Teresita Fernández
The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin
Through January 3, 2010

by Dan Boehl

Teresita Fernández, Epic (Wall Meteor), 2009, Natural and machined graphite stones, tools, projection slides, 150 x 686 x 1 inches. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, NYC.

When the Blanton Museum opened its new gallery building in 2003, visitors’ biggest complaint about the place (besides the fiasco about the architectural plans) was that there wasn’t any artwork in the museum’s atrium, the large vaulted room under those jagged shark-tooth windows. Vaulted space is an absolute architectural necessity in museums. These spaces serve a purpose. They simultaneously fill the visitor with awe and trepidation. As Dave Hickey points out in Air Guitar, museums are the temples of the academy and every good temple should intimidate its supplicant. Hence the Blanton Museum atrium.

But nature hates a vacuum, and people don’t visit museums to look at white space. So, I was totally gleeful when the Blanton commissioned Teresita Fernández’s Stacked Waters (2009) to fill that huge room. Made by laying countless sheets of tiled acrylic sheeting on the walls, Stacked Waters works so well because it uses the room’s volume to transport the viewer underwater. The effect is to be standing at the bottom of a clear lake staring up into the sky.

Stacked Waters is included in Fernández’s exhibition Blind Landscape, a collection of new and recent work that showcases her ability to mimic natural elements using stark industrial materials. The piece also sets the precedent of scale and proportion that marks the show.

Teresita Fernández, Epic (Wall Meteor), 2009.

When I entered the first large gallery dedicated to the show, I was drawn towards Epic (Wall Meteor) (2009). A constellation of over 14,000 graphite marks topped by graphite stones, it resembles a black yet gossamer cloud. Epic sprawls across the wall above the viewer’s head. The elevation gives it the same aloof but imposing quality that activates Stacked Waters. There was a moment when I consciously realized that the work was above me. It’s like the sensation you get when looking through a airplane window. There is a feeling of the familiar and intangible. Vertigo (sotto in su) (2007) has a similar effect, as it’s made from layers of aluminum sheets, die cut in lacey patterns, suspended overhead in series to resemble another cloud, but from a different viewpoint.

Eruption (2005) sits on the floor, a red and yellow colored membrane covered in puddles of clear beads. It appears to be a volcano opening obscured by wavering heat, or, as I like to think, the God’s Eye nebula. Here scale is reversed so the viewer towers over something otherwise daunting. It’s a view we would only get from a Nova episode on PBS, and it empowers the viewer like a magician’s reveal.

The other works in the show never quite match the shock and awe salvo created by Epic and Eruption. Drawn Waters (Borrowdale) (2009), an eight-foot cascade of graphite slabs and rocks that appears as a waterfall, is neither large enough nor small enough to addequitly create a disruptive power of scale. As a black spout, Drawn Waters comes off as sentimental. It’s quaint next to our idea of a waterfall. Dune (2002) suffers the same disparity of perspective, looking more like too-small bleachers than a miniaturized mountain of sand.

Things get even more disjointed when the works directly confront the viewer. Portrait (Blind Landscape) (2008) and Portrait (Blind Water) (2008) are sheets of aluminum die cut to look like clumps of hanging vines. They unsettle the illusion of the natural image by reflecting the viewer on their surfaces. In this case it seems over-slick and cheesy, like 80’s boom time condo mirrors. The effect is too transparent. The same is the case with Ink Mirror (Landscape) (2007). A black sheet of high polished fiberglass footed in a drift of marble dust snow, the piece nearly looks kitsch, and if it stood alone, I would judge it as such. The mirrored parts are pretty, but they show us too much of our earthly desires.

Fernández’s work mimics the natural world while using the space it inhabits to its advantage. Removed from the cluttered landscape like specimens under a microscope, she offers us a focused glimpse at things we already think we know. So it isn’t any wonder that the best works in the show are bafflingly huge. The big pieces inhabit their environments like natural features floating seamlessly in the gallery. Whether their forms are plucked from the ground, the water, or the sky, they work by shifting the viewer’s entire perspective upward in scale. Like walking into a cathedral, they literally inspire awe, which is exactly what people want from a museum.

Dan Boehl is a poet. His chapbook Les MISERES ET LES MAL-HEURS DE LA GUERRE will be available from Greying Ghost soon.

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Death of the Propane Salesman
Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, Fort Worth
Through December 13

By Alison Hearst

Amy Revier, Wooly Headed, 2008, Video Still. Courtesy the artist.

Curiously enough, the title of the latest exhibition at Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, Death of the Propane Salesman: Anxiety and the Texas Artist, curated by Christina Rees, references an episode from Mike Judge’s popular television series “King of the Hill.” In the episode, an explosion at the Mega Lo Mart kills Luanne Platter’s boyfriend and imbues Hank Hill with the fear of propane and anxiety over his imminent death. While “King of the Hill” was widely venerated during its twelve-year run, it imparts all-Texans-are-rednecks stereotypes and, thus, marginalizes Texas and Texans—something that most of us Texans simultaneously enjoy and dislike.

It’s easy to buy into Rees’s implication that artists in Texas endure many anxieties akin to Hank’s anxiety over his livelihood, propane—anxieties related to these artists’ work and context, including a general lack of attention paid due to regional constraints. In Death of the Propane Salesman, Rees brings together work by fourteen Texas-based artists to pick apart the many symptoms of such anxiety. The exhibition is mainly comprised of paintings and drawings, although there is a sculpture by Kevin Todora and three videos, two by Edward Setina and one by Amy Revier. Here, anxiety is primarily defined by anger, obsessive-ness, utopian dreams and discomfort. But what’s also important is that the carefully chosen works deflect the regional pigeonholing akin to that of “King of the Hill” (or found in the overriding folksy vibe of this year’s Texas Biennial, for example.)

In Amy Revier’s video Wooly Headed (2007), the artist is seen wrapping and obsessively knit-picking a Rapunzel-esque braid around her head to mask her face and shroud herself from her environment. Audio transmitted from Revier’s piece—which is a fast-paced, high-pitched looping track punctuated by moments of a slowed-down version—can be heard throughout the gallery and inflicts a feeling of restlessness on the viewer. This type of agitation appears again in the process behind Terri Thornton’s three nearby diptychs of nearly erased magazine pages. However, formally, Thornton’s works are calm and ethereal, and the pages’ enduring traces take on the form of abstract drawings; hence, Thorton’s process leads to markedly different results; the works withdraw from anxiety into a non-verbal state.

Ludwig Schwarz, Untitled (Cocksucker), 2005.

A blatant rage—rage spurred by the unavoidable pitfalls of being a Texas driver—can be found in Ludwig Schwarz’s paintings Untitled (Cocksucker) and Untitled (Fucking Mother Fucker) (both 2005 and from the Road Rage series). Untitled (Cocksucker) shows the word in a Pettibon-esque cursive scrawl over a plane of feisty, messy underpainting. The tension mounts in Untitled (Fucking Mother Fucker), as these words are emblazoned bigger, bolder and in all caps. The hostility prompted by anxiety—here, in relation to driving—is all too familiar. Kevin Todora’s work best fits with Schwarz’s breed of anger; the hinged, triangular MDF sculpture f.u. (2009), like his other work in the exhibition, renders vintage magazine photographs almost indiscernible underneath incensed marks of spray paint. The back of the sculpture is marked “f.u.” in spray paint in a conspicuous gesture of nose-thumbing. Got it.

In the front of the gallery, Matthew Bourbon’s paintings illustrate uneasy situations through a voyeuristic lens. For Your Own Good (2009) loosely depicts a brawl between two men in a neutral palette. Crisp splices of vivid color perk up the otherwise grim scene; the colorful interjections make light of the tense situation we are witnessing, but at the same time suggest that recollections of such events can be glossed over with time and optimism. Vernon Fisher’s nearby painting The Spectrum of Human Emotions (2006), features vignettes of Mickey Mouse in various emotional states. The work seems to relay the motions of an identity crisis, but perhaps this mainly ensues from its context within the exhibition’s overarching theme.

Yes, being a Texan means a lot of things, so prodding the psychological state of the Texas artist is a novel approach that’s played well here. Overall, the works are strong, varied and do not fit neatly into a specific niche or genre. Moreover, unlike the characters in “King of the Hill,” the artworks here rightfully eschew the provincial typecasting—minus the context-driven anxiousness—sometimes given to art in the lone star state by outsiders and insiders alike.

Alison Hearst is the Curatorial Research Assistant at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and a co-founder of Subtext Projects.

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William Cordova
Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York
Through December 5, 2009

By Nicole J. Caruth

William Cordova, Installation view, On wall: prophets (p.l.o. d.c.), 2009, gold leaf, graphite, watercolor on paper, 50.5 x 102 inches. On floor:
laberintos (after octavio paz), 2003-09, Appropriated vinyl records from undisclosed ivy league institution in response to that institution’s refusal to return 200 Inca artifacts from Peru after it originally borrowed them in 1914, Dimensions variable. Courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

William Cordova’s latest exhibition takes me back to the early days of Kanye West—not the egotistical, cheeky personality who steals the spotlight from little girls, but the gentle genius who recorded The College Dropout. West was highly regarded for his talented sampling and mixing, through which he bridged earlier generations of sound and cultural history with today’s music. Cordova’s first solo show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. calls attention to his best West-like tendencies. Even so, with laberintos Cordova only sporadically finds his way out of a maze of mediocrity.

laberintos is, appropriately, a sprawling puzzle of interconnected pieces. Individual works and installations, each of their own complexity, frequently point back to the central floor piece laberintos (after Octavio Paz). A diorama composed of upright vinyl record covers, the piece stands for the “existential labyrinth” of Paz’s influential book of essays El laberinto de la soledad. The author theorizes that Mexicans, who have inherited two distinct cultures, pre-Columbian and Spanish, deny one part of their identity to become “stuck in a world of solitude.” Pluralism is Cordova’s mainstay: multiple identities flow rather than clash into one another in his oeuvre.

The caption for laberintos (after Octavio Paz) reads informatively like a didactic text, a footnote on the artist’s use of appropriation as well as his Peruvian ancestry: “Appropriated vinyl records from undisclosed ivy league institution in response to that institutions refusal to return 200 Inca artifacts from Peru after it originally borrowed them in 1914.” Cordova’s account begs the question of the object’s fragility: If the walls of this vinyl labryinth were broken, what adequate compensation could there be to replace these records now rendered rare and precious by his hand? As with his earlier works, a lot rests on Cordova’s titles and captions. This trick is occasionally clever, as with laberintos (after Octavio Paz), but more often wearisome. The clues Cordova’s captions provide aren’t always useful in the moment, leaving the artworks to stand on their own. Some hold up better than others.

Cordova occasionally tries too hard to drive home points of reverence and lineage, sliding from elusive to superfluous. Untitled (sacsayhuaman, mukden, bayon, de libertat), a series of overlapping cardboard bridges (the wobbly suspension variety at the climax of any Indian Jones-grave-robber-type film) with railing fashioned out of imitation-gold chains, hangs from the ceiling; bits of broken chain scatter the floor beneath. From a nearby room echoes the voice of hip-hop pioneer KRS-One: “Get what I’m sayin’ forevah.” A little research reveals the title of this video projection, 18° 6’ 11.87” N, 94° 2’ 24.69” W (decero a la infinidad), to match the coordinates of the La Venta Olmec Archaeological Ruins. You get the idea.

In the sculpture Untitled (lineage), two small book covers encase mounds of Peruvian chocolate; their spines read “Inca” and “Tupac Shakur” in gold lettering. Shakur makes a second appearance in This One’s 4U (p’a nosotros), a sharp (albeit heavy-handed) video installation in which a film about the rapper’s life plays on a TV monitor. The 1984 film about revolutionary Peruvian Indian Tupac Amaru II plays through the speakers. I learn from Cordova’s assessment of the film online that “Black Panther Afeni Shakur named her son, Tupac Amaru Shakur, after the Inca revolutionary as an acknowledgment for common struggle for all oppressed people.” The piece is installed in such a way that viewers must approach it from the back, where raw wood and cables—the innards—are in plain sight. The arrangement seems a metaphor for exposure: uncovering the ever-present link between today and the past, or two sides of the same story. Like watching a foreign film without subtitles, viewers might fail to fully grasp the narrative in these two works. But ambiguity functions remarkably well here by drawing attention to the importance of language (both spoken and visual) in our understanding of peoples, histories and objects.

Untitled (the Echo in Nicolás Guillén Landrián’s Bolex)—one hundred individual works arranged in a side gallery—is a breakthrough moment. The space reads like an artist’s studio, teeming with inspirations and offhand studies; the air is fluid but also bumpy. From this fragmented display of meandering microphone cords, sunbursts and other motifs, I sense that something big is on the artist’s horizon.

In recent group exhibitions and his own curatorial endeavors, Cordova has shown signs of getting too comfortable, working within the boundaries of early recognition rather than pushing them further. If I was troubled about his future (much in the way I am about Kanye West’s) the show at Sikkema Jenkins & Co. is a flashing light (pun intended) that Cordova is headed in the right direction.

Nicole J. Caruth is a freelance writer and curator based in Brooklyn. A regular blogger for Art21, her writing has been published by the Studio Museum in Harlem, Taipei Fine Arts Museum, NYFA Current, CUE Art Foundation, and Gastronomica. Her personal blog, Contemporary Confections, merges two of her greatest loves: art and sweet foodstuffs.

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