The Lining of Forgetting
Austin Museum of Art
Through August 9

By Claire Ruud

Louise Bourgeois, Ode à L’Oubli, 2004 (detail – page 4), Fabric and color lithograph book, thirty-six pages, 10.75 x 13.25 x 2 inches. Collection of the artist; courtesy Cheim & Read, New York. Photo: Christopher Burke.

When Rachel Whiteread first exhibited her white plaster casts of cardboard boxes in New York, Ken Johnson called the show “underwhelming.” Right now, Surface (2005), stacks of Whiteread’s boxes resting under and on top of a white laminate table, are smartly installed in a remote corner of the Austin Museum of Art as part of the exhibition The Lining of Forgetting. Recently, I expressed appreciation for the ghostly white boxes to a curator, and in response, she echoed Johnson’s opinion, “I love Rachel Whiteread, but frankly, this work is insignificant.” Underwhelming, insignificant… in other words, forgettable? Fitting, then, in a show about memory.

In the exhibition catalogue, curator Xandra Eden argues for the contemporary relevance of memory through a discussion of the effects of modern technologies and artificial memory. These technologies remember for us, making it more convenient for us to forget; vast sums of information stored in on our personal electronic devices make it possible to find forgotten details at the speed of our internet connection. By contrast, the most affecting works in The Lining of Forgetting are those that slow this process down and ask us to relocate memory within our minds, hearts and bodies.

Whiteread’s boxes, of a type and scale to which I can relate, do just that. Like the boxes in my grandmother’s attic, or the ones containing all the novels I read years ago but can’t stand to part with. Literal and metaphorical boxes in our lives contain all kinds of memories and the emotions that go with them.

Like Whiteread’s boxes, Louise Bourgeois’s Ode á L’Oubli (Ode to Forgetfulness, 2004), a book based on fragments of old linens and clothing that the artist has collected over time, is about affect—not only thinking backward, but also feeling backward. The book evokes a family album or a patchwork quilt. The pages (which may be buttoned into the cover and spine, but were individually framed for the exhibition) recall motifs from Bourgeois’s oeuvre, while the fabrics typify the colors and patterns of domestic textiles from decades gone by. The book may evoke our collective memories of Bourgeois’s career as an artist, but her own personal memories of a private life seem buried deep within its pages, too.

The family album appears again in the work of Cody Trepte, Photo Album (2006–7), two shelves of black books, each filled with page upon page of zeros and ones. On the front of each book, a small placard bares a concise text describing a family photograph, most often of Cody and his twin sister Cami as children. The numbers inside express the photo in binary code—pages and pages of information impenetrable to the human eye. The books are literally heavy with this information; it’s as if the thicker the book, the more weighty the memory.

Rachel Whiteread, Surface, 2005.

The photo albums of my childhood are bulky physical objects, polaroids and snapshots pressed onto thick, sticky cardboard, now browning with age. Today, my photo albums are virtual; I store them on my hard drive, and I flip through the albums of my friends with the click of a mouse on Flickr and Facebook. Trepte’s Album translates the concrete photos of his childhood into the virtual language of our computers, but invests these zeros and ones with physical substance by printing them line by line, page by page, in thick volumes. Whiteread’s Surface and Bourgeois’s Ode work similarly. These works weigh the difference between the surface of a memory—a description, an image, a symbol—and the emotional content it holds. Among others, Emma Kay’s Shakespeare from Memory (1998), Scott Lyall’s the little contemporaries (2007), Dinh Q. Lê’s Untitled (From Vietnam to Hollywood) (2003) and Mungo Thomson’s The American Desert (for Chuck Jones) (2002) stand out for their contemplative rhythm and wistfulness. A few works in the exhibition translate the mechanics and theories of memory too literally, but more often, The Lining of Forgetting effectively ponders the affective substance of memories through physicality, duration and meditative repetition.

Claire Ruud is Editor of ...might be good and Associate Coordinator of testsite.

Torsten Slama
Contemporary Art Museum, Houston
Through August 2

By Lauren Hamer

Torsten Slama, Vision 6: The Herbert Bayer Cigarette Kiosk, 2007, Watercolor, pencil, and Chinese ink on paper, 28 ¾ x 40 1/8 inches. Courtesy Galerie Vera Gliem, Cologne, and Hotel, London.

Berlin-based Torsten Slama's work currently on display in Houston is a dead-pan stab at 21st century allegory, a bit of post-realist psychoanalytic narrative with a smirk. At times Slama's work appears only a few steps removed from that of Carl Grossberg (1894-1940), a painter associated with the Neue Sachlichkeit (The New Objectivity) movement in Germany in the 20s and 30s. Slama shares Grossberg's icy exactitude, his constant return to satirical, gently neo-primitivist industrial subjects. The show itself can be roughly divided into two categories: dry, autumn-hued paintings on board and large, soft, illustration-style pencil drawings.

The drawings feature a series of Oedipal dramas, many starring the same, bearded and bespectacled male figure. I found the drawings too self-consciously awkward and their implied narration too dry to be seriously intriguing, but the ambivalent take on psychoanalysis' standard dramas is humorous. The catalogue accompanying the show wishes us to attribute Slama's mysterious male subject to his lack of a father figure (!), but it is entertaining enough to cast this sometimes-nude, sometimes-pipe smoking figure as Freud himself. In more than one image, he is holding a fat cigar or a short wooden bat, chasing a young man through the woods or skulking outside a boy's dormitory. Why not?

In his painted works, Slama presents quaint, empty post-apocalyptic landscapes that feature industrial buildings rendered in a skewed orthogonal perspective and the occasional non-sequitor: a statue, a gorilla, a single-speed bicycle. The titles of the works often identify an absurd or whimsical manufacturing capacity for the pictured buildings. In Geröllmine (Rubble Mine, 2005) and Walt-Whitman-Gedenk-Raffinerie (Walt Whitman Memorial Refinery, 2005), buildings work as stage sets on lunar landscapes rendered with soft airbrushing. Puffy airplane trails in the sky, distant hills and craters in the foreground are whispy and a bit too smooth. Slama's architecture is hilariously similar to banal Second Life computer renderings: window highlights are too consistent to be "right," edges are too sharp, the buildings themselves evidently drafted before receiving surface treatments of painted faux-brick or faux-wood.

Torsten Slama, Zementwerk (Cement Works), 2008, Oil on canvas, 48 ¾ x 34 ½ inches. Courtesy Galerie Vera Gliem, Cologne.

It is Slama's attention to tiny details in these chalky, board mounted paintings that give them more than a touch of a De Chirico or Magritte-style Unheimlichkeit: TV antennas, wiring, rivets on steel containers or mysterious hovering objects are meticulously rendered. The curve of a sadly isolated lamp-post and bits of unidentified industrial mechanical parts that litter the foreground are weirdly elegant, even as they are illustrated with a childish attention to detail. In writing, Slama finds the need to explicate precisely what is symbolized by the various unusual pictorial elements, but the peculiar rigor and strangeness of his work stands on its own. This post-apocalyptic and computer-generated Sachlichkeit of psycho-sexual tensions might seema bit dry and opaque, but Slama plays to the side of whimsy, never taking any of these fantasies too seriously.

Lauren Hamer is a graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin.

No Zoning
Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
Through October 4

By Kate Watson

Dan Havel and Dean Ruck, Give and Take, 2009, Reclaimed sections from condemned bungalow at 931 Cottage Street, Houston, 20 x 30 x 15 feet. Courtesy the artists and Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery, Houston. ©2009 Hester & Hardaway.

A few Fridays ago, I found myself leaning against a worn out warehouse, drinking dollar Lone Stars in a far-flung neighborhood of Houston. The streets were desolate. Inside, friends from Austin played sleepy, nouveau surf rock on a massive stage at wacko altspace Super Happy Fund Land to a sparse audience of no more than ten people sitting in used movie theater seats. The industrial building felt more likely to have accommodated an early 90’s rave than experimental music and performance.

The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston’s epic No Zoning is a bit quick to memorialize and romanticize this brand of happy accident: the spaces and projects that crop up like tiny bluebonnets peeking through the cracks in the sprawling Houston pavement. The exhibition examines the last three decades of alternative art practices that have flourished and floundered in the urban landscape of our nation’s fourth largest city. But despite the institution’s overly eager canonization of a flourishing DIY scene, I couldn’t help but fall for the romantic mish mash that spills out from the gallery onto the lawn surrounding the museum.

As a non-native, a long-term Texas tourist, I cannot begin to grasp all of the history and all of the people that the exhibition attempts to deal with. I know that the show has caused quite a hubbub in Houston—who has been included in this exhibition’s narrative? Who is left out? Luckily, I was able to float with the story presented to me and ignorantly swim in the shark-free waters. If this exhibition were a cocktail, the concoction would go something like this: mix two parts history lesson, two parts cabinet of curiosities, one part jam session and one part Texas-style, maverick urban grit. I imbibed this refreshing beverage with the zeal of a curious convert.

The rich history of alternative, often utopian experiments in Bayou City shines through most in this gutsy retrospective. Houston is lucky to have had long-term documentarians Ben Tecumseh DeSoto and George Hixson preserving the ephemera of performances, spontaneous gatherings and openings. This is the stuff of memories in the young life of an art scene that is too often lost in the constant turnover of changing spaces and nomadic characters.

Inevitably, the show can only take us so far into the life of the city it seeks to catalogue; ultimately, it leaves us with a sensation of longing for the history and the spaces that simply cannot be properly reenacted in the exhibition space. Dan Havel and Dean Ruck’s massive architectural cutout Give and Take sits in the middle of the beautiful chaos; the extracted cross section of a condemned home almost begs us to climb upon it and explore this rotten piece of the past. Wallpaper still peels off of its walls and a fetid bathrobe clings precariously to a remaining rusted hook. A single photograph of the dissected house in its original urban environment hangs nearby, suggesting how poorly the transplanted cross section can evoke an encounter with the real thing.

Bill Davenport’s satellite version of his ongoing Heights project, Bill’s Junk Shop, is perhaps the most inviting installation in the show. “Yes, everything really is for sale,” a hand scrawled note on lined paper confirms for us. When the artist isn’t there, the audience is instructed to take their coveted item of choice to the museum shop cashier. I would have loved to see Davenport’s balls of yarn, macramé wall hangings and figurines living amongst the hip designer toys usually up for sale in the CAMH. Inevitably missing during my visit was the most interesting part of the artist’s project: the conversation with the artist himself as he peddles his often meaningless (yarn balls: $1) or at times very personal (RISD degree: $32 grand) wares.

Several pieces feel sorely out of place or just don’t hold up in a museum space. The Flower Man’s front yard installation suffers most from being taken out of context—the piece simply cannot compare to walking into the artist’s home in the Third Ward and exploring the incredible piles of mildewed toys, trophies and seemingly endless urban detritus, especially in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. You just have to experience the real thing.

Ultimately, No Zoning prospers when it most closely approximates the actual experience of the Do-It-Yourself ethos that it seeks to catalogue. I was fortunate enough to come upon Aurora Picture Show founder Andrea Grover inflating temporary Jacuzzis in the hot Texas sun for a special night screening; my friend and I mused with her as she considered what might occur if the precarious pools overflowed in the back yard. I look forward to the moment at which Workshop Houston’s Benjy Mason and Zach Moser burn the sailboat that is being built by workshop participants throughout the duration of the show. The fact that these acts are occurring in conjunction with a museum exhibition? Pretty damn radical if you ask me. These kinds of subversive acts are what make tough times like these hilarious and memorable. When the exhibition flounders, it’s because it’s just too tidy. Bring on the mess, CAMH. Houston, and fans of Houston’s wacky and wild past and present, are ready for it.

Kate Watson is Coordinator of testsite and Associate Editor of ...might be good.