Rapture in Rupture
Arthouse, Austin
Through January 11, 2009

By Kate Watson

Lauren Kelley, Wild Seed, 2008, Stop-motion animation and digital video with sound, Approximately two minutes. Courtesy the artist.

“The world is mixed up—should it surprise us that the art of our times would be mixed up too?”*

What will we say about this cultural and political moment ten years from now? Each morning we hit snooze on our clock radios, dreamily welcoming the day as the latest news stories quietly ring in our ears, breaking the latest bank collapses and terrifying numbers to us as gently as possible. Corporations fail, markets crash and perhaps our gulf neighbors will never rebuild again after the devastation of another fall hurricane. Yet the gentle word “Obama” continues to shimmer in our minds and somehow all is not yet lost.

During the greatest and darkest cultural moments, we close our eyes and tell ourselves to remember—remember where we were when we “heard the news” so that one day we might tell our children. But how else do we make it through these heady and uncertain days? Specifically, how do artists remember and catalog difficult times and how do they contribute to an historical snapshot of an era? Rapture in Rupture, featuring Lauren Kelley, Shiri Mordechay, Mindy Shapero and Nicolau Vergueiro, offers one solution to this question—don’t try to find answers, just continue to make, explore and question. These four emerging artists explore one genre of current production— “…a resurgent strain of art making defined by a rather ramshackle aesthetic along with a deliberate, even defiant openness and resistance to easily digestible meaning.”

When times get tough, artists get messy and bold. Galleries crumble, art fairs bleed, collectors buy safety and the youngest in the economy suffer most. An artist’s securest approach is to work small and two-dimensionally, to think “collectible.” The artists currently featured at Arthouse offer the opposite. They work with courageously huge “canvases” and make tender, bold images from materials seemingly found lying around the home and the studio—Nicolau Vergueiro trumps all with his wild list, which includes latex, wool, velvet, silk, ink, copper, Magic-Sculpt and cheesecloth.

Shiri Mordechay, who was born in Israel and raised in Nigeria, has a much shorter list of materials—chiefly cutout paper collage, delicately bound with hair and string—but renders gorgeous images with the hand of a master. Violent palettes explode with human and bestial corporeal landscapes; the most glorious moments in Mordechay’s massive paper installations occur when the images literally leap off of the page. Three-dimensional cutout apes swing drunkenly in space; landscapes completely fall away, leaving a cascade of images dangling and animated.

Houston-based Core fellow Lauren Kelley emerges as the brightest star in this mesmerizing exhibition with Wild Seed, a brand new minute and a half stop-motion animation. This video marks a new direction in Kelley’s work. Although she continues to construct playful yet elaborate dioramas for her surreal melodramas, this piece is tinged with a much greater solemnity than previous work. Kelley has abandoned her Barbie dolls in favor of tiny, topiary animals. Apocalyptic chaos descends on this peaceful environment and the characters are left powerless in the eye of the storm. At the climax of the piece, a viscous slime descends on the pristine, orderly world turned upside down.

For a video that spans less than two minutes, Kelley is doing some heavy lifting. Made after surviving the difficult period of time in Houston after Hurricane Ike, Wild Seed is a meditation on control, on humanity against nature. Maps of projected flooding due to global warming rang quietly in my head as I watched the piece—Houston will most certainly be lost in our battle against rising sea levels. Our deeply human desire to create complicated, organized landscapes (whether they be topiaries or skylines) will most certainly fail. Earth will prevail.

Mordechay and Kelley beautifully exemplify the mission of Rapture in Rupture—make now and ask questions later. Devour inspirational material; work big and work messy. The “whys” of this vulnerable historical moment have not yet come into focus, but the visual results of these hyperactive and courageous explorations are one luscious delirium after another.

*All quotes taken from Elizabeth Dunbar, “Rapture in Rupture” (Arthouse exhibition brochure, 2008)

Kate Watson is Coordinator of testsite and an assistant editor at ...might be good.

The New York Graphic Workshop
Blanton Museum of Art
Through January 18, 2009

By Katie Anania

Luis Camnitzer, Topical Change of a Word Sequence 2, 1969, Index cards, glue and marker. Luis Camnitzer Collection. Courtesy the artist and The Blanton Museum of Art.

The New York Graphic Workshop once mailed out a manifesto in an edition of boxes, each of which included the printed text of the manifesto and a single cookie. Unable to accept food, Argentinean customs sent the box back to Luis Camnitzer and he kept that box for forty years. He still has the cookie.

The archival nature of the exhibition of work by the New York Graphic Workshop (NYGW) at The Blanton Museum could probably prompt a reading analogous to that cookie: moldy objects from the clutches of dead files and enthusiasts; objects that espouse theories of printmaking concurrent with the dematerialization of art in the 1960s and 70s. But actually, the Workshop’s contribution to conceptual art—and the exhibition on view at the Blanton that supports it—reads like a brightly unearthed index that points to both a fresh, interrogative output and the relative inadequacy of art history to contain crucial moments like this.

Keep in mind that NYGW is a quiet and nearly monochromatic show. In the NYGW’s mode of printmaking, its three cardinal members—Argentine Liliana Porter, Uruguayan Luis Camnitzer and Venezuelan José Guillermo Castillo—maintain a spare visual vocabulary to steer the viewer toward the recognition of printing processes (as opposed to the material outcome of these processes) as visible arguments. Works like Liliana Porter’s Shadows (1969) argue for a more inclusive conception of printmaking—one in which any object can become a print, as long as an impression is being made onto some surface and can be somehow repeated. The work consists of cast shadows of human figures against one wall. The source of the projection is invisible, so we see the result of the process but not the impulse behind it. Shadows questions the relationship of the original matrix to its printed copy—a theme that weaves throughout much of the work in the exhibition.

Located in the Blanton’s relatively compact front exhibition space, the show cycles through NYGW’s works on paper as well as their late-60s installations and non-object-based projects. A fair number of early photo etchings are on view, plus cases of ephemera that identify one of the group’s major modes of visual argument: missing or itinerant works. We can view a mailed flier from their Hanover Transit Safe Deposit Box exhibition, in which the group exhibited “new work” inside a locked safe deposit box at a 57th street post office. The deposit box exhibition received no viewers despite the aggressive mail and paper advertising campaign associated with it.

Reception of this show may depend on whether you find public gestures like this to be humorous or alienating. I felt that the warmth and intimacy of the projects came through despite (or perhaps because of?) their overly aggressive populism rooted in late-60s revolutionary political rhetoric. Kinships with more visible figures from the European cannon like Joseph Beuys, Blinky Palermo (whose 1967 gridded print Flipper is eerily similar in grammar and argument to José Guillermo Castillo’s 1969 Untitled) and Dieter Roth are clear but go largely unmentioned.

A question faced by curators Ursula Davila-Villa and Gábriel Pérez-Barreiro was how to present such obviously overlooked information without becoming pedantic in their display. The exhibition works feverishly to efface didactic content with jokes, devoting one wall to the group’s amusing hoax, The Trepadori Project. The NYGW members invented Juan Trepadori, an artificial artist born in Paraguay in 1939. Trepadori, rumors circulated, was a self-taught artist who had volunteered to donate a portion of the proceeds of his work to a scholarship fund to send Latin American students to the Pratt Institute. In reality, Trepadori never existed and it was the members of NYGW who produced those prints under his mantle and successfully managed the scholarship fund.

One can discern the simultaneous hermeticism and populism in the work that’s similar to concurrent international projects; think of collectives like Superstudio, whose Hidden Architecture proposed in 1970 to seal an architectural project inside a box for all eternity. Davila-Villa and Pérez-Barreiro’s nearly decade-long endeavor to expose the NYGW’s work and polemics is well-articulated and extremely generative, and opens up larger historical vectors unconsidered by American museums. After touring the exhibition, the exclusion of this group from the master narrative of contemporary and conceptual art feels like a ragged, gaping hole.

Katie Anania is a curatorial researcher at Fluent~Collaborative and an assistant editor at ...might be good.

Gretchen Phillips
The Vortex, Austin
November 6 - 8, 2008

By Claire Ruud

Gretchen Phillips, Tim Mateer and John Perkins of Meat Joy. Courtesy the artist.

Gretchen Phillips’s Manlove, by turns tender, funny, intimate and political, premiered last week at The Vortex. Phillips is a career musician and lesbian icon in Austin since the 80s; today it’s easy to pick out her signature silvery-white crest of hair out in a crowd. With Manlove, she continues her experimentation with performance art, interspersing tunes from her new album with narrative and projected images. The resulting performance takes the audience on an emotional rollercoaster—something along the lines of Lisa Kron’s 2.5 Minute Ride—through the personal and the political. Manlove was unbelievably timely. Arriving two days after the presidential election, the performance provided a space for performer and audience to share mixed feelings: celebration and hope, alienation and regret, with the emphasis squarely on the former.

Variously a member of Meat Joy, Girls in the Nose and Two Nice Girls and The Gretchen Phillips Experience and Phillips & Driver, Phillips has worked across musical genres—from punk rock to lesbian folk to disco. But her first official foray into the performance art world occurred in 2007 when she created the performance Don’t Stop Believing for the Rude Mechanical’s fourth Throws Like a Girl festival. That performance followed a similar format to Manlove, but this time a more focused theme (tagline: “How sweet it is to love men when your investment is limited”) created coherence and flow that was just nascent in Don’t Stop Believing.

Like many other queer performance artists, Phillips draws on personal history, but the premise of Manlove is fresh: a lesbian’s relationships with (mostly) straight men. She structures the performance around a series of men in her life, some of them surprising. Dad, Jesus, little brother Caleb and president-elect Barack Obama made an appearance in that order through images, text and song. Phillips began each chapter by opening a black binder to the appropriately tabbed section and reading from it a pre-written script about the man in question. Photographs projected behind her created the effect of flipping through a family album while a friend tells stories about the people pictured in its pages. Each episode culminated in a song, now enlivened by the preceding stories and images.

Manlove pokes fun at the stereotype of the separatist lesbian; early on Phillips confesses to the audience that she “needs her Vitamin M” and sings an old country classic, “Almost Persuaded,” with a lesbian twist. The original is a straight woman’s first-person account of the temptation of infidelity. In Phillips’s rendition it’s about heterosexuality. She sings, “I was almost persuaded to let strange lips lead me on. Almost persuaded ... but thirty years of lesbianism made me stop and go home.” As Phillips sings, “strange lips” gains a double meaning: these lips aren’t just strange because they’re not her lover’s, they’re strange because they’re a man’s. The love song becomes a funny yet poignant riff on the pressures of a hetero-normative world—in a world that “persuades” heterosexuality, gay men and lesbians are almost, but not quite, persuaded.

Each of the men Phillips discusses serves a symbolic function: Dad gives Phillips life through a passion for music, Jesus offers the potential for a good and abundant life, her little brother elicits Phillips protectiveness—a good man hurt by the demands of masculinity—and the president-elect embodies the hope of alliance and a revolutionary response to a broken world. But throughout the performance, Phillips complicated each figure’s symbolic import through the revelation of her messy emotions surrounding him. For example, images of her brother as a child accompanied stories about their relationship and his ongoing battle with addiction as a teen and adult. Enriched by her preceding stories, Phillips’s song, “Your Drinking,” expressed so much tangled emotion. Together, images, stories and song both revealed and supplemented one another’s inadequacies of expression.

Each chapter of the performance evoked a jumble of gratefulness, pain, sadness and joy, and every time these feelings risked overwhelming the audience, Phillips leavened her sincerity and openness with humor, sarcasm and self-mockery. In this way, she worked her way into the audience’s affection, enabling her to draw us further into her sentimental journey—further than a jaded 21st century crowd is usually willing to go. In addition, the freshness of Obama’s victory, provoking in us a desire to let go of cynicism, embrace hope and work toward change, had most likely primed the audience for such a performance.

Phillips makes an astute yet endearing performance artist. She’s refreshingly real, without abandoning those critical moments of self-reflexivity. In a moment when artists and audiences seem more nostalgic than ever for the 70s and 80s, her stories and music offer fascinating glimpses at lesbian feminism and Austin’s rock and punk-rock scenes. It remains to be seen how well Manlove’s earnestness will translate into larger venues and for audiences less familiar with Phillips’s iconic persona. But here in Austin where Phillips enjoys a large cult following, the performance, so well-timed with the presidential election, felt refreshing and invigorating.

Claire Ruud is Editor of ...might be good.