar
Clarkson
Loaded Text was commissioned for a Durham art conference in 1989. Taking note of the town’s little-publicized downtown revitalization plan, the artists spent five days on their hands and knees writing the sixty-five-page document in magic marker on an unrepaired, 150-foot section of sidewalk. After leaving the text on view for a few days, they hired a contractor to jackhammer the pavement and load it onto the beds of three trucks, which were parked in front of the conference site. When the event was over, the trucks took the sidewalk fragments to a nearby stream, where they were used to build a riprap wall to prevent erosion. The town also received a new sidewalk, paid for out of the artists’ budget. Much better than the average commemorative bench, Loaded Text coupled public art with public works to create a conceptual, site-specific social commentary that made itself useful by serving a community need.
The local and temporary nature of Ericson and Ziegler’s art gave it clarity and zing, but these qualities also make it difficult for museums to show their work. Such constraints didn’t stop co-curators Ian Berry and Bill Arning—from Skidmore College’s Tang Museum and MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, respectively—from putting together a retrospective. America Starts Here opened at the Tang earlier this year and is currently visiting MIT before it travels to the Austin Museum of Art in 2007.
Berry and Arning addressed the challenges presented by Ericson and Ziegler’s absent art in a very Ericson-and-Ziegler-like way: research, collaboration and loads of text. To make up for the art institution’s bias in favor of physical remains, they put together a nearly exhaustive catalog that includes documentation and analysis of the pair's undisplayable work. As Arning writes in his introductory essay, the book assembles a “panoply of participants’ voices, the results of Ericson’s and Ziegler’s project-researches, and descriptions of vanished works to complete the story that future students of art should have at their disposal.” The catalog, then, attempts to recollect what the show can’t collect.
Part memorial for the artists’ collaboration—which ended with Ericson’s death of brain cancer in 1995—and part criticism, the catalog is divided into nine short essays, each on a different project, by academics and curators. All of the contributors worked with Ericson and Ziegler on the pieces they discuss, and these firsthand accounts reveal the depth of thought and commitment behind the couple’s art. They didn’t shy away from the unwieldy permit applications some of their projects required, and their friendliness helped them gain the trust of the communities in which they worked. After Loaded Text ended in controversy (“People in the city felt that somehow this was not art and that we had ripped them off,” Ziegler tells Berry in an interview for the catalog), the pair began giving presentations about their proposed artworks to the towns that would be their audience. For them, the art was as much in the legwork as in the objects hanging on a gallery wall.
Through ample and often full-page color photographs, the catalog offers a visual record of how individual pieces unfolded in time and place. Many works that would disappoint if you were to visit them—like Durham’s riprap wall—enjoy the benefit of context provided by the catalog. House Monument, which looks like just another suburban California house today, began as neat stacks of wood in a Los Angeles gallery in 1986. The artists bought all the lumber needed to build a standard two-story house and covered every piece with handwritten quotations about the idea of home, which they had culled from literature, philosophy and fables. They ran an ad in the Los Angeles Times and found a couple with a vacant lot in Costa Mesa, CA to buy the wood at half-price, under the condition that none of it be visible after construction. The catalog documents the project from start to finish, including photographs of the gallery exhibit, the newspaper ad, the homeowners at the building site, and the finished house.
The catalog is generous, too, in its coverage of works that the contributors mention only in passing. In between the essays, which proceed chronologically by the projects they highlight, captioned photographic spreads catch us up to the works Ericson and Ziegler completed in the interim. There’s also a nice photographic prologue of their individual work as students before they became collaborators.
Together, the America Starts Here catalog and exhibition assemble a picture of a body of work that has never before been—and was never intended to be—collected. As a result, two artists who proved that success is possible outside of the museum have found a place within it.
Lamar Clarkson is a writer living in Brooklyn.
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The List Visual Arts Center 20 Ames Street Building E15, Atrium level Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139 617.253.4680 web.mit.edu/lvac The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College 815 North Broadway Saratoga Springs, New York 518.580.8080 tang.skidmore.edu |
V. Readers
Write Back: Mel Chin: Do Not Ask Me
Dearest …might be good,
After reading Barna Kantor’s review of Mel Chin’s Do Not Ask Me at The Station in Houston (...mbg issue #64), I felt …mbg readers could benefit from an alternative reaction to the much-lauded show.
Critically gauging political art is difficult. (This is an oversimplification to be sure, as the classification of political art, as a category unto itself, is near impossible. For the sake of argument, though, this discussion will be limited to art with overt, direct political subject matter.) While it should not become a referendum on the artist’s moral aptitude and authenticity of feeling, that type of criticism is near inescapable. This creates a significant problem: how is an observer to relate to the piece critically without reacting to the sentiment fueling it? Some might counter, “Why bother with the distinction at all?”…in all works of art, drawing a line between sentiment and execution is a semantic distinction, not an actual one. Do Not Ask Me, with its high degree of craftsmanship and politically aggressive subject matter, proves exactly why critics and casual observers should tackle this prickly question.
While Do Not Ask Me, a heretofore highly-praised collection of sculpture, installation and painting, is physically well-executed, the sentiment driving the work seems saccharinely self-flagellating at best and casually pornographic at worst. Chin’s pieces allude to many an American foreign policy misstep, and, in their breadth, create a catalogue of horrors spanning the last half century. A brief sampling includes Cluster, referring to the cluster bombs popular in Iraq; More to Tell, which draws from the radio broadcasts recorded during a particularly blood-soaked period in Sierra Leone, and Wheel of Death that comments on the adverse impact of American-led capitalism. Despite the restrained, clinical installation of the exhibition, one could not escape the mall parking lot/haunted house quality of Loom (2005), an installation featuring myriad eyes staring up from dirt-covered ground (referencing disappearances in Guatemala and throughout Latin America under U.S.-backed dictators) and the blood-spattered Render that Kantor referenced in detail in his …mbg review. Taken together, the pieces, despite the physical quality and emotional impact of Chin’s work, appear as mementos from a dilettante’s tour of global tragedy, some amped up (for the audience’s benefit, ostensibly) in Halloween funhouse style.
While critics have highlighted the aspect of social commentary in Chin’s work, the exhibit’s title, Do Not Ask Me, appropriately emphasizes that the focus of Chin’s show is simply Mel Chin, or, more specifically, the artist’s self-centered processing of guilt. Through the many indictments issued through the different pieces in the show, what emerges most clearly is a self-indictment of the artist as omnipotent and haphazard master of ceremonies, throwing the spot-light on a potpourri of sorrow and torture at appropriate dramatic interludes. Visitors to Chin’s exhibition become the accidental tourists, facing indictments of their own as they inadvertently act as peeping Toms to real historical horror.
Political art is difficult precisely because it throws issues of selection, voyeurism, position and privilege in relief. Against the backdrop of history, media and current events, artists create works which represent varying distances, different perspectives and alternative modes of thinking. On the one hand, the artist can play the winning role of informant and truth-bearer, while on the other, self-serving profiteer. Most likely is a combination of the two. In highly contentious times, heavy-handedness is to be expected, if not welcomed. However, artists and audiences, must recognize the personal and professional responsibility in creating a tableau (however well-meaning) out of tragedy.
Respectfully,
Erin Smith
Dearest …might be good,
After reading Barna Kantor’s review of Mel Chin’s Do Not Ask Me at The Station in Houston (...mbg issue #64), I felt …mbg readers could benefit from an alternative reaction to the much-lauded show.
Critically gauging political art is difficult. (This is an oversimplification to be sure, as the classification of political art, as a category unto itself, is near impossible. For the sake of argument, though, this discussion will be limited to art with overt, direct political subject matter.) While it should not become a referendum on the artist’s moral aptitude and authenticity of feeling, that type of criticism is near inescapable. This creates a significant problem: how is an observer to relate to the piece critically without reacting to the sentiment fueling it? Some might counter, “Why bother with the distinction at all?”…in all works of art, drawing a line between sentiment and execution is a semantic distinction, not an actual one. Do Not Ask Me, with its high degree of craftsmanship and politically aggressive subject matter, proves exactly why critics and casual observers should tackle this prickly question.
While Do Not Ask Me, a heretofore highly-praised collection of sculpture, installation and painting, is physically well-executed, the sentiment driving the work seems saccharinely self-flagellating at best and casually pornographic at worst. Chin’s pieces allude to many an American foreign policy misstep, and, in their breadth, create a catalogue of horrors spanning the last half century. A brief sampling includes Cluster, referring to the cluster bombs popular in Iraq; More to Tell, which draws from the radio broadcasts recorded during a particularly blood-soaked period in Sierra Leone, and Wheel of Death that comments on the adverse impact of American-led capitalism. Despite the restrained, clinical installation of the exhibition, one could not escape the mall parking lot/haunted house quality of Loom (2005), an installation featuring myriad eyes staring up from dirt-covered ground (referencing disappearances in Guatemala and throughout Latin America under U.S.-backed dictators) and the blood-spattered Render that Kantor referenced in detail in his …mbg review. Taken together, the pieces, despite the physical quality and emotional impact of Chin’s work, appear as mementos from a dilettante’s tour of global tragedy, some amped up (for the audience’s benefit, ostensibly) in Halloween funhouse style.
While critics have highlighted the aspect of social commentary in Chin’s work, the exhibit’s title, Do Not Ask Me, appropriately emphasizes that the focus of Chin’s show is simply Mel Chin, or, more specifically, the artist’s self-centered processing of guilt. Through the many indictments issued through the different pieces in the show, what emerges most clearly is a self-indictment of the artist as omnipotent and haphazard master of ceremonies, throwing the spot-light on a potpourri of sorrow and torture at appropriate dramatic interludes. Visitors to Chin’s exhibition become the accidental tourists, facing indictments of their own as they inadvertently act as peeping Toms to real historical horror.
Political art is difficult precisely because it throws issues of selection, voyeurism, position and privilege in relief. Against the backdrop of history, media and current events, artists create works which represent varying distances, different perspectives and alternative modes of thinking. On the one hand, the artist can play the winning role of informant and truth-bearer, while on the other, self-serving profiteer. Most likely is a combination of the two. In highly contentious times, heavy-handedness is to be expected, if not welcomed. However, artists and audiences, must recognize the personal and professional responsibility in creating a tableau (however well-meaning) out of tragedy.
Respectfully,
Erin Smith
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VI. Announcements: Luke, I am Your Father
Before launching into this issue’s announcements like the Millennium Falcon on a Rebel’s mission, we offer you the following questionnaire:
After a decade’s hiatus, Art Matters, an activist foundation that funded artists and artist’s projects during the height of the culture wars in the mid-eighties and nineties, is thinking about reemerging. As part of their reconsideration of what Art Matters should and could be, they are seeking comments from artists and are eager to hear responses to the following questions:
1. What issues excite you and inform your art now?
2. What kind of challenges do you face in your career (with the exception of money)?
Send your responses to info@fluentcollab.org.
Now back to the action!
Openings: In an art community very nearby but relating to a galaxy far, far away…
Austin painter Eric Gibbons presents new work at Art Palace this Saturday, March 25. Princess Leia, Han Solo and Darth Vader share tender moments of personal turmoil as the subjects of Gibbon’s portraits. Back on earth and concerning issues dealing with more human affairs, Arthouse opens Xtra-Ordinary tonight from 8 to 10. Artists Francesca Fuchs, Katrina Moorhead and Thomas Glassford reconsider objects and moments that make up the everyday. The Carver Museum opens next Tuesday, March 28th at 6:30 pm with an exhibition, Through the Camera’s Lens, of photographs by Austin-based artist Steve Martin. Friday, March 31st, Austin’s newest art collective, MASS (located in the old Fresh-Up Club’s space) opens with Related, a show of work by the space’s members—a diverse group of painters, sculptors and video artists—that explores various possibilities for relating. On April 1st from 7 to 9 pm, Hana Hillerova will launch the Austin art community back into hyper-speed with a her solo exhibition Superspace at Women and the Work.
Two exhibitions in San Antonio take the book, as site, as object and as medium, for their themes. The Common Reader, an exhibition of paintings, sculpture and video by Lucie Stahl, Will Benedict, Tom Humphreys and Alexander Wolff, consider Wolff’s (that’s Virginia's, not Alexander's) The Common Reader (1925), and refigures the book's contents as a visual arts exhibition. The Common Readers opens tonight, March 24, at Triangle Project Space. Jeb Stuart presents Page Turner: Recent Paintings as Books at Sala Diaz next Friday, March 31. George Zupp will also present recent paintings, albeit paintings related to Ms. Pac-man, at his opening at Joan Grona Gallery on April 6th at 6 pm.
The McNay Museum has three new exhibitions up: Toulouse-Lautrec and Friends at the Theatre, Villa American: American Moderns, 1900-1950 and, our personal favorite for the kids, Babar’s Museum of Art. Beloved illustrated character elephant-king Babar and Queen Celeste inhabit recreations of canonical works by Goya, Manet, Munch, Pollack, Picasso, Seurat and Van Gogh. Perhaps simply because we at …mbg have a predilection for Babar, we anticipate that this children’s exhibition will out do AMoA’s recent Dr. Suess show. To announce their recent acquisition over 100 theatre programs illustrated by a circle of artists affiliated with Toulouse-Lautrec, the McNay presents these and other materials and programs, including a dramatic reading of Oscar Wilde’s Salome (March 30 at 7 pm). Paintings by Georgia O’Keefe, Andrew Wyeth, Ben Shahn, Joseph Stella and Arthur Dove headline in Villa America, on view through June 4th.
Lectures: President Bush… I am your Father
True to its name and the theme of these announcements, Trinity University is presenting a veritable trilogy of lectures. Monday, April 3rd beginning at 7:30 in Northrup Hall Room 040 Charles B. Froom will speak on the “Realities of the Museum” from the perspective of an installation designer and museum planner. Former President George H. W. Bush will speak on Tuesday, April 4th at 7:30 in Laurie Auditorium about politics and public affairs. Lastly, Liz Ward, whose work was recently featured at Women and Their Work (see ...mbg issue 61), will talk on her latest project which takes inspiration from the migration of monarch butterflies in Michoacán, Mexico at noon Wednesday, April 5 in the Coates University Center Fiesta Room. Tickets to Ward’s lecture cost $14 (luncheon included), while Froom’s and Bush’s talks are free.
Artist Charlie Morris and writer Aretha Williams are Artpace’s 2 to Watch. Each will discusses their own work and consider the political affectations that informs it on March 30 at 6:30. Other lectures in San Antonio include Michael Soto’s April 1 talk “Great and Greater Gatsbys” at the McNay at 2 pm. Corresponding to the exhibition American Villa, Soto’s presentation will engage the book The Great Gatsby and its filmic interpretations and includes a screening.
In conjunction with the exhibition Christo and Jeanne-Claude currently on view at Austin’s Museum of Art, the artist duo will speak about their latest project Over the River for the Arkansas River, State of Colorado at the Paramount Theatre on Thurdsay, March 30th from 7 to 8:30 pm. Tickets are currently on sale at the Paramount box office and cost $20 or $48 dollars. Since Christo and Jeanne-Claude self-generate all the funds for their projects themselves, this is a good opportunity to support the creation of contemporary art without breaking the bank.
Two free lectures will take place at the University of Texas at Austin’s Art Building Room 1.102. On Wednesday, April 5, New York University professor Marita Sturken will present “Teddy Bears, Snow Globes and the Kitschification of Memory,” the last in the Humanities Institute’s spring semester lecture series. Thursday, April 6th Lowery Stokes Sims and Ralph Rugoff will present their last words in their third and final edition of the Department of Art and Art History’s Viewpoints series.
Artist Andrea Fraser, known for her practice of institutional critique, will speak at 7 pm on Monday, March 27 at the Freed Auditorium at the Glassel School of Art in Houston. Upcoming lecturers at the Glassell School include art historian Amelia Jones (April 11th) and curator Helen Molesworth (April 19th).
Events: Films that have no reference to Star Wars and Intergalactic Planetary music that has no relation to the Beastie Boys
PATHOGEN, a feature length zombie flick directed, produced, written and filmed by 12-year-old Emily Hagins of Austin will be screening at the Alamo Drafthouse tomorrow, March 25th from 4-6 pm. Check it out before catching two performance presented by The Creative Music Workshop at Little City’s Congress St. location at 9. The collaborative, avant-music of The Brian Allen Trio may sound like all the joyous grunts of a wookie family reunion and the Electro-Acoustic Ensemble may sound like an exploding R2D2’s impersonation of Spalding Gray. Tickets for PATHOGEN are $7 and CMW’s event costs $8-12.
Every Wednesday night through May 3rd at 7:30, UT’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, in conjunction with the Austin Film Society, will screen one or more Iranian documentary at the Jesse H. Jones Communication Center (CMA Room 3.116) on the UT campus. Most of the films to be screened were made between 2001 and 2005, the period that Khatami was president of Iran and had loosened strictures on expression. March 29th’s screening is Kaveh Bahrami Moghaddam’s 2004 I Talk to God. For a full schedule of the Iranian Documentary Film series, go to:
www.austinfilm.org/screenings/iraniandocs.php
Dario Robleto will present David Lynch’s The Straight Story (1999) at Artpace Thursday, April 6th at 6:30 pm. Second in a three-part series, Robleto’s selection reflects aspects of mourning and loss in his own artistic practice. The final film in the series, Werner Herzog’s Land of Silence and Darkness (1971) will be screened on May 18th.
Opportunities: Help me art historians with advanced degrees, you are my only hope…
Texas State University in San Marcos is currently seeking applications for adjunct faculty members in their Art History department to teach for the Fall 2006 semester. Wield your knowledge of art history like a light-saber in courses spanning the Renaissance to the contemporary, directing young padawans toward the Force of critical perspective and away from the Dark Side of ignorance. Applications will be accepted until the open positions are filled.
The McNay Art Museum in San Antonio is accepting applications through April 14th for an internship in curatorial work for the fall. The McNay's website has more information about the application process, but the internship pays $20,000 and lasts 10 months.
Houston’s Aurora Picture Show has a call for entries out for their 9th annual Extremely Shorts festival. Submit film and video works of three-minutes or less before May 1st. Entries will be judged by Kevin Everson, whose second feature film Cinnamon was featured at Sundance this year. Entry forms can be found at www.aurorapictureshow.org.
Amazwi, a South African School of Media art that also produces a cultural literary magazine under the same name, is accepting applications for their Artists and Writers Residency Program in December 2006. The primary focus of the residency, in addition to working with and mentoring students, is the implementation of a project, designed in advance of arrival, that somehow integrate the environment, the people, the culture and/or the society of South Africa. Interested writers and artists should email Amazwi at Maggie@amazwiwriters.org or an information packet and preliminary application.
Jan van Eyck Academie, a Post-Academic Institute for Research and Production in The Netherlands is currently accepting proposals from artists, designs and theorists for a two-year research project. Proposals may fold into the Academie’s current research projects or develop a new conversation. Applications are due April 15 and more information about the organization can be found at their website:
www.janvaneyck.nl/_devices/frames_applications.html
Good bye and good luck, Catherine! May the Force be with you!
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Send
your Art Matters responses to: info@fluentcollab.org
Art Palace www.artpalacegallery.com Arthouse www.arthousetexas.org George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Center www.carvermuseum.org MASS www.massgallery.org Women and Their Work www.womenandtheirwork.org Triangle Project Space www.triangleproject.org Sala Diaz 517 Stieren, San Antonio, Texas Joan Grona Gallery www.joangronagallery.com The Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum www.mcnayart.org Trinity University www.trinity.edu Artpace www.artpace.org Austin Museum of Art www.amoa.org Paramount Theatre www.austintheatre.org The University of Texas at Austin, Humanities Institute www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/huminst The University of Texas at Austin, Department of Art and Art History http://www.finearts.utexas.edu/aah The Core Program of the Glassell School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston www.core.mfah.org PATHOGEN www.cheesynuggests.com The University of Texas, Center for Middle Eastern Studies www.utexas.edu/cola/cmes Austin Film Society www.austinfilm.org Texas State University, Department of Art and Art History www.finearts.txstate.edu Aurora Picture Show www.aurorapictureshow.org Amazwi Artists and Writers Residency http://www.idealist.org/if/idealist Jan van Eyck Academie www.janvaneyck.nl |
Images courtesy of Robert Therrien
and Lora Reynolds Gallery.
Left: No Title (oil can), 2000.
16 1/2 x 12 3/8 inches ink and graphite on paper.
Right: No Title (chapel), 2002.
16 1/2 x 12 3/4 inches ink and graphite on paper.
Left: No Title (oil can), 2000.
16 1/2 x 12 3/8 inches ink and graphite on paper.
Right: No Title (chapel), 2002.
16 1/2 x 12 3/4 inches ink and graphite on paper.
Fluent~Collaborative
is a speculative non-profit initiative established to increase awareness
of new developments in the contemporary visual arts and the ideas and
issues that inform contemporary culture. We are a place where a critical
and creative mix of visual, media and performance artists join authors,
filmmakers, musicians, architects, poets and other diverse communities
outside of the arts to enable a new awareness and sophisticated discernment
of changing thought and culture around the world.
..might
be good is a contemporary art biweekly produced by Fluent~Collaborative
that reaches over 4,000 international subscribers via email and at our
website: www.fluentcollab.org/mbg.
An independent voice based out of Austin and San Antonio, with a team
of writers covering exhibitions from Paris, France to Marfa, Texas, …might
be good encourages close looking, smart writing and brave
thinking about art.
Situating itself between an exhibition space, an open studio, a temporary residency program and a private home, testsite explores new ideas in contemporary art through the initiation of collaborations. An artist and a writer are invited to create an experimental project that develops out of conversation, fruitful exploration and healthy doubt.
Situating itself between an exhibition space, an open studio, a temporary residency program and a private home, testsite explores new ideas in contemporary art through the initiation of collaborations. An artist and a writer are invited to create an experimental project that develops out of conversation, fruitful exploration and healthy doubt.
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